The Normativity of Contract
Peter A. Alces
Rollins Professor of Law, The College of William & Mary School of Law
To what extent is the normativity of our Contract law doctrine the product of evolutionary forces? The paper draws extensively on the rich evolutionary psychology and experimental ethics literature to support a positive theory of morality and morality's operation in the Contract law. It engages evolutionsry theory in terms that demonstrate the failure of the prevailing normative approaches. The resulting empirical morality makes clear that the doctrine accommodates, even encourages, resolution of recurring controversies by reference to a dialectic between deontology and consequentialism; that is, the doctrine is best understood not as either deontological or consequentialist, but, instead, as mediating a persistent tension between those two normative commitments to which human actors are evolutionarily predisposed.
http://web.wm.edu/law/faculty/fulltime/alces-2.php
Toward a Universal Juridical Grammar: A Return to Physis
Ana Rosa Tenorio de Amorim
Lawyer/Graduate Law Student, Federal University of Pernambuco - UFPE
Can evolutionary psychology and neuroethology provide the basis for a Universal Juridical Grammar? Recent legal studies based on evolutionary psychology and neuroethology have suggested that right to property has a biological origin. That idea can be a point of departure toward the development of a Universal Juridical Grammar, where some natural rights could function as Chomsky's principles and parameters theory.
Places, Boundaries, and Crime: Using Evolutionary Analysis to Understand Spatial Dynamics in Criminal Law
Adam Benforado
Assistant Professor, Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law
How might evolutionary analysis help elucidate key spatial dynamics in criminal law? Although largely overlooked, physical space and the meanings that we attach to landscapes, places, spatialities, and natures actively shape (and are reflected in) our legal structures, order interactions, and determine outcomes. A systematic spatial analysis of criminal law provides the foundation for understanding the origins of our legal system and assessing whether our current legal structures—from the laws on the books to the practices of police officers to our approaches to punishment—align with our current societal needs and values, and, thus, whether the structures we have in place ought to be changed. The insights of evolutionary analysis and human behavioral biology hold clues to w hy physical space plays such a central role in our legal system (e.g., why laws are frequently built around protecting the physical boundaries of the body, the home, the local community, and the state) and imply that the emphasis on physical space may ultimately be harmful, mandating particular alterations to our laws, practices, and institutions.
http://www.drexel.edu/law/adam-benforado.asp
Normative Neuroscience and Criminal
Theodore Y. Blumoff
Professor of Law, Mercer University
Building on suggestions made by Robert Sapolsky, I argue that recent findings in neuroscience must not only “challenge our sense of self,” but lead to both substantive and procedural changes in criminal law, because by incorporating these findings within our discussions of jurisprudence, we take into account more fully than we now do the cognitive and volitional deficits that many among us are condemned to suffer. Although neuroscience and the tools of brain imaging are sufficiently well developed to evidence our neurobiology at a level of detail unimaginable until even decade ago (roughly the size of a grain of rice), they are not yet sufficiently developed to be consistently useful in the guilt phase of most criminal trials. Given the advances in imaging and behavioral genetics, however, neuroscience is sufficiently mature today to effect some global procedural and substantive changes in our criminal law jurisprudence – e.g., definitions of, and burdens of proof on the issue of competency. In this work, I survey many of the presuppositions that guide work in a jurisprudence grounded in neuroscience and behavioral genetics and suggest how the findings in these could useful in effecting real change.
http://www.law.mercer.edu/faculty/bio.cfm?staffid=41
Cohesion and Trust: Evolutionary Psychology and the Implications of Admitting Women to Ground-Combat Units
Kingsley Browne
Professor of Law, Wayne State University Law School
How Might Evolutionary Psychology Shed Light on the Effects of Lifting the Ground-Combat Exclusion for Women in the Military? Group cohesion is critical to military performance, and trust is critical to group cohesion. Women in military groups often seem to adversely affect cohesion, especially as danger increases, at least partially because of men's reluctance to trust them in dangerous circumstances. This reluctance to trust may reflect men's evolved psychology, and it may pose an obstacle to implementation of any regulatory change opening ground-combat units to women.
http://faculty.law.wayne.edu/browne/index.htm
“Minding” Civil Law's Regulation of Adolescents
Jennifer A. Drobac
Professor of Law, Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis
Should the civil law that regulates teenagers respond to recent scientific discoveries concerning adolescent neurological and psychosocial development? Sexual harassment law gives legal significance to adolescent consent, despite the science regarding adolescent development. Courts are re-examining adolescent capacities and the question arises how much further, if at all, the law should adapt to new scientific evidence.
http://indylaw.indiana.edu/people/profile.cfm?Id=41
Are Critical Bio-Legal Histories Possible? Some Thoughts on Comparative Law and Evolutionary Social Constructivism
Bart Du Laing
Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) , Ghent University
To what extent are attempts to bridge the gap between evolutionary approaches to human behavior and social constructivism relevant to comparative legal theory, or put differently, are there interesting ways in which to combine bio-legal histories and critical legal histories? In my talk I aim to assess to what extent evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson's recent proposal for an evolutionary social constructivism (as further elaborated upon in De Block & Du Laing (2007), 2(4) Biological Theory 337-348) can contribute to the comparative study of law and legal cultures. Contrasting both different evolutionary approaches to human behaviour and different ideas about comparative legal theory, and taking into account some specific social constructivist core theoretical elements, I will argue that evolutionary social constructivism, by investigating cultural transmission mechanisms, as well as the characteristics that make cultural variants attractive to individuals, does provide possible bridges between 'critical legal histories' and 'bio-legal histories'. Especially to some extent 'indirect' evolutionary approaches (like Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson's dual inheritance theory and similar recent efforts) would seem to offer promising perspectives to take into account 'human nature' as it relates to law and legally relevant phenomena, without at the same time dismissing as largely irrelevant their (equally) socio-culturally constructed dimension.
http://www.ugent.be/nl/people?ugentid=802000455431
The Evolution of Stalking
Joshua Duntley
Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice & Psychology, The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey
Can the legal system benefit from an evolutionary analysis of stalking?
We hypothesize that stalking tactics have ancient origins that were shaped by evolutionary processes to help solve recurrent adaptive mating problems, including: (1) acquiring a new mate, (2) guarding an existing mate to prevent defection, (3) fending off potential mate poachers, (4) regaining sexual access to a mate who has defected, and (5) interfering with the new romantic relationships of former mates. We hypothesize the existence of several, sex-differentiated psychological design features of stalking psychology, including: (1) sensitivity to adaptive problems for which stalking was an ancestral solution, (2) maintaining false beliefs in stalkers, and (3) motivating stalking tactics. Evidence from a university sample (N=975) of stalking victims provide preliminary support for several hypothesized design features and demonstrates that stalking tactics are sometimes effective.
http://loki.stockton.edu/~duntleyj/
Reciprocal Altruism as the Basis for Contract Proposed
Scott Fruehwald
Professor of Legal Writing, Hofstra University School of Law
Does Evolutionary Biology provide a basis for contract through reciprocal altruism? This presentation will discuss the connection between reciprocal altruism, a characteristic of human behavior that evolved to deal with the "selfish gene," and contract law. This author believes that reciprocal altruism illuminates the basis of contract and that it provides a better explanation for the development of contract law than traditional theories. This presentation will analyze reciprocal altruism and contract in connection with contract formation, damages, gap filling, unallocated risks, good faith in performance, and unconscionability, and it will show how neuroscientific studies support the existence of reciprocal altruism.
http://law.hofstra.edu/directory/faculty/FullTimeFaculty/ftfac_fruehwald.html
What Can Neuroscience and Mechanism Design Tell us about the Role of Emotion in Law, and Vice Versa.
Oliver Goodenough
Professor of Law, Vermont Law School
This essay lays out a framework for thinking about institutions, emotions, and law. It combines work that links our emotions with internal, psychological commitments, and an understanding of institutions as mechanisms that re-frame the strategic landscape in a world of potential cooperation and conflict between social actors. This combination suggests a positive theory of moral sentiments, a clearer way to understand the role of emotion in law, and a reframing of the old is/ought distinction, sometimes called the naturalistic fallacy. The internal institutions created through our moral sentiments are important but limited. Our intuitive tool kit for structuring cooperative institutions, and for reacting punitively to transgressions against these institutions provides some reframing solutions. Institutions, however, can originate in many ways and can be located many media - psychology, culture, even the physical world. Law is an institution built across many of these layers, a composite that can create a more nuanced and capable set of structures and responses, leading to a better set of outcomes than would be available in an emotion-only world. The problem for the composite is getting the mix right - both too much emotion and too little can prevent us from fully capturing the expanded solution space which a rule of law can open to its adherents.
http://www.vermontlaw.edu/Our_Faculty/Faculty_Directory/Oliver_R_Goodenough.htm
The Neural Substrates of Participation in Legal Systems: Evidence from Economic Experiments
Michael D. Guttentag
Associate Professor of Law, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles
How much do we already know and how can we learn more about the neural substrates of participation in legal system from fMRI studies of participants in economic experiments? fMRI studies of participants in economic experiments can provide insight into the neural substrates of participation in legal systems, as suggested by the important new article in “Neuron” by Buckholtz et al. I delve into the relationship between behavior in economic experiments and participation in a legal system by exploring the overlap between the necessary and sufficient existence conditions for participation in a legal system and behavior in economic experiments. This analysis offers suggestions for studies that could further advance our understanding of the neural substrates of participation in legal systems.
http://www.lls.edu/academics/faculty/guttentag.html
Kinship Foster Care: Implications of Behavioral Biology Research
David Herring
Professor of Law, University of Pittsburgh School of Law
Does evolutionary theory and behavioral biology research provide a foundation for a research agenda that would produce information useful to caseworkers and judges who seek to place children in kinship foster homes? This paper describes how evolutionary theory and behavioral biology research on kinship allow for the development of a rank listing of second-degree kin in terms of their expected level of investment in a related foster child. The paper also describes how child welfare researchers could use the rank listing to formulate and test hypotheses concerning expected levels of investment by different types of kin. In addition, this paper discusses how the findings from such research could allow for the development of sophisticated kinship foster care placement policies and practices.
http://www.law.pitt.edu/faculty/profiles/herringdj
Simmelian Ties in Chimpanzees: Social Structure and the Evolution of Reciprocity
Gregory Todd Jones and Sarah Brosnan
Director of Research, Georgia State University College of Law and Assistant Professor, Georgia State University
Would an understanding of the relationship between social structure and reciprocal behavior inform the design of institutions, including legal systems? In this talk, we will use computational simulations of social networks to demonstrate the relationship between social structure, including average degree (connectedness), heterogeneity of degree, and clustering on the evolution of reciprocal behavior. Using this theoretical foundation along with Simmel's work on the importance and characteristic distinctiveness of triads, we report on our recent study that partitions empirical Chimpanzee social networks into sub-net architectures and demonstrates that reciprocity is driven largely by fully symmetrical triadic relationships.
http://law.gsu.edu/directory/jones
Worldwide Patterns of Incest Regulations: A Window on Biolegal History?
Anita Sue Jwa
LL.M student, Vanderbilt University Law School
How might evolutionary analysis of incest regulations around the world illuminate biolegal history, the common legal structure reflecting the evolved human brain? The present study undertakes a "biolegal history" (O. Jones (2001)) through comparative research regarding incest regulations. Incest aversion in identified circumstances is a well demonstrated predisposition in evolutionary biology, appearing in humans as well as other species. If incest regulations around the world appear in evolutionarily predicted patterns, this fact may provide a preliminary illustration of biolegal history, a common legal structure arising from cross-species similarities in the evolved human brain.
The First Law of Jurisdynamics? The Emergence of Scaling, The Development of Community Structure and Its Implications for the "Evolution" of the Law
Daniel Martin Katz
Ph.D. Candidate, University of Michigan, Department of Political Science & Center for the Study of Complex Systems
How can developments in complexity theory and network science help enrich positive legal theory? A significant amount of recent scholarship documents the tendency of the American common law and its constitutive institutions to self-organize in what has been characterized as "crystalline" "fractal" or "highly-skewed" manner. Building upon this prior research and leveraging advances in complexity theory, computational linguistics and applied graph theory, I outline why these developments are the prerequisite to an enriched consideration of law's fitness landscape.
http://www.sitemaker.umich.edu/dankatz/home
The Natures of Universal Moralities
Bailey Kuklin
Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law School
Do the moral impulses that stem from theories of evolutionary psychology offer a sufficient normative grounding for legal principles? Three theories of evolutionary psychology have been advanced as giving rise to moral impulses: kin selection, reciprocal altruism and sexual selection. The consequences of all three theories depend upon a variety of contingencies, including the conditions in the EEA, the cognitive abilities of the organisms, and the particular payoff matrix of the games played by interactors. Hence, the question of evolved norms is an empirical matter that cannot be accurately predicted from theory alone and such norms are likely to vary greatly.
http://www.brooklaw.edu/faculty/profile/?page=82
Brain Laterality and Deception Detection in the Courtroom
John Lanou
Attorney, Washington, DC
Is the Jury Box Evolution-compliant? Part II. Humans identify emotional facial expressions more accurately when they see those expressions in their left visual field, and humans detect lies more accurately when they can identify the liar's emotional facial expressions. Is the jury box on the wrong side of the room? We present the results of our lab research.
In Quest of the Fundamental Principles of “Neurolaw”.
Federico Gustavo Pizzetti
Associate Professor of Public Law, University of Milan, Italy
Which should be regarded the fundamental, constitutional principles of the new field of Law called:“neuro-law”? The growing use of brain imaging technology and the developing of cognitive neuroscience pose unaccustomed challenges to legal scholars, legislators and courts. Until now, the fields of Law much involved in discussions and controversies about the relevance and the implications of neuro–imaging and cognitive neuroscience seem to be the civil and criminal law and procedure, but the constitutional dimension of “neurolaw” cannot be easily underestimated, even more in the future. As the capacity to investigate and to trace brain mechanisms and functional neural activities dramatically increases, reaching the essence of what makes a human being, human (such as the comprehension of neural correlates of behavioural character, of attitude to have free wills, of capacity to have remembrances, and of ability to develop rational consciousness and emotions…), it becomes urgent the recognition and definition of the several unalienable rights and fundamental values, that must be protected and safeguard by the Constitution in respect of this new techno-scientific power —that, in the next years, might be able to fully “scan” and eventually to deeply “influence”, or to profoundly “manipulate” the human “mind” — : human dignity, personal identity and the pursuit of individual “happiness” (hereby intended as the liberty right recognized to everyone to define the personal « concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life » ( Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey , 505 U.S. 833, 851 (1992), without technological interferences superimposed by the state or the society).
http://www.giuripol.unimi.it/
Changes in U.S. Bankruptcy Law and the Toleration or Punishment of Freeriders
Christina Pomianek coauthor
Johnathan Stone
Ph.D. Student, University of Missouri : J.D. Candidate, University of Toledo
How can an evolutionary analysis of the treatment of freeriders inform a better perspective on the historical changes in Bankruptcy law? Given the obvious incentives associated with freeriding at any scale, effective strategies for the detection, deterrence, and sometimes punishment of non-reciprocators are essential to the maintenance of order. However, the actual treatment of freeriders is based on the costs and benefits of monitoring and sanctioning. When the costs of punishment outweigh the benefits, free-riders are more likely to be tolerated. Conversely, when the costs do not outweigh the benefits, freeriders are less likely to be tolerated. Changes in U.S. Bankruptcy Law over time reflect larger changes in economic conditions at institutional and individual levels, which influenced the perception of the costs and benefits associated with tolerating or punishing freeriders.
Black Boxes
Julie Seaman
Associate Professor of Law, Emory Law School
How might advances in neuro-imaging based lie detection techniques impact the role of the jury in our criminal justice system? In our current system, the jury is the lie detector. Most deception researchers agree, however, that humans are not very adept at detecting untruthfulness. This presentation will describe recent advances in brain-based lie detection and will then engage in a thought experiment that asks whether a perfect lie detector would render the jury system obsolete.
http://www.law.emory.edu/faculty/faculty-profiles/julie-seaman.html
Metaphysics and Patenting Life
Andrew W. Torrance
Associate Professor of Law and Research Associate, University of Kansas
What are the consequences for the patentability of living organisms, and for the rational administration of a patent system, when a country's highest court bases its understanding of biology on pre-Darwinian conceptions of organic evolution? The Supreme Court of Canada negated the patentability of animals and plants in Harvard College v. Canada (2002), variously justifying its decision on the basis of "commonly understood" distinctions between "higher" and "lower" life forms, and the striking hypothesis that "higher," though not "lower," life forms "transcend" their genomes, despite the fact that Canadian statutory patent law is silent on any such distinctions. The Supreme Court offered no scientific evidence whatsoever to justify its demarcation of the border between patentable and unpatentable organisms, nor could it, because no scientific evidence exists that the evolutionary history of life can be divided into "higher" or "lower" organisms. Rather, through its rhetoric the Supreme Court majority revealed its prescientific and pre-Darwinian Weltanschauung, in which evolution progresses ever onwards and upwards toward an identifiable endpoint (notably the apex of evolution, Homo sapiens) and the ancient belief in a "Chain of Being" prevails over the accepted scientific view of evolution first published a full century and a half ago in Charles Darwin's The Origin Of Species, thus revealing worrying implications for the rational administration of a patent system whose existence is otherwise premised on the societal value of scientific advances.
http://www.law.ku.edu/faculty/faculty/torrance.shtml
Postpartum Dep ression, Evolution, and the Law
Stacey A. Tovino
Associate Professor of Law, Drake University Law School
How might evolutionary analysis and behavioral biology help us improve mental health law and policy in the context of the postpartum mood disorders ? Advances in neuroscience, including functional neuroimaging, are improving our understanding of the brain structure and function of women with postpartum mood disorders, including postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis. Some scientists believe that even the healthy maternal brain may be networked for a period of transient obsessive and/or anxious thoughts and behavior that, at one time, may have been adaptive, when new mothers had to be hyper-vigilant in order to protect their young from prey, but that now play a role in the development of postpartum mood disorders. This talk will examine the ways in which advances in the neurobiology of the postpartum mood disorders may impact mental health law and policy, including federal and state mental health parity and mandated benefit legislation and regulation.
http://www.law.drake.edu/facStaff/profiles.aspx?profileID=tovino
The Paradox of Statistical Discrimination
Deborah Weiss
Research Fellow, University of Texas School of Law
What are the implications for discrimination law of evidence of a biological basis for statistical aptitude and temperament differences between men and women? A growing body of research suggests a biological basis for some of the differences in the distribution of aptitudes and temperament between men and women. Such statistical differences, however, produces a paradox: while they suggest that men and women will never be equally distributed among occupations, they will almost inevitably cause discrimination in professions that make use of sex-linked aptitudes and personality traits. This paradox poses challenges both to those who would reduce antidiscrimination efforts because of evidence of difference and to those who advocate statistically based theories of recovery.
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The Neural Correlates of Third-Party Punishment
Joshua W. Buckholtz
PhD Candidate, Neuroscience; Department of Psychology and Vanderbilt Brain Institute; Vanderbilt University
Legal decision-making in criminal contexts includes two essential functions performed by impartial ‘‘third parties:'' assessing responsibility and determining an appropriate punishment. To explore the neural underpinnings of these processes, we scanned subjects with fMRI while they determined the appropriate punishment for crimes that varied in perpetrator responsibility and crime severity. Activity within regions linked to affective processing (amygdala, medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortex) predicted punishment magnitude for a range of criminal scenarios. By contrast, activity in right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex distinguished between scenarios on the basis of criminal responsibility, suggesting that it plays a key role in third-party punishment. The same prefrontal region has previously been shown to be involved in punishing unfair economic behavior in two-party interactions, raising the possibility that the cognitive processes supporting third-party legal decision-making and second-party economic norm enforcement may be supported by a common neural mechanism in human prefrontal cortex.
http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/files/iRkp8Y/Buckholtz_NeuroLaw.pdf
http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/files/jiKa9W/Fehr_Haushoffer_Commentary_on_Buckholtz.pdf
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/psychological_sciences/people/buckholtz
Outcome vs. Intent: Which Do We Punish, and Why?
Fiery Cushman
Post-Doctoral Fellow, Mind, Brain & Behavior Initiative; Harvard University
Sometimes people cause harm accidentally; other times they attempt to cause harm, but fail. How do we treat such cases where intentions and outcomes are mismatched? I will present a series of studies suggesting that while people's judgments of moral wrongness depend overwhelmingly on an assessment of intent, their judgments of deserved punishment exhibit substantial reliance on accidental outcomes as well. This pattern of behavior is present at an early age and consistent across both survey-based and behavioral economic paradigms. These findings raise an important functional question: why should we judge moral wrongness and deserved punishment by different standards? I will present evidence that punishment is sensitive to accidental outcomes in part because it is designed to teach social partners not to engage in harmful behaviors by, and because teaching on the basis of outcomes is more effective than teaching on the basis of intentions.
http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~cushman/publications/Publications_files/crimepun_1.pdf
http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~cushman/
Evolution, Biolegal History, and the Deep Structure of Law
Robin Bradley Kar
Professor of Jurisprudence and Law, Deputy Director, Loyola Center for Interdisciplinary and Comparative Jurisprudence; Loyola Law School
In this talk, I will discuss the role that evolutionary theory (and, in particular, the concept of a natural function) can play in contributing to what Owen Jones has dubbed "Biolegal History." After setting out a general description of this project, and a number of theoretical desiderata that it should presumably meet, I will outline some of my own work, which aims to identify the structural features of the attitudes that breathe life into our legal practices, and give rise to our sense of legal obligation. In the process, I will pay some attention to integrating recent work by a number of other theorists (e.g., Jones, Kurzban, Robinson, Mikhail, and Guttentag) into this general account. On the descriptive side, this work should--in my view--be understood as posing a distinctive and underappreciated challenge to the psychological views commonly espoused by most economists (including most behavioral economists). I will, however, also discuss a very different problem that arises in this literature, concerning the appropriate way to picture the relationship between moral and legal obligations. In my view, this relationship has been misconstrued not only by economists but also by most moral and legal philosophers. I will explain why I think this problem arises so robustly, propose a way of resolving it, and then trace out a number of important normative consequences that should follow.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=891491
http://www.lls.edu/academics/faculty/kar.html
Mysteries of Morality
Robert Kurzban
Associate Professor, Department of Psychology University of Pennsylvania; University of Pennsylvania
Evolutionary theories of morality, beginning with Darwin, have focused on explanations for altruism. More generally, these accounts have concentrated on conscience (self-regulatory mechanisms) rather than condemnation (mechanisms for punishing others). As a result, few theoretical tools are available for understanding the rapidly accumulating data surrounding third-party judgment and punishment. A potentially useful place to begin is a consideration of the strategic interactions among actors, victims, and third-parties. There are fundamental differences between the adaptive problems faced by actors and third-parties; this suggests that actor conscience and third-party condemnation are likely performed by different cognitive mechanisms. Further, current theories of conscience do not easily explain its experimentally demonstrated insensitivity to consequences. However, these results might be explicable if conscience functions, in part, as a defense system for avoiding third-party punishment. If conscience serves defensive functions, then its computational structure should be closely tailored to the details of condemnation mechanisms. This possibility underscores the need for a better understanding of condemnation, which is important not only in itself but also for explaining the nature of conscience. Analysis of moral condemnation suggests three evolutionary mysteries of condemnation that require further attention: third-party judgment, moralistic punishment, and moral impartiality.
http://www.psych.upenn.edu/PLEEP/
http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~kurzban
Moral Grammar and Intuitive Jurisprudence: A Formal Model of Unconscious Moral and Legal Knowledge
John Mikhail
Associate Professor; Georgetown University Law Center
Could a computer be programmed to make moral judgments about cases of intentional harm and unreasonable risk that match those judgments people already make intuitively? If the human moral sense is an unconscious computational mechanism of some sort, as many cognitive scientists have suggested, then the answer should be yes. So too if the search for reflective equilibrium is a sound enterprise, since achieving this state of affairs requires demarcating a set of considered judgments, stating them as explanandum sentences, and formulating a set of algorithms from which they can be derived. The same is true for theories that emphasize the role of emotions or heuristics in moral cognition, since they ultimately depend on intuitive appraisals of the stimulus that accomplish essentially the same tasks. Drawing on deontic logic, action theory, moral philosophy, and the common law of crime and tort, particularly Terry's five-variable calculus of risk, I outline a formal model of moral grammar and intuitive jurisprudence along the foregoing lines, which defines the abstract properties of the relevant mapping and demonstrates their descriptive adequacy with respect to a range of common moral intuitions, which experimental studies have suggested may be universal or nearly so. Framing effects, protected values, and implications for the neuroscience of moral intuition are also discussed.
http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1163422
http://www.law.georgetown.edu/faculty/mikhail/
Benign Beliefs, Destructive Desires: A Mental State Model of Forgiveness and Blame
Liane Young
Post-doctoral Associate, Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences; MIT
We've all faced the challenge of having to forgive someone who has hurt us without meaning to. Most likely, we've also all experienced a natural dislike for someone who has attempted but failed to hurt us. The focus of today's talk is on the specific cognitive and neural processes that enable us to reason about the minds of moral agents in the service of exculpation and condemnation - as well as the factors that affect these processes, including the identity of the agent and the severity of the outcome. We'll look at (1) patterns of brain activation in healthy adults making moral judgments, (2) moral judgments of healthy adults with "virtual lesions" to specific brain regions due to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and (3) moral judgments of patient populations with specific cognitive deficits, associated with autism and damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.
http://www.mit.edu/~lyoung/Site/Publications_files/Young_Saxe_Neuropsychologia.pdf
http://www.mit.edu/~lyoung/Site/Home.html
KEYNOTE LECTURE
Is Man a Wolf to Man? – Morality and the Social Behavior of our Fellow Primates
Dr. Frans B. M. de Waal
C. H. Candler Professor, Psychology Department, Emory University Director of the Living Links Center, Yerkes National Primate Research Center; Atlanta, USA
Homo homini lupus – “man is wolf to man” - is an old Roman proverb popularized by Thomas Hobbes. Even though it permeates large parts of law, economics, and political science, the proverb fails to do justice to our species' thoroughly social nature as well as to canids, which are among the most gregarious and cooperative animals. For the past quarter century, this cynical view has also been promoted by an influential school of biology, followers of Thomas Henry Huxley, which holds that we are born nasty as a result of “selfish” genes. Accordingly, it is only with the greatest possible effort that we can hope to become moral beings. Charles Darwin, however, saw things differently: he believed in continuity between animal social instincts and human morality. He wrote an entire book about The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Modern psychology and neuroscience support Darwin's view about the moral emotions. Human moral decisions often stem from “gut” reactions, some of which we share with other animals. I will elaborate on the connection between morality and primate behavior. Other primates show signs of empathy, prosocial tendencies, reciprocity, and a sense of fairness that promote a mutually satisfactory modus vivendi . I will review evidence for continuity to support the view that the building blocks of morality are older than humanity.
http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/
http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/dewaal.html
http://www.psychology.emory.edu/nab/dewaal/
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