Will advances in neuroscience move reasonable people to abandon the idea that criminals deserve to be punished? Some researchers working at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience and philosophy think the answer is yes. Their reasoning is straightforward: if the idea of deserving punishment depends upon the idea that criminals freely choose their actions, and if neuroscience reveals that free choice is an illusion, then we can see that the idea of deserving punishment is nonsense. As Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen speculated in a 2004 essay: “new neuroscience will undermine people’s common sense, libertarian conception of free will and the retributivist thinking that depends on it, both of which have heretofore been shielded by the inaccessibility of sophisticated thinking about the mind and its neural basis.”
This past summer, Greene and several other colleagues did empirical work that appears to confirm that 2004 speculation. The new work finds that when university students learn about “the neural basis of behavior” — quite simply, the brain activity underlying human actions —they become less supportive of the idea that criminals deserve to be punished.
[For more of this story, written by Erik Parens, go to http://opinionator.blogs.nytim...setType=opinion&]
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