‘Brain-Reading’ in Criminal Justice and Forensic Psychiatry: Towards an Integrative Legal-Ethical Approach

Abstract

Whereas brain-reading technologies could, in principle, strengthen forensic psychiatric evaluations, deploying brain-reading in this context also raises fundamental, interwoven ethical and legal questions. Although both in ethics and in the law similar questions arise in this respect, the legal and ethical debates tend to be separated from each other. This chapter aims to provide some further direction on how ethics and the law could learn from each other in the debate on forensic brain-reading. We argue that although ethical analysis can be very informative for the law, we should be careful in extrapolating ethical arguments into the legal debate. Conversely, legal doctrines can—and should—sometimes inform ethics as well.