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The neuroscience and philosophy of evil
How is it possible that human beings commit atrocities like the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide? Or torture people like the Spanish Inquisition did, and ISIS and similar groups still do today? That’s a question that has been debated in philosophy at least since the time of Socrates, who had some very insightful things to say about it, as we shall see. Nowadays, the study of evil is shaping up as a multidisciplinary inquiry, where natural science, social science, and philosophy interact constructively.
In this context, I’d like to highlight certain concepts from a fascinating article that appeared recently in the excellent Aeon magazine: “Is neuroscience getting closer to explaining evil behavior?,” by Noga Arikha (full disclosure: I’m more than an occasional contributor to Aeon). Despite the title, very fortunately this isn’t yet another “this is your brain on X” kind of thing.
Arikha covers a lot of territory, and I highly recommend reading her essay in full, but here I wish to focus on an aspect that is both important and yet difficult for many to accept: “evil” is often done by perfectly normal people, who are moreover convinced that they are doing the right thing.
Consider for a moment Heinrich Himmler’s speech in Poznan in 1943. Among other things he said: “We have the moral right, we had the duty to our people to do it, to kill this people who wanted to kill us.” Sure, you may dismiss Himmler himself as a psychopath (though was he, really?). But you can’t dismiss the millions of Germans who acted accordingly, either in direct support of the Nazi regime or by way of complacency. They were not all psychopaths, nor is it tenable that they were all acting under the threat of a gun to their head. (If you are not convinced, read this review of two books exploring ordinary lives under Nazism.)
Arikha discusses research on the neural correlates of “evil” behavior, and highlights how it is pharmacologically inducible: “the amphetamine Captagon — used, inter alia, by ISIS members — affects dopamine function, depletes serotonin in the orbitofrontal cortex, and leads to rigid, psychopathic-like behaviour.”
But the author recognizes that just because we can induce a given behavior artificially, and because we find neural correlates of that behavior, it doesn’t…
