June 2005

The New Neuromorality

Panel 1: The New Neuroscience:
What Can Modernistic Advances Tell Us About Human Behavior?

Hank Greely
Stanford University

The rapid progress in brain scan imaging for structure and function has forced neuroscientists and bioethicists to consider its ethical consequences. The newly named “neuroethics” is popular because of concerns about what sort of information brain scans might reveal. Researchers and ethicists alike are concerned with privacy: the ability to watch the brain’s activity, not just scan its structure, poses questions about when or if society has the right to know what an individual is thinking.
 
Researchers are the in process of linking brain activity patterns to personality characteristics, raising concerns that soon various documents, including school and employment applications, might be supplemented by brain scans. The most serious implications of research into personality currently exist in the justice system. What if we were able to detect brain patterns or defects that would predict the possibility of criminal behavior? Or, if we were able to detect deception and deceit at the neural level, would our justice system continue to exist? If deception could be detected, criminals, judges, witnesses, and the jury would be affected.
 
Aside from the ethical implications, there are also concerns about the validity of brain scans. Before neuro-imaging can be useful at the legal level, it will need significant additional testing to perfect both the technique and the best ways to interpret the information. We do not yet know if the scans are misleading or if people have the capacity to train their thoughts and deceive machines.
 
Finally, there is the fundamental question of whether brain scans actually offer information that is not otherwise available. Is trying to gauge brain activity at the neural level better than the existing, more traditional personality indicators, like psychological personality assessments and other supplemental testing?

It could be that the most damaging effect to personal liberty to arise from the evolving field of advanced neuroscience is the belief that brain scans are highly accurate. Despite the technological advances, we are still far away from a complete and viable understanding of neural imaging. It is necessary to consider the potential ethical complications to stay ahead of the technology, rather than be faced with technology that outthinks our ethics.

Sally Satel
AEI

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), addiction is a chronic and relapsing brain disease. A lot of the support for this comes from neuroimaging.  The impression that images are intended to create is this: “see, it is in the brain…it is not a matter of will; it is a physiological imperative, irresistible,” or as the head of NIDA puts it, “something happens in the brain” after exposure to addictive drugs such as cocaine or heroin.

But I do question what we can infer about the inevitability of behavior from brain imaging. In my view, there is not a lot that is clinically relevant that a scan can tell us that we cannot already infer from observations of the behavior of addicts.

An addicted person is understood to be someone who cannot control his behavior…but actually, it means someone who does not control his behavior and has the perception that he is helpless. (And when you think about drug treatment: what does it essentially do? It teaches the addict that he is not helpless at all. That he makes dozens of micro-decisions everyday that set him up for continued use or not to use--what street to walk down, who to hang out with, etc).
 
Sometimes people stop using drugs when they get to a point where either the absurdity, the degradation, the pressure, or the empty dullness of his life became too much. This is not the cognitive freedom of someone with a brain disease: a schizophrenic cannot decide not to hallucinate, and multiple sclerosis does not decide not to have spasticity. So when we look at this scan, where does technology leave off and philosophy begin? After all, we cannot tell from a PET scan whether a craving impulse is irresistible or whether it was simply not resisted.

But, as I said earlier, the addict is not helpless.  Several lines of evidence support this.
First: people stop using. You would never know this to listen to the brain disease rhetoric. And a lot, if not most, stop on their own.
 
Second, addictive behavior is fundamentally voluntary. I mean this according to a strictly behavioral definition. To say that the addict is capable of voluntary behavior, or choices, means that he can modify his actions in response to the short-term consequences those actions provoke. In other words, he regulates his behavior based on carrots and sticks. Scores of studies demonstrate that even small monetary incentives or token gifts awarded for staying clean substantially increase the numbers of patients who become drug-free. Alcoholics--even after a first drink--can regulate the amount they consume depending on the cost and the effort required to obtain it, even after taking a first drink. And through all this, the brain is activated too.

The promise of reward or the threat of punishment enables to brain to engage in a cognitive calculus and make a decision about use. sure enough if we could image the brain of the alcoholic resisting the next drink we would likely see his brain light up like a Christmas tree, possibly a lot more intensely because recruitment of inhibitory areas. And why not, all brain activity has a neurological correlate.

Philip Tetlock
University of California at Berkeley

In the last thirty years survey research on racial attitudes in the general American population have shown promising advances: white hostility toward African-Americans is on the decline and is showing evidence of reaching record lows. However, many remain pessimistic about deeper, implicit prejudice, and believe that while prejudice might have diminished on the surface, hidden beliefs will continue to have a profound effect on society. To better test those implicit prejudices, social psychologists have developed more advanced techniques for monitoring unconscious racism, including self-report surveys, behavioral monitoring, and the study of memory links between words and negative reactions.

It is this third area that has both avoided a critical evaluation and is the topic I am most interested in. The process of measuring word association with prejudice is problematic in three ways. First, measuring implicit prejudice based on word associations is just as likely to reflect shared cultural prejudice or stereotypes as prejudicial views of a particular person. Therefore, it is difficult to label an individual as prejudiced when he could be reflecting shared stereotypes that he does not necessarily endorse. We do not yet know enough about distinguishing these subtleties to validate the data beyond reproach.
 
Second, monitoring brain activity for negativity will catch cognitions and emotions that are negative but are not necessarily prejudiced. There are a wide range of ideological and emotional perspectives related to race and racial inequality that might appear affectively negative. However this affective negativity does not necessarily imply or reflect racism the way that we understand it.

Third, the patterns that have been identified as marking prejudice also pass diagnostic tests for rational behavior. If these thought patterns, identified as marking prejudice, can also be explained by classic test of rationality, are they an effective tool for measuring racism?

While neuroscientific techniques have allowed for growing insight and understanding in evaluating implicit prejudice and racial assumptions, there is still room for improvement. We need to work to bridge the gape between implicit associations and implicit prejudices. The questions of whether or not we are measuring assumptions that people actually hold, or those that they do not believe but know that other people hold, still looms large.

Additionally, the technology is not yet capable of distinguishing between differing types of affective negativity. Does this negativity imply prejudice or rather varying cognitive difference? Further research on the emotional-cognitive associations that underlie negativity must be done to answer these lingering questions. And lastly, can people still be considered prejudice if they pass classic tests, or benchmarks, of rationality?

The field of implicit prejudice is rife with holes that neuroscience is only now beginning to explore. Until further research becomes available, we cannot take the human element out of the exploration.

Thomas Zeffiro
Georgetown University

Dr. Zeffiro described how fMRI worked and cautioned about over interpretation of brain scan images.

Keynote Address:
The Concept of Responsibility in the Age of Cognitive Neuroscience

Steven Pinker
Harvard University

Determinism in its original sense is that concept presented as the opposite of “free will” when taught in traditional philosophy courses. The traditional belief was that human beings had a “ghost in the machine;” their bodies are inhabited by a soul that chooses our behavior; therefore, they do exercise free will. With the recent advances in neuroscience, the ghost is receding in some schools of thought to be replaced by a biological determinism wherein behavior is caused solely by the brain’s physiological processes.

The basic apprehension evoked by determinism, whether ghostly or biological, is that we are not responsible for our own actions. All of our activities are preordained, and we do not have control. And, with the lack of control comes a lack of personal responsibility. If we do not choose our actions, then how can we be held responsible for them? Despite the deterministic refutation of personal responsibility, it is believed that our soul can render a human being responsible. The replacement of the ghost by the brain challenges this assumption entirely: our brains and their physiology are a “get out of jail free card.”
 
Why do we link free will and responsibility so closely, and why does biology threaten both? It is because we blame those people for an evil act or bad decision only when they intended the consequences and could have chosen otherwise. The biological notion of human nature admits more people to the ranks of the blameless: there must be something that separates a criminal from law-abiding members of society. Biology may show that we are all blameless. Is a future without personal responsibility the pot of gold at the end of the scientific inquiry? Will we soon be blaming Darwin for our actions?

This is not to suggest that with a soul we would hope that it has the freedom to do anything: if behavior were chosen by an utterly free will, then there would be no way to hold people responsible for their actions. A soul or person with that sort of ghost behind their machine would not be deterred by the threat of punishment or a twinge of guilt that would inhibit future devious behavior. A totally free agent would remain unaffected by any codes of behavior or legal ramifications that existed to maintain the civic order.
 
The current problem is a confusion of explanation and exculpation. If behavior is not entirely random, then it will have some form of explanation. Therefore if we are to hold people responsible for their behavior it will be in support of any casual explanation, genetic or otherwise. Thus, how can we have both explanation, with lawful causation, and responsibility, with the requirement of free choice? We have to be clear about what we want the notion of responsibility to achieve. For us, responsibility has a very practical function: deterring harmful behavior. A main reason to hold someone responsible is to deter the person from committing similar acts in the future. In a human society, the policy can also deter similar acts by others in the future.
 
We have learned, through trial and error, that the same deterrence will not be effective for all people, due to differing mental states. Therefore we seek to deter those who can be deterred; these people who are held responsible and therefore justly punished and punishable. We exempt children, animals, and those with significant mental defects, because they lack a functioning, adult brain that will respond to public contingencies of punishment. Therefore, despite the growing science that can help us understand and explain criminal behavior, this same science should not be used to excuse all people from responsibility.
 
Unless you believe that acts are governed by the ghost in the machine, all acts are a product of cognitive functions in the brain. This marriage of personal responsibility and an increased knowledge of neural functioning can coexist, as long as the science is not used to eliminate the notion of personal responsibility. I have attempted to dispel two fallacies that have increased fear around the science of human nature.

Panel II: Legal and Moral Implications of the New Neuroscience

Martha Farah
University of Pennsylvania

Recent advances in neuroscience have started to raise ethical questions about both imaging technology and its practical implications, and more importantly, complex questions about how we think about ourselves as human beings. Neuroscience gets right to the heart of our essence: the connection of the self to the brain is essential for survival yet interpreted in many different ways. This brings us to the question of science and the soul, that fundamental human inquiry that differentiates people from things.

Many people believe that the body and the mind are fundamentally different. However, with the continuing development of neuroscience, more of human thought, feeling, and action are being explained using the purely physical process of brain function. When dealing with things like motor control and reflexes, the human concept of the soul is not really threatened; however, the recent forays into the mechanisms of personality open an entirely new door. If we can predict an individual’s personality by scanning his brain, what does that say about human beings? Is there anything about a person that is not dictated by his physical composition?
 
The idea that there is something else--call it a soul, or a ghost in the machine, or a presence--which makes each human being unique beyond their physicality, is something that we as a species seem reluctant to relinquish. Neuroscience can seem threatening as it continues to make inroads that might explain away the soul. When those two dramatically different views collide, there will be broad social consequences that extend beyond national and generational boundaries. Until the day when science “edges out the spirit,” both sides are left to explore. 

Joshua Greene
Princeton University

While the law frames the question of responsibility in terms of a suspect’s diminished capacity, most people want to know if the person on trial really did it. Was it really him or was it his circumstances, his upbringing, his genes, or even his brain that made him do it?

According to the dualist approach to human cognition, the mind and the brain are separate yet interacting entities. A mind distinct from the body is a source of free will that opposes the materialistic conception: the view that all events, including every human operation, are simply interactions of matter that obey the laws of physics. In the materialistic view, there is no room for free will. So, what happens to that little man in the brain, the one who takes responsibility for bad actions and allows us to distinguish ourselves from a criminal, in the materialistic model? If there is no mind, what keeps some members of society within the law and enables others to trespass its boundaries?

So far as the law is concerned, responsibility lies in the capacity for rational behavior. If it can be proven that a person’s mental functioning was not compromised at the time of the crime, he can be found guilty: those forces that might contribute to his desire to commit the crime are irrelevant. However, this is not a comfortable position for the moral onlooker. Should a child who was raised to be mean be responsible for later acts that he commits despite the fact that his crimes, from his birth, could be rendered unavoidable? The law says yes and many people say no--the question of moral responsibility lies somewhere between the two.

It seems that the law misses something intuitively essential in its exclusive concern with rationality. What people really want to know is was the accused person responsible for the crime, or was it something else: brain, genes, or environment? That question lies in the debate of internal versus external determination. Our general belief is that genes and environment determine all of our actions, and the choices that we exercise render us responsible.
 
And now, what about neuroscience? I believe that with greater knowledge of the brain’s inner workings and its scientific parts, we will be able to have a better understanding of where the little brain ends and the physiological brain begins. While there is much still to be done, the promises of neuroscience’s contribution to this question will be a greater understanding of the mechanical nature of human action.

Stephen Morse
University of Pennsylvania Law School

John Hinckley’s trial in 1982 marked the introduction of brain abnormality as court evidence to buttress claims of insanity. A CAT scan that showed wider than normal grooves in the upper part of Hinckley’s brain was presented as further evidence of Hinckley’s psychological abnormalities. Now similar, albeit more technologically advanced, scans are being used by those who oppose the juvenile death penalty: the argument being parallel to that of the Hinckley case, that juveniles have less developed cognitive structure, thus their brain physiology directly affects their capacity for rationality. As more sophisticated neuroscience continues to develop, its legal implications remain unclear. At the current moment in time, no direct connection exists between neuroscience and legal policy.

The legal world defines a person as a being capable of acting intentionally and with reasons. While physical science and study of the brain can help explain the mechanics of action, only human action can be explained by reason: thus the law views humans as intentional agents. Humans are unique in this capacity, and asking why a human acted as he did is asking for reasons, and oftentimes rationality--not a simple, mechanical explanation.
 
This rationality is the cornerstone of responsibility. Only those humans capable of rationality can be governed by law, and thus the law assumes that adults are capable of minimal rationality and responsibility, and it is applied in the same way to all. Therefore, the lack of capacity for rationality exists as the cornerstone for excuse. A person is not considered to be criminally responsible if he does not understand either the nature of his conduct or the nature of the law. The most pressing question that remains, and one neuroscience seeks to explore, is how to assess responsibility of a person who seems to be acting in response to an inner compulsion, seemingly beyond his control? Is it enough to label somebody with a “syndrome,” and does that seemingly altered brain physiology then excuse responsibility? No. And therein lies the fundamental psycholegal problem: syndromes do not excuse responsibility unless they can prove that there was sufficiently diminished rationality in the particular context.
 
While neuroscience might assist in evaluating responsibility, it could never tell us the amount of rationality required for responsibility. Neuroscience cannot replace behavioral investigation and our own commonsense when assessing responsibility. For neuroscience to fundamentally alter our current legal and moral systems and social structure is a tall order indeed. It will require extensive data evaluation, including accuracy and relevance, and a further investigation into the value and power of existing morals in the justice system. For now, neuroscience poses no threat to our justice system, founded on the innately human judgments of rationality and responsibility.

AEI research assistant Nell Manning prepared this summary.