Will advances in neuroscience move reasonable people to abandon the idea that criminals deserve to be punished? Some researchers working at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience and philosophy think the answer is yes. Their reasoning is straightforward: if the idea of deserving punishment depends upon the idea that criminals freely choose their actions, and if neuroscience reveals that free choice is an illusion, then we can see that the idea of deserving punishment is nonsense. As Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen speculated in a 2004 essay: “new neuroscience will undermine people’s common sense, libertarian conception of free will and the retributivist thinking that depends on it, both of which have heretofore been shielded by the inaccessibility of sophisticated thinking about the mind and its neural basis.”
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