Can Your Brain Force You to Do Something You Don't Want to Do?

I have been reading Jerome Kagan's compelling recent book on emotion. I stumbled on one particular line:

An article in the June 20, 1988, issue of Time magazine, reporting on a woman who murdered her infant, told readers that the hormonal changes that accompany the birth process create emotional states, especially in women unprepared for the care of children, that can provoke serious aggression that women are unable to control. It is thus not fair, the journalist argued, to hold such mothers responsible for their horrendous actions. This conclusion is a serious distortion of the truth. There is no known hormonal change that can force a woman to kill her infant if she does not want to do so!

This raises one of most difficult problems facing 21st Century ethics. We want to treat criminals differently if they are in control of their actions. For instance, a soldier who is ordered to commit an atrocity is, if still guilty, a bit less guilty than one who does the same thing, but just for kicks.

When the outside influence constraining your free will actually arises within your own body, it's a bit more difficult. Suppose Alfred goes on a drug-induced killing spree. Again, it's different from the just-for-kicks murderer, but then one might wonder if Alfred should have thought of the consequences before injecting himself with psychotics. Or what about somebody who had a psychotic break? Where do we draw the line between that and a bad mood?

Many people used to be comfortable drawing the line between psychosis and a bad mood using medical information. Anyone who acts under the influence of a medical condition is less culpable (or, at least, differently culpable) than somebody who is not. However, neuroscientists find the brain correlates of conditions like a bad mood and geneticists find that nearly every personality trait is heritable (including being just plain mean), this line is breaking down.

To be fair, this is in essence not a new problem. Certain strains of Christian religious thinkers have spent centuries tying themselves into knots trying to explain how, given that everything is according to God's plan, including sin, it was not sacrilege to punish sinners, who, by definition, were just carrying out God's plan.

Nonethess, Christian civilizations did not collapse under the weight of this paradox, and I suspect we'll get along for some time without a coherent answer to the Great Question of Free Will. But it would still be nice to have...

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Kagan (2007) What Is Emotion, p. 80

Iranian politician moonlights as scientific plagiarist

It appears that one of the plagiarists caught by Harold Garner's Deja Vu web database, "author" of a paper, 85% of which was stitched together from five papers by other researchers, is Massoumeh Ebtekar, former spokeswoman for the militant students that held 52 Americans hostage in the US Embassy in Tehran during the Carter administration, former vice-president under Mohammad Khatami, and current member of the Tehran City Council.

Nature, my source for this news, reports that she has blamed this on the student who helped her with the manuscript. This would seem to indicate that the student wrote most or all of the paper, despite not being listed as an author...which is a different kid of plagiarism, if one more widely accepted in academia.

Why the Insanity Defense is Un-scientific

In his class book Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman presents a very compelling case for studying individual differences in social and emotional skills. Since people who are less empathic -- less aware of others' thoughts and feelings -- are apparently more likely to commit crime, Goleman argues that this raises the issue of what to do about criminals who are biologically limited in their empathic abilities:

If there are biological patterns at play in some kinds of criminality -- such as a neural defect in empathy -- that does not argue that all criminals are biologically flawed, or that there is some biological marker for crime ... Even if there is a biological basis for a lack of empathy in some cases, that does not mean all who have it will drift to crime; most will not. A lack of empathy should be factored in with all other psychological, economic, and social forces that contribute to a vector toward criminality.

This may seem like a reasonable, middle-of-the road take on the issue, but I would argue that it is actually an extremely radical, non-scientific statement. (Since it is such a common sentiment, I realize this means I may be calling most of the public crazy radicals. So be it. Sometimes, that's the case.)

The Fundamental Axiom of Cognitive Science

It is the scientific consensus that all human behavior is the result activity in the brain. Like gravity and the laws of thermodynamics, this cannot be proven beyond a doubt (in fact, there's a good argument that nothing can be proven beyond a doubt). However, it is the foundation upon which modern psychology and neuroscience is built, and there is no good reason to doubt it.

In fact, many of the world's events cannot be understood otherwise. Classic examples are people who, as a result of brain injury, are unaware of the fact that they can see or that the left half of the world exists or think their leg is a foreign entity not part of their own body. The oddest fact about such syndromes is that such patients sometimes are completely unaware of their problem and cannot understand it when it is explained to them (Oliver Sacks is a great source of such case histories).

The Problem for the Insanity Defense

Back to Goleman. He writes "Even if there is a biological basis for a lack of empathy in some cases..."

I hope that the fundamental problem with the quote is now clear. The consensus of the scientific community is that for any behavior, personality trait or disposition, there is always a biological basis. There are fundamental brain differences between Red Sox fans and Yankees fans, or between those attracted to Tom Cruise or Nicole Kidman. There is some brain state such that it is being a Red Sox fan.

So whenever somebody says, "My brain made me do it," they are telling the truth.

The Soft Bigotry of Medical Evidence

As matters currently stand, however, certain brain differences are privileged over others. Say Jane and Sally are both accused of a similar crime, but Jane has a known brain "abnormality" that correlates with criminal behavior, but Sally has no such brain data to point to. They may likely face different sentences.

However, the difference between Jane and Sally may have more to do with the state of our scientific understanding than anything else. If Sally is predisposed to crime in some way, then it must be because of some difference in her brain. At the very least, if you were able to take a snapshot of her brain during the moments leading up the crime, there would be some difference between her brain and the brain of Rebecca, who had the opportunity to commit the crime but chose not to, because the act of choosing is itself a brain state.

The effect is to discriminate between people based, not on their actions or on their persons, but based on current medical knowledge.

A problem without an easy solution

I think that most people prefer that the legal system only punish those who are responsible for wrongdoing. If we exclude from responsibility everybody whose actions are caused by their brains, we must exclude everybody. If we include even those who clearly have little understanding or control of their own actions, that seems grossly unfair.

I don't have any insight into how to solve the problem, but I don't think the current standard is workable. It is an exceptionally complex problem, and many very smart people have thought about it very hard. I hope they come up with something good.

Are we more moral than cavemen?

Over the weekend, Eric Posner of Slate asked whether humans have become any more moral in the last few thousand years. His target was opinion leaders (most recently, David Brooks) who decry a moral decline in our society.

Posner asks if opinion leaders have been making such statements since the beginning of time (I believe they have, but I couldn't track down the right citation), and whether if we are to take from that fact that we as humans are far less moral than our caveman ancestors.

Posner suspects that we are at least as moral as our ancestors. I'm not sure if there is good data on morality (definition would be the first problem in that study), but there is good evidence in terms of violence.

In pre-state societies, about 60% of men die in violence. Since the Middle Ages, the murder rate in Europe has fallen a hundredfold. A smaller proportion of the human population died due to violence in the 20th century than in any previous century (yes, that's including both world wars and Stalin).

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Further Reading

The first two of the factoids above come from The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker. Chapter 17 is particularly relevant. 

Will neuroscience end responsibility?

As we learn more and more about the brain, it seems fewer and fewer people are responsible for their actions. You may be mean, ignorant or violent simply because of bad genes or a bad brain.

In Freedom Evolves, Daniel Dennett argues that this is not a perpetually sliding slope, leading to nobody being responsible for anything:

"The anxious mantra returns: 'But where will it all end?' Aren't we headed toward a 100 percent 'medicalized' society in which nobody is responsible, and everybody is a victim of one unfortunate feature of their background or another (nature or nurture)? No, we are not... People want to be held accountable. The benefits that accrue to one who is a citizen in good standing in a free society are so widely and deeply appreciated that there is always a potent presumption in favor of inclusion. Blame is the price we pay for credit, and we pay it gladly under most circumstances."

What does he mean by "benefits that accrue?" Put it this way: kleptomania is the impulsive desire to steal. I had a friend his high school who was a compulsive shop-lifter, and I believe the disease is real. However, it doesn't matter whether you think kleptomania is a true medical condition or simply another symptom of Prozac Nation -- either way, you wouldn't put a kleptomaniac in charge of your store. More generally, people recognized as moral and responsible are likely to receive many advantages (more friends, better credit rating, community awards, etc.).

I'm less sure what he means when stating that this causes people to "want to be held responsible." However, I think do think the argument can be made that we will continue to hold people responsible for their actions. Acting morally leads to personal gain, but only if society at large recognizes and rewards good character (for instance, by employing people known to be honest and passing over thieves). Of course, anyone who does not distinguish between trustworthy and untrustworthy neighbors is not going to last long -- it doesn't matter whether the untrustworthy neighbor has a "condition" is is simply "bad."

By this argument, bad behavior is always going to punished. The question is how. Our growing understanding of neuroscience may change what bad behavior leads to jail time and what bad behavior leads to medication, but it won't affect whether we hold people responsible for their actions. As Dennett and others have convincingly argued, morality is useful.