Flickers of Freedom

A Judge's Guide to Neuroscience

The Law and Neuroscience Project (along with the SAGE Center at UCSB) recently published A Judge's Guide to Neuroscience:  A Concise Introduction.  The useful manual contains articles by Marcus Raichle, Michael Gazzaniga, Adina Roskies, Read Montague, Scott Grafton, and others.  And while it is aimed at judges, I think it might be useful for philosophers interested in these issues as well.  

ROME III

The Center for Values and Social Policy at U.C. Boulder is hosting ROME III from August 5th - 8th, 2010. See here for more details. The three keynote speakers are: 

Keynote #1: Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Keynote #2: Susan Wolf
Keynote #3: John Martin Fischer

Hopefully, some of the readers of this blog will be able to attend.  It should be a great conference!

CFA: Conference on Responsibility in Ghent, Belgium

Details here.

Deadline is coming up fast (July 31), but they are only looking for 250 words abstracts. 

Free Will @ NYT (Part Two)

Manuel posted a link recently to a piece by Galen Strawson in the NYT's new The Stone series.  Now, they have a non-skeptical piece on free will and science by William Eggington entitled "The Limits of the Coded World."

G. Strawson @ NYT

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/your-move-the-maze-of-free-will/

Addiction and Self-Control

In May this year, the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics held a very successful conference bringing together philosophers, neuroscientists and psychologists to discuss the mechanisms involved in addiction and in the loss of self-control. The Science Network filmed some of the sessions (for various reasons, such as the use of patient information which had to remain confidential, some participants preferred not to be filmed). The videos from the conference are now available here. Anyone with a serious interest in addiction should watch them.

The Character Project

Christian Miller asked me to post the following information about The Character Project:

• The past 30 years have seen a resurgence of interest in character, particularly in the areas of psychology, philosophy, and theology. This work has given rise to a number of challenging questions, such as:
• (i) Do character traits such as honesty or compassion really exist?
• (ii) If they do exist, how prevalent are they, and what is their underlying psychological nature?
• (iii) Should character traits such as the virtues be the centerpiece of our best ethical theory?
• (iv) How should we go about improving our characters and overcoming our character flaws?
• (v) For those working in theology, should thinking about human and divine character be central to theological ethics?

Post-doc in Moral Cognition

Nicholas Iles asked me to pass along the following job advertisement (see here for more details):

Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Moral Cognition

FACULTY OF PHILOSOPHY, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics

Grade 7: Salary £28,983 - £35,646 p.a.

Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship to work on a project that is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, and jointly hosted by the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics (both of which are within the Faculty of Philosophy). The project is entitled Emotion and Intuition in Moral Decision-Making: Empirical Evidence and Ethical Implications.

The fellowship is for a fixed-term of two years from the date of appointment. The Research Fellow will be based at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, which is located at Littlegate House in central Oxford, where the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics is also based.

The Moral Psychology Handbook

John Doris's The Moral Psychology Handbook (OUP) just came out.  So, you should check it out.  Here is the description:

The Moral Psychology Handbook offers a survey of contemporary moral psychology, integrating evidence and argument from philosophy and the human sciences. The chapters cover major issues in moral psychology, including moral reasoning, character, moral emotion, positive psychology, moral rules, the neural correlates of ethical judgment, and the attribution of moral responsibility. Each chapter is a collaborative effort, written jointly by leading researchers in the field.

As always, happy reading!

Retributivism and the Problem of Psychopathy

 Psychopathy is a developmental disorder that confers greatly increased risk to life-long behavioral problems.  First, psychopaths are notoriously domineering, exploitative of others, and deficient (or entirely lacking) in proper moral emotions such as guilt, remorse, and empathy.  They are also stunningly hyper-aggressive, predatory, and recidivistic.  Despite the fact that only about .05 to 1% of the population is thought to be afflicted with psychopathy, some estimates suggest that psychopathic individuals could nevertheless be responsible for as much as 30%-40% of all violent crime.  Furthermore, psychopaths are prone to a number of interpersonal problems such as glibness, self-grandiosity, pathological lying, manipulativeness, remorselessness, shallow affect, callousness, and they usually refuse to take responsibility for their actions, often choosing to blame their victims instead.  Finally, psychopaths lead a "chronically unstable and antisocial lifestyle" (Hare et al. 1990, p. 340)—e.g., poor behavioral control, sexual promiscuity, lack of realistic, long-term goals, impulsivity, early behavior problems, and juvenile delinquency.