Passage
To a neuroscientist, you are your brain; nothing causes your behavior other than the operations of your brain. This viewpoint, together with recent findings in neuroscience, radically changes the way we think about the law. The official line in the law is that all that matters is whether you are rational, but our punishment buck when we punish some person, then it is not worth punishing that person.
Passage
Neuroscience constantly produces new mechanistic descriptions of how the physical brain causes behavior, adding fuel to the deterministic view that all human action is causally necessitated by events that are independent of the will. It has concept of free will can coexist with determinism.
In 1954 English philosopher Alfred J. Ayer put forth a theory of “soft determinism.” He argued, as the philosopher David Hume had two centuries earlier, that even in a deterministic world, a person can still act freely. Ayer distinguished between free actions and constrained actions. Free actions are those that are caused someone performs a constrained action to do A, he or she could have done only A.
Ayer argued that actions are free as long as they are not constrained. It is not the existence of a cause but the source of the cause that determines whether an action is free. Although Ayer did not explicitly discuss the brain’s role, one could make the analogy that those actions—and indeed constrained, and are therefore free, even though they may be determined.
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