The Anatomy of Violence: Dissecting the Biological Roots of Crime

The rapid developments taking place in neuroscience research on crime are creating an uncomfortable tension between our concepts of responsibility and retribution on the one hand, and understanding and mercy on the other. This talk provides a brief overview of this new body of knowledge and its implications for our future conceptualization of moral responsibility, free will, and punishment from a neuroscience perspective. If the neural circuitry underlying morality is compromised in psychopaths, how moral is it of us to punish them as much as we do? Should we use neurobiology to better predict who amongst us are predisposed to future violence? And how can we improve the brain to treat psychopathic criminal offending?

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