See the Horizon

Blame Your Brain: The Fault Lies Somewhere Within

In at the journal Psychological Science, psychologists Azim Shariff, Joshua Greene and six of their colleagues bring these heady issues down to earth by considering whether learning about neuroscience can influence judgments in a real-world situation: deciding how someone who commits a crime should be punished.
The motivating intuition is this: to hold someone responsible for her actions, she must have acted with free will.
But if her actions were the result of brute, mechanical processes that fully determined their effects — a view that a neuroscientific understanding of the mind might engender — then she didn't have free will, so she shouldn't be held morally responsible or punished too harshly. (More precisely, she shouldn't be punished merely for , or to receive her "just deserts." It might still make sense to support punishment for other reasons, such as deterring others from acting similarly in the future.)

See the spectres.