Could neuroimaging evidence help us to assess the degree of a person's responsibility for a crime which we know that they committed? This essay defends an affirmative answer to this question. A range of standard objections to this high-tech approach to assessing people's responsibility is considered and then set aside, but I also bring to light and then reject a novel objection-an objection whi...

I have argued elsewhere that respect for human rights requires a robust notion of responsibility, and that this in turn depends on folk-psychological ideas including free will, and also that such ideas need to be articulated in such a way that they can be used in combination with contemporary science in the development of the criminal law. Stephen J. Morse contends that responsibility is explai...

This article offers an introductory analysis of the philosophical and empirical considerations having to do with the significance of psychopathy, intellectual disability and ADHD regarding one’s moral responsibility. Moral responsibility comes in degrees and is ultimately determined on social grounds. Whether a certain diagnosis and its underpinning neuro-cognitive impairment affects one’s cogn...

In this article I examine the relation between causation and moral responsibility. I distinguish four possible views about that relation. One is the standard view: the view that an agent’s moral responsibility for an outcome requires, and is grounded in, the agent’s causal responsibility for it. I discuss several challenges to the standard view, which motivate the three remaining views. The fin...

Industry today has a severe problem in the automatic t es t i ng of analog cards. At the A i r Force I n s t i t u t e of Technology, we are developing an Expert System based on the s t ruc ture and funct ion of an analog c i r c u i t card to d r ive automatic tes t equipment. This system uses the informat ion contained in the schematic diagram of the c i r c u i t as we l l as fundamental kno...

Some believe that genetics threatens privacy and autonomy and will eviscerate the concept of human nature. Despite the astonishing research advances, however, none of these dire predictions and no radical transformation of the law have occurred. Advocates have tried to use genetic evidence to affect judgments of criminal responsibility. At present, however genetic research can provide little ai...

"In any case, progress implies that it looks much greater than it really is." This statement by the Austrian poet Johann Nestroy became famous when Ludwig Wittgenstein chose it as a text for the beginning of his Philosophical Investigations. Is it true, however? It seems to be true for the problems, methods, and methodologies of philosophy itself—for Wittgenstein's own investigations, which dep...

A s sports medicine clinicians, we spend a lot of time around athletes during their daily routines. These daily encounters by athletic trainers, physical therapists, and physicians in the training room and on the field often provide us with an opportunity to improve the experience of athletes entrusted to our care. Along with this opportunity, more importantly, comes the responsibility to inter...

1 Robert Adams argues against this assumption, providing counter-examples, in “Involuntary Sins,” Philosophical Review 94 (1985): 3–31. For a more recent argument against the assumption, see Angela M. Smith, “Responsibility for Attitudes: Activity and Passivity in Mental Life,” Ethics 115 (January 2005): 236–71. The assumption seems to appear in the opening of Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics...