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2017, Journal of Medical Ethics
In this paper we examine one reason for rejecting the view that violent offenders should be forced to undergo neurotechnological treatments (NTs) involving such therapies as psychoactive medication to curb violent behaviour. The reason is based on the concern that forced treatment violates the offender’s right to freedom of thought. We argue that this objection can be challenged. First, we present some specifications of what a right to freedom of thought might mean. We focus on the recently published views of Jared Craig, and Jan Cristopher Bublitz and Reinhard Merkel. Second, we argue that forcing violent offenders to undergo certain kinds of NTs may not violate the offender’s right to freedom of thought as that right is specified by Craig, and Bublitz and Merkel. Third, even if non-consensual NT is used in a way that does violate freedom of thought, such use can be difficult to abandon without inconsistency. For if one is not an abolitionist, and therefore accepts traditional state punishments for violent offenders like imprisonment—which, the evidence shows, often violate the offender’s right to freedom of thought—then, it is argued, one will have reason to accept that violent offenders can legitimately be forced to undergo NT even if doing so denies them the right to freedom of thought.
Journal of Medical Ethics
Should neurotechnological treatments offered to offenders be in their best intersts?2017 •
The paper critically discusses the moral view that neurotechnological behavioural treatment for criminal offenders should only be offered if it is in their best interests. First, I show that it is difficult to apply and assess the notion of the offender’s best interests unless one has a clear idea of what ‘best interests’ means. Second, I argue that if one accepts that harmful punishment of offenders has a place in the criminal justice system, it seems inconsistent not to accept the practice of offering offenders treatment even when the state will harm them in applying the treatment. Finally, leading penal theories like consequentialists and retributivists would not accept that the offender’s best interests, at least in certain situations, impose a necessary condition for the treatment of an offender.
Criminal Justice Ethics
Criminal Justice Ethics Objections to Coercive Neurocorrectives for Criminal Offenders -Why Offenders' Human Rights Should Fundamentally Come First2019 •
“Committing a crime might render one morally liable to certain forms of medical intervention”, claims Thomas Douglas, who stated in this context that “compulsory uses of medical correctives could in principle be justified.” This article engages critically with his and other arguments on the use of coercive neurocorrectives for criminal offenders. First, the rehabilitation assumption that includes—for coercive neurocorrectives to work as an alternative to incarceration—that rehabilitation is the “only goal” of criminal punishment is criticized. Additionally this article engages with the theoretical difficulty of solely rehabilitative approaches, and discusses why it is unfortunate to design neurocorrectives so as to be particularly harmful in order to imagine administering them as being a punishment. Second, until we know more about specific neurocorrectives, we are well advised not to undermine the most important objection against coercive neurocorrectives, namely offenders’ human rights. This article argues that the use of coercive neurocorrectives would particularly violate Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights which guarantees as an absolute right that “[n]o one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”, and finally holds that a still weak human right to mental integrity and self-determination should fundamentally come first.
2018 •
Neuroethics
Neurotechnological Behavioural Treatment of Criminal Offenders - A Comment on Bomann-LarsenWhether it is morally acceptable to offer rehabilitation by CNS-intervention to criminals as a condition for early release constitutes an important neuroethical question. Bomann-Larsen has recently suggested that such interventions are unacceptable if the offered treatment is not narrowly targeted at the behaviour for which the criminal is convicted. In this article it is argued that Bomann-Larsen’s analysis of the morality of offers does not provide a solid base for this conclusion and that, even if the analysis is assumed to be correct, it still does not follow that voluntary rehabilitation schemes targeting behaviour beyond the act for which a criminal is convicted are inappropriate.
According to what Douglas calls ‘the consent requirement’, neuro-correctives can only permissibly be provided with the valid consent of the offender who will undergo the intervention. Some of those who endorse the consent requirement have claimed that even though the requirement prohibits the imposition of mandatory neurocorrectives on criminal offenders, it may yet be permissible to offer offenders the opportunity to consent to undergoing such an intervention, in return for a reduction to their penal sentence. I call this the neurocorrective offer. In this chapter I consider the coercion-based objection to the neurocorrective offer, which claims that offenders cannot provide valid consent to undergoing a neurocorrective on the basis of this offer because it is inherently coercive. Having outlined early formulations of this argument, I point out that there are in fact two different versions of this objection, which appeal to different understandings of the concepts of coercion, consent and voluntariness.
Teoria e Critica della Regolazione Sociale / Theory and Criticism of Social Regulation
Neurocorrection. On the use of neurodevices for criminals2021 •
Abstract: The possibility of using neurodevices to treat criminal offenders, as a means of voluntary diversion to avoid incarceration, has become a widely discussed topic in the last decade. A widely debated issue concerns the right to control or alter the neu- rological patterns of criminal offenders, provided that punishing implies limiting one’s autonomy also without their consent. On the one hand, mandatory neurointervention is not only meant to be a lesser evil than incarceration, but it is even supposed to be advantageous for criminals because it can allow to restore their decisional autonomy by inhibiting their criminal impulses. On the other hand, mandatory neurointevention is rejected because it is considered to inflict significant harm on an offender, which goes far beyond the limits of criminal punishment. Some scholars have argued that the issues at stake call for a resemantisation of notions like mental integrity, freedom of thought, and cognitive liberty. My aim is to show that this resemantisation cannot preserve the specificity of legal categories if it is not set free from the naturalistic background, which underpins the uses of neurocorrection tools, in order to preserve the specificity of legal categories. For this purpose, I will analyse, in particular, some arguments offered by J.C. Bublitz. Keywords: Criminal Justice; Law and Neuroscience; Mental Integrity; Neurointer- vention and Criminal Justice; Will. Indice: 1. A background to begin with – 2. A new frontier for DBS – 3. Advantages – 4. Equivalence and coercion – 5. Some concerns – 6. A comeback: the deviant – 7. Repetita nocent – 8. On the notion of mental integrity – 9. Forms of the will – 10. So what? A provisional conclusion
Neuroscientific evidence is increasingly being used in criminal trials as part of psychiatric testimony. Up to now, “neurolaw” literature remained focused on the use of neuroscience for assessments of criminal responsibility. However, in the field of forensic psychiatry, responsibility assessments are progressively being weakened, whereas dangerousness and risk assessment gain increasing importance. In this paper, we argue that the introduction of neuroscientific data by forensic experts in criminal trials will be mostly be used in the future as a means to evaluate or as an indication of an offender's dangerousness, rather than their responsibility. Judges confronted with the pressure to ensure public security may tend to interpret neuroscientific knowledge and data as an objective and reliableway of evaluating one's risk of reoffending. First,weaimto showhowthe current socio-legal context has reshaped the task of the forensic psychiatrist,with dangerousness assessments prevailing. In the second part,we examine froma critical point of viewthe promise of neuroscience to serve a better criminal justice systemby offering new tools for risk assessment. Thenwe aim to explainwhy neuroscientific evidence is likely to be used as evidence of dangerousness of the defendants. On a theoretical level, the current tendency in criminal policies to focus on prognostics of dangerousness seems to be “justified” by a utilitarian approach to punishment, supposedly revealed by new neuroscientific discoveries that challenge the notions of free will and responsibility. Although often promoted as progressive and humane, we believe that this approach could lead to an instrumentalization of neuroscience in the interest of public safety and give rise to interventions which could entail ethical caveats and run counter to the interests of the offenders. The last part of this paper deals with someof these issues—the danger of stigmatization for brain damaged offenders because of adopting a purely therapeutic approach to crime, and the impact on their sentencing, in particular.
Aggression and Violent Behavior
Why we should universalize the insanity defense and replace punishment with therapy and education2019 •
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