The Bad Brain

Biology Of Moral Thinking
  • Laurence R. Tancredi
Chapter
Part of the International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine book series (LIME, volume 21)

Abstract

The notion that humans possess “free will” is basic to our understanding of moral decision-making, and essentially underlies the foundations of responsibility they are perceived within the criminal law. The requirement that an individual have the capacity for free will to be held legally and morally responsible for his actions goes back to early Greek and Roman law (Jones, 1956). By the 17th Century this incapacity was framed in various ways to exonerate wrong-doers who had compromised free will. In Anglo-Saxon law “incapacity” was equated to “insanity” which ranged in its definition for the law at specific points in history from “total” and “partial” insanity (Hale, 1736), to the capacity to differentiate “good” from “evil” [the “good-evil” test] (Rex v. Arnold, 1724) to the M’Naghten Rule in 1843 (M’Naghten Case, 1843) which initiated more substantial tests for “insanity” that addressed cognitive and eventually emotional capacity (ALI Model Penal Code, 1955) for decisions. These latter tests gave explicit recognition of the potential role of mental illness to affect an individual’s ability to make moral choices. By the same token, the presence of these tests alone implicitly acknowledged the existence and primacy of “free will” in human decision making.

Keywords

Prefrontal Cortex Frontal Lobe Conditioned Fear Violent Behavior Orbitofrontal Cortex 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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