The Moral Conflict of Law and Neuroscience

Law is built on the assumption that humans make their own choices and bear moral responsibility for the consequences. Yet over the past fifty years, increased understanding of how the brain works has challenged this foundation. The law already accounts for certain cognitive factors—age, sanity, emotional distress—when assessing agency and responsibility. As neuroscientific research increasingly questions whether humans possess free will, the question arises: how should law adapt to this new understanding? Peter A. Alces examines where current law fails to incorporate neuroscientific findings suggesting humans may lack normative free will and therefore moral responsibility. Criminal law offers the clearest context for this inquiry, as it already demonstrates inconsistencies in how it treats people with equally severe cognitive deficits, whether present from birth or acquired later. Tort and contract law similarly rest on flawed assumptions about human agency and responsibility. Alces identifies contradictions within existing legal doctrine and explores what new legal frameworks based on neuroscientific insights might require.