Debates in neuroethics often tackle the purported clash between commonsense and scientific perspectives as they pertain to moral concepts. The assumption that undergirds the framing of the conflict between these two approaches is that advances in neuroscience, psychiatry, and psychology can be used to explain phenomena covered by commonsense concepts and in some cases undermine them entirely. Consider the debates about free will where discoveries that unconscious processes guide behavior are taken to challenge free will and moral responsibility.
In these debates, the issue of the scope and character of common sense is not usually sufficiently explored. The characterization of the commonsense concept of free will is that it requires consciousness, which is then compared unfavorably with the evidence for a variety of unconscious brain processes that precipitate behavior we thought was caused by conscious willing. But how do we justify the view that conscious willing is a tenet of commonsense morality? There are certainly counterexamples to this claim. There are situations when we attribute free will to individuals who do not consciously will their actions. We ascribe free will to people who engage in some automatic behavior, such as successfully driving home without consciously minding each action required to reach the destination. Expert athletes perform better when they do not attend to their moves (Gray 2004), but we would still praise them for a successful performance. Even in the legal realm, criminal responsibility can be ascribed to individuals performing complex habitual actions when they are not consciously intended (Yaffe 2012). If there are quotidian, and relatively frequent, ascription of free will to individuals when they do not consciously will their actions, then there are contexts in which commonsense ascription of will do not require consciousness.
A further reason to question what could be called a conservative characterization of commonsense is that our conceptions of free will and moral responsibility have adjusted to scientific facts about human psychology. Advances in psychology and neuroscience have shaped the domain of autonomous actions (Boysen and Vogel 2008). Additionally, education about the biological etiology of particular mental illnesses affect the interpretation of the degree of control individuals can exert over their behavior (Goldstein and Rosselli 2003). We do not blame people for offensive behavior if we know that they have a mental illness or a neurological disorder that limits their ability to control themselves in certain circumstances. Given that everyday predictions and explanations of human behavior integrate scientific facts, commonsense concepts should not be treated as static and as inherently antagonistic to the emerging scientific rendition of human psychology.
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