In the days after the murderous rampage in Colorado, it seems like we have a pretty good idea of what evil looks like: it looks like a failed neuroscience student named James Holmes, who now stands accused of killing 12 and shooting another 58 in a midnight premiere of the newest Batman movie.
Mass shootings are a particular problem in the U.S., but not unique to us. In 1996, Thomas Hamilton killed 16 primary school children and a teacher in Dunblane, Scotland. A year ago, Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 in Norway.
I write about such tragedies and the nature of evil in The Myth of Choice: Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits. For example:
In 1966, the nation was stunned by the news of a sniper in the clock tower at the University of Texas at Austin. The sniper, who turned out to be a twenty-five-year-old former Marine by the name of Charles Whitman, killed fourteen people and wounded thirty-two before he was killed by police. It was later discovered that Whitman had killed both his mother and his wife the night before. [At the time,] It was the deadliest campus shooting in the United States...
Whitman left behind a letter, asking that an autopsy be performed on his body, hoping it would explain his increasing headaches and “unusual and irrational thoughts.” He wondered why he could not stop himself from doing what he was preparing to do, writing, “I don’t really understand myself these days.” He asked that his life insurance proceeds, if still valid, go to medical research “to prevent further tragedies of this type.” When the autopsy was performed, doctors found that a tumour in his brain was putting pressure on his amygdala, one of the structures that regulate emotions.
Should this revelation affect how we think about Whitman’s guilt? He certainly understood what he was doing, knew it was wrong, and nevertheless planned his rampage with care and sophistication. Sounds like the embodiment of evil. But perhaps his brain was sufficiently diseased that he had no emotional connection to what he was doing, no empathy for his victims or concern for his own future. The part of the brain that would have stopped a healthy person from committing such atrocities may not have been in working condition. Without the tumour, there might have been no violence. So was he evil? Or was he, like the others who died that day, a victim of the tumor?
This is where the law’s traditional response does not map well with brain science. Traditionally, defendants can be found not guilty because of insanity only when they cannot distinguish between right and wrong. Whitman knew what he was doing was wrong, yet he was still compelled to do it. “You can have a horrendously damaged brain where someone knows the difference between right and wrong but nonetheless can’t control their behaviour,” says Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford. “At that point, you’re dealing with a broken machine, and concepts like punishment and evil and sin become utterly irrelevant.” Calling the brain a machine may seem cold and overly scientific. But here it makes sense, since Whitman’s defect was not that he was doing a bad job of thinking, but that he was doing a bad job of feeling.
It’s important to distinguish between noticing that Whitman may have been impaired and deciding what to do with that information. Even if the science says Whitman had no control over his actions, how we determine moral responsibility or punishment is a different question, even though we often conflate them. As Sapolsky puts it, “Does that mean the person should be dumped back on the street? Absolutely not. You have a car with the brakes not working, and it shouldn’t be allowed to be near anyone it can hurt.”
I find it hard to be sympathetic toward Whitman, even if a neuroscientist could ascertain that portions of his brain were on the fritz. But one thing is clear: good choices depend not only on the rational, deliberative part of the brain but on the emotional part as well. Culturally we are more understanding when the brain defect is in the deliberative part rather than the emotional part, but there is little doubt that what goes on biologically in our brains affects how we make decisions. We may be unsure what juries and judges should do about it, but the fact is inescapable.