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April 11, 2008

On Neuroreductionism

Alice Ristroph has an excellent post over at CoOp on the relationship between criminal law and neuroscience.  She writes:

But I’m skeptical that more knowledge of the brain is going to unsettle retributive arguments and the associated attributions of responsibility. (Here, I think I'm in agreement with Jeff Lipshaw's take on experimental philosophy: many moral claims are just not provable or disprovable.) I suspect that whatever we learn about the brain processes of criminals, some persons will look at those brain processes and say, “this criminal deserves to be held responsible; this criminal deserves to be punished.” Put differently, one might say that “responsibility” is a normative judgment, not a fact about the causal mechanisms of the human brain. Whether a defendant “is” responsible depends on whether we (the punishers) decide to hold him responsible. To take an example raised last night, did new facts about the juvenile brain, or about developmentally disabled persons, dictate the outcomes in Roper v. Simmons and Atkins v. Virginia? I don’t think so. It is still the case that some will look at all the empirical information available about Daryl Atkins—IQ tests, medical records, brain scans, whatever—and say he deserves to die, and others will look at the same information, and say he does not.

[ . . . ]

All in all, I think it’s pretty hard to unseat the belief in deserved punishment by introducing new facts.

This is right on, in my view.  Violence, like any other complex social phenomena, is just that -- irreducibly social.  To homogenize all violence as analysable under the same category and to reduce it to brain dysfunction is both patently reductionist and quite dubious, in my view.  Not to mention which, it is also exceedingly dangerous.  In the comments to Ristroph's post, guest-blogger extraordinaire Frank Pasquale points to a truly brilliant article by Amanda Pustilnik, entitled Violence on the Brain: A Critique of Neuroscience in Criminal Law.

Here is the Abstract:

Is there such a thing as a criminally violent brain? Does it make sense to speak of the neurobiology of violence or the psychopathology of crime? Is it possible to answer on a physiological level what makes one person engage in criminal violence and another not, under similar circumstances?

Current research in law and neuroscience is promising to answer these questions with a yes. Legal scholars working in this area claim that we are close to realizing the early criminologists' dream of identifying the biological roots of criminality. In the grip of a neuroeverything craze, legal scholars, practitioners, and lawmakers have already begun incorporating new neurolaw into criminal adjudications, lawmaking, and criminal law scholarship. These breathless hopes for a neuroscientific transformation of the criminal law, although based in the newest research, are part of a very old story. Criminal law and neuroscience have been engaged in an ill-fated and sometimes tragic affair for over two hundred years. Two failures have appeared in current work that mirror precisely the prior failures. First is the claim is that the various phenomena we call criminal violence comprise a single entity, which arises causally from dysfunction within specific locations in the brain (localization). Second is that violent crimes are committed by people who are essentially biologically different from typical people (otherization). This Article first demonstrates the parallels between current neurolaw claims and past movements in law and neuroscience: phrenology, Lombrosian biological criminology, and lobotomy. It then engages in a scientific critique of the shortcomings of current neurolaw claims about the neurological bases of criminal violence. Drawing on research and interviews with leading neuroscientists, this Article shows that causally localizing what we call criminal violence to bits of the brain is highly scientifically contestable and epistemologically untenable. In viewing the criminal law-neuroscience relationship through the lens of history of science, this Article hopes to offer caveats to legal users of neurolaw and a realistic and constructive portrait of how current neuroscience might inform criminal law discourse about regulating violence.

This paper is brilliant, and is sorely needed.  Weaving together historical, legal, social, and cultural analyses, Pustilnik provides a contextualized and devastating critique of our continued penchant to reduce complex social phenomena to individual brains.  Not content with merely explaining the history, Pustilnik engages the neuroscience on its own terms, illustrating the divergence and dissent within the praxis of neuroscience, and thereby seriously undermining the excessive reliance on localization that rests at the heart of neuroreductionism (which actually can be traced to the early 19th century, and is relevant to my own work on pain.  Contrary to what some scholars have suggested, I quite firmly believe that we are still enthralled with a specificity theory of disease as relates to mental phenomena).

Pustilnik's critique also touches on the dangers of using "biology" to other, though there is obviously a great deal more that can be side of the importance of using neuroscience to stigmatize.  Indeed, American eugenics and scientific racism did just that, and relied heavily on then prevailing neuroscientific theories of crime and race.  We would be well-advised to exercise extreme caution before skipping down such paths again.

In any case, for those interested in the intersection of criminal law and neuroscience, Pustilnik's paper is a must-read.

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