Does Consciousness Cause Misbehavior?
Does Consciousness Cause Misbehavior?
This chapter examines the concepts of free will as well as conscious volition and conscious efficacy in light of recent psychological and neuroscientific studies. It challenges the results of such studies and the inferences drawn from them and considers a range of scenarios about the impact these developments may have on legal, social, and moral judgments of responsibility and blame. It discusses conscious intention as a problem in neurobiology and how consciousness is related to volition and misbehavior, first by analyzing mental causation and freedom of the will and the results of experiments conducted by Benjamin Libet and others. It also describes folk models of volition and the law.
Keywords: free will, volition, conscious efficacy, responsibility, blame, intention, consciousness, mental causation, law, misbehavior
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