Liberalism and neurology - Free to choose?

Modern neuroscience is eroding the idea of free will 

The Economist, Dec 19th 2006

IN THE late 1990s a previously blameless American began collecting
child pornography and propositioning children. On the day before he
was due to be sentenced to prison for his crimes, he had his brain
scanned. He had a tumour. When it had been removed, his paedophilic
tendencies went away. When it started growing back, they returned.
When the re-growth was removed, they vanished again. Who then was the
child abuser? 

His case dramatically illustrates the challenge that modern
neuroscience is beginning to pose to the idea of free will. The
instinct of the reasonable observer is that organic changes of this
sort somehow absolve the sufferer of the responsibility that would
accrue to a child abuser whose paedophilia was congenital. But why? 

The chances are that the latter tendency is just as traceable to
brain mechanics as the former; it is merely that no one has yet
looked. Scientists have looked at anger and violence, though, and
discovered genetic variations, expressed as concentrations of a
particular messenger molecule in the brain, that are both congenital
and predisposing to a violent temper. Where is free will in this case?

Free will is one of the trickiest concepts in philosophy, but also
one of the most important. Without it, the idea of responsibility
for one's actions flies out of the window, along with much of the
glue that holds a free society (and even an unfree one) together. If
businessmen were no longer responsible for their contracts,
criminals no longer responsible for their crimes and parents no
longer responsible for their children, even though contract, crime
and conception were "freely" entered into, then social relations
would be very different. 

We, the willing

For millennia the question of free will was the province of
philosophers and theologians, but it actually turns on how the brain
works. Only in the past decade and a half, however, has it been
possible to watch the living human brain in action in a way that
begins to show in detail what happens while it is happening (see
survey). This ability is doing more than merely adding to science's
knowledge of the brain's mechanism. It is also emphasising to a
wider public that the brain really is a just mechanism, rather than
a magician's box that is somehow outside the normal laws of cause
and effect.

Science is not yet threatening free will's existence: for the moment
there seems little prospect of anybody being able to answer
definitively the question of whether it really exists or not. But
science will shrink the space in which free will can operate by
slowly exposing the mechanism of decision making.

At that point, the old French proverb "to understand all is to
forgive all" will start to have a new resonance, though forgiveness
may not always be the consequence. Indeed, that may already be
happening. At the moment, the criminal law -- in the West, at
least -- is based on the idea that the criminal exercised a choice: no
choice, no criminal. The British government, though, is seeking to
change the law in order to lock up people with personality disorders
that are thought to make them likely to commit crimes, before any
crime is committed. 

The coming battle 

Such disorders are serious pathologies. But the National DNA
Database being built up by the British government (which includes
material from many innocent people), would already allow the
identification of those with milder predispositions to anger and
violence.