Abstract
In this chapter, we examine Owen and Owen’s (2015) meta-construct of neuro-agency and developments in neuroscience concerning notions of free will, embodied cognition, neuroplasticity and neuro-ethics in relation to cybercrime. The meta-construct, neuro-agency is employed in Genetic-Social metatheoretical reasoning as an acknowledgement of the neural influence upon human free will. It is contended here that it is timely and essential to acknowledge recent developments in the neuroscience of free will and to abandon the ‘old’ term, ‘agency’. Whilst, a neural influence upon human free will is acknowledged here, it is not argued that free will is an illusion, as has been suggested by the hard-line, determinist work of Eagleman (2011). The suggestion here is that the most convincing model of free will, and the one which has played the most significant role in the development of Owen and Owen’s (ibid) notion of neuro-agency, is the ‘soft compatabilist’ model of free will offered by Dennett (1981), in which a belief in both determinism and free will is not seen as logically inconsistent. In what follows, we firstly examine selected examples from the literature on the subject of the ‘neuroscience of free will’.
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Owen, T., Noble, W., Speed, F.C. (2017). Neuro-Agency, Neuro-Ethics and Cybercrime. In: New Perspectives on Cybercrime. Palgrave Studies in Cybercrime and Cybersecurity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53856-3_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53856-3_2
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