Eagleman

Recall...

Evil: Essential characteristics

Evil deserves blame, punishment, and resistance.

And also recall...

Phinias Gage

A head injury changed his personality for the worse.

Is he to blame?

Similar cases

Dementia

Lead exposure in childhood

(Alternate hypothesis: childhood poverty)

But it seems that most cases of wrongdoing caused by injury don't rise to the level of evil.

are we sure?

The Brain on Trial

Charles Whitman

Killed 16, including own wife and mother. Wounded 32 more.

Why did he do it?

From Life magazine profile, "The Eagle Scout Who Grew Up with a Tortured Mind"

He was big, strong, handsome, neat, hardworking. He was pleasant to be around and interesting to talk with. He spoke ill of no one – except, occasionally, his father – and he tried to speak well of many people. His grades were excellent. He enjoyed civic work, loved his wife, admired his professors and seemed to have no enemies.

But he was also a violent man. He bit his nails to the quick and perspired ‘rings of sweat on the coolest days.’ He was a meticulous perfectionist…. What he said in deep intimate conversations changed from person to person.

Nail biting?

There seems to have been a change in his personality leading up to the attack.

From his suicide note:

I do not quite understand what it is that compels me to type this letter. Perhaps it is to leave some vague reason for the actions I have recently performed. I do not really understand myself these days.

I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I cannot recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts. These thoughts constantly recur, and it requires a tremendous mental effort to concentrate on useful and progressive tasks.

He doesn't seem to have been making this up.

He had visited at least five physicians, as well as a psychiatrist, in the year leading up to the attack

He complained of intense headaches and intrusive thoughts.

Note from a visit to Maurice Heatly, staff psychiatrist at Texas Health Center:

This massive, muscular youth seemed to be oozing with hostility… [He said] that something seemed to be happening to him and that he didn't seem to be himself. He readily admits having overwhelming periods of hostility with a very minimum of provocation.

What was happening?

In his suicide note, Whitman requested an autopsy, to find the answer.

During the autopsy, doctors extracted from his brain an astrocytoma (a tumor) the size of a pecan.

The tumor was pressing on Whitman's amygdala, a part of the brain that is believed to modulate feelings of fear, anxiety and agression.

What if?

Constitutive Moral Luck

You can be morally condemned for bad luck in who you turn out to be.

When external circumstances (dementia, lead poisoning, brain injury) outside of your control, shape your habits and personality for the worse, can you be blamed for who you are as a result?

For the things you do as a result of who you are?

The Origin of Evil

Of course, even if Whitman's actions were the result of a brain disease, that doesn't mean every evil action is.

But there are common conditions that seem to have something to do, at least statistically, with certain evil actions.

Example

There is a generic condition that makes you

• 8 times as likely to be arrested for murder (compared to non-possessors)
• 13 times more likely to be arrested for sexual offense.

and

• 98.1 percent of death row inmates have this condition.

Of course, not everyone with a Y chromosome is dangerous.

But maybe the Y chromosome, together with other factors?

How do we know?

In some sense, everything we do, all of our behavior, comes down to physical interactions in our brains.

So don't there have to be some kind of factors that produce evil behavior?

If a condition of my brain (that I had no control over) produces evil behavior, how am I different from Whitman?

An Objection

What about Augustine's example?

A Reply

Augustine didn't know very much about modern biology.

Another Objection

You're responsible for some conditions of your brain.

Like, conditions produced by drinking alcohol, or by cultivating violent habits.

Another Reply

Are you responsible for the condition of your brain that resulted in you drinking the alcohol?

Or the condition of the brain that resulted in the condition of your brain that resulted in you drinking alcohol?

Or the …?

At some point, maybe the moment of your birth, you can't be responsible for your constitution.

Fundamental choices

Option 1: Embrace constitutive luck, condemn Whitman (and dementia patients, and…)

Option 2: Embrace radical free will, siding with Augustine against your physics and biology professors.

Option 3: Reject both free will and moral luck, and accept that, because people don't truly control what they do, and you can only be blamed for what you control, nobody can be blamed (or praised) for anything.

Option 4: Find some meaningful difference between subtle almost indetectable conditions of the brain, and obvious injuries.

Option 3 seems the least “expensive”.

But maybe that's just because it's the hardest to imagine.