Nicole A. Vincent

A Structured Taxonomy of Responsibility Concepts

This paper distinguishes six different responsibility concepts from one another, and it explains how those concepts relate to each other. The resulting “structured taxonomy of responsibility concepts” identifies several common sources of disputes about responsibility, and it suggests a procedure for resolving such disputes. To demonstrate their utility, this taxonomy and procedure are then used to illuminate debates in two familiar contexts.

How cognitive enhancement can change our duties

This theoretical paper draws the scientific community’s attention to how pharmacological cognitive enhancement may impact on society and law. Namely, if safe, reliable, and effective techniques to enhance mental performance are eventually developed, then this may under some circumstances impose new duties onto people in high-responsibility professions—e.g., surgeons or pilots—to use such substances to minimize risks of adverse outcomes or to increase the likelihood of good outcomes. By discussing this topic, we also hope to encourage scientists to bring their expertise to bear on this current public debate.

Neuroimaging and Responsibility Assessments

Could neuroimaging evidence help us to assess the degree of a person’s responsibility for a crime which we know that they committed? This essay defends an affirmative answer to this question. A range of standard objections to this high-tech approach to assessing people’s responsibility is considered and then set aside, but I also bring to light and then reject a novel objection—an objection which is only encountered when functional (rather than structural) neuroimaging is used to assess people’s responsibility.

Neurolaw and Direct Brain Interventions

This issue of Criminal Law and Philosophy contains three papers on a topic of increasing importance within the field of “neurolaw”—namely, the implications for criminal law of direct brain intervention based mind altering techniques (DBI’s). To locate these papers’ topic within a broader context, I begin with an overview of some prominent topics in the field of neurolaw, where possible providing some references to relevant literature. The specific questions asked by the three authors, as well as their answers and central claims, are then sketched out, and I end with a brief comment to explain why this particular topic can be expected to gain more prominence in coming years.

Legal Responsibility Adjudication and the Normative Authority of the Mind Sciences

In the field of ‘neurolaw’, reformists claim that recent scientific discoveries from the mind sciences have serious ramifications for how legal responsibility should be adjudicated, but conservatives deny that this is so. In contrast, I criticise both of these polar opposite positions by arguing that although scientific findings can have often-weighty normative significance, they lack the normative authority with which reformists often imbue them. After explaining why conservatives and reformists are both wrong, I then offer my own moderate suggestions about what views we have reason to endorse. My moderate position reflects the familiar capacitarian idea which underlies much lay, legal, and philosophical thinking about responsibility – namely, that responsibility tracks mental capacity.

Blame, desert and compatibilist capacity: a diachronic account of moderateness in regards to reasons-responsiveness

This paper argues that John Fischer and Mark Ravizzas compatibilist theory of moral responsibility cannot justify reactive attitudes like blame and desert-based practices like retributive punishment. The problem with their account, I argue, is that their analysis of moderateness in regards to reasons-responsiveness has the wrong normative features. However, I propose an alternative account of what it means for a mechanism to be moderately reasons-responsive which addresses this deficiency. In a nut shell, while Fischer and Ravizza test for moderate reasons-responsiveness by checking how a mechanism behaves in a given time slice across other possible worlds, on my account we should ask how that mechanism behaves in this world over a span of time – specifically, whether it responds to reasons sufficiently often. My diachronic account is intended as a drop-in replacement for Fischer and Ravizzas synchronic account.

“The Neuroscience of Responsibility”—Workshop Report

This is a report on the 3-day workshop “The Neuroscience of Responsibility” that was held in the Philosophy Department at Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands during February 11th–13th, 2010. The workshop had 25 participants from The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, UK, USA, Canada and Australia, with expertise in philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry and law. Its aim was to identify current trends in neurolaw research related specifically to the topic of responsibility, and to foster international collaborative research on this topic. The workshop agenda was constructed by the participants at the start of each day by surveying the topics of greatest interest and relevance to participants. In what follows, we summarize (1) the questions which participants identified as most important for future research in this field, (2) the most prominent themes that emerged from the discussions, and (3) the two main international collaborative research project plans that came out of this meeting.

The Importance of Monitoring in the Adoption of More Liberal Drug Policies

Bell, Lucke, and Hall’s (2012) evocative historical recount of society’s prior bad experience with liberalized access to cocaine and amphetamines, and the parallels that they draw between those two unfortunate chapters in public health history and the more recent calls to liberalize access to drugs like methylphenidate and modafinil for the purpose of cognitive enhancement, provide a welcome prompt for pause and reflection. However, it would be easy to draw the wrong public health policy conclusion from this sobering paper - namely, that there is something intrinsically problematic about a shift from using such drugs for the treatment of clinically diagnosable mental disorders to using them for the purpose of attempting to enhance cognition, and hence that regulation of these drugs should remain restrictive and maybe that it should even be tightened. I argue that the central public health policy message that should be taken away from Bell and colleagues’ excellent paper is that if we do wish to allow these medications to be made available for cognitive enhancement purposes, then we should not neglect to also put into place the necessary public health mechanisms through which users’ health and dosage (quantity, frequency, and method of delivery) can be periodically monitored.