Hero/Monster

"Who's gonna fight for the weak?
Who's gonna make 'em believe?
I've got a hero, I've got a hero Living in me"
- Hero, Awake by Skillet (track 1)

"The secret side of me, I never let you see
I keep it caged but I can't control it
So stay away from me, the beast is ugly
I feel the rage and I just can't hold it"
- Monster, Awake by Skillet (track 2)

I've got a lawyer living in me. And a lawyer that has been cross-pollinated by a psychologist is a dangerous thing indeed: a dangerous thing with an interest in neuroethics...

It amazes me what people will attempt to use as a defense for committing a crime (or for just behaving badly). It amazes me, perhaps, because every attempted defense is a statement of sorts about what we believe it is that makes us who we are. At a very basic level, it's a statement about what it means to be human. Are we our nature, or are we our nurture? From whence cometh the hero, or the monster?

[ASIDE: As a huge fan of multi-dimensional modeling (huge!), I once commented that, as we all agree that the truth is some combination of nature and nurture, the prudent course would be for science present the nature/nurture debate from an 'overlapping windows' perspective. Not all aspects of the phenotypical expression of our genetic nature are equally susceptible to the nurturing (or lack thereof) of environmental influence. Furthermore, a single aspect of our genetic nature may not be equally susceptible to environmental influence at different points within our lifespan. There are critical windows in development where the influence of nurture can have a much more dramatic impact on the way our nature develops. This really isn't news to anybody, when you stop to think about it, yet the idea that a single gene is somehow 'responsible' for our behavior persists, and convinces juries.]

The dangerous idea in both cases is that we are somehow not responsible for who we are, and by extension, for what we do. As the social and biological sciences advance, we believe that we are acquiring increasing power to explain why we do what we do. But having a partial understanding of why we might behave in a particular way is itself not enough to absolve any individual of responsibility for a particular action.

There is now a pathological characterization for people who are obsessed with brain pathologies as acceptable legal excuses - Brain Overclaim Syndrome, "the essential feature of which is to make claims about the implications of neuroscience for criminal responsibility that cannot be conceptually or empirically sustained." Morse's allegation that "[b]rains do not commit crimes; people commit crimes"  brings up (yet does not answer) an interesting question: what is a person, if not his/her brain?

"For a materialist, the brain always plays a causal role in behavior. Despite all the astonishing recent advances in neuroscience, however, we still know woefully little about how the brain enables the mind, and especially about how consciousness and intentionality can arise from the complicated hunk of matter that is the brain." (Quoting a slightly different version of this paper which appeared in Neuroethics: An Introduction with Readings (2010).) But the legal arguments need only demonstrate that "an agent’s capacity for rationality might be diminished by faulty neurotransmitters, psychological stress, trauma, or a host of other causes" (q, my emphasis) in order to argue that criminal responsibility for a particular action (which is based on certain presumptions of rationality) need not apply.

Morse's argument hinges around the idea of responsibility: an idea that was developed from and predicated on what we subjectively understand about our mental experiences. He argues that the correct perspective (and therefore also the correct use of neuroscience) is one which accepts the idea of responsibility (the internalist perspective). In contrast, an externalist perspective is based on the idea "determinism... is true or that our mental states play no role in explaining our behavior", and is therefore outside the current framework of our understanding of responsibility. In other words, the externalist perspective states that everything that we experience as human beings is essentially irrelevant in explaining our behavior. Morse argues (correctly, IMHO) that this perspective is inconsistent with the entire notion of responsibility.

Morse has written a fascinating and beautifully-nuanced argument in either source, and the real world-oriented humanist would do well to give some consideration to the question raised above: What is a person, if not simply his/her brain? I suspect that Morse never intended to answer that question, but rather only to illustrate that since our understanding of the brain is partial (one might even say minimal), a person should be judged by behavioral criteria of responsibility, rather than by what we think we may know about their brain. The use of neuroscientific 'evidence' should be used to support, rather than override, behavioral observations.

In the larger picture, the same can be said for other attempts to 'blame' behavior on various (usually oversimplified) aspects of genetics or environment. "Partial knowledge about causation does not mean that there is partial causation." Likewise, "[c]ausation cannot be an excuse per se for an internalist, who accepts responsibility, because all behavior is caused and thus all behavior would have to be excused." Morse, a determinist himself, believes that responsibility is compatible with determinism, however he defers the explanation of such compatibility to a realm other than science. "Science cannot resolve the dispute because the issue is metaphysical and normative and it is unlikely ever to be resolved by logic."

"As the biological and behavioral sciences offer ever more sophisticated understandings of normal and abnormal behavior alike, there will be constant pressure to use their findings to affect assessment of criminal responsibility and other legal doctrines. A lot will be at stake morally, politically and legally, and much will be debatable." I concur.