In defense of free will: Neuroscience and criminal responsibility.

ABSTRACT

Is neuroscience the death of free will and if so, does this mean the imminent demise of the psycho-legal practices related to insanity and criminal responsibility? For many scholars of neuro-jurisprudence, recent advances in brain sciences suggesting that the perception of free will is merely illusory, an epiphenomenon of unconscious brain activity, do indeed undermine our traditional understandings of moral and legal responsibility. In this paper, however, we reject this radical claim and argue that neuroscientific evidence can indeed reveal how free will actually works and how its underlying neural and perceptual machinery gives rise to our sense of responsibility for our actions. First, the experience of free will is recast in terms of neuroscientific studies of agency and willed action. Second, evidence is presented of a neural network model linking agency to widely-distributed brain areas encompassing frontal motor and parietal monitoring sites. We then apply these findings to criminal responsibility practices by demonstrating (a) how the experience of intentionality and agency is generated by specific interactions of this discrete frontal-parietal network, (b) how mental disease/defect may compromise this network, and (c) how such pathologies may lead to disturbances in the sense of agency that often are central to the phenomenological experience of psychosis. The paper concludes by examining criminal responsibility practices through the lens of cultural evolution of fairness and cooperation.