How Responsible are Killers with
Brain Damage?
Cases of criminal behavior after brain injury raise profound questions about the
neuroscience of free will.
By Micah Johnson on January 20, 2018
arles J. Whitman and his wite Kathleen are shown in these family album photos released by Whitman's father, C
hitman, Jr Creat: Getty Images
Charles Whitman lived a fairly unremarkable life until August 1, 1966, when he
murdered 16 people including his wife and mother. What transformed this 25-year-old
Eagle Scout and Marine into one of modern America’s first and deadliest school
shooters? His autopsy suggests one troubling explanation: Charles Whitman had a
brain tumor pressing on his amygdala, a region of the brain crucial for emotion and
behavioral control.
Can murder really be a symptom of brain disease? And if our brains can be hijacked so
easily, do we really have free will?Neuroscientists are shedding new light on these questions by uncovering how brain
lesions can lead to criminal behavior. A recent study contains the first systematic
review of 17 known cases where criminal behavior was preceded by the onset of a brain
lesion, Is there one brain region consistently involved in cases of criminal behavior?
‘No—the researchers found that the lesions were widely distributed throughout
different brain regions. However, all the lesions were part of the same functional
network, located on different parts of a single circuit that normally allows neurons
throughout the brain to cooperate with each other on specific cognitive tasks. In an era
of increasing excitement about mapping the brain's “connectome,” this finding fits
with our growing understanding of complex brain functions as residing not in discrete
brain regions, but in densely connected networks of neurons spread throughout
different parts of the brain.
archers is
Interestingly, the ‘criminality-associated network’ identified by the res
closely related to networks previously linked with moral decision making. The network
is most closely associated with two specific components of moral psychology: theory of
mind and value-based decision making. Theory of mind refers to the capacity to
understand other people's points of view, beliefs, and emotions. This helps you
appreciate, for instance, how your actions would make another person scared or hurt.
Value-based decision making refers to the ability to judge the value of specific actions
or their consequences. This helps you see not only what the outcomes of your actions
will be, but whether those actions and outcomes are good or bad. The letters written by
Charles Whitman on the eve of his killing spree provide a chilling window into a mind
losing the ability to understand good, bad, and other people: “It was after much
thought that I decided to kill my wife, Kathy...1 love her dearly, and she has been as
fine a wife to me as any man could ever hope to have. I cannot rationally pinpoint any
specific reason for doing this.”
This research raises troubling questions about Charles Whitman and the other subjects
in the study—and for all of us. If their actions were caused by brain damage and a
disrupted neural network, were they acting under their own free will? Should they be
held morally responsible for their actio
ind found guilty in a court of law? Should we
see them as patients or perpetrators—or both?
Some scientists have followed cases like Charles Whitman’s down the slippery slope,
reaching the most extreme conclusion: that by uncovering the biological causes of
behavior, neuroscience shows that “free will, as we ordinarily understand it, is an
umusion’.
But these arguments depend on a faulty conception of free will. Free will should not be
understood as a mysterious ability to cause actions separate from our brain activity. In
fact just the opposite might be true: that free will requires certain connections betweenour brains and our actions. After all, our brains are the biological basis of our identity,
housing our memories, our values, our imagination, our ability to reason—in other
words, all the capacities necessary to make choices that are uniquely our own, and to
carry out actions according to our own will.
This understanding of free will allows us to ask more sophisticated questions about the
connection between the brain and criminal behavior when evaluating cases like
Charles Whitman's. Instead of just pointing to the obvious fact that an action had a
neural cause (every action does!), we can ask whether a person’s specific neurologic
injury impaired the psychological capacities necessary for free will—imagining possible
courses of action, weighing relevant reasons, perceiving the moral features of actions
and outcomes, making decisions that align with our values, and controlling behavior
against competing impulses.
The specific components of moral psychology disrupted by lesions in the criminality-
associated network may indeed interfere with these abilities: value-based decision
making and theory of mind are important for grasping the moral impact of our actions
and understanding how they will be experienced by other people. If a person has
genuine impairments in these capabilities, then they possess only a diminished form of
free will. Future research should evaluate more robustly the degree to which these and
other psychological capacities are truly impaired in patients with lesions in this
network.
When moving from the question of free will to issues of moral responsibility and legal
guilt, itis important to evaluate each case in light of the wide array of factors beyond
neurologic injury that influence behavior. Previous research has demonstrated that
criminal behavior is impacted by genetics, childhood mistreatment, low self-esteem
during adolescence, lack of parental support, social and economic disadvantage, and
racial discrimination. Digging deeper into Charles Whitman's case, we might wonder
whether his extraordinarily strict father, or his fascination with guns
rly as age 2,
contributed to his later violent turn. The lesson is that human behavior is complex and
a brain lesion is neither necessary nor sufficient for criminal behavior: after all, there
are nearly 700,000 people living with brain tumors in the US and approximately
800,000 people have str
kes every year, but the known cases leading to criminal
behavior number in the dozens. Further research would be helpful in determining the
likelihood that patients who suffer brain lesions in the ‘criminality-associated network’
actually go on to commit crimes, with the expectation that this kind of impairment will
emerge as one of many factors increasing the risk of criminal behavior.
The fact that violence can be a symptom of brain disease shows not that free will is an
illusion, but that free will can be injured just like other human abilities. These rarecases of dysfunction allow us to see more clearly that our healthy brains endow us with
remarkable capacities to imagine, reason, and act freely.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
‘Micah Johnson is an MD candidate at Harvard Medical School with interests in ethies ana health policy. He studied
neuroscience and philosophy at Yale University and the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
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