Neuroethics & Law Blog

TEDx Talk on "The Dark Side of Free Will"

Gregg Caruso on "The Dark Side of Free Will":

 

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

Last Edition's Most Popular Article(s): Brain Training Doesn’t Make You Smarter, Scientific American In The Popular Press: Special K, a Hallucinogen, Raises Hopes and Concerns as a Treatment for Depression, New York Times A Crowd Of Scientists Finds A Better Way To Predict Seizures, NPR Shots Blog Is Personality Unique to Humans?, BBC News Why Your Brain Loves Procrastination, Vox Voices in the Dark: An Audio Story, Mosaic What the Science of Memory Can Tell Us About the UVA Rape Story, Vox This Is How Twitter Uncovers Mental Illness Trends, Tech Times Social Pain, Physical Pain: Different After All?, Discover vOICe: The Soundscape Headsets That Allow Blind People To ‘See’ The World, The Guardian Toward Cracking the Code of How Brains Work, Machines Like Us This Artificial Skin Can Feel Pressure, Heat and Dampness, Gizmodo An Overview of Neurointerventions and the Law: Regulating Human Capacity (Lawyers, Neuroscientists, Philosophers, and Psychologists in Conversation), Neuroethics Blog Personality Affects Maths-Enhancing Brain-Zap Method, NewScientist A Mood-Changing Headset, Thync, That Uses Electrodes to Perk You Up, The Guardian Too Simple Minds: Debunking Myths About the Human Brain, NewScientist Artificial Intelligence is Here—and it’s Nothing to Fear (Yet), Quartz In the Academic Literature: Dopamine Receptors Differentially Enhance Rule Coding in Primate Prefrontal Cortex Neurons, Neuron Place Cells in the Hippocampus: Eleven Maps for Eleven Rooms, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Development and Preliminary Evaluation of a Novel Low Cost VR-Based Upper Limb Stroke Rehabilitation Platform Using Wii Technology, Disability and Rehabilitation: Assistive Technology                Hebbian and Neuromodulatory Mechanisms Interact to Trigger Associative Memory Formation, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Submillisecond Unmasked Subliminal Visual Stimuli Evoke Electrical Brain Responses, Human Brain Mapping Smoking and the Developing Brain: Altered White Matter Microstructure in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Healthy Controls, Human Brain Mapping

Subscribe to our mailing list The Program in Ethics and Brain Sciences (PEBS) is a collaborative effort of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and the  Johns Hopkins Brain Sciences Institute . The goal of PEBS is to ensure that research in brain science proceeds with an informed understanding of ethical issues, and that philosophical and empirical analyses of the advances in brain research proceed with an informed understanding of the science.

Blog Post Recap

Here's a recap of my posts during a recent guest blogging stint at Prawfsblawg:

• What the Binary-Scalar Distinction Misses
• The Injustice of Bumpy Laws
• Four Advantages of Bumpy Laws
• The Rule-Standard Distinction vs. the Smooth-Bumpy Distinction
• Convictions Overturned for Italian Earthquake Researchers
• The Misreading of Greene and Cohen
• The Law's Position on Free Will
• One Way Neuroscience Will Eventually Affect the Law
• The Dangers of Sloppy Brain Imaging Studies
• The Concretization of Law
• Two More Reasons the Law May Concretize
• Speciesism in Chimpanzee Habeas Case

Speciesism in Chimpanzee Habeas Case

A New York appellate court has ruled  that a chimpanzee is not a "person" entitled to state habeas corpus protections. Hence the Nonhuman Rights Project cannot get an order to show cause to commence a habeas proceeding to challenge the confinement of Tommy the chimpanzee (who is apparently being kept in accordance with state and federal animal welfare laws).

The court reasoned  that there is no precedent for treating chimps as persons and that personhood ought not be extended because the rights associated with the writ have "historically been connected with the imposition of societal obligations and duties" (emphasis added). "Under this view, society extends rights in exchange for an express or implied agreement from its members to submit to social responsibilities." Since chimps do not accept legal responsibilities, they ought not have the rights of persons.

As to why humans that are too young or too intellectually disabled to have legal duties are still persons, the court states in a footnote: "To be sure, some humans are less able to bear legal duties or responsibilities than others. These differences do not alter our analysis, as it is undeniable that, collectively, human beings possess the unique ability to bear legal responsibility. Accordingly, nothing in this decision should be read as limiting the rights of human beings in the context of habeas corpus proceedings or otherwise."

The court's position exemplifies what Peter Singer and others call speciesism. What entitles a being to protection, according to the court, is not something about the creature itself but about its membership in a particular group--namely, the species homo sapiens. If sexism is an irrational prejudice in favor of one gender and racism is an irrational prejudice in favor of one race over another, to many animal rights advocates, specisism is an irrational prejudice in favor of one species over another.  So how one feels about the decision likely turns on how seriously one takes the charge of speciesism.  

In this case, there is apparently no allegation that Tommy was being mistreated in the sense protected by current animal welfare laws. Often, however, even when animal welfare laws are being violated, private parties lack standing to bring suit. So questions of personhood for great apes and other animals both raise fundamental questions about the nature of personhood and less fundamental, but still important issues, about how expansively animal welfare protections apply.

(Hat tip: Eugene Volokh) (This post originally appeared at Prawfsblawg.)

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

Last Edition's Most Popular Article(s): Can Brain Science Be Dangerous?, New York Times In The Popular Press: Brain Training Doesn’t Make You Smarter, Scientific American Why Our Memory Fails Us, New York Times High School Football Tied to Brain Changes, Even Without Concussion, US News & World Report Stephen Hawking Warns Artificial Intelligence Could End Mankind, BBC News Saved: How Addicts Gained the Power to Reverse Overdoses, Mosaic Agency Revisited: Dr. Heidi Ravven on Moral Psychology, Ethics and the Myth of Free Will, The Neuroethics Blog Has the Brain-Zap Backlash Begun?, NewScientist Health The Mysterious Vanishing Brains, The Atlantic When Everyday Noise Is Unbearable, New York Times Well Blog How Brain Scans Can Diagnose Autism With 97% Accuracy, TIME 'Hug' Brain Test Could Diagnose Disorders Like Autism, New Scientist Unlike Humans, Monkeys Aren’t Fooled By Expensive Brands, Discover How Dogs Understand What We Say, NPR Shots Blog Can Mushrooms Treat Depression?, New York Times Most People With Depression Aren’t Getting Treatment, Survey Finds, TIME The Weird Reason Happy Things Make You Cry, TIME The Presidents We Remember—and the Ones We’ve Almost Entirely Forgotten, Washington Post The Military is Trying to Make Soldiers Stronger, Smarter, and More Amphibious, Vox Brain Inspired Data Engineering, ScienceDaily The Smart Mouse with the Half-Human Brain, New Scientist In the Academic Literature: Neurobiology: A Molecular Knife to Dice Depression, Nature Bacteria and the Neural Code, New England Journal of Medicine Simultaneously Uncovering the Patterns of Brain Regions Involved in Different Story Reading Subprocesses, PLoS One                The Human Ortholog of Acid-Sensing Ion Channel Gene ASIC1a Is Associated With Panic Disorder and Amygdala Structure and Function, Biological Psychiatry The Functional Connectivity of Intralaminar Thalamic Nuclei in the Human Basal Ganglia, Human Brain Mapping Genome-Wide Studies of Verbal Declarative Memory in Non-Demented Older People: The CHARGE Consortium, Biological Psychiatry Neuroimaging and Neurodevelopmental Outcome in Extremely Preterm Infants, Pediatrics Working Memory Capacity Links Cognitive Reserve with Long-Term Memory in Moderate to Severe TBI: A Translational Approach, Journal of Neurology An Adaptive Threshold in Mammalian Neocortical Evolution, PLoS Biology Human Infrared Vision is Triggered by Two-Photon Chromophore Isomerization, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Subscribe to our mailing list The Program in Ethics and Brain Sciences (PEBS) is a collaborative effort of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and the  Johns Hopkins Brain Sciences Institute . The goal of PEBS is to ensure that research in brain science proceeds with an informed understanding of ethical issues, and that philosophical and empirical analyses of the advances in brain research proceed with an informed understanding of the science.

Two More Reasons the Law May Concretize

In my last post, I raised the admittedly speculative possibility that advances in artificial intelligence will lead the law to concretize (by which I mean that it will become more clearly expressed and more transparently applied). I gave the example of autonomous cars which may lead manufacturers to push for more concretized speed limits (unlike the ones we have now in which it's unlikely you'll get ticketed if you travel a little above the speed limit). Superficial appearances aside, actual speed limits are neither clearly expressed nor transparently applied.

Let me offer two more reasons why the law may concretize. First, the law may become more concrete as computers play a larger role in making legally relevant decisions. For example, a group of German researchers is working to develop a computer system “to make automatic decisions on child benefit claims to the country’s Federal Employment Agency . . . probably with some human auditing of its decisions behind the scenes” and is in talks with the agency about how to deploy it. One researcher “hopes that one day, new laws will be drafted with machines in mind from the start, so that each is built as a structured database containing all of the law’s concepts, and information on how the concepts relate to one another.” In other words, when legally relevant tasks are performed by computers, legislation may itself be crafted more algorithmically to facilitate processing. That is a kind of concretization although whether or not such laws are clearer than current laws may be a matter of taste (and of whether you’re a human or a computer).

Second, the law might concretize by creating greater pressure to clarify the theoretical underpinnings of the law. For example, many copyright holders already use automated software systems to scan the Internet looking for copyright violations. Some users make constitutionally protected “fair use” of others’ copyrighted material, but it is difficult to know precisely what constitutes fair use. Before the Internet age, copying audio, visual, and written materials was more difficult, so there was less need to police violations. Furthermore, it was more expensive to police each violation when you could not simply search for violations on the Internet. Thus, fair use determinations were made less frequently. In the Internet age, such determinations are made much more frequently, and there is more political pressure to understand the principles underlying fair-use doctrine in order to make the law more concrete.

In the future, such pressures may apply to some of the most central questions facing moral and legal philosophers. Consider the tricky theoretical issues that underlie the famous trolley thought experiments: A runaway trolley is heading toward five entirely innocent people who are, for some reason, strapped to the trolley tracks. If the trolley continues along its current path, all five will die. You can flip a switch to divert the trolley to an alternate track, but it will still kill one innocent person strapped to the alternate track. 

This trolley problem and its numerous variations raise interesting questions about when it is mandatory or permissible to take an action that will save several lives, when the action will also knowingly cause the death of some smaller number of people. There is no consensus solution to all trolley problems. Nevertheless, autonomous agents, especially unmanned military drones, will likely be confronted with real-life trolley problems. We will want these entities to follow rules of some sort, but we cannot program those rules unless we agree on what they should be. It is possible that we will have different rules for humans and nonhumans, but we will at least have to codify some rules for autonomous machines that will require more theoretical clarity and agreement than we have today.

Of course, humans already face trolley-like situations from time-to-time, and we still do not have clear rules to follow. The difference, however, is that after humans have confronted an emergency situation, there is usually quite a bit of uncertainty about what they knew and when they knew it. With autonomous entities, we will know more precisely what information the entity had available to it and how it was processed. Indeed, we will typically have video footage of the pertinent events, along with all of the other data available to the entity. Being clear about the rules is more important when we can no longer hide behind ambiguous facts.

(This post is adapted from "Will There Be a Neurolaw Revolution?" and originally appeared at Prawfsblawg.)

The Concretization of Law

In recent decades, progress in artificial intelligence has been widely considered disappointing. The tide may have changed, however. Reasonably good voice recognition software is now widely available. Websites like Facebook and Google can translate a snippet from a foreign language, at least in a pinch. And facial recognition is surprisingly accurate. Now, increasingly autonomous vehicles appear to be on the horizon. 

In an admittedly speculative portion of a recent paper, I argue that such technologies, especially autonomous vehicles, may lead law to "concretize" by which I mean that it will become more clearly expressed and more transparently applied. The law might concretize because rules for autonomous entities have to be described with some precision. We cannot so easily rely on the ability of computers to understand human attitudes and conventions. But if we can develop self-driving cars that recognize pedestrians, road debris, and traffic signs, the cars can surely recognize that it is generally permissible to drive a few miles-per-hour above the posted speed limit.

A more significant push to concretize may emerge from corporations that design self-driving cars. They will fear the accident liability from even de minimis vehicle infractions, like driving a little bit above the speed limit. So the law may concretize as corporations push for convergence between laws on the books and the laws that we are expected to follow. More concretized speed limits, for example, may be somewhat faster than those we have now but with more strict enforcement around the limit.

After my article was published, Google announced that it has programmed the autonomous vehicles it is testing to go up to ten miles-per-hour above the speed limit. I can certainly believe that it is sometimes safer to exceed the speed limit, but it is still surprising that a corporate juggernaut would program its cars to so easily break the law. We'll see, though, what happens when autonomous vehicles become more mainstream. I suspect that there will still be a push to make speed limits more transparent to facilitate compliance by autonomous vehicles.

(This post is adapted from "Will There Be a Neurolaw Revolution?" and originally appeared at Prawfsblawg.)

Recap of Recent Posts

Here's a recap of my recent posts during a guest blogging sting at Prawfsblawg:

• What the Binary-Scalar Distinction Misses
• The Injustice of Bumpy Laws
• Four Advantages of Bumpy Laws
• The Rule-Standard Distinction vs. the Smooth-Bumpy Distinction
• Convictions Overturned for Italian Earthquake Researchers
• The Misreading of Greene and Cohen
• The Law's Position on Free Will
• One Way Neuroscience Will Eventually Affect the Law
• The Dangers of Sloppy Brain Imaging Studies
• The Concretization of Law
• Two More Reasons the Law May Concretize
• Speciesism in Chimpanzee Habeas Case

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

Last Edition's Most Popular Article(s): His Brain, Her Brain, Science In The Popular Press: A Better Way to Screen Airport Passengers, With Psychology, Discover Brains of People with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Offer Clues About Disorder, New York Times Well Blog Why Have Our Brains Started to Shrink?, Scientific American The Secret to a Successful Thanksgiving: Free Will, Scientific American Can Brain Science Be Dangerous?, New York Times Brain's Dementia Weak Spot Identified, BBC News New Gene Studies Suggest There Are Hundreds of Kinds of Autism, Wired A Mouse Experiment Suggests How We Might One Day Sleep Off Toxic Memories, Scientific American Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy Exists, and We’re Terrible at Dealing With It, The Incidental Economist Blind From Birth, But Able To Use Sound To 'See' Faces, NPR Shots Blog Prosopagnosia – a Common Problem, Commonly Overlooked, Wellcome Trust Blog Illustration From 1881 Resolves Century-Old Brain Controversy, SCOPE How Does the Brain React to Virtual Reality? Completely Different Pattern of Activity in Brain, ScienceDaily Babies Remember Nothing but a Good Time, Study Says, ScienceDaily Man’s Headaches Due to Tapeworm Living in his Brain for Four Years, The Guardian Drug and Alcohol Abuse Among Physicians: How Concerned Should We Be?, The Neuroethics Blog US Regulators Move on Thought-Controlled Prosthetics, Nature News In the Academic Literature: Reversal of Cortical Information Flow During Visual Imagery as Compared to Visual Perception, NeuroImage Mind Matters: Placebo Enhances Reward Learning in Parkinson's Disease, Nature Neuroscience Grammatical Analysis as a Distributed Neurobiological Function, Human Brain Mapping                Follow the Liar: The Effects of Adult Lies on Children's Honesty, Developmental Science Imaging Blood-Brain Barrier Dysfunction in Football Players, JAMA Neurology Selective Conversion of Fibroblasts into Peripheral Sensory Neurons, Nature Neuroscience NOS1AP, A Protein Implicated in Schizophrenia, Controls Radial Migration of Cortical Neurons, Biological Psychiatry Cerebellar Plasticity and Motor Learning Deficits in a Copy-Number Variation Mouse Model of Autism, Nature Communications

Subscribe to our mailing list The Program in Ethics and Brain Sciences (PEBS) is a collaborative effort of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and the  Johns Hopkins Brain Sciences Institute . The goal of PEBS is to ensure that research in brain science proceeds with an informed understanding of ethical issues, and that philosophical and empirical analyses of the advances in brain research proceed with an informed understanding of the science.