The biggest dividing line in politics and indeed within Western civilization in the past century, in my view, has been over the issue of personal responsibility. The best way to predict someone’s position on the various political, cultural, and even scientific issues of the day is to know their position on the issue of personal responsibility versus philosophical determinism.
Briefly stated, there is a continuum of beliefs about how much autonomy human beings really have. On one end are those who believe in basic free will (which they acknowledge will always be inherently constrained by circumstances), and on the other are those who strongly believe that pretty much all human choices are largely determined by factors such as economic circumstances, genetics, upbringing, and the like.
Note that I don’t say people’s decisions are determined by their position on the issue of personal responsibility versus determinism, though I could do so while remaining consistent with a freewill position. The free choice to believe in determinism could indeed determine subsequent decisions.
As this brief outline suggests, the issue of which position most closely accords with the truth is a complex question, and a person’s position on it can indeed be seen as at the very least extremely influential in deciding how he or she will judge others’ actions. And it is a question that can’t be answered definitively through science but is in fact a philosophical one.
As a result, one’s answer will most likely be arrived at culturally (including one’s religious beliefs, of course), not scientifically.
Most readers of this publication will have discerned that I take a position on the freewill side of the spectrum. The consequences of a strongly deterministic approach conflict greatly with common sense. A recent case in an Italian court illustrates this, showing the disturbed consequences of taking a strongly deterministic position regarding human behavior.
A news story in Nature magazine summarizes the issues well:
An Italian court has cut the sentence given to a convicted murderer by a year because he has genes linked to violent behaviour—the first time that behavioural genetics has affected a sentence passed by a European court. But researchers contacted by Nature have questioned whether the decision was based on sound science.
Abdelmalek Bayout, an Algerian citizen who has lived in Italy since 1993, admitted in 2007 to stabbing and killing Walter Felipe Novoa Perez on 10 March. Perez, a Colombian living in Italy, had, according to Bayout’s testimony, insulted him over the kohl eye make-up the Algerian was wearing. Bayout, a Muslim, claims he wore the make-up for religious reasons.
Simple enough, right? Bayout was convicted of killing someone in a burst of anger. If the law is for anything, it’s to stop just this sort of hamful behavior.
But that’s not what the Italian appeals court found, as the judges’ adherence to hard determinism overcame common sense and intelligent reasoning:
During the trial, Bayout’s lawyer, Tania Cattarossi, asked the court to take into account that her client may have been mentally ill at the time of the murder. After considering three psychiatric reports, the judge, Paolo Alessio Vernì, partially agreed that Bayout’s psychiatric illness was a mitigating factor and sentenced him to 9 years and 2 months in prison—around three years less than Bayout would have received had he been deemed to be of sound mind.
But at an appeal hearing in May this year, Pier Valerio Reinotti, a judge of the Court of Appeal in Trieste, asked forensic scientists for a new independent psychiatric report to decide whether he should commute the sentence further. . . .
On the basis of the genetic tests, Judge Reinotti docked a further year off the defendant’s sentence, arguing that the defendant’s genes "would make him particularly aggressive in stressful situations". Giving his verdict, Reinotti said he had found the [genetic] evidence particularly compelling.
The Nature story clearly describes this line of thinking as extremely hazardous:
Some fear that such cases could lead to the acceptance of genetic determinism—the idea that genes determine the behaviour of an organism—in criminal cases.
As the Nature story makes clear, the Italian court’s decision was not based on science, and certainly not on any scientifically tested and proven propositions:
But forensic scientists and geneticists contacted by Nature question whether the scientific evidence supports the conclusions reached in the psychiatric report presented to Judge Reinotti.
"We don’t know how the whole genome functions and the [possible] protective effects of other genes," says Giuseppe Novelli, a forensic scientist and geneticist at the University Tor Vergata in Rome. Tests for single genes such as MAOA are "useless and expensive", he adds. . . .
Other genes, such as those that encode the serotonin transporter, have also been linked to different reactions to stress. But these also show a large degree of dependence on environmental factors. "The point is that behavioural genetics is not there yet, we cannot explain individual behaviour, only large population statistics," says Nita Farahany of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, who specializes in the legal and ethical issues arising from behavioural genetics and neuroscience.
But of course the decision was not based on science. Determinism is a philosophical position, not a provable, scientific proposition. Thus the judges will pick and choose which facts are to be considered relevant based on their presupposition that individuals are largely driven by a variety of forces that are at the very least highly difficult to resist, if not indeed impossible to overcome.
Thus a cultural tendency to undermine people’s sense of moral/ethical responsibility and spreads belief in philosophicall determinism has enormous consequences for a society.
Consider this: if the determinists are wrong and people do have some choice in things, then cutting prison sentences in the deluded belief that the individuals in question deserve pity, not punishment, means that you will necessarily reduce both the actual and perceived costs of behavior that harms other people. And you will necessarily get much more of it.
That’s why culture is so important. It drives politics and personal and public actions, not the other way around.
–S. T. Karnick
Thanks for this comprehensive response to my article and the others on this issue, Prof. Sartori. I acknowledge that you may have intended your testimony merely as an accurate analysis of the facts before you.
Of course, how one sees the facts is determined by one’s presuppositions, some of which are quite fundamental. Thus, you write, correctly, “To date there is NO indication of any DETERMINISTIC effect, that is, there is no genetic variant that determines abnormally aggressive behavior (no cause-effect relationship).” You later apply this to the specifics of this instance, writing, “Neuroscience methods may, therefore, be used to better picture the ‘disease of mind’ but can say nothing, contrary to what seems attributed to us, about the direct proximal causal link with the crime.”
Yet one cannot help but notice two things in these seemingly cautious statements, both of which are quite important. One, it leaves open the door through which you walk a moment later, the notion that even though claims of a deterministic relationship are not at this point proven, the relationship between the person’s brain chemistry/genetics and the person’s actions is so powerful as to be practically irresistible, thus arguing for a conclusion of diminished capacity.
Thus, although you admit the obvious point that “there is no test in medicine that has a sensitivity nor a specificity of 100%,” you go on to say that “genetic and molecular studies are offering a powerful tool to understand the complex interaction between genetic characteristics and environmental factors in shaping our personality and behavior.” Characterizing these factors as “shaping” people’s behavior is simply a euphemism for what the court ultimately did: using these factors to argue for a reduction in the criminal’s perceived responsibility.
This reduction, moreover, resulted not in acquittal but in a reduced sentence. This is a slippery slope indeed, for if a person can have only a degree of responsibility for a crime so clear-cut and dire as murder, there is little for which ultimately we will be able to hold people responsible, for there will always be genetic and environmental factors that “contribute” to the individual making a decision to commit a crime.
This is inevitable for simply logical reasons: the crime happened; therefore, everything that happened to this individual–including their genetics–led up to it; therefore, everything a is a potential cause and thus potentially exculpatory. All a person’s lawyers need to do is find some suitably sad circumstances–such as a 70 IQ, history of social exclusion, etc., to press the sympathy buttons among judge and/or jury, and the thing is done.
That is exactly the danger that is suggested in the articles you criticize.
And they are clearly correct to do so, as is indicated by the second loophole in your cautious statements cited above. When you write, “To date there is NO indication of any DETERMINISTIC effect, . . . no genetic variant that determines abnormally aggressive behavior (no cause-effect relationship).” It’s quite telling that you use the qualifier “to date.” That strongly suggests that the real caution you are trying to establish is against drawing excessively deterministic conclusions based on the level of current science in the matter.
Thus your qualifier statements are not a matter of acknowledging caution in applying such evidence in itself because it is inherently skewed toward exculpation, but instead simply a matter of advising judges, juries, policymakers, and legislators not to lend too much weight to this type of evidence just yet, until direct, deterministic links between circumstances and human behavior can be identified. That is simply an assertion of deterministic effects for which the causal relationships cannot yet be fully established but which certainly are assumed to exist.
In light of all this, if the titles and some of the rhetoric in the news and opinion articles you cite make this situation sound more calamitous than you take it to be, that is a matter for debate over how disastrous the implications of this case are regarding whether it will be possible to have any kind of a sensible justice system within a liberal society. The alternative, rampant criminality, is no modus operandi for liberty and human happiness. That is why the these articles express such strong concern.
This is a note from the two court experts (Pietro Pietrini, Professor of molecular neuroscience from the University of Pisa and Giuseppe Sartori, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Padova) involved in the Bayout case in Italy.
(see Nature news: ttp://www.nature.com/news/2009/091030/full/news.2009.1050.html)
No es mi culpa: son mis genes
Bad genes get a ligther sentence
Strafmilderung wegen “schlechter Gene”
The “DNA Pardon”: Murder sentence genetically reduced
Un juge italien découvre le gène du meutre
These titles, used to summarise a decision from an Italian Criminal Court on a case of “diminuished capacity” due to psychiatric problems, are ill-posed and do not represent the core issue of this forensic case. Nowhere in our report or in the judge decision it is claimed a causal link between genes and criminal behaviour.
Dimisnuished responsibility was proved by a casual link (required by Italian criminal law) between a pathological mental state and and the criminal behaviour. The crime (homicide) resulted to be a symptom of the undelying psychiatric disorder. The defendant had a reduced capacity to “do otherwise” due to his mental illness.
Given that psychiatric symptoms may be easily faked as they are mostly based on the defendant’s verbal report, the objectivisation of the “disease of the mind” is therefore critical. Evidence that the psychiatric phenomenology causally linked to the crime has a “hard” neural basis was investigated using neuropsychological assessment, MRI and fMRI (using the stop-signal as activation task) and molecular genetics. Cognitive and molecular neurosciences were not used to causally explain the crime but to instrumentally prove the “hard” correlates of the mental illness which symtpoms are causally linked to the crime.
We have found that the psychosis was also accompanied by other severe cognitive disorders, by a dysfunctional frontal lobe and a sfavorable genetics. We have assessed the defendant, previously evaluated only with a psychiatric interview, also with a full neuropsychological, imaging (morphological and functional) and genetic evaluation. The psychiatric interview may be may be easily faked by the defendant and it has a unsatisfacory inter-rated concordance. Neuroscience methods may, therefore, be used to better picture the “disease of mind” but can say nothing, contrary to what seems attributed to us, about the direct proximal causal link with the crime.The symptoms which, by incontrovertible evidence, are linked to the crime are a fully blown untreated psychotic state characterised by delusions of persecuzione, lowIQ, a very poor “theory of mind”, and control of impulse. THESE ARE THE DIRECT CAUSES OF THE CRIME NOT THE BRAIN OR THE GENETIC.
In order to better characterise the required “disease of the mind” there is the legal requirement to show that the disease has a biological basis.Altered brain functioning in controlling behaviour and genetics are the required biological markers of the “disease of the mind”. The only methods that can respond to this requirements are the methods of neuroscience that we have applied. THE CRITICAL ISSUE IS WHETHER THERE ARE BETTER TECHNIQUES, TO ADDRESS THIS ISSUES OTHER THAN THE ONE USED BY US? WE BELIEVE THE RESPONSE IS NO.
As regards to moleculasr genetics, we sequenced 5HTTLPR, STin2 – VNTR (Variable Number of Tandem Repeats) , rs4680, MAOA, DRD4-1/7. Results showed that for each of the examined genes the Defendant had one or both the alleles found to be significantly associated with aggressive and violent behavior.In our specific case, as I said above, for each of the candidate genes examined the subject had one or even both the alleles associated with a significantly greater risk for abnormal aggression, impulsivity and violence. This is a very sensitive issue and there is a need to be absolutely clear. To date there is NO indication of any DETERMINISTIC effect, that is, there is no genetic variant that determines abnormally aggressive behavior (no cause-effect relationship). What the studies reported in the literature have shown is that possessing one or more specific allele(s) is associated with a significantly greater probability of having abnormal aggressive behavior. That is, possessing such a variant is neither necessary nor sufficient to have abnormal aggressive behavior. However, the incidence of individuals with abnormal aggressive behavior is significantly greater in the group of people with such a variant than in the group without.
It is important to clarify that results from association studies have shown that possessing one or more of these genetic variants makes the individual more vulnerable to the effects of an unfavourable environment, such as childhood abuse and maltreatment or social exclusion (see for instance Caspi et al., Science, 2002; Eisenberger et al., Biol Psychiatry, 2006). Indeed, some of these environmental features were present in the case of our Proband.
In no way the conclusions reported in our evaluation of the defendant can be interpreted in a way that denies free will in favour of a genetic determinism (“I did not do it, my genes made me do it”, like a couple of newspaper titled). Indeed, our conclusion was based on the whole evaluation of the defendant, who showed a limited cognitive development (IQ= 70), a history of psychotic disorder with delusional ideation, a history of social exclusion, abnormal performance on cognitive testing for impulse control, abnormal pattern of brain activity in response to inhibition tasks and, finally, a genetic background associated with a statistically significant higher risk of impulsivity and aggressive behavior, especially in response to provocation. Considered each and all these pieces of evidence, we concluded that the defendant at a greatly diminished capacity, which is the requisite by law for a judge to cut the sentence.
Skeptics say that behavioral genetics studies are mostly based on correlations in groups of people so these data is hardly applicable to single individuals. This is false logic. Such a statement, infact, applies to every aspect of medical science. What we mean is that there is no test in medicine that has a sensitivity nor a specificity of 100%. Not even for a diagnosis of hyperglicemia you can rely on a clear-cut reference value, simply because what we call “normal reference values” are obtained through a statistical evaluation of data collected from hundreds of subjects. Thus, such objections are a too simple way to disguise the question. Data are data. In medicine, there is increasing evidence showing that having certain genetic variants increases the susceptibility to certain disease or may affect the likelihood to respond to specific drug treatment. Oncologists already take into account the genetic features of their patients in deciding for the best treatment strategy. In neuroscience, genetic and molecular studies are offering a powerful tool to understand the complex interaction between genetic characteristics and environmental factors in shaping our personality and behavior. This is with no doubt a great step forward. We need to avoid oversimplification as well as mystification. The titles of some news reports I read about this case around the world are simply misleading and untrue. In no way the conclusions reported in our evaluation of the defendant can be interpreted in a way that denies free will in favour of a genetic determinism (“I did not do it, my genes made me do it”, like a couple of newspaper titled). Indeed, our conclusion was based on the whole evaluation of the defendant, who showed a limited cognitive development (IQ= 70), a history of psychotic disorder with delusional ideation, a history of social exclusion, abnormal performance on cognitive testing for impulse control, abnormal pattern of brain activity in response to inhibition tasks and, finally, a genetic background associated with a statistically significant higher risk of impulsivity and aggressive behavior, especially in response to provocation. Considered each and all these pieces of evidence, we concluded that the defendant at a greatly diminished capacity, which is the requisite by law for a judge to cut the sentence.
The Court recognised all these further data as more convincing than a previous court evaluation based solely on the clinical interview and applied the maximum sentence reduction for “diminuished capacity”. This further reduction was worth 8 months.
Oh Great! What’s the next alibi? “The Devil Made Me Do It?”
Great point, DB. It’s another indication of the absurdity of determinism in practical terms.
If the guy is genetically predisposed to kill (lower trigger threshold) shouldn’t they add years to his sentence, since he is more likely to kill again on the outside? I don’t see the rationale to let him out early.