Ben Roberts

9/24/02

Psych 115W

The Genetic Loophole

I harbor no great love for lawyers. There’s just something about them that says to me, “I shirk responsibility for a living, and make lots of money!” Indeed, it is quite unnerving to watch a good lawyer work. Bad traffic tickets turn into broken taillights; felonies turn into misdemeanors; misdemeanors melt away into vague community service sentences. But is the new revolution in Law just around the corner? My greatest fear is the day the lawyers discover their weapon of the 21^st century: the genetic loophole.

The day of “I’m sorry officer; I was speeding because I was genetically predisposed,” draws nigh. With advancements in biotech and neuroscience accelerating every day, it is enough to make the metaphysicians worry a bit about their job security. Well, maybe we’re not going to find the Ultimate Meaning of Life in an electroencephalograph’s readout quite yet. But we may very well discover that there are legitimate biological processes influencing our emotions, our thought processes, and hence our very actions. Shall we say a prayer for accountability? Well, don’t write any eulogies yet – that day is not yet upon us.

The evidence for heredity making up a large portion of the human consciousness is certainly rather strong. Andrew Sullivan makes a rather convincing argument for the importance of testosterone in the male psyche and physiology in his essay The He Hormone. He tells of its amazing effects on depression, an emotion we would not usually associate with this hormone. “Depression,” he tells us, “once a regular feature of my life, is now a distant memory. I feel better able to recover from life’s curveballs, more persistent, more alive. (Hormone, p 155)” He tells the reader that testosterone, a hormone usually associated with squeaky-voiced teenage males, is the reason for much greater occurrence of depression in females than males. He goes on in the article to discuss the characteristics of lust, as they apply to testosterone. More than ever before, he realizes that “lust is a chemical. (Hormone, p. 156)” Testosterone has such a profound effect over this man that it changes his social behavior entirely. Certainly all this is good argument for the power of biology in the human consciousness.

We must remind ourselves in our eagerness to be able to explain the deepest reaches of the human soul that certain things will never be explained by genetics. As amazing as it is, genetics is simply a blueprint, a scheme for things to come. The human brain is an amazingly adaptable device. As Mr. Pinker points out in his book The Language Instinct, this is explained by the brain having a plethora of different systems, each capable of dealing with different circumstances. (LI, p. 212-3) Science has told us this much. What it cannot tell us is what that brain will become. Will he/she be a doctor? An architect? A philosopher? And science cannot tell us these things because it cannot predict how the child will be nurtured, raised, and educated.

Here we have run again into the monolith that is “Nature vs. Nurture.” This always seemed a silly concept to me, though. Can anyone honestly say that it is completely one or the other? Of course not. A hypothetical human that grows up in a room devoid of contact with an outside culture would never amount to anything more than something that knew that food was good. And likewise, expose your pet goldfish to everything that a human child sees and hears, and you will still have a creature that knows little more than how much it likes it when you drop those food flake thingies into its microcosm. It is quite obviously a mixture of both Nature and Nurture that makes a human the thinking, judging, philosophizing creature that he/she is. So shall we argue percentages, then? And does being able to say that the human being is 34.4% nurture really help us?

At the same time, there is a large segment of society that would have us believe the Standard Social Science Model, or SSSM (as discussed in The Language Instinct). It asserts that humans are 100% a result of their upbringing; criminals are obviously the result of poor upbringing, and model citizens the result of good upbringing. This model is unfortunately a PC way of getting around the thorny idea that certain people are going to be smarter, stronger, and all around more skilled than other people as a direct result of their genetic inheritance. As Tom Wolfe discusses in his essay Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died, nobody wants a test that will be able to tell you your IQ using nothing more than electrodes placed on the scalp. “Nobody wanted to believe that human brainpower is… that hardwired. (Soul, p. 5)” It is a difficult issue to wrestle with; will we eventually be able to hire employees based on their inherent intelligence potential? Should we even allow this if we have the ability?

I don’t pretend to be the Moral Guru with all the answers to these questions. What I do know is that whatever we say or do, science is an unstoppable force that will continue revolutionizing the way we live. Morally, we will always be playing catch-up with the breakneck pace of science. Perhaps all men are not created equal. The virtue of the statement lives on: we are all human beings, born with certain inalienable rights, and no scientific discovery will ever take that away from us. Perhaps Antonio R. Damasio puts it best when he says, “After considering how consciousness may be produced within the three pounds of flesh we call brain, we may revere life and respect human beings more, rather than less. (FWH, p. 28)”

If we can accept that the human being is governed by both upbringing and genetics, then we must again look at our moral dilemma of earlier. Can we hold people accountable for their actions, in spite of their genetic predispositions? In answer, allow me to make a horribly ludicrous analogy. A human learns as a computer is programmed. My point lies in the reason that statement is so erroneous. A computer is programmed to react to a finite set of stimuli with a finite set of responses. When a human being learns, he/she is bestowed with the gift of choice, and can therefore respond in an infinite number of ways. Humans can assign such values as good or bad or anything in between to what they learn, and as such “pick and choose the most appropriate [options of action] and reject the bad ones. (FWH, p. 24)”

Where this choice comes from is something for metaphysicians to debate, but the existence of such a choice implies something far greater: free will. And herein lies the fallacy of the “I’m sorry officer; I was speeding because I was genetically predisposed,” argument. Humans are not automata; we have the ability to discern good from bad, right from wrong, justice from injustice, and all the other dichotomies in your “Metaphysics for Dummies (©)”handbook. So even if you’re a hot-blooded 16 year-old driving your dad’s new Porsche, you know that it’s wrong to floor it and try to break the sound barrier. And officer Bob will hold you accountable when you do simply because you made a choice.

So apologies go out to the lawyers, but as long as free will exists, no action can ever be justified with genetics alone. Every human has a great deal of ethical and moral guidelines that he/she uses to make every choice in his/her life. As much as testosterone can (and will) make you want to do something stupid, we must remember that it is ultimately your choice as to whether or not you do it.