Filed under: Uncategorized
Fascinating article here about how neuroscience could begin to play a part in criminal trials; firstly, as a souped-up way of detecting lies; secondly, and much more controversially, as a means of informing the extent to which defendants should be held responsible for their actions.
On the surface, this is nothing to write home about. Inquiry into the state of the accused’s brain is already sanctioned by the criminal law. Insanity - defined in the archaic ‘Mc’Naghten Rules’ as “a disease of the mind” leading to an ignorance of the difference between right and wrong- is already a complete defence to murder, and diminished responsibility - which excuses a defendant from blame for murder if it can be shown that he suffered from a ‘mental deficiency’ - reduces the offence to that of manslaughter. In each of these defences, evidence of either a physical or mental abnormality must be adduced; study of the brain can help to discern any such peculiarity.
What experts in this article seem to be arguing for, though, is a vast extension in neuroscience’s scope of application to legal cases. Lawyers would be given the keys to an armory of neurological explanations for their client’s behaviour. Any harmful deviation from the norm, which is the essence of all crime, could be attributed to factors they are powerless to change; factors hard-wired into their brains.
“To a neuroscientist, you are your brain; nothing causes your behavior other than the operations of your brain,” Greene says. “If that’s right, it radically changes the way we think about the law. The official line in the law is all that matters is whether you’re rational, but you can have someone who is totally rational but whose strings are being pulled by something beyond his control.”
In a strictly material sense, Greene has a point: without my brain I am not much use to anyone. But what he is saying seems to go further. Just as, to a Marxist, ‘you are your class’, or, to a feminist, ‘you are your gender’, Greene’s assertion that ‘to a neuroscientist, you are your brain’, merely offersyet another monolithic method of analysing and predicting behaviour.
All of which brings us back to a theme explored in a previous post on this site, namely, the gigantic shift in power that technological advances can produce. If all behaviour can be analysed by a neuroscientist, what need is there for a jury? What need is there even for a trial? As science gallops ahead at an unthinkable pace, it risks throwing the jockey off the saddle.
