This is a comment on Brain Scans and Capital Punishment by O. Carter Snead from http://www.thenewatlantis.com/
O. Carter Snead appears to be the expert on neuroimaging and capital punishment. Professor Snead is the former general counsel to the President's Council on Bioethics. In researching this article, numerous references were made to Professor Snead. Most articles were in other law journals, but also other publications. I could find no articles that disputed his views.
The article starts with the question "Can brain scans be used to determine whether a person is inclined toward criminality or violent behavior?”
What follows is a general description of some of the techniques involved from EEGs to Pet scans to SPECT and MRIs. Scientists seem drawn to this area because they want to eliminate the inhumane nature of capital punishment.
The author however feels that "But in fact, despite these humanitarian intentions, the project’s aspirations for capital sentencing reform would more likely exacerbate the draconian and brutal features of the present capital sentencing regime."
Professor Snead also states :
In defense of reductive materialism in neuroscience, proponents cite evidence connecting changes in the brain to changes in the mind. The most well-known example of this principle is the nineteenth-century case of Phineas Gage, a law-abiding railway worker who was radically changed into a callous, unreliable troublemaker after an accident in which an iron tamping rod was accidentally driven through his brain. As Harvard experimental psychologist Steven Pinker put it in his 1997 book How the Mind Works:
Another problem [with arguments against materialism] is the overwhelming evidence that the mind is the activity of the brain. The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals, started or stopped by electricity, and extinguished by a sharp blow or by insufficient oxygen. Under a microscope, the brain has a breathtaking complexity of physical structure fully commensurate with the richness of the mind.
Ultimately Professor Snead argues that although promising the use of neuro imaging in capital punishment cases has the opposite impact of what it intends. As he states “If we examine both through the lens of our humanitarian aspirations, we are likely to discover that the wisdom behind our laws fares a good deal better than we imagined against the assumptions (often masquerading as hard facts) behind the new science of the brain.”
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
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