In his prospective suicide note, Whitman wrote about the impulsive violence and the mental turmoil he was experiencing. He had a history of aggressive outbursts and a troubled family life, but in the months leading up to the Austin rampage, Whitman thought things were getting worse. He wrote, ‘After my death I wish that an autopsy would be performed to see if there is any visible physical disorder.’ He also asked that after his debts had been paid off, any money left over should go into research to find out if there was some explanation for his actions. He knew that something was not right. And he was unfortunately correct. Deep inside his brain was a sizeable tumour in the region of his amygdala.
The amygdala is part of the brain circuitry responsible for emotional behaviours: damage to this region can cause excessive swings in rage and anger. Overstimulation of the amygdala will cause both animals and humans to lash out violently. Whitman’s tumour could have been responsible for his impulsive aggression throughout his life. Together with the fact that his family life was troubled, he abused amphetamines and he had been under a lot of stress in the summer of 1966, having a tumour of his amygdala would have impaired his ability to remain calm. But now that we know he had a brain tumour, was Whitman responsible for his actions? Did Whitman murder those innocent people or did his tumour?
There is also the strange case of the forty-year-old man who developed an interest in child pornography.2 He was aware that his paedophilia was wrong because he went to great lengths to conceal his activities, but eventually he was exposed by his stepdaughter and sent to a rehabilitation centre for treatment instead of prison. However, he could not avoid soliciting sexual favours from staff and other patients at the centre and was eventually expelled. The evening before his prison sentence was due to commence, he was taken into hospital complaining of severe headaches, where it was discovered that he had tumour in his prefrontal cortex – the same region related to suppressing and inhibiting drives and sexual urges. You need your prefrontal cortex in order to overcome the impulse to eat the marshmallows as a toddler, but as an adult you also need it to curtail the urge to fight, flee and fornicate.
Was the tumour responsible for the paedophile’s behaviour? In a way, it was. When his tumour was removed, his sexual urges declined and, after seven months, he was allowed to go back to his home where his stepdaughter lived. However, a year later he started collecting pornography again whereupon another brain scan revealed that his tumour had grown back, again requiring surgery to remove. But how can a lump of cancerous cells have sexual urges towards young children? There is something very wrong in the way that we tend to think about the link between brain, behaviour and mind.
My Brain Made Me Do It
Neuroscientist David Eagleman believes that we are entering a new era in which our understanding of how the brain works will force us to confront the difficulty of establishing when others are responsible for their actions.3 This is the emerging field of neuroethics – the brain basis of morality and how we should behave. He makes the point that there are few among us who would attribute blame to Whitman or the paedophile when there is a clear brain abnormality such as a cancerous tumour. As Eagleman points out, the problem is that, as our understanding of how the brain works improves, we will increasingly encounter arguments that those who commit crimes are not responsible for their actions due to some biological abnormality. As we understand more about the microcircuitry of the brain, we are going to discover more about the different imbalances and predispositions that are linked to criminal acts. Where will society eventually draw the line of culpability?
In fact, we have now reached a point at which there does not need to be any evidence of a biological abnormality – you just have to act out of character in such a way as to not be regarded as your usual self. This is what the Canadian jury decided in the case of Ken Parks who, in 1988, drove twenty-three kilometres to his in-laws’ house in Ontario, where he stabbed his wife’s parents, killing the mother-in-law. He then presented himself to the local police station where he said, ‘I think I have killed some people.’
Prior to the attack, Parks was said to have loved his in-laws who described him as a ‘gentle giant’. His defence team argued that as Parks did not remember the attack, he was sleepwalking; they entered a plea of ‘homicide during non-insane automatism as part of a presumed episode of somnambulism’. He had no prior history of such behaviour, but because the attack was so out of character, the jury accepted the defence and acquitted him.4
But what does it mean to be acting out of character? This statement assumes a sovereignty of self that is usurped by external forces. Where do these external forces exert their influence if not within us? Does it make any more sense to say that my background or environment is responsible for my actions than to say that my brain made me do it? I once discussed these issues of culpability over dinner with two adults who differed in their political leanings to the left and to the right. As you probably expected, the conservative was inclined to see fault in the individual whereas the liberal saw society to blame. Clearly these are questions that have no clear-cut answers and may reflect our personal belief systems.
Many legal systems operate on a version of the M’Naghten Rules, a precedent drawn up following the attempted assassination of the British Prime Minister Robert Peel by Daniel M’Naghten in 1843. This is known as the insanity defence and based on the criteria that:
at the time of committing of the act, the party accused was not labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.
The problem is that many of us do things that we do not regard as wrong. We can always find ways of justifying our actions in retrospect to make sense of senseless acts – a point that is important when discussing decision-making. Also, we have all done things when we do not fully take into consideration the consequences of our actions. Are these exceptions, too? If so, how are we to decide what counts as being out of character? Is the one-off act worse than the repeat offender? After all, if someone repeatedly offends, then maybe they are unable to control their actions or do not think what they are doing is wrong. On the other hand, if an act is only done once, does this not mean that the offender should be punished more severely because they should have known better?
These are exactly the sorts of arguments that were raised in 2010 when the world was outraged by an impulsive act of cruelty perpetrated by forty-five-year-old British bank worker, Mary Bale, from Coventry. She was walking home one August evening when she encountered a cute four-year-old cat called Lola on a garden wall. She often stopped to stroke the cat on her visits to see her ill father who she would visit every day in hospital. On this occasion, she once again stopped to pet the tabby cat, but then glanced around twice before opening the lid of a nearby recycling bin, grabbing the cat by the scruff of its neck and then neatly dropping it inside before walking off briskly to her home three streets away.
Unfortunately for Mary, her dastardly deed was captured on the home surveillance system of the cat’s owners who posted the video on their Facebook page. The video went global and soon thousands of people from around the world were calling her ‘worse than Hitler’. When Mary was eventually identified from the video, she was arrested for cruelty but also put under police protection because of all the death threats she had received.
What possessed such a mundane, normal bank worker to commit such a senseless act of cruelty? Bale at first said she ‘suddenly thought it would be funny’ to put the cat in the bin. Later, she claimed her actions were ‘completely out of character’ and that she had no recollection of the event. Surely this was just a one-off lapse in morality. When she was tried in October 2010, the court accepted that she had been under stress. She had to leave her job at the bank. Her father had also just died, but the court was less understanding than those who judged Ken Parks. Bale was found guilty of animal cruelty, ordered to pay a large fine and banned from keeping animals for five years. Maybe that says more about the way the British feel about their pets than their willingness to absolve a momentary moment of madness.