Reference no: EM132203355

Here is a story of Collera, a twenty-eight-year-old man with a life-long history of aggressive behavior, including assault and verbal abuse.

Collera, is driving his large SUV behind a slow-moving vehicle on a narrow road, with no room to pass. He honks and honks, but the driver in front neither speeds up nor pulls off the road to let him pass. Collera starts to curse vehemently and pulls dangerously close to the slower vehicle. Collera’s passenger warns that he is taking a very serious risk. Collera finally announces in a fury that he is going to kill the [expletive deleted] in front of him. He allows his vehicle to drop back, then he floors the gas pedal, crashing into the slower vehicle at great speed. Neither he nor his passenger is hurt, but the driver of the slower vehicle is killed.

A functional brain image, which measures brain activation, conducted after the killing discloses that Collera has a type of neurophysiological activity in his frontal cortex that is association with poor behavioral self-regulation. Collera’s life history includes a history of severe abuse. It is known that such abuse is strongly associated with later antisocial conduct if the person also has a genetic enzyme abnormality that affects particular neurotransmitter levels. Collera indeed has the genetic abnormality and the associated neurotransmitter levels.

Imagine that this story takes place in the future, when we will have much better information about the biologically causal variables, especially neuroscentific and genetic factors, that in part produce all dangerous behavior and not just seemingly extreme cases like Collera’s. The description of Collera’s evaluation results makes no mention of disease or disorder. It simply reports a number of neuroscientific, genetic, and gene-by-environment interaction variables that played an apparently causal role in producing Collera’s behavior and that might have helped us predict it.

Collera's story is taken from "Neuroscience and the Future of Personhood and Responsibility" by Stephen J. Morse inConstitution 3.0: Freedom and Technological Change, Rosen, J. and Wittes B. (Eds.) (2011) (The Brookings Institution: Washington, D.C.).

How Should the Law Respond to science? How should the law respond to people like Collera? Do we treat him, as we do now, as an acting agent who is properly subject to moral assessment and potential liability to just punishment? If so how does the evaluation bear on his responsibility and future dangerousness?

Or is Collera simply a “victim of neuronal circumstances” and that no one is genuinely responsible? Should we abandon the concepts of criminal, crime, responsibility, blame, and punishment and replace them with concepts such as biological mechanisms, and will doing harm be characterized simply as one mechanistic output of the system?