The Neuroscientific Challenge to Legal Doctrine

Contemporary neuroscience suggests that there is no aspect of human behavior that cannot be reduced to neural activity: our actions and experiences are correlated with electrical and chemical processes in neural synapses.  But extant legal doctrine, in its language and application, is based upon a radically different, dualistic, conception of human agency:  the idea that we are somehow more than just our brains, that there is something essential but inaccessible by mere empirical means that is at the core of concepts such as free will, blame, and responsibility.  As one commentator has put it, in terms that resonate with a contemporary dualism: “brains don't kill people; people kill people." [1] If the empirical perspective is correct, the law’s dualist perspective is necessarily wrong.  This would require that we adjust our conceptions of human agency, and calls into question the core assumptions of legal doctrine. 

Mr. Alces will draw from his forthcoming book, The Normative Intersection of Law and Neuroscience, to reveal the impact these two ostensibly separate fields are having on our understanding of legal doctrine’s normative commitments.