Neuroethics & Law Blog

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

Last Edition's Most Popular Article(s): Researchers Track Eye Movements to Sway Moral Decisions, Nature News In The Popular Press: Early Intervention in Schools: A Site for Empirical Neuroethics, The Neuroethics Blog Bioethics Commission Releases Final Neuroscience Report as Part of BRAIN Initiative: Focuses on Controversial Topics that Must be Addressed if Neuroscience is to Progress and be Applied Ethically, The Blog of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues Technology and Persuasion, MIT Technology Review The Science of Why We Love to Root for Underdogs, Vox Genetics of Altruism: Is Blood Really Thicker than Water?, Science Daily Being Comfortable in Robotics' Uncanny Valley, BBC We Get Infected By Other People’s Emotions – And That’s a Good Thing, Discover: The Crux Compulsive Behavior Sells, MIT Technology Review Can Neuroscience Teach Us About Winemaking?, Discover: Neuroskeptic Scientists Spot Gene Tied to Severe Autism in Girls, Health Day Games as Therapy, The Guardian Tech Weekly Podcast How is the Brain Relevant in Mental Disorder?, Mind Hacks Rethinking Alcohol: Can Heavy Drinkers Learn To Cut Back?, NPR: Shots Blog Meet the Gene that Keeps Your Brain Young, Quartz Your Brain Learns New Words By Seeing Them Not Hearing Them, TIME Biogen's Alzheimer's Drug Slows Mental Decline in Early Study, Reuters Can Monkeys Get Depressed?, Discover: Neuroskeptic Teaching Science to the Brain: How the Brain Learns the Way Things Work, Science Daily In the Academic Literature: Rethinking the Brain, Nature Intelligent Robots Must Uphold Human Rights, Nature The Neuroscience of Mindfulness Meditation, Nature Reviews Neuroscience Towards an Empirically Grounded Predictive Coding Account of Action Understanding, The Journal of Neuroscience

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.

"The Future of Emotional Harm"

Recently published in SSRN (and forthcoming in 83 Fordham Law Review (2015)):

 

"The Future of Emotional Harm"

 

BETSY GREY, Arizona State University

Why should tort law treat claims for emotional harm as a second-class citizen? Judicial skepticism about these claims is long entrenched, justified by an amalgam of perceived problems ranging from proof difficulties for causation and the need to constrain fraudulent claims, to the ubiquity of the injury, and a concern about open-ended liability. To address this jumble of justifications, the law has developed a series of duty limitations to curb the claims and preclude them from reaching the jury for individualized analysis. The limited duty approach to emotional harm is maintained by the latest iteration of the Restatement (Third) of Torts. This Article argues that many of the justifications for curtailing this tort have been discredited by scientific developments. In particular, the rapid advances in neuroscience give greater insight into the changes that occur in the brain from emotional harm. Limited duty tests should no longer be used as proxies for validity or justified by the presumed untrustworthiness of the claim. Instead, validity evidence for emotional harm claims — like evidence of physical harm — should be entrusted to juries. This approach will reassert the jury’s role as the traditional factfinder, promote corrective justice and deterrence values, and lead to greater equity for negligent infliction of emotional distress (NIED) claimants. The traditional limitations on tort recovery, including the rules of evidence and causation, are more than adequate to avoid opening the floodgates to emotional distress claims.

"Symposium on Minds, Brains, and Law: A Reply"

Recently published in SSRN (and forthcoming in Jurisprudence (2015)):

 

"Symposium on Minds, Brains, and Law: A Reply"

 

MICHAEL S. PARDO, University of Alabama School of Law
DENNIS PATTERSON, European University Institute,

This essay, forthcoming in a symposium issue of Jurisprudence, replies to reviews of our book, Minds, Brains, and Law: The Conceptual Foundations of Law and Neuroscience (Oxford University Press, 2013), by Stephen Morse, Teneille Brown, and David Faigman. Morse and Brown are largely in agreement with many aspects of our arguments. But they each raise challenges with respect to some of the details. We first discuss the extensions, amendments, and objections they each have raised. Faigman takes a more critical stance. Accordingly, we devote the bulk of our reply to correcting several misunderstanding and misinterpretations that underlie his critique.

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

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PEBS Neuroethics Roundup: Mar 12, 2015

 

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Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. Last Edition's Most Popular Article(s): Descendants of Holocaust Survivors Have Altered Stress Hormones, Scientific American In The Popular Press: If an Algorithm Wrote This, How Would You Even Know? NY Times One Day, Scientists May Be Able To Erase Negative Memories In Your Brain While You Sleep, HuffPo Science Drug may restore brain function, memory in patients at risk for Alzheimer's disease, HUB Why are we ticklish? Here’s what we know about our silliest defense mechanism, Vox Primordial soup to nuts: are some men naturally selected to be better dads? Neuroethics Blog Many People Hear Voices -- and It Isn't Always a Sign of Illness, Gizmodo Mediators call for change to science of Human Brain Project, Nature News Are murderers born or made? BBC News The Feel-Good Gene, NY Times To digitize a brain, first slice 2,000 times with a very sharp blade, Arstechnica Was Neuroscience’s Most Famous Amnesiac, “HM”, A Victim of Medical Error? Neuroskeptic Bioelectric signals spark brain growth, Nature News Women Hurt More Than Men, Due to Both Biology and Bias, The Crux Blog Suicide rates are going up, especially among young women, Vox How Molly Works in the Brain, Scientific American This is how parents turn their kids into narcissists, Vox My Brain Made Me Do It — So What? Practical Ethics Blog Is Neuroscience Based On Biology? Neuroskeptic NIH-funded scientists identify brain site for stress role in binge alcohol drinking, NIH The Revealingly Flawed AI of “Chappie” Out There Blog In the Academic Literature: Cats Prefer Species-Appropriate Music, Applied Animal Behaviour Science The tendency to trust is reflected in human brain structure, NeuroImage The effect of ageing on fMRI: Correction for the confounding effects of vascular reactivity evaluated by joint fMRI and MEG in 335 adults, Human Brain Mapping Chronic Stress Induces Anxiety via an Amygdalar Intracellular Cascade that Impairs Endocannabinoid Signaling, Neuron Of mice, men, and macaque brains, Science A Ten-Year Follow-Up of a Study of Memory for the Attack of September 11, 2001: Flashbulb Memories and Memories for Flashbulb Events, Journal of Experimental Psychology 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.

Intensive Course in Bioethics June 2015 (JHU)

"A Duty to Remember, a Right to Forget? Memory Manipulations and the Law"

Recently published in Handbook of Neuroethics 1279 (2014):

"A Duty to Remember, a Right to Forget? Memory Manipulations and the Law"

Christoph Bublitz

Martin Dresler

Neuroscience might develop interventions that afford editing or erasing memories, changing their content or attenuating accompanying emotions. This section provides an introduction to the intriguing ethical and legal questions raised by such alterations, with a special focus on the report of the President’s Council “Beyond Therapy” and the proposal of a right to freedom of memory advanced by Adam Kolber.

"Erasing traumatic memories: when context and social interests can outweigh personal autonomy"

Recently published in Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine:

"Erasing traumatic memories: when context and social interests can outweigh personal autonomy"

Andrea Lavazza

Neuroscientific research on the removal of unpleasant and traumatic memories is still at a very early stage, but is making rapid progress and has stirred a significant philosophical and neuroethical debate. Even if memory is considered to be a fundamental element of personal identity, in the context of memory-erasing the autonomy of decision-making seems prevailing. However, there seem to be situations where the overall context in which people might choose to intervene on their memories would lead to view those actions as counterproductive. In this article, I outline situations where the so-called composition effects can produce negative results for everyone involved, even if the individual decisions are not as such negative. In such situations medical treatments that usually everyone should be free to take, following the principle of autonomy, can make it so that the personal autonomy of the individuals in the group considered is damaged or even destroyed. In these specific cases, in which what is called the “conformity to context” prevails, the moral admissibility of procedures of memory-erasing is called into question and the principle of personal autonomy turns out to be subordinate to social interests benefitting every member of the group.

"Justice without Retribution Conference"

Recently sent to the Neuroethics & Law Blog:

"Justice without Retribution Conference"

An Interdisciplinary Conference on the Legal and Social Implications of Rejecting the Retributive Conceptions of Free Will and Responsibility.

For centuries, certain philosophers have argued that our everyday concepts of free will and responsibility are misguided. New neuroscientific findings have given added impetus to such critiques. Free will sceptics often point out that their view undermines the retributive justification of punishment, but they are only just beginning to develop positive accounts of what our legal system would look like if we abandoned all retributive ideas (see, e.g., Derk Pereboom (2001), Living without Free Will. Oxford: OUP). According to retributivists, the outcome would be disastrous. They warn that the only way to treat  offenders as persons rather than objects is to recognise that they are ‘free’ and ‘responsible’ in the retributive sense of these words; they insist that abandoning ‘just deserts’ means abandoning justice. These concerns may partly explain the growing tendency of philosophers to favour compatibilist solutions to the free will problem (see The Philpapers Survey 2011 http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl, for the latest data on the rise of compatibilism among academic philosophers).

The purpose of this conference is to move beyond the traditional debate about whether we have free will and consider whether free will sceptics can provide a convincing non-retributive conception of justice and respect for persons that can help us tackle current legal problems.  This shift in focus is particularly timely. Recently, two important conferences (resulting in edited collections) have brought together leading compatibilists to work out the implications of their position for contemporary legal and social issues (see Vincent, N A, van de Poel, I & van den Hoven, J (eds) (2011). Moral Responsibility: beyond free will & determinism. Dordrecht, NL: Springer; and Vincent, N A (ed) (2012). Neuroscience and Legal Responsibility. New York, NY, USA: OUP.). The conference will provide a forum for free will sceptics to present an alternative approach to these real-world challenges.

"Is There a Future for Involuntary Treatment in Rights-Based Mental Health Law?"

Recently published in SSRN (and recently published in 21 Psychiatry, Psychology and Law 747 (2014)):

 

"Is There a Future for Involuntary Treatment in Rights-Based Mental Health Law?"

 

SASCHA M. CALLAGHAN, University of Sydney
CHRISTOPHER RYAN, University of Sydney

Involuntary psychiatric treatment is currently permitted in all Australian jurisdictions. In almost all, Tasmania being a recent exception, this is so regardless of the person’s ability to make his or her own decisions about treatment. In recent years mental health legislation has come under pressure from several quarters, most urgently, as a result of Australia’s ratification of the United Nations Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. While interpretation of the Convention is not yet settled, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN Disabilities Committee have both indicated that supported decision-making regimes must be instituted in place or substituted decision-making arrangements and that involuntary treatment is no longer permissible under the CPRD.

This article argues that in order to give effect to the provisions of the CRPD, new supported decision-making regimes must be incorporated into mental health legislation but that these must admit a limited role for substituted decisions, including involuntary treatment, where a person lacks decision-making capacity. We argue that such a scheme can, and must, respect the rights, will and preferences of the person affected. Furthermore, we suggest that failing to account for it in law will jeopardise rights more than it protects them.

"How Deceptive are Deceptive Visualizations?: An Empirical Analysis of Common Distortion Techniques"

Recently published in SSRN (and forthcoming in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2015):

 

"How Deceptive are Deceptive Visualizations?: An Empirical Analysis of Common Distortion Techniques"

 

ANSHUL VIKRAM PANDEY, New York University (NYU)
KATHARINA RALL, New York University School of Law
MARGARET L. SATTERTHWAITE, New York University School of Law
ODED NOV, New York University (NYU) - NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering
ENRICO BERTINI, New York University (NYU) - NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering

In this paper, we present an empirical analysis of deceptive visualizations. We start with an in-depth analysis of what deception means in the context of data visualization, and categorize deceptive visualizations based on the type of deception they lead to. We identify popular distortion techniques and the type of visualizations those distortions can be applied to, and formalize why deception occurs with those distortions. We create four deceptive visualizations using the selected distortion techniques, and run a crowdsourced user study to identify the deceptiveness of those visualizations. We then present the findings of our study and show how deceptive each of these visual distortion techniques are, and for what kind of questions the misinterpretation occurs. We also analyze individual differences among participants and present the effect of some of those variables on participants’ responses. This paper presents a first step in empirically studying deceptive visualizations, and will pave the way for more research in this direction.

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

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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.