Mandatory Neurointerventions and the Risk of Racial Disparity

摘要

In “Punishing Intentions and Neurointerventions,” Birks and Buyx (2018) consider the possibility that criminal offenders could one day be punished by means of neurotechnical interventions—whereby the offender is subjected to a treatment that alters the brain in ways that make them less likely to reoffend. The authors argue that these interventions are impermissible insofar as they cause secondary changes to the offender's mental state unrelated to the primary changes necessary to keep the offender from reoffending. We should, they argue, count these secondary changes as violations of the offender’s liberty. I agree that these secondary changes are violations, but I believe this line of argument (and even the terminology of the debate) misses a crucial problem with the very idea of using neurointerventions as a means of correcting an offender's behavior. That is, in some cases, neurointerventions are impermissible even when the intervention seems to have been administered to an appropriate “offender,” precisely because some (potentially prejudiced) other (or group of others) is given the ability to judge which of the offender's mental states is "valuable" or "disvaluable" and take action to thwart those mental states directly. In what follows, I argue that neurointerventions are impermissible insofar as they will likely be applied in ways that enact prejudiced attitudes toward marginalized groups.