Right to be Wrong: If Brain is Guilty, are We Responsible?

Abstract

There are experts in ethics who apparently maintain that if genetic factors result in criminal behaviour, then the perpetrator is responsible for his acts. As David Papineau puts it in his review: If criminal tendencies are foisted on you by your genes, you are still responsible for succumbing to these desires. If you are capable of deliberation, it's still up to you whether or not you give in to those tendencies (our rephrasing). This claim needs important amendment. You may be morally responsible, we maintain, only if your genes can not influence your capacity of deliberation, but since they could and probably often will, the original claim is not false but incomplete. In addition, the capacity for deliberation may be far too insufficient to enable us to make infallible moral judgements. Someone may be capable of moral deliberation - but this would not guarantee an acceptable result. To be able to behave in morally justified ways we need, for example, not only adequate knowledge, but also a rich socially modelled background allowing for the development of satisfactory em- pathy - something that may not always properly apply because of disease or other extreme circumstances. These may, in turn, be a result of cultural specificity, difficult living conditions, emotional states, extreme fatigue or the stress of war. These are closely related to another quite early identified question: which is more important, an individual as a pure social subject, or as an independent human entity. If we could agree that such dualistic morality may be simply a compromise between individually and socially determined morality, we might secure more solid grounds for our actions.