Mechanical Choices

Mechanical Choices

"This book assays how the remarkable discoveries of contemporary neuroscience impact upon our conception of ourselves and our responsibility for our choices and our actions. Dramatic (and indeed revolutionary) changes in how we think of ourselves as agents and as persons are commonly taken to be the implications of those discoveries of neuroscience. Indeed, the very notions of responsibility and of deserved punishment are thought to be threatened by these discoveries. Such threats are collected into four groupings: (1) the threat from determinism, that neurosciences shoes us that all of our choices and actions are caused by events in the brain that precede choice; (2) the threat from epiphenomenalism, that our choices are shown by experiment not to cause the actions that are the objects of such choice but are rather mere epiphenomena, co-effects of common causes in the brain; (3) the threat from reductionist mechanism, that we and everything we value is nothing but a bunch of two-valued switches going off in our brains; and (4) the threat from fallibilism, (5) that we are not masters in our own house because we lack the privileged knowledge of our own minds needed to be such masters. The book seeks to blunt such radical challenges while nonetheless detailing how law, morality, and common-sense psychology can harness the insights of an advancing neuroscience to more accurately assign moral blame and legal punishment to the truly deserving"--

Mechanical Choices

Mechanical Choices details the intimate connection that exists between morality and law: the morality we use to blame others for their misdeeds and the criminal law that punishes them for these misdeeds. This book shows how both law and morality presuppose the accuracy of common sense, a centuries-old psychology that defines people as rational agents who make honorable choices and act for just reasons. It then shows how neuroscience is commonly taken to challenge these fundamental psychological assumptions. Such challenges--four in number--are distinguished from each other by the different neuroscientific facts from which they arise: the fact that human choices are caused by brain events; the fact that those choices don't cause the actions that are their objects but are only epiphenomenal to those choices; the fact that those choices are identical to certain physical events in the brain; and the fact that human subjects are quite fallible in their knowledge of what they are doing and why. The body of this book shows how such challenges are either based on faulty facts or misconceived as to the relevance of such facts to responsibility. The book ends with a detailed examination of the neuroscience of addiction, an examination which illustrates how neuroscience can help rather than challenge both law and morality in their quest to accurately define excuses from responsibility.

Mechanical Engineering