Neurobiology, Free Will and Moral Responsibility

Abstract

"Do we have free will, or are we just puppets, ultimately controlled by our brains? From the story of Oedipus, a mythical Greek king who fulfilled a prophecy predicting that he would kill his father and marry his mother, and thus brought disaster on his city and family, to the 2002 Stephen Spielberg movie “Minority Report”, in which the police sought to arrest individuals before they had committed a crime, this is a theme which has raised many questions throughout history. Neuroscience is a discipline which reveals more about the workings of our brains. Recent technical advances, particularly in being able to produce live images of what is going on inside our head, have given us unprecedented access to our brains. Many things are consequently claimed, some of which appear to support mechanistic explanations (people as puppets, controlled by their brains) against philosophical and theological models of human behaviour in which a person cannot be reduced simply to the material which comprises his or her body. Although the scientists themselves mostly stress that they are still a long way from true mindreading or prediction, people are impressed by brain pictures. This means that brain scans are being used in areas other than the medical purposes for which they were developed."