Legal Responsibility between Morality and Mind

The challenge that legal responsibility currently faces in the face of neuroscientific findings has often been framed in the context of the free will debate. Free will has been seen as the philosophical basis of both moral and legal responsibility. Against this view, I will argue that legal responsibility depends more on practical reason, by considering a line of scholarship that focuses primarily on the conditions that excuse action before the law. This idea will be tested by examining some recent legal cases in which neuroscientific expertise has been used.