Addiction, Responsibility, and the Potential Contributions of Neuroscience

This concluding chapter seeks to preview the help that neuroscience can offer to moralists and criminal lawyers once its revolutionary ambitions are put aside. The topic of addiction is a well-developed topic in contemporary neuroscience, and that literature is probed for the contributions it has made, and might yet make, to a question that has long bedeviled moralists and lawmakers, namely, does addiction excuse because it compels? The chapter explores the arguments over how addiction should be defined; surveys the competing explanations offered up in psychology for continued drug use by addicts; and evaluates whether any of those explanations, if true, would be excusing. The chapter then surveys how the insights of neuroscience could change, deepen, and enrich these definitional, explanatory, and evaluative tasks.