Neuroethics & Law Blog

"The Value of Suffering Punishment"

I recently wrote a guest post for the Value of Suffering Project. I encourage you to read the post and to read about the project more generally.

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

Last Edition's Most Popular Article(s): The Rise of Cognitive Enhancers Is a Mass Social Experiment, The Conversation US In The Popular Press: Tell It About Your Mother: Can Brain-Scanning Save Freudian Psychoanalysis?, New York Times Magazine Can the Bacteria in Your Gut Explain Your Mood?, New York Times Magazine Lasers, Magnetism Allow Glimpses of the Human Brain at Work, New York Times New Primer for Researchers on Neuroscience and Consent Capacity Now Available, Blog of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues This Documentary Uses Science to See Who Loves the Hardest, Gizmodo Selfhood and Ethics: Who Am I and Why Does It Matter?, The Neuroethics Blog To Ease Pain, Reach For Your Playlist, NPR: Shots Blog Robots in Japan Now Have Emotions, Quartz How Does The Brain Recognize Faces From Minimal Information?, Science Daily How Machine Vision Solved One of the Great Mysteries of 20th-Century Surrealist Art, MIT Technology Review Rats Have Empathy, But What About the Scientists Who Experiment on Them?, Bioethics Forum This Will Probably Be the Last Father’s Day My Dad Remembers Me, Quartz The Future of Depression Treatment, The Neurocritic Blog Inside Out – A Neuroscience Metaphor, Neurologica Blog Two Philosophers Explain What Inside Out Gets Wrong About the Mind, Vox What Should Investigators be Doing with Unexpected Findings in Brain Imaging Research?, Journal of Medical Ethics Blog Telepresence Robots Can Give People with Disabilities the Feeling of Being Home, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne YouTube Channel Pollution May Age the Brain, New York Times: Well Blog Picture This? Some Just Can’t, New York Times UK Woman Gets "World's Most Advanced" Bionic Hand Replacement, Gizmodo That's Not Fair! Crime And Punishment In A Preschooler's Mind, NPR: Shots Blog From Brains to Computers: How Do Us Reverse-Engineer the Most Mysterious Organ?, Stanford SCOPE Blog Injectable Implants Could Help Crack the Brain’s Codes, MIT Technology Review In the Academic Literature: Neuroscience: The Hard Science of Oxytocin, Nature Addiction, Nature The Neuroscience of Placebo Effects: Connecting Context, Learning and Health, Nature Reviews Neuroscience Threat of Death and Autobiographical Memory: A Study of Passengers From Flight AT236, Clinical Psychological Science Placebos without Deception: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Irritable Bowel Syndrome, PLoS One Neural Population Dynamics in Human Motor Cortex during Movements in People with ALS, eLIFE Homing in on Consciousness in the Nervous System: An Action-Based Synthesis, Behavioral and Brain Sciences Expression Change in Angiopoietin-1 Underlies Change in Relative Brain Size in Fish, Proceedings B Role of Striatal Cholinergic Interneurons in Set-Shifting in the Rat, 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.

"American Punitiveness and Mass Incarceration: Psychological Perspectives on Retributive and Consequentialist Responses to Crime"

Recently published in SSRN (and forthcoming in New Criminal Law Review):

"American Punitiveness and Mass Incarceration: Psychological Perspectives on Retributive and Consequentialist Responses to Crime"

MARK R. FONDACARO, J.D., PH.D., John Jay College - CUNY
MEGAN O'TOOLE, CUNY, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

A recent National Academy of Sciences Report explored the drivers of the fourfold increase in incarceration rates in the United States and provided a firm recommendation for significant reduction in incarceration rates. Policy makers representing the entire political spectrum are now publicly airing their views on the need for reform. Although public sentiment is generally favorably disposed toward reform in the abstract, when confronted with specific examples of crime, they tend to favor more punitive, retributive responses to crime. Retributive justifications for punishment that are deeply ingrained in our culture and our legal system as well as our biological and psychological make-up are a major impediment to constructive reform efforts. However, recent advances in research across neurobiological, psychological, and social levels of analysis suggest that following our retributive impulses to guide legal decision making and criminal justice policy is not only costly and ineffective in reducing crime, but unjust and increasingly difficult to justify morally. This article will draw on a body of research anchored in social ecological models of human behavior to argue for more forward-looking, consequentialist responses to crime that aim at the individual prevention of criminal behavior in the least restrictive and most cost effective manner at both the front- and back-ends of our criminal justice system.

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

Last Edition's Most Popular Article(s): Let’s Stamp Out Perversion, Bill of Health In The Popular Press: How Do We Hold a Child’s Mind Accountable?, The Marshall Project The Rise of Cognitive Enhancers Is a Mass Social Experiment, The Conversation US Left in the Brain: Potentially Toxic Residue from MRI Drugs, ProPublica Meanwhile in the Future: Never Sleep Again, Using This Drug, Gizmodo Deep Learning Machine Beats Humans in IQ Test, MIT Technology Review Why Some Teen Brains May Be Hardwired To Make Risky Choices, NPR: Shots Blog Surgeon Proposes Human Head Transplant Operation As Soon As 2017, New Scientist Changing the Way We Think, The Neuroethics Blog Trailer Arrives for Film on Stanford Prison Experiment, Inside Higher Ed ‘Voices in My Head Were Telling Me to Set Myself on Fire’, The Guardian Here's the First Artificial Leg That Can Feel, Gizmodo Green Spaces at School May Help Kids’ Brains, TIME Science of Sadness and Joy: 'Inside Out' Gets Childhood Emotions Right, NPR: Shots Blog What Babies Understand About Adult Sadness, NPR: Shots Blog Activating Happy Memories Cheers Moody Mice, Nature News Dolphin Intelligence, National Geographic This is Your Brain on Human Rights: Moral Enhancement and Human Rights, Neuroethics & Law Blog A Crazy Satisfying Theory About Why You Love Swiping Right, Gizmodo In the Academic Literature: Neuroscience: The Power of Positivity, Nature Hippocampal–Prefrontal Input Supports Spatial Encoding In Working Memory, Nature Evaluation of White Matter Injury Patterns Underlying Neuropsychiatric Symptoms after Mild Traumatic Brain Injury, Radiology Case Report: Stimulation of the Right Amygdala Induces Transient Changes in Affective Bias, Brain Stimulation Distributed Cognition and Social Brains: Reductions in Mushroom Body Investment Accompanied the Origins of Sociality in Wasps (Hymenoptera: Vespidae), Proceedings B Scratching Induces Overactivity in Motor-Related Regions and Reward System in Chronic Itch Patients, Journal of Investigative Dermatology Cooperative and Competitive Spreading Dynamics on the Human Connectome, Neuron

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 Ethics of Subjecting a Child to the Risk of Eternal Torment: A Reply to Shawn Bawulski"

Recently published in SSRN:

"The Ethics of Subjecting a Child to the Risk of Eternal Torment: A Reply to Shawn Bawulski"

KENNETH EINAR HIMMA, University of Washington - School of Law

In “Birth as a Grave Misfortune,” I argue that it is morally wrong, given ordinary moral intuitions about child-bearing decisions, together with the traditional Christian doctrines of hell and salvific exclusivism, to bring a child into the world when the probability that she will spend an eternal afterlife suffering the torments of hell is as high as it would be if these two doctrines are true. In a paper published by this journal, Shawn Bawulski responds to my arguments, offering a number of philosophical and theological objections to my arguments. In this essay, I reply to those objections and counterarguments.

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

Last Edition's Most Popular Article(s): Two Ways to Be Happy, New York Times In The Popular Press: Surgery’s Far Frontier: Head Transplants, Wall Street Journal The Ambiguity of "Neurotheology" and its Developing Purpose, The Neuroethics Blog Do Creativity And Schizophrenia Share A Small Genetic Link? Maybe, NPR: Shots Blog Bioethics Commission Recommends Funding Research on the Intersection of Neuroscience and the Legal System, Blog of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues Use of Anti-Inflammatories Associated with Threefold Increase in Homicides, The Neurocritic Can Gaming Help Me See In 3D?, Mosaic Let’s Stamp Out Perversion, Bill of Health Too Much Praise Promotes Narcissism, Scientific American fMRI Memory Detectors Can Be Easily Fooled, Scientists Show, Science Daily Anorexia Nervosa and Deep Brain Stimulation: Philosophical Analysis of Potential Mechanisms, Oxford Practical Ethics Blog My Beautiful Broken Brain Review - Moving Study of Life after Stroke, The Guardian Sleep Like A Baby (Minus The Night Terrors) With Good Vibrations, NPR: All Tech Considered Blog Study: Children from Poorer Families Are More Altruistic Than Wealthier Kids, Quartz 20 Billion Nanoparticles Talk To the Brain Using Electricity, New Scientist For Some Chimpanzees, Happy Hour Starts With Stealing, New York Times American Medical Association Adopts Concussion Policy for Young Athletes, TIME Injectable Brain Implant Spies on Individual Neurons, Nature News Our Poor Sleeping Habits Are Filling Our Brains with Neurotoxins, Quartz Statins May Not Affect Memory, Study Suggests, New York Times: Well Blog Guest Post: What’s Wrong with Obesity (And Addiction)?, Oxford Practical Ethics Blog In the Academic Literature: Lateral Orbitofrontal Cortex Links Social Impressions to Political Choices, The Journal of Neuroscience Goal-Directed Modulation of Neural Memory Patterns: Implications for fMRI-Based Memory Detection, The Journal of Neuroscience Intelligence-Related Differences in the Asymmetry of Spontaneous Cerebral Activity, Human Brain Mapping Monitoring the Growth of the Neural Representations of New Animal Concepts, Human Brain Mapping Neurons Selective To the Number of Visual Items in the Corvid Songbird Endbrain, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Go When You Know: Chimpanzees’ Confidence Movements Reflect Their Responses in a Computerized Memory Task, Cognition

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.

"This is Your Brain on Human Rights: Moral Enhancement and Human Rights"

Recently published in SSRN (and recently published in Law and Ethics of Human RIghts, Vol. 9 (2015) and featured in the Human RIghts and Human Minds Symposium, 2015):

"This is Your Brain on Human Rights: Moral Enhancement and Human Rights"

I. GLENN COHEN, Harvard Law School
It seems fair to say that human rights law takes the human as given. Human beings are particular kinds of entities with particular kinds of psychologies and propensities, and it is the job of human rights law and human rights enforcement to govern that kind of entity, be it through sanctions, education, incentives, or other mechanisms. More specifically, human rights law takes human brains as given. If humans were different kinds of beings, both the mechanisms of getting compliance and possibly the very rules themselves would be different. The purpose of this essay, part of a symposium on Human Rights and Human Minds, is to very tentatively start to tie together thinking in neuroscience, bioethics, and human rights law to ask whether human rights law should take the nature of human beings, and more specifically, human brains, as given. I sketch the alternative possibility and examine it from a normative and (to a lesser extent) scientific perspective: instead of merely crafting laws and setting up structures that get human beings such as they are to respect human rights, that the human rights approach should also consider embracing attempts to remake human beings (and more specifically human brains) into the kinds of things that are more respectful of human rights law. This is currently science fiction, but there is some scientific evidence that moral enhancement may one day be possible. I call the alternative "moral enhancement to respect human rights law." To put the aim of the essay in its mildest form it is to answer the following question: if it becomes possible to use enhancement to increase respect for human rights and fidelity to human rights law (whatever you think is constitutive of those categories), and in particular in a way that reduces serious human rights violations, is it worth "looking into?" Or, by contrast, are the immediate objections to such an endeavor so powerful or hard to refute that going in this direction should be forbidden.

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

Last Edition's Most Popular Article(s): Why Honest People Do Dishonest Things, Scientific American In The Popular Press: Health Check: Can Your Brain Be ‘Full’?, The Conversation Can Your Brain Really Be "Full"?, Scientific American Why College Students Use Cognitive Enhancers: It’s Not Only about Grades, Bioethics Forum Diary of a Madman?: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Notebook of James Holmes, The Marshall Project Watching the Local News Could Make You Racist, Vox When The Color We See Isn't the Color We Remember, Science Daily What If People With Autism Are Actually Hyperfunctional?, TIME Forgetting the Pain of Exercise, New York Times Well Blog Cooking Skills May Have Emerged Millions of Years Ago, BBC News Chimpanzees Would Cook if Given the Chance, Research Says, New York Times I Was A Test Subject For Brain Experiments, Gizmodo Video: Man Plays Guitar to Remain Conscious during Brain Surgery, The Guardian New Hearing Technology Brings Sound To A Little Girl, NPR: Shots Blog Epicenter of Brain's Predictive Ability Pinpointed By Scientists, Science Daily 23andMe: The Ethics of Genetic Testing for Neurodegenerative Diseases, The Neuroethics Blog The Search For Reward Prediction Errors in the Brain, Discover Neuroskeptic Seeing What Isn't There: Inside Alzheimer's Hallucinations, NPR: Shots Blog For Many Patients, Delirium Is a Surprising Side Effect of Being in the Hospital, Kaiser Health News Two Ways to Be Happy, New York Times The Problem With Michael LaCour’s Rebuttal, Discover Neuroskeptic Brain Drain, The Scientist America Needs a Real Definition of What a ‘Natural’ Food Is, WIRED In the Academic Literature: Brainprint: Assessing the Uniqueness, Collectability, and Permanence of a Novel Method for ERP Biometrics, Neurocomputing Neural Correlates of Post-Conventional Moral Reasoning: A Voxel-Based Morphometry Study, PLoS One Monitoring the Growth of the Neural Representations of New Animal Concepts, Human Brain Mapping Postmortem Diffusion MRI of the Human Brainstem and Thalamus for Deep Brain Stimulator Electrode Localization, Human Brain Mapping Rapid Categorization of Natural Face Images in the Infant Right Hemisphere, eLIFE Interoceptive Predictions in the Brain, Nature Reviews Neuroscience Locomotion, Theta Oscillations, and the Speed-Correlated Firing of Hippocampal Neurons Are Controlled by a Medial Septal Glutamatergic Circuit, Neuron

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.

PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

EvidenceLast Edition's Most Popular Article(s): Meet Flakka, the Drug Police Say Is Making People Run Around Nude and Have Sex with Trees, Vox In The Popular Press: Brain Implant That Decodes Intention Will Let Us Probe Free Will, NewScientist Hacking the Nervous System, Mosaic Alzheimer's Origins Tied to Rise of Human Intelligence, Nature News Why Honest People Do Dishonest Things, Scientific American Inside the Cunning, Caring and Greedy Minds of Fish, Nature News Looking for Creativity in Brains Will Take More Creativity, WIRED Disease or Diversity: Learning from Autism, The Neuroethics Blog fMRI of the Amygdala: All in Vein? Neuroskeptic Brain Cell Spheres in a Lab Dish Mimic Human Cortex, Study Says, SCOPE Is This the First Computational Imagination? MIT Technology Review 'Instinctive' Robot Recovers From Injury Fast, Nature News Arguing in Court Whether 2 Chimps Have the Right to ‘Bodily Liberty’, NY Times Old Brains in Mice Given a Trait of Young Brains with Embryonic Nerve Transplant, Stem Cellar Infidelity Lurks in Your Genes, NY Times Evidence of 430,000-Year-Old Human Violence Found, BBC News What is Impostor Syndrome? Scientific American In the Academic Literature: Pictionary-based fMRI paradigm to study the neural correlates of spontaneous improvisation and figural creativity, Scientific Reports A crossmodal role for audition in taste perception, Journal of Experimental Psychology BOLD fMRI Correlation Reflects Frequency-Specific Neuronal Correlation, Current Biology Prelinguistic Relational Concepts: Investigating Analogical Processing in Infants, Child Development Psychotic Experiences in the General PopulationA Cross-National Analysis Based on 31 261 Respondents From 18 Countries, JAMA Psychiatry Can Neural Activation in Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex Predict Responsiveness to Information? An Application to Egg Production Systems and Campaign Advertising, PLOS One

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.