Neuroscience, Accountability and Individual Boundaries

INTRODUCTION Cognitive neuroscience holds the promise of explaining operations of the mind in terms of the physical operations of the brain. It is claimed that brain imaging techniques now allow the discovery of neurophysiologic markers for almost any kind of behavioural phenotype, normal or pathological, both at explanatory and predictive level. Since early 2000, law has taken part in this debate within the parameters of neuroethics, a new interdisciplinary fi eld “at the intersection of the empirical brain sciences, normative ethics, the philosophy of mind, law and the social sciences of anthropology, economics, psychology and sociology” (Glannon, 2007). When issues like these are discussed in legal contexts a normal fi rst reaction is to wonder whether a more complete understanding of the neural mechanism for voluntary decision-making might undermine the legal notion of accountability. Would brain scans that reveal a brain feature correlated, even weakly, with a propensity for violence, infl uence a court’s sentence? Will brain imaging subvert the current nosography of mental diseases? Is free will still alive? In this paper, after a short presentation of these issues, we maintain that it is neither exhaustive, in theoretical terms, nor productive to face the new reality in this way. The issue is factually and conceptually wider than that. In some respects this approach might seem to be less noble (almost everything is banal if compared with free will) but, in the end, the questions that arise might be even more challenging; e.g. the social/mental/technical/biological boundaries of any individual who might be under discussion.