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Neuroscience and Law: Conceptual and Practical Issues

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Abstract

This chapter will address the potential contributions of neuroscience to law, with special emphasis on criminal justice and criminal responsibility because these are the areas that have received the lion’s share of neurolaw attention. The discussion will clearly generalize to other applications, however.

The neurosciences in question are the behavioral neurosciences, such as cognitive, affective and social neuroscience, because these are the types of neuroscience most relevant to law. There have been major advances in these fields since the beginning of the present century when non-invasive functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate brain function became widely available for non-clinical research. The central question for this chapter is the relevance of neuroscience to law. The general conclusion is that it is scarcely useful at present but may become more relevant as the science progresses.

Many readers of this chapter may not be lawyers, so the chapter begins with a brief explanation of the meaning of criminal responsibility that will be used throughout. It then speculates about the source of claims for the positive influence of neuroscience. The next section discusses the scientific status of behavioral neuroscience. Then it addresses two radical challenges to current conceptions of criminal responsibility that neuroscience allegedly poses: determinism and the death of agency. The question of the specific relevance of neuroscience to criminal law doctrine, practice and institutions is considered next. This is followed by a discussion of how neuroscience evidence is being used in criminal cases in five different countries, including the United States. The penultimate section points to some areas warranting modest optimism. A brief conclusion follows.

This chapter is an adapted and updated version of, Stephen J. Morse, Neuroscience and Criminal Law, first published in, Larry Alexander and Kimberly Kessler Ferzan, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Applied Ethics and the Criminal Law, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. It is reproduced with permission of SNCSC.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Robinson v California (1962).

  2. 2.

    Morissette v United States (1952).

  3. 3.

    Menninger (1968).

  4. 4.

    The Economist (2002).

  5. 5.

    Pardo and Patterson (2013) and Gabriel (2017).

  6. 6.

    Hunter and Nedelsky (2018).

  7. 7.

    Feldman (2009).

  8. 8.

    Miller v Alabama (2012), n 5.

  9. 9.

    Adolphs (2015), p. 175; McHugh and Slavney (1998), pp. 11–12.

  10. 10.

    Wittgenstein (1953), § 621.

  11. 11.

    Bennett et al. (2009a), Button et al. (2013), Eklund et al. (2016) and Vul et al. (2009). But see Lieberman et al. (2009).

  12. 12.

    Francis (2009); Morse and Newsome (2013), pp. 150, 159–160, 167; Rego (2016).

  13. 13.

    Ioannides (2011).

  14. 14.

    Morse and Newsome (2013), p. 150.

  15. 15.

    Roskies (2013), p. 37; Hong et al. (2019).

  16. 16.

    For sophisticated, systematic and comprehensive reviews of the proper uses and limitations of fMRI, see Logothetis (2008) and Poldrack (2018).

  17. 17.

    Poldrack (2006).

  18. 18.

    Button et al. (2013) and Szucs and Ioannidis (2017).

  19. 19.

    Varoquaux (2018).

  20. 20.

    Faigman et al. (2014).

  21. 21.

    Simmons et al. (2011).

  22. 22.

    Poldrack et al. (2017).

  23. 23.

    Chin (2014).

  24. 24.

    Ioannides (2011).

  25. 25.

    Chin (2014) and Open Science Collaboration (2015), but see Gilbert et al. (2016).

  26. 26.

    Szucs and Ioannidis (2017).

  27. 27.

    Miller (2010).

  28. 28.

    Adolphs (2015).

  29. 29.

    Morse (2011).

  30. 30.

    But see Bennett et al. (2009b) for an amusing exception.

  31. 31.

    E.g., Pereboom and Caruso (2017).

  32. 32.

    Ibid.

  33. 33.

    Morse (2018) and Sehon (2016).

  34. 34.

    Mele (2009, 2014), Moore (2012), Morse (2015), Nachev and Hacker (2015), Schurger et al. (2012) and Schurger and Uithol (2015).

  35. 35.

    Sifferd (2006).

  36. 36.

    Morse (2011).

  37. 37.

    Mudrik and Maoz (2014).

  38. 38.

    Stone (1984).

  39. 39.

    Bennett and Hacker (2003).

  40. 40.

    Morse and Newsome (2013), p. 150.

  41. 41.

    Roskies et al. (2013) and Schweitzer et al. (2011).

  42. 42.

    Morse (2011).

  43. 43.

    Morse and Newsome (2013), p. 150.

  44. 44.

    Greely (2013), p. 120.

  45. 45.

    Husak and Murphy (2013), p. 216.

  46. 46.

    Miller (2010).

  47. 47.

    But see Vilares et al. (2017) for a “proof of concept” exception.

  48. 48.

    People v Weinstein (1992); Morse (1995), p. 527; Davis (2017) (“Spyder Cystkopf” was the pseudonym first used in the literature).

  49. 49.

    Farahany (2015) and Gaudet and Marchant (2016).

  50. 50.

    Alimardani and Chin (2019).

  51. 51.

    Catley and Claydon (2015).

  52. 52.

    Chandler (2015).

  53. 53.

    de Kogel and Westgeest (2015).

  54. 54.

    Farahany (2015), pp. 488–489.

  55. 55.

    See Rakoff (2016) for an analysis by a neuroscientifically informed federal judge.

  56. 56.

    Morse (2004), p. 81. But see Jones (2013) for a contrary view.

  57. 57.

    Ibid.

  58. 58.

    United States v Hinckley (1981), p. 1346.

  59. 59.

    Presidential Commission (2015).

  60. 60.

    Aharoni et al. (2013), p. 6223; Pardini et al. (2014), p. 73.

  61. 61.

    For example, a re-analysis of the Aharoni et al. study, 2013, n 35 by Russell Poldrack, a noted “neuromethodologist” demonstrated that the effect size was tiny. The study used good but not use the best behavioral predictive methods for comparison.

  62. 62.

    Rissman et al. (2010), p. 9849; Rissman et al. (2016), p. 604.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Pennsylvania, Law School, Center for Neuroscience and Society, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Stephen J. Morse

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Correspondence to Stephen J. Morse .

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  1. Department of Law, Politics and International Studies, University Center for Bioethics, University of Parma, Parma, Italy

    Antonio D’Aloia  & Maria Chiara Errigo  & 

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Morse, S.J. (2020). Neuroscience and Law: Conceptual and Practical Issues. In: D’Aloia, A., Errigo, M.C. (eds) Neuroscience and Law. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38840-9_20

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