Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts Boston, United States; Department of Psychiatry, Laboratory of Neuroscience, Harvard Medical School, United States.
Int J Law Psychiatry. 2019 Jul-Aug;65:101344. doi: 10.1016/j.ijlp.2018.04.004. Epub 2018 Apr 22.
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.
神经科学是否意味着自由意志的消亡，如果是这样，是否意味着与精神错乱和刑事责任相关的心理法律实践即将消亡？对于许多神经法学的学者来说，最近大脑科学的进展表明，自由意志的感知只是一种幻觉，是无意识大脑活动的一种副现象，确实颠覆了我们对道德和法律责任的传统理解。然而，在本文中，我们拒绝了这一激进的观点，并认为神经科学证据确实可以揭示自由意志是如何运作的，以及它的潜在神经和感知机制如何产生我们对自己行为的责任感。首先，自由意志的体验被重新表述为关于能动性和意愿行动的神经科学研究。其次，提出了证据证明，一个将能动性与包括额叶运动和顶叶监测部位在内的广泛分布的大脑区域联系起来的神经网络模型。然后，我们通过展示（a）特定的离散额顶网络交互如何产生意向性和能动性的体验，（b）精神疾病/缺陷如何损害这个网络，以及（c）这种病变如何导致代理感的紊乱，通常这是精神病学现象体验的核心，来将这些发现应用于刑事责任实践。本文最后通过考察公平与合作的文化进化的视角来审视刑事责任实践。
