Neuroscience, and Free Will: Legal and Educational Lessons

Abstract

Recent developments in the sciences such as neuroscience raise questions about the social experience. This paper is concerned with the consequences related to the realm of the legal system and the educational system. To this purpose, in this paper I discuss Joshua Green and Jonathan Cohen's 2004 paper “For the Law, Neuroscience Changes Nothing and Everything”. After presenting their argument, I cast some doubts on some of its main premises then, I raise two objections. First, I show that their assumptions about folks’ understanding of free will are misleading. Second, I argue that their argument fails to recognize the difference between constituting the law on consequentialist calculations and applying the law in particular cases. This failure causes them to advocate an account that allows punishing innocent people.  I conclude with educational lessons. Green and Cohen’s argument fails to ground the effect they claim neuroscience will have on the law. It seems that their assumptions about folks’ intuitions about free will are misleading. They raised the bar too high for free will which makes it incompatible with any kind of causality. That presentation does not reflect what people think about free will according to the data we get from recent studies. Also, their argument fails to recognize the difference between constituting the law on consequentialist calculations and applying the law in particular cases. This failure causes them to advocate an account that allows punishing innocent people. Educational lessons include a discussion of what we real mean by education: a system of interactions where causality determines the results, or a field of interactions open to different, new, and surprising future.