Richard Dawkins writes:
But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not?
If you have thought of Richard Dawkins as an important evolutionary scientist, you should give up that idea right now. For to credit Dawkins with any scientific achievement is to say that Dawkins is responsible for that work. Yet Dawkins himself denies "the very idea of responsibility."
Okay, that's a bit tongue in cheek. I am applying Dawkins' reasoning to Dawkins himself to show that it makes no sense.
It is standard practice for scientists to take a mechanistic stance toward what they are studying in their science. Dawkins is making the mistake of treating that stance as if it were reality. He thereby implicitly denies his own consciousness, the purposefullnes of his own activities, his own humanity. Is it any wonder that some people are confused? See
Evolution and Specialness of Humanity for a discussion of such confusion.
That Dawkins' thesis on responsibility does not work should be clear from the fact that Dawkins does not even seem to follow it himself.
Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?
If Dawkins really believed his own thesis on responsibility, he would believe that the court itself is merely behaving in accordance with antecedent conditions. But here he is holding the courts responsible for their decisions.
I'm sorry, Mr Dawkins, but I must disagree. We are conscious. We are, under normal circumstances, responsible for our conscious actions. And evolution works, and is so creative, because biological systems are not the mechanistic systems that you take them to be.
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