The Myth of Choice_ Personal Responsibility in a World of Limits - Kent Greenfield [24]
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 behavior,” 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.”17 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.
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Raelyn Balfour and Charles Whitman are only extreme examples of the broader point that good decisions depend on deliberation, reflex, and emotions all working together. Few of us have caused the death of our own child or used a sniper’s rifle to pick off victims. But we’ve all made bad decisions. And the more we learn about the brain, and about why and how we make those decisions, the more we see how decisions can be manipulated. The people who seem to understand this best are those who want to sell us something.
Take the “bikini effect.” You might not expect that giving a man a bra or panties to caress would make him want to drink beer. But you’d be wrong, according to studies that showed this very effect. Apparently the brain has a common appetite system, which—at least in the case of straight men—can be stimulated by the sight of beautiful, scantily clad women or the touch of their underthings. It can also be stimulated by the smell of baked goods or anything else that tips off the brain that it is time for pleasure. Once stimulated, the brain seeks to satisfy the craving, and the source of satisfaction need not correlate with the stimulation. What matters is that when the pleasure centers are put on high alert, the brain tries to answer the alarm. It seeks a way to satisfy the craving now. As the lead researcher in one study said, after seeing beautiful women “men valued the future less and the present more.”18 Long-term thinking be damned.
This is why the Miller Lite Girls, the Coors Light Twins, or the St. Pauli Girl work as marketing gimmicks. Men see attractive women and crave pleasure. In the absence of something better, they get their drink on. That’s also why casinos dress their hostesses in