Of course, if neuroscience were to ‘prove’ that we have no such thing as free will, we’d need to re-think our entire legal system. So on Valentine’s night I took my husband on a hot date to LSE to hear about neuroscience, responsibility and the law. Read More
You may recall that a chapter on Corporate Psychopaths was included in the 2010 book I co-edited on Ethical Leadership. Its primary author, Clive Boddy, has been attracting some recent press attention on the subject, following publication of an extended version of the chapter in the Journal of Business Ethics. One of my longstanding worries about this very useful identification of a potential boardroom problem is whether the said psychopaths could then use this diagnosis to plead diminished responsibility for any perceived wrongdoing. Read More
Free will allows us to choose. But we have incomplete knowledge, and so will often make errors. However, this does not mean that sins arising from an incomplete data set are not our fault. Rather, we have a duty to create as complete a data set as possible, lest we fall back on this as an excuse. Such sins of commission arise from a sin of omission in learning.
