Name: Mireille

Family Name: Hildebrandt

Affiliation: Law, Science, Technology and Society (LSTS) Vrije Universiteit Brussel; Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus University Rotterdam

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Short BIO

Mireille Hildebrandt is a senior researcher at the Centre for Law Science Technology and Society Studies (LSTS) at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, she is Associate Professor of Jurisprudence at the Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus University Rotterdam and Dean of Education of the Research School on Safety and Security in the Netherlands. After defending her PhD thesis in legal philosophy (highest distinction) on the nexus of criminal procedure, legal history, anthropology and the epistemology of legal norms, at Erasmus University Rotterdam, she was seconded to LSTS and started working on the confrontation between future and emerging technologies, law and democracy. She is associate editor of Criminal Law and Philosophy and of Identity in the Information Society (IDIS), co-founder and editor of the Dutch Journal of Expertise and Law and a member of the editorial board of the New Criminal Law Review. She is a member of the Stakeholderforum of the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), work package leader and a member of the scientific board of FIDIS, and a member of the scientific advisory committee of the European Privacy Institute. Mireille Hildebrandt publishes widely on the nexus of philosophy of technology and of law, on the issues at stake around profiling technologies, security policies and the criminal law. In 2008 she published Profiling the European Citizen. Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives, co-edited with Serge Gutwirth and co-authored with 28 FIDIS authors.

Title of the presentation

Autonomic and autonomous ‘thinking’: preconditions for criminal accountability

Abstract

Cognitive psychology suggests that unconscious ‘thought’ is capable of complex analyses, way beyond the capability of the conscious mind. In fact, many cognitive scientists claim that most – if not all – of our behaviour is the result of ‘the adaptive unconscious’ without which we would not be able to function at all. Explaining or justifying our actions depends on being consciously aware of what motivated these actions. If, however, the ‘causes’ of our behaviour are not accessible to the conscious mind, the ‘reasons’ we give may be qualified as a comfortable illusion. The difference between autonomic computing and human behaviour, in that case, is not obvious. This would either mean that attributing criminal liability to autonomic computing systems should not be a problem or it would mean that attributing criminal liability to human beings makes no sense anyway. In this paper I will challenge such a position by elaborating the distinction between autonomic and autonomous ‘thought’, behaviour and action, claiming its relevance for criminal accountability. I will build on recent findings of cognitive psychology about ‘The New Unconscious’, relating this to findings in philosophical anthropology and phenomenology. The argument will be that the interplay between autonomic and conscious thought is the precondition for autonomous action, constituting the possibility to blame a person for wrongful action. In other work I hope to build on this, arguing that autonomic computing environments can manipulate our autonomic behaviours in ways that do not reach the treshold of consciousness, thus easily manipulating us into being nice and decent (or horrible and dangerous) individuals without us having a clue as to why we act as we do.

On-line publications

Ambient Intelligence, Criminal Liability and Democracy, (2) Criminal Law and Philosophy 2008-2, p. 163-180, see: http://www.springerlink.com/content/1871-9791

Legal and technological normativity: more (and less) than twin sisters, (12) TECHNÉ (12) 2008-3, p. 169-183, see: http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/SPT/spt.html

(with Serge Gutwirth), (Re)presentation, pTA citizens' juries and the jury trial, Utrecht Law Journal May 2007, see: http://www.utrechtlawreview.org/archive.html

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