1,721,016 research outputs found
When the self is contested ground
No full text“When the Self Is Contested Ground”: letters from Tommaso Bruni and Ilina Singh about “Anorexia Nervosa and the Language of Authenticity” (Nov-Dec 2011); and “Strings Attached”: a letter from John A. Robertson about “Conceived and Deceived: The Medical Interests of Donor Conceived Individuals” (Jan-Feb 2012), with a reply from Vardit Ravitsky
Ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesions and motivational internalism
Get PDFThis article discusses the argument by Roskies to the effect that ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) patients are a living counterexample to motivational internalism.
Motivational internalism is a philosophical position according to which moral judgments are accompanied by a particular motivational force that induces agents to act
accordingly. Roskies takes into account a very strong version ofmotivational internalism and claims that this version is defeated by the existence of VMPFC patients, who
are able to make moral judgments but fail to be motivated accordingly. Violations of moral norms can be caused by a lack of moral motivations, by a lack of nonmoral
motivations to respect those rules, or by a conflict between nonmoral motivations to violate and motivations to stick to the rule. I accept that VMPFC patients carry out
moral judgments, but I believe that nothing so far proves that VMPFC patients lack moral motivations, as their behavior is not immoral and conformity to moral rules
can be caused by nonmoral motivations too. Hence, Roskies’s argument against motivational internalism fails as she cannot show that the patients’ behavior is caused
by a lack of moral motivation
Post traumatic stress disorder, neuroscience, and the law
Get PDFPost-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a complex psychiatric condition, the effects of which can be seriously
debilitating. As it originates from a specific traumatic event, it often impacts soldiers and victims of violent
crime. It is currently one of the most frequently litigated mental diseases. Neuroscience is slowly discovering
the neural bases of PTSD and other psychiatric ailments and is building tests to distinguish actual patients
from non-suffering individuals. We examine the current state of neuroscientific research on PTSD and its biomarkers,
focusing on a recent experiment by Apostolos Georgopoulos and coworkers. Then we analyze the
legal consequences of these scientific advances, both in civil and criminal law, from a comparative perspective.
Neuro-technology is likely to provide courts with a new kind of evidence, which will not replace but
add to older behavioral evidence. Furthermore, it will weaken the so far standing distinction between physical
and emotional harm. However, even extremely sensitive tests (>95%) can have insufficient accuracy if
the prevalence of a condition in the tested population is low. Therefore, the law ought to take into account
the prevalence of PTSD and other psychiatric conditions when the decision whether to admit neuroevidence
in courts or not is made
Neuroetica e balcanizzazione della bioetica
No full textSi discute la nozione di neuroetica all'interno del quadro della bioetic
Cross-cultural variation and fMRI lie-detection
Get PDFAs decidedly underscored by a recent editorial in Nature Neuroscience (2010), many experiments
in cognitive neuroscience have been carried out with a sample that is not representative of the general human
population, as the subjects are usually university students in psychology. The underlying assumption of this
practice is that the workings of the brain do not vary much even when subjects come from different cultural
groups. Recent research by Henrich et al. (2010) shows that this assumption is unwarranted. On several
basic features of perception and cognition, Western university students turn out to be outliers relative to the
general human population, so that data based on them should be interpreted with caution. In particular, this
situation seems to provide an argument for questioning the conformity of functional Magnetic Resonance
Imaging (fMRI) lie-detection to Federal Rule of Evidence 702 and Daubert. Deception is a social
phenomenon and it is related to mental functions, such as theory of mind, for which cross-cultural variability
at the neural level has been detected. Furthermore, culture is a multi-dimensional variable whose effects are
diverse. Thus, the use of fMRI lie-detection in legal contexts may hinder the ascertainment of truth if the
experimental results are not shown to be conserved in different cultures. Cross-cultural variability in
neural activation patterns is just a facet of the broader issue of external and ecological validity for
neuroscientific experiments on the detection of deception; nonetheless, fMRI lie- detection is unlikely
to meet the Daubert standards if cross-cultural variation is not controlled by appropriate experiments
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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