Andrew Vierra

Forthcoming Chapter in "Neurointerventions and the Law" with Oxford University Press ed. Nicole Vincent.
Feedback Appreciated

Abstract: Current legal arguments for gay rights use gay primarily to refer to individuals that have same-sex erotic desires. However, as this chapter argues using a thought experiment based on a neurointervention that would alter the orientation of one’s erotic desires, the term gay should be understood in a broader sense to include a more diverse group of individuals, including some individuals that do not have same-sex erotic desires. For this reason, the current restrictive use of the term gay presumed in legal discourse doesn’t capture the entire gay community that we should want to extend rights to. To rectify this problem with the way that arguments for gay rights are being framed, this chapter suggests that we expand the use of the term gay in legal discourse to encompass a more heterogeneous population than the one picked out by same-sex-attracted individuals, and it explains some of the advantages of doing so.

Published in the Springer Journal Neuroethics
Available here: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12152-015-9243-6?wt_mc=internal.event.1.SEM.ArticleAuthorOnlineFirst

Neil Levy argues that the degree to which psychopaths ought to be held blameworthy for their actions depends on the extent to which they are capable of mental time travel--episodic memory and episodic foresight.  Levy claims that deficits in mental time travel prevent psychopaths from fully appreciating what it is to be a person, and, without this understanding, we can at best hold psychopaths blameworthy for harming non-persons.  In this paper, I build upon and clarify various aspects of Levy’s view.  Specifically, I begin by outlining the neurobiological data on mental time travel, and I argue that psychopaths, or at least some psychopaths, indeed appear to have the deficits Levy ascribes to them.  I then expand upon the legal implications of his argument.  I use an analogy between juveniles and psychopaths to argue that the penological justification for retributive punishment against psychopaths ought to be substantially diminished.

Chandra Sripada argues that the degree to which one has free will depends on one’s psychological capacity to construct options. Individuals who can imagine a variety of future scenarios, direct their attention towards various alternatives, and plan sequentially have more free will than those who cannot. In this paper, I argue that secondary psychopaths have deficits in each of the capacities that Sripada highlights, which diminishes their free will to a level comparable to adolescents. For this reason, the degree to which secondary psychopaths are held morally and legally responsible for their actions should mirror the diminished degree to which we hold adolescents to be morally and legally responsible for their actions.

In lieu of an abstract, here is the introduction:

Following reports that a private prison in Arizona treated eighteen year old Regan Clarine's open C-section wound by filling it with sugar from McDonald's sugar packets, legislator and proponent of privatized health care State Representative John Kavanagh released the following statement:
“You know prisoners have 24/7 to think up allegations and write letters,” he said. “I'm not saying that some of them can't have a basis in fact. But you got to take them with a grain of salt or in the case of the hospital, with maybe a grain of sugar.”
(Abigail and May)
In the United States, about 2,300,000 adults are in prison and with the cost of keeping a convicted criminal in prison for one year as high as 170,000 dollars, it is no surprise that many States have started to cut costs. However, as the above example illustrates, these cuts come at a high ethical price, and as the
conditions in prisons deteriorate, the psychological trauma prisons cause will only increase. Neurointerventions could provide an opportunity to circumvent the monetary and psychological damages caused by the prison system. Unlike the uncontrolled psychological and physical dangers characteristic
of American prisons, interventions could target individuals' psychologies in a safe and targeted manner that prevents future recidivism, so what, besides current technological limitations, would prevent us from using them?
According to Neil Levy, there is a bias against any kind of intervention that would affect "the mind". As Andy Dufrense, a prisoner in the Shawshank Redemption put it, "there are places in this world that aren't made out of stone. There's something inside...that they can't get to, that they can't touch. That's yours." The mind is a sacred domain, the one place that is one's own, and, therefore, the one place that must be protected by the law.
However, Levy argues that the view that the mind is a "sacred domain" is misguided. Following Clark and Chalmers, Levy argues that the mind is actually extended outside of the skull and into the world, suggesting that certain changes in the environment actually change the mind directly.
"Much of the heat and the hype surrounding neuroscientific technologies stems from the perception that they offer (or threaten) opportunities genuinely unprecedented in human experience. But if the mind is not confined within the skull...(then) intervening in the mind is ubiquitous. It becomes difficult to defend the idea that there is a difference in principle between interventions which work by altering a person's environment and that work directly on her brain, in so far as the effect on cognition is the same; the mere fact that an intervention targets the brain directly no longer seems relevant." (Levy 2011, 91).
Levy uses the extended mind thesis to argue that it is only bias that stops us from intervening on criminals' brains instead of assigning prison time. He defends his view by systematically providing counter-arguments to many well defended objections against the extended mind thesis. For the most part, I believe that Levy is successful. However, in this paper, I will argue that his objection to Dan Weiskopf's information integration theory relies on a misinterpretation of the relevant empirical data, and,
therefore, Levy's appeal to the extended mind theory to support neurointerventions is unsuccessful. I conclude by suggesting that Levy may not need the extended mind thesis to argue for the use of neurointerventions. He ought to argue that there is no practical dissimilarity between prison and neurointerventions instead of arguing for a controversial metaphysical claim.

Feel free to use and adapt this syllabus to fit your needs. I am happy to answer any questions. The syllabus covers topics in ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of race, gender, and sexuality. The format was taken from a syllabus created by Jennifer Daigle (Yale).