Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

54 HOW THE MIND WORKSstrual syndrome) Defense, raging hormones exonerated a surgeon whohad assaulted a trooper who stopped her for drunk driving.(4) In 1989 Lyle and Erik Menendez burst into their millionaire parents'bedroom and killed them with a shotgun. After several months ofshowing off their new Porsches and Rolexes, they confessed to the shootings.Their lawyers argued the case to a hung jury by claiming selfdefense,despite the fact that the victims had been lying in bed,unarmed, eating strawberries and ice cream. The Menendez boys, thelawyers said, had been traumatized into believing that their parents weregoing to kill them because they had been physically, sexually, and emotionallyabused by the father for years. (In a new trial in 1996 they wereconvicted of murder and sent to prison for life.)(5) In 1994 Colin Ferguson boarded a train and began to shoot whitepeople at random, killing six. The radical lawyer William Kunstler wasprepared to defend him by invoking the Black Rage Syndrome, in whichan African American can suddenly burst under the accumulated pressureof living in a racist society. (Ferguson rejected the offer and arguedhis own case, unsuccessfully.)(6) In 1992 a death-row inmate asked an appeals court to reducehis sentence for rape and murder because he had committed hiscrimes under the influence of pornography. The Pornography-Made-Me-Do-It Defense is an irony for the schools of feminism that arguethat biological explanations of rape reduce the rapist's responsibilityand that a good tactic to fight violence against women is to blame it onpornography.As science advances and explanations of behavior become less fanciful,the Specter of Creeping Exculpation, as Dennett calls it, will loom larger.Without a clearer moral philosophy, any cause of behavior could fee takento undermine free will and hence moral responsibility. Science is! guaranteedto appear to eat away at the will, regardless of what it finds, becausethe scientific mode of explanation cannot accommodate the mysteriousnotion of uncaused causation that underlies the will. If scientists wantedto show that people had free will, what would they look for? Some randomneural event that the rest of the brain amplifies into a signal triggeringbehavior? But a random event does not fit the concept of free will anymore than a lawful one does, and could not serve as the long-sought locusof moral responsibility. We would not find someone guilty if his fingerpulled the trigger when it was mechanically connected to a roulette wheel;