Neuroscience System

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The Upheaval that Neuroscience Will Bring to our Legal System It is no secret that technology is advancing at an extremely fast pace every day. Most people do not stop to think about the advancing of technology that invades an individual’s brain, thought processes, feelings, and beliefs, or even the fact that people could be convicted of a crime based solely on these new and still improving technologies. Today, neuroscience has not had much of an impact on our legal system, but Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen, neural philosophers, argue that neuroscience will completely change our legal system in the future. I agree with Greene and Cohen’s argument that the compatibilist justice system will eventually switch to a deterministic viewpoint, …show more content…
Their whole argument is based off of the idea of “free will”. Van Inwagen defines free will with this quote, “to say that one has free will is to say that when one decides among forks in the road of time, one is at least sometimes able to take more than one of the forks”. Based off of this quote, my interpretation of free will is an individual has the free choice to choose between two or more options. Determinism is this belief that the present state of the universe, combined with the laws of nature, uniquely determine all future and past states of the universe. Determinism completely disregards this idea of free will because determinists believe that everything in an individual’s life is already set in stone. Incompatibilists believe that free will and determinism cannot exist together, we can only have one or the other. Libertarians believe that we have free will, with no determinism, and hard-determinists …show more content…
To understand why Green and Cohen believe in this, we need to have an understanding of the different types of punishment our legal system uses. Retributivism is punishment of the guilty because the guilty individual deserves it. This form of punishment requires there to be a wrong-doer and a libertarian view. The second form of punishment is consequentialist punishment, which punishes people because it will have beneficial consequences such as deterrence, protection, and rehabilitation. Consequentialist punishment does not require a wrong-doer and can follow a libertarian, compatibilist, and hard deterministic view point. Determinism plays a large part in retributivism punishment. This form of punishment is based on what a criminal deserves, following the belief that someone “deserves” to be punished. On the other hand, determinism does not matter in consequential

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