Is Being Evil also a Medical Illness?

By Tom Kando

I have always been a humanistic psychologist. For years, I have argued that the medicalization of human behavior is, in my view, an error - an error of which psychology is increasingly guilty. Because of the great success of the natural sciences and their unrivaled prestige, the behavioral disciplines - sociology, psychology - feel compelled to emulate them. This is called "Positivism," and it requires physical reductionism. Human beings no longer decide to mis-behave; they are just ill. When I came across one more instance of this in the media, I wrote the following rebuttal:

Here we go again. The neuro-psychological reductionists are at it again. According to an article in the Sacramento Bee (March 22), "part of our moral behavior is grounded in a specific part of our brains... It is hard-wired." Dr. Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California, recently researched this. He concluded that moral behavior is controlled by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is a small region in the forehead. His findings are based on submitting a number of moral questions to 6 subjects whose ventromedial prefrontal cortex was damaged, to 12 people without brain damage, and to 12 patients with other forms of brain damage. The subjects with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex were found to be more willing to sacrifice one person for the greater good of many, than the comparison groups. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is said to house " feelings of empathy, shame, compassion and guilt."

I will not quibble about the study’s ridiculously small sample - 6 experimental subjects. What bothers me much more is the ever stronger belief of psychologists that human decisions and behavior are rooted in specific locations in our nervous system. The psychologists’ holy grail is a map of the human brain which will indicate the precise physical locations of all our emotions. This is as futile and idiotic as the pseudo-science of alchemy was, during the Dark Ages. Why?

Because our responses to stimuli (our decisions) are the result of our perceptions and our interpretations of the stimuli, and these interpretations are socially arrived at. Of course we already know that some areas of the brain play a major role in cognition, and that other areas experience certain chemical states under certain stimuli, states to which we then apply such socio-cultural labels as "fear," "anger," "love," "happiness," "pride," etc. In and of themselves, without the labels, these are only chemical states. It is obvious that many forms of brain damage reduce cognitive ability, i.e. the ability to understand, i.e. intelligence. Equally obvious is the fact that various forms of brain damage alter the chemical reaction triggered by stimuli.

However, words such as "fear," "shame," "guilt, "empathy," and "compassion" are cultural concepts, similar to "love" and "pride." They are not physiological states or processes. These neuro-scientists are committing the error of reification. They endow words with physical reality. They should hear themselves talk! They are looking to find - under a microscope perhaps - "shame" or "pride" in a patient’s brain. Please tell me, doctor: What are the size and color of the patient’s "shame," which you have just located. Is it one centimeter in size? Is it green? The Japanese are known to experience more shame than Americans do. Is this because their brains are different? In wars and disasters, the decision is sometimes made to sacrifice one or a few for the greater good of many. This is sometimes called leadership or heroism. These people presumably suffer from a damaged ventromedial prefrontal cortex?

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