The progress of sciences and the concept of responsibility

Abstract

The paper addresses the issue of the impact of neuroscientific research and techniques on moral and legal responsibility in a methodological perspective and using the method of the conceptual analysis. It contains a discussion of some philosophical and legal problems – the foundation of the concepts of capacity and person, the conceptual link between capacity and responsibility, the legal doctrine of “irresistible impulse”, the problem of automatism and the issue of the psychopath’s responsibility.

Its aim is to show what the sciences of the mind cannot do. They cannot put in jeopardy beliefs the justification of which does not depend on empirical facts, insofar as these beliefs are part of the basic conceptual structure through which a complete and consistent description and understanding of the world is possible – that there exist macroscopic objects like persons, that responsibility is compatible with the causal explanations of human behaviour, that the mind and the will are capacities and not mechanical objects, that it is possible to exercise certain abilities without being self-conscious, and that the limits of the participation to a moral community are not defined according to one’s adherence to its norms, but through the general ability of rule-following.