I’d have to say Jury Nullification would be one and especially so because mentioning it or admitting that you know of it can get you pulled off an American jury.

It’s the idea that even if a person is brought to trial and is guilty of an action that is legitimately classified as a crime, if you and your fellow jurors disagree, you can still find the plaintiff “not guilty”.

For example: marijuana is illegal on the federal level and some state levels and if someone were in court on charges of possession of marijuana and nothing more, regardless what the law says or how the judge feels, you and your jurors can vote to find this person innocent so they don’t face the legal consequences for possession.

This one can have legal ramifications. Generally speaking, you can explicitly state that you are not willing to follow the law regarding the duty of jury members to make judgements of fact based on the facts presented. You should be able to defend your position, and you may be asked to do so privately.

If you were to potentially taint the jury pool by going on about nullification, that might open you up to contempt charges. I’m not saying that it should, but people interested in the subject should know that it’s a risk they run if they take that approach. Talking about nullification outside the context of a court falls under free speech, but I do think people have been cited for handing out nullification flyers outside of a court building.

I have a similar problem in that I do not believe free will exists, which shifts the idea of “guilt” from a moral to a medical dimension. I could not find anyone guilty of the crime of murder, for example, because there are a whole range of cause and effect cascades that brought the particular action about that had nothing to do with free will or choice. I do think it’s ethical to remove someone who has committed murder from society for as long as that tendency persists, but that’s a very different thing than finding someone guilty of the crime of murder, which requires mens rea - a state of mind that renders an individual as culpable for their actions. I would not find that the defendant had willfully carried out the act, any more than I’d find someone who had an epileptic seizure while driving and killed a pedestrian as guilty of murder. In order to do so, I’d require the prosecution to demonstrate a conclusive neurological argument proving the existence of free will.

Come on now. On a very practical level, you can choose to reply to this message, or not, and that has nothing to do with "a whole range of cause and effect cascades that brought the particular action." Saying you can't make that choice is pure sophism that is tantamount to an excuse. So what's your choice going to be?

It is an argument with a strong foundation in neuroimaging, neurobiology, developmental biology, and the experimental philosophy of the basis of the ego and ego-identity.

Did I have a choice to reply to your message? Let’s put on our statistician’s hat and take a look at that. Let’s build a probability function R that we’ll use to predict the probability of a reply. Lets define the probability of replying using some basic measure of number of replies based on number of users.

First, I am a cis male in what is still a largely patriarchal society. I’m more likely to speak up because I’m allocated a higher social value and feel I have the right and authority to speak in group settings, even if I have a contrary opinion. I am less likely (holding other factors constant) to just go along. Similarly, I’m the eldest child in my family, which has similar kinds of effects and compounds the male thing.

Second, I am an academic type whose position and career has been driven by research and presentation of results. That creates both a physical alteration in my brain that combines both a dopamine-driven preferential pathway for arguing (because I get the neurochemical rewards for doing so) and also has a survivorship bias - people without certain dispositions tend to drop out of academia or never try in the first place. This will also increase R over baseline.

I’m entering a week that will be applying minor social stressors, priming my amygdala and limbic system to respond with either confrontation or withdrawal. I just delivered a major project but now need to catch up on other work, which has a similar effect. My prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for pushback on that kind of thing, is primed by my active intellectual engagement in this area, and its role in future-projection is moderated by both knowing that I know about this area and that I have a bit of breathing room regarding my actual work.

I have a crappy lemmy client, which reduces my R because of the level of effort associated with the response, but not so much as if it needed to be done using the web client on an iPhone.

If we were having this discussion in a bar, my tendency to reply would be driven positively by the effects of disinhibition by alcohol. It would be further increased if there were others at our table for whom I felt some level of attraction and wanted to create an impression.

I was born with a brain that is predisposed to systemic and synthetic thinking, and raised in an environment that encouraged it. My mother was an educator who worked with young children, and thus had an educational and experiential background that created reward mechanisms for reading and learning. At the same time it was confrontational, which conditions fight/flight/freeze from the physical requiring of the limbic system.

None of these influences are conscious. For my conscious self, I think I am choosing to reply. But even that image of “self” is questionable based on current research. If you were to have stuck me into a neuroimaging machine, you could see that my brain decided to reply somewhere around 1s before I thought I decided to reply. The delta between making a decision and realizing you made a decision ranges from about 700ms to a few minutes, depending on context and complexity, but it has been demonstrated that much of what we consider reasoning is a backwards projection based on decisions that were made by neural processes not under conscious control.

So if you do want to argue that it was my “choice” to reply, you would need to identify the neurological/physiological basis of some kind of phenomena that do not follow from these kinds of causal relationships. Without retreating into a non-materialistic dimension (eg, god told me to respond the same way he told Rep. Mike Johnson that he had been chosen to be the Moses of America and become the speaker of the house), I think that’s a pretty tough climb.