Later that day, October 8, 4:30 pm, Rockefeller 003: The William H. Timbers '37 Lecture: “Mechanical Brains and Responsible Choices: Challenges of Neuroscience to Responsibility”

The insights of the contemporary sciences of the brain have penetrated popular consciousness in a way that their Freudian and behavioristic predecessors did not.  Often the popular reaction is one skeptical of whether our moral and legal institutions can survive such insights.  Some believe that neuroscience has shown that:

“Human beings are nothing bur neurons…Once we understand the brain well enough, we will be able to understand behavior.  We will see the chains of physical causation that determine actions…We will see that people don’t really possess free will; their actions are caused by material processes emerging directly out of nature.  Neuroscience will replace psychology and other fields as the way to understand action.”  (NYTimes, June 17, 2013)

The lecture seeks to critically assess these skeptical conclusions.  It does so first by asking whether the data produced by neuroscience supports the psychological conclusions that we are not free, not in control, that even our rational agency does not exist, and second, by asking whether these psychological conclusions mean that no one is really responsible or blamable for their choices.

• Will neuroscience change how we think about ourselves?
• Will neuroscience show that none of us are free, blameworthy, or praiseworthy?
• Will neuroscience change our legal institutions away from considerations of justice?

Michael Moore currently holds the only University-level chair at the University of Illinois’ three campuses, the Walgreen Chair.  He is also the Center for Advanced Studies Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the Urbana-Champaign campus of the University.  He has previously taught at Penn, Berkeley, San Diego, USC, ANU, Virginia, Stanford, Northwestern, and others.  His research interests have had as one of their centers the issues related to moral responsibility.  Five of his seven books (including the most recent, Causation and Responsibility, OUP 2009, paper 2010) have been devoted to these issues.  From 2007 to 2010 he was a member of the MacArthur Foundation’s Law and Neuroscience Research Project and Chair of its Intentions and Decisions research group; he also lectures from time to time to the Neuroscience Seminar of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.