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- All Subjects: Science--Philosophy
- Creators: Hurlbut, James B
- Creators: Evans, Bronwynne
This project explores the limits and legitimacy of neuroimaging as a means of understanding behavior and culpability in determining appropriate criminal sentencing. It highlights key philosophical issues surrounding the ability to use neuroimaging to support this process, and proposes a method of ensuring their proper use. By engaging case studies and a thought experiment, this project illustrates the circumstances in which neuroimaging may assist in identifying particular characteristics relevant for criminal sentencing.
I argue that it is not a question of whether or not neuroimaging itself holds validity in determining a criminals guilt or motives, but rather a proper application of the issue is to focus on the way in which information regarding these images is communicated from the `expert' scientists to the `non-expert' making decisions about the sentence that are most important. Those who are considering this information's relevance, a judge or jury, are typically not well versed in criminal neuroscience and interpreting the significance of different images. I advocate the way in which this information is communicated from the scientist-informer to the decision-maker parallels in importance to its actual meaning.
As a solution, I engage Roger Pielke's model of honest brokering as a solution to ensure the appropriate use of neuroimaging in determining criminal responsibility and sentencing. A thought experiment follows to highlight the limits of science, engage philosophical repercussions, and illustrate honest brokering as a means of resolution. To achieve this, a hypothetical dialogue reminiscent of Kenneth Schaffner's `tools for talking' with behavioral geneticists and courtroom professionals will exemplify these ideas.
This dissertation explores the contemporary politics of global transformation: the ways biological expertise and economic rationalities are positioned as agents of governance in the face of emerging global crisis. It examines visions for a new bioeconomy that are offered in response to impending global crisis. Leaders point to calculations of global population growth and resource depletion to predict future crises and call for a new bioeconomy as a pillar of sustainable and “good” governance.
Focusing on visions and practices of bioeconomy-making in the U.S. and Brazil, the dissertation examines bioeconomy discourse as a response to global crisis and a framework of global governance that promises resource abundance and human wellbeing. Bioeconomy discourse makes visible shared notions of how the world is and how it should be that animate the world-making practices of bioeconomy. The dissertation analyzes the bioeconomy as simultaneously a product of existing institutional and nationally situated values and rationalities, and a significant site of performative novelty. It is an effort to reformulate existing projects in the biosciences—from technology regulation to market formation—and establish new rationalities of governance in the name of producing thoroughgoing transformations to both the global economy and to life itself.
Framing existing scientific and economic rationalities as suppressed and misdirected in their power to govern, bioeconomy proponents envision a novel order derivable from the proper conjugation of biological and economic rationalities. Through the lens of bioconstitutionalism, the dissertation elucidates how national, scientific and public rights and responsibilities are coproduced in relation to a sociotechnical imaginary of vital conjuring. Underwritten by the imaginary of vital conjuring, visions of a future transformed promise that abundance and order can be called up from a tangle of crisis and decay. The imaginary of vital conjuring marries a vision of the technological potential of biological life and the forms of economy capable of unlocking that potential. This vision of bioeconomy, the dissertation argues, is a vision of governance: of the right relationships between state, citizen and science.