Biology is Destiny?

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I think you have unwittingly shown that we all adhere to a certain core of common moral principles.

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Not so much with the unwittingly, already.
Of course we all adhere to a set of common moral principles. It's only when the brain is damaged or religions get involved that we vary. You'd be hard pressed to find any society on the planet at any point in history that thought rape, murder, theft, lying etc was a good thing to be encouraged amongst its own tribe.

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blatantly clear that it's not difficult at all to find differences in the moral acceptability of the "big rules" you listed across multiple cultures.

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You're fluffing the general point.You won't find any societies that practice those behaviours as general principles, as 'good' things that all should do on a day to day basis. We all know it's wrong to steal your neighbour's sheep, rape his wife, murder the husband and lie to the police about it later.No society could survive it it tolerated those behaviours.

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I think the variation is greater than you think. We all vary in height, weight, et cetera, but also in brain structure and thus in mental makeup. You don't have to be brain damaged or religious to differ in morality from the next person.

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I'm happy to agree as I said pretty much exactly the same thing in message 13.But we do all have those gross moral fixtures are fittings. They can vary by culture and by individual but we know that they exist. The point I'm trying to make is that if the brain and how it's wired is responsible for how an indivual feels about right and wrong and if it does vary as significantly as say, height and weight varies, then we are not equally culpable for our actions.

{edit} etc etc including the other handwaving and smoke blowing that followsI guess you didn't read the case history that is included in the paper that I posted. This is what we know.http://www.ahealthymind.org/...y/right%20OFC%20pedophile.pdfYou will see that he denies any interest in children before his tumour, but you will also see that he admits to an interest in pornography going back to adolescence. You will see that when he was 16 he suffered a head injury with 2 minutes of unconsciousness followed by 2 years of migraines. You will see his documented extreme behaviour change leading up to his tumour, the MRI scans showing the (enormous) size and position (orbitofrontal cortex) of the tumour and you will see how Fred's behaviour changed after its removal.You'll also want to take particular note of this:

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Functional MRI indicate that orbitofrontal, dorsolateral prefrontal and subcortical limbic structures are involved in behavioral deregulation and response inhibition, including the conscious regulation of sexual urges.

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It simply doesn't get any clearer than that. So yes, I, like the authors of the paper, are SURE that the tumour caused Fred's extreme behaviours.Now, perhaps if you wish to say that it didn't, you'll explain why.Edited by Tangle, : just fixing chuck's problem so he can't complain anymore about something he has no need to complain about anyway ;-)

I have fixed your quote so that it is clear that I added the fact that you were blowing smoke an handwaving - although it's a little puzzling to me why you think it might be read otherwise.So, after blowing away the smoke, I take it that this is your core point? If so, you'll find it answered in the paper. However, as you obviously haven't read the paper, here's what it says about it: In other words, he knew it was wrong (which is why he turned himself in) but he couldn't prevent his behaviour. I have sited papers, summarised them (in my own words) and debated in my own words. I note that "here" - i.e. the Science Forum - we like to include evidence as well as opinion.So do you still feel that Fred could have stopped himself and how could he have done so? If he couldn't have stopped himself, how is he culpable?

Reading around this subject a little is quite an eye opener. Current thinking is that morality appears to be a competition between different modules of our brain - parts that deal with emotion and parts that deal with logic. It's the logic or utilitarian part that was damaged (prefrontal cortex) in Fred and it's a fairly recent evolutionary development.The Slate has a reasonable take on a Nature paper; Brain damage, evolution, and the future of morality.This appears to be exactly the opposite of the position you'd expect to find if you were a believer; surely you'd think that the emotional (i.e. moral) response would come latest in the development of mankind - the thing that makes him human. But it actually the rational that seems to have made us different. And it's the rational that makes us do immoral things when our control over it is lost. It becomes rational to do hideous things - which seems to be what Fred was struggling with.

Well that's essentially the Turin test which I suppose is abbreviated to 'if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's probably a duck.Whether or not it's necessary to be aware of our own selves in order to do what we do, is an interesting a mind game (because we can do mind games) but is it a useful question? If we hadn't pre-invented the explanation of a soul to explain all sorts of things without evidence, would it concern us as a question? I suspect not.

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No, I believe the Turin test is reserved for things 'shrouded' in mystery.

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Pfnrrr, so much for the future of conscious machines - that was an intervention by the iPad auto error correction mind.

It's admitted that he did know that at least some of the things he did was wrong - he turned himself in partly because he feared that he would rape his landlady. But he also exhibitted extreme behaviour that he clearly didn't care enough about but must have known somewhere was wrong eg he propositioned nurses whilst pissing himself or caring that there were others around him. (It's unlikely to be a winning tactic with women, so something else is broken too.)This is going to be a bit more complex than knowing right from wrong - he may well have known that society thinks some things are wrong but didn't feel it wrong himself. With the rape issue, he wanted to rape her but knew it was wrong. I don't know about you but I know that rape is wrong and have a gut revulsion of it so I couldn't do it even if I wanted to. (So much for free will.)

More handwaving, perhaps you could answer my question?"So do you still feel that Fred could have stopped himself and how could he have done so? If he couldn't have stopped himself, how is he culpable?"

As the title of the thread suggests, biology perhaps? Perhaps this, as also suggested in the opening post? You need to address the fact that the tumour disrupted Fred's ability to choose between what he previously knew as right and wrong. Some wrong impulses he simply acted on, some he managed to fight off long enough to be operated on - who knows, perhaps if he hadn't been cured he would have raped too.Fred may have known that rape is just plain wrong at a gut level (what I'd call a real moral inhibition), or he may have known that society would punish him severely if he did it (no moral inhibition at all - simply self preservation). From the case study it looks like at least some of the latter to me - he actively wanted to rape, he felt driven to do it.If the brain tumour provided the irresistible impulse to do something, where has free will and moral choice gone?

Ok, good - you're beginning to get the point. Now try reading this again. I've shortened it to a single sentence for the hard of reading."Nothing puts the brakes on their behavior. They are always in trouble," he said. "If their brain wants something, they take it."I know you want this to be really black and white - knowing what's right and what's wrong is really simple isn't it? Here's another one of those inconvenient quotes from the original post."Studies suggest that when damage is done to the frontal lobe before 18 months, people never learn right from wrong," Swerdlow said.So brain damage before 18 months disables free will, how can that be if you think we all have the ability to know right from wrong as - I'm guessing - a god given thing?Two sentences now, try to concentrate."When damage is done after that time, people can learn right from wrong but they can't control their impulses. There is no longer regard for long-term consequences, only short-term gratification."IF we accept your simple proposition that Fred's knowledge of right and wrong hadn't changed at all but his decisions to act on it had, where has his free will gone? He didn't choose to get the tumour, he didn't choose to have his brain state change so that he couldn't control his impulses and he didn't choose to have pedophilia.In order to be culpable you have to fully know what's right and wrong and have the real ability to choose. If you steal from a shop because someone has a gun to your head, you're making a choice, but not an immoral one.

This must be groundhog day. You can't be convicted of a criminal offence if you're found to be incapable of free moral choice. That's the law and judges apply it.Here it is again: Fred would not have been convicted had he raped someone - but he would have had his liberty removed until such time as society deemed him safe. In other words he would be a patient not a criminal.

For those interested, there's quite a readable review paper on the neurobiology of moral behaviour here:http://psych.umb.edu/...kaldy/courses/psy641/pdfs/Mendez.pdfIt seems that the idea of morality as a sixth sense is growing with the identification of a neuromoral network within the brain:

I think not, as you say yourself, mental derangement can make a defendent incapable of possessing mens re(a) - which is exactly my point. If a disease can be shown to have removed a person's ability to act in a moral way, he can not be culpable in law.In the UK at least, Fred would have been fairly quickly judged incapable of even making a plea, let alone having to make a defense of diminished responsibility or higher, one glance at the size of the tumour in his head and medical report would be enough to have him sectioned and treated.