Revising the Frontiers of Responsibility and Blame: How Neuroscience Is Reshaping Philosophy and the Criminal Law
Thursday, October 11, 2007
3:00 p.m. - 6:15 p.m. — College of Law, Room 114
Sponsored By
The Glenn M. Weaver Institute of Law and Psychiatry, College of Law
Department of Philosophy
College of Medicine
University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio
For more information, contact Toni McGuire at 513/556-0090.
About the Symposium
Traditionally, the law has viewed human action as something governed by our beliefs and desires. And society has regarded people as potentially blameworthy and punishable because we believe we can control our own behavior. But in courtrooms across the country, judges and juries are facing a new type of evidence that challenges this thought: evidence from brain scans and other neuro-imaging techniques that explains behavior as the outcome of biological processes, rather than conscious decisions. This calls into question the very bases upon which law and Western society attribute personal responsibility and blame.
This symposium will exam psychiatry's new approach to cognition and the ways that neuroscience is reshaping legal and philosophical thinking. Targeted to attorneys, mental health professionals, academic physicians, and legal scholars, presentations will cover a broad range of legal, ethical, and scientific challenges. Join speakers and panelists—including law professors, psychiatrists, neuoroscientists, and philosophers—for a probing discussion of modern theories of human behavior, what "choice" is, the interaction of mind and brain, and what it means to be rational.
This symposium is jointly sponsored by The University of Cincinnati College of Law, The University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, The University of Cincinnati Department of Philosophy, and the Glenn M. Weaver Institute of Law and Psychiatry.
Conference Objectives
Symposium Participants
Dr. John Bickle is Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy and Professor in the Neuroscience Graduate Program at the University of Cincinnati. Professor Bickle specializes in the philosophy of neuroscience, philosophy of science, and cellular mechanisms of cognition and consciousness. His recent books include Psychoneural Reduction: The New Wave (1998) and Philosophy and Neuroscience: A Ruthlessly Reductive Account (2003) address the importance of molecular and cellular cognition for cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind and science.
Dr. Valerie Gray Hardcastle was recently appointed Dean of the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Cincinnati. Before coming to UC, she was an Associate Dean and Professor of Philosophy at Virginia Tech. Dean Hardcastle's research has focused on interdisciplinary theories in cognitive science and on developing a framework for understanding consciousness that takes into account neuroscientific and psychological data. Her work looks at how consciousness, memory, and perception relate to underlying neurophysiology, and what these relations tell us about the mind and ourselves as thinking creatures.
Dr. Douglas S. Lehrer is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine. Dr. Lehrer leads Wright State's major neurobiological research efforts in partnership with the Wallace-Kettering Neuroscience Institute. His research uses positron emission tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, and the coordinated efforts of radiochemists, physicists, and computer scientists to produce detailed neuroimages that elucidate psychopathology in major mental disorders.
Attorney and Dr. Stephen J. Morse is the Ferdinand Wakeman Hubbell Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology and Law in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a renowned expert in criminal and mental health law, whose work examines the role of individual responsibility in criminal and civil law. Both a lawyer and a psychologist, Professor Morse has authored numerous law reviews articles, publications in professional mental health journals, and op-eds. Most recently, he has published Foundations of Criminal Law (with Leo Katz and Michael S. Moore), and he is currently working on a book entitled Desert and Disease: Responsibility and Social Control.
Dr. Douglas Mossman is Administrative Director of the Glenn M. Weaver Institute of Law and Psychiatry at the UC College of Law, and Professor and Director of the Division of Forensic Psychiatry at the Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine.
Dr. Stephen Strakowski is currently Professor and Acting Chair of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. He also directs the UC Bipolar and Psychotic Disorders Research Program, which uses neuroimaging, neurocognitive measures, and longitudinal outcome and treatment methods to study neurophysiology of affective disorders. Dr. Strakowski has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications, and he serves as a reviewer for federal grant subcommittees and for most of the major psychiatric journals. His many honors include the Gerald L. Klerman Award from the National Depressive and Manic Depressive Association.
Dean Glen Weissenberger has been Dean of the College of Law at DePaul University since July 2002. Before taking this post, he taught at the UC College of Law for 27 years, serving as Dean and as the Judge Joseph P. Kinneary Professor of Law. Widely recognized as an authority on evidence, civil commitment, and the insanity defense, he also is the developer of casebooks, anthologies, and texts that can be found in law school classrooms around the country.
Schedule
2:50 p.m. — Registration