Modern medicine enables us to keep many people alive after they have suffered severe brain damage and show no reliable outward signs of consciousness. Many such patients are misdiagnosed as being in a permanent vegetative state when they are actually in a minimally conscious state. This mistake has far-reaching implications for treatment and prognosis. To alleviate this problem, neuroscientists have recently developed new brain-scanning methods to detect consciousness in some of these patients and even to ask them questions, including "Do you want to stay alive?"

Finding...

Scholars are struggling to come to grips with the picture of human agency being pieced together by researchers in the biosciences. This volume aims at providing philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists, and legal theorists with an opportunity to examine the cluster of related issues that will need to be addressed in light of these developments. Each of the twelve essays collected here sheds light on an issue essential to the future of punishment and retribution. In addition to exploring the sorts of issues traditionally discussed when it comes to free will and punishment, the volume also...

How should neuroscience, psychology and behavioral genetics impact legal responsibility practices?

Recent findings from these fields are sometimes claimed to threaten the moral foundations of legal responsibility practices by revealing that determinism, or something like it, is true. On this account legal responsibility practices should be abolished because there is no room for such outmoded fictions as responsibility in an enlightened and scientifically-informed approach to the regulation of society.

However, the chapters in this volume reject this claim and its related agenda of...

Psychopaths constitute less than 1% of the general population but over 20% of prison populations. They commit a disproportionate amount of crime and violence in society. Given that the economic burden of crime in the United States is estimated to be over $2.3 trillion per year, psychopaths likely constitute one of the most expensive mental health conditions known today. This volume chronicles the latest science of psychopathy and the various ways the condition intersects with the criminal justice system. From the modern techniques to assess the symptoms, to its utility in predicting violent...

This book brings together a set of papers, many which grow out of presentations at a conference in Oxford in 2009 on addiction and self-control, by a set of thinkers who are united in believing that understanding agency and failures of agency requires engagement with the best science. The papers it collects attempts to illuminate the mechanisms involved in addiction and thereby to understand to what degree and in what ways actions driven by addiction are controlled by the agent, express his or her will or values, and the extent to which addicts are responsible for what they do. Some of the...

Neuroscientists are mining nucleic acids, blood, saliva, and brain images in hopes of uncovering biomarkers that could help estimate risk of brain disorders like psychosis and dementia; though the science of bioprediction is young, its prospects are unearthing controversy about how bioprediction should enter hospitals, courtrooms, or state houses. While medicine, law, and policy have established protocols for how presence of disorders should change what we owe each other or who we blame, they have no stock answers for the probabilities that bioprediction offers. The Neuroethics...