Positive Illusions and the Free Will Debate

I am quite confident that all of the Gardeners are busy readying themselves to spend some quality time with their friends and family over the holidays (and rightly so!).  So, I have no illusions (pun intended) concerning the likelihood that people will have time left in 2007 to take a glance at the paper I wrote with one of my undergrads here at Dickinson (Tatyana Matveeva).  But since I thought some of you might nevertheless have time to read it after the new year and before the beginning of spring semester, I figured now might be a better time to post it than once we're all back to work in mid to late January.  For now, have a delightful break! 

Download positive_illusions.pdf

The Trolley Problem and Self-Defense

I realize that the main focus here at the Garden is usually on issues pertaining to free will and moral responsibility, but since there is a special category for The Trolley Problem, I figured I would post a draft of a short piece I am working on about the trolley problem and self-defense.  Any and all feedback would be greatly appreciated.  Just be gentle--it's still a little rough around the edges.  But before I do any more work on it, I thought I would see what the gardeners think about the general strategy I adopt first.  Thanks in advance!

Download trolley_problem_revisited.pdf

OPC2 is On!

The Second Annual Online Philosophy Conference (OPC2) has begun!  Please go to the conference website to see the line-up of this week’s talks, which include a video of Ernie Sosa’s keynote address and papers by Meredith Williams, Delia Graff Fara, Shaun Nichols, and Juan Comesana.  Each talk includes one or two commentaries.  And the discussion thread is waiting for your questions and comments.  Next week will feature six more talks!

Please check out the conference, read some papers and commentaries, and participate in the discussion with this excellent group of philosophers.  You can enjoy this conference for free (though we encourage donations to the conference charities linked at the site).  Please spread the word among your colleagues, friends, and students!

Neurolaw Revisited

As I noted a few weeks back, there was a recent article in The New York Times by Jeffrey Rosen concerning the growing new field of neuro-law.  The central issue in Rosen's piece is the role that cognitive neuroscience (CNS) can (and should) play with respect to the criminal law (and its underlying notion of criminal culpability).  In the article, Rosen mentions an interesting paper by O. Carter Snead entitled “Neuroimaging and the ‘Complexity’ of Capital Punishment.”  And while Snead mostly limits his attention to the role that CNS could play with respect to capital sentencing (and punishment) rather than punishment more generally, for present purposes I want to use his argument as a way of jump starting a discussion concerning the general relationship between CNS and criminal law.

For starters, I want to first provide a brief overview of what I am going to call the Cognitive Neurolaw Agenda (CNLA)—an agenda that Snead associates with the following two-fold goal:  (a) the short term goal of CNLA: get CNS findings into the courtroom as mitigating evidence, (b) the long term goal of CNLA: use findings from CNS both to debunk retributivism at the institutional level and to develop a forward looking two-pronged preventative and rehabilitative regime. 

According to Snead, the proponents of CNLA envision the long term goal as a focused attempt to adopt a more humane and compassionate response to the crime problem than the present retributivist regime. Snead criticizes CNLA on two fronts.  On the one hand, he tries to show that the short term goal and long term goal of CNLA are inconsistent.  By his lights, the present goal of using data from CNS to mitigate or exculpate blame would be undermined by the long-term goal of purging the criminal law of retributivist principles.  On the other hand, Snead claims that if the long-term goal of CNLA were to come to fruition, it would make the system of criminal law more rather than less brutalizing and inhumane. 

Neurolaw in The NY Times

I originally hoped that my first post here would be more substantive than this one, but apparently that was not in the cards!  Instead, I simply want to point the Gardeners to an article in yesterday's NYT about neurolaw in the event that some of you have not already seen it.  I thought the crew here might not only find the piece interesting, but it might even open the door to yet another discussion here concerning the thorny relationship between the gathering data in the sciences of the mind and our (shrinking?) autonomy and responsibility.