ISSUES EMERGING

Steven Rose began this book with a commentary on the spectacular advances in the neurosciences over recent years, the claims for their implications, and possible aspirations for the future. The chapters that followed have explained and explored many of these aspects in some detail. We now approach this concluding chapter with somewhat different perspectives because, unlike other authors, we have no personal distinction or first-hand knowledge in modern neuroscience or any of the cognate disciplines brought into the discussion such as philosophy, law or social sciences. We come from other areas of science, and from the oversight of medical research linked to issues of public interest and government policy. One of us (DR) has been more concerned with practical applications and industry, and the other (BW) with the parliamentary process and with public sensitivities to ethics and welfare. It is natural for us to look, as it were, down the other end of the telescope to ask questions not so much about neuroscience, philosophy, law, or social sciences in themselves, but about how the new developments might impact on everyday life.

The guided tour of the new brain sciences has certainly made us think again about humanity's understanding of itself and what this means for the norms and dynamics of social behaviour, for example how criminal responsibility should be decided in law; about the scope we already have through the use of drugs and which it seems will soon be greatly expanded by genetic engineering and stem cell technology, to redesign not only ourselves and our children but other people such as those that the politically powerful might think in need of ‘improvement’; and about the moral questions as to whether, if, how, and when, these new abilities may be used.

Consciousness has recently become an immensely fashionable theme within the new-found cultural popularity of the natural sciences. However, what is immediately noticeable about the proliferation over the past decade of books and journals with ‘consciousness’ in their titles or invoked in their texts is that they seem to be drawn to the cultural glamour of the concept, but with little sense that the concept of consciousness has an entirely other history. Consciousness seems to lie around in the culture like a sparkling jewel irresistible to the neurotheorists. There seems to be no recognition amongst the many biologists, artificial intelligencers, physicists and philosophers who have played in print with their new toy that the concept of consciousness is part of other discourses. Above all I want to underline that while for these neurotheorists consciousness is located within the individual human organism – and sometimes just the brain within that – the older tradition, coming from the humanities and social theory, sees it as located in subjectivity and intersubjectivity within a historical context. As David Lodge (2002) has pointed out, novelists may approach consciousness more readily than neuroscientists. The methodological individualism expressed in the objectivist language of the natural sciences erases both ‘me’ and ‘you’; by contrast in social theory both agency and structure are crucial. For social theory there can be no development of individual consciousness without a social context.

In 1953, the same year in which he had operated on the brain of the famous amnesic H. M., the American neurosurgeon W. B. Scoville described the major achievements of contemporary neurosurgery, while at the same time disclosing his aspirations for the future:

One doesn't need to be a neuroanatomist, with a detailed understanding of these brain structures to appreciate the optimistic tone. These were, no doubt, the high days of psychosurgery. They began in the 1930s when the Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz attempted to treat mental illness by severing neural tracts in the frontal cortex. The approach became astonishingly widespread, apparently not without support from the popular press. Moniz was even awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949 for developing it.

When a defendant claims in an English court that his offence was not murder but manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility, the judge has to explain to the jury that:

This provision was introduced into the law of England and Wales by Act of Parliament in 1957. It had by then been part of the judge-made law of Scotland for many years. Both jurisdictions had also for centuries reduced murder to manslaughter in cases of provocation. Provocation too was recognised by Parliament in 1957, but its classic formulation, which judges are still required to use, was given to a jury by Lord Devlin as a trial judge in 1949:

The preceding chapter described how developments in the knowledge and potencies of stem cells are now holding out the promise of transplantation replacement therapies to restore organ functions that have been damaged or diseased, for example in Parkinson's disease, various types of heart disease and diabetes. Since these developments are currently drawing significant attention not only from biologists but also from the media, ethicists, governments, politicians, and indeed the general public, this chapter will explore the ethical issues causing concern. For further explanation of concepts and terminology, the reader is referred back to the previous chapter.

Much of the current ethical and societal debate is about spare embryos ‘left over’ from in vitro fertilisation (IVF) procedures, and the even more revolutionary alternative of embryos created specifically for the purpose by transfer of a cell nucleus from the patient's mature tissue (for example the skin) to a donor egg from which the nucleus has been removed. Cells from the latter would be ‘autologous’ (meaning: from the same organism) with the patient, holding out the promise of eliminating or at least substantially reducing the problem of graft rejection which normally bedevils transplantation surgery. This would have important benefits, for example for the sensitive human brain in the treatment of patients suffering from neurological or neurodegenerative disorders and handicaps, by improving on its natural advantage of suffering less violent immune reactions than other organs.

This chapter considers the contributions that new biological research in the areas of behavioural genetics, brain anatomy and neurochemistry may make to our understanding of and responses to male violence against women as a public health problem. It also tests recent claims that the new biology can seek out and treat the dangerously femicidal and violence-prone.

FEMINISM AND THE PROBLEM OF FEMICIDE

‘Femicide’ is the ‘misogynous killing of women by men’ (Radford and Russell, 1992). The term points at the politics of woman killing at both the individual level and that of governance. It covers the many forms it takes – marital, stranger and serial killings as well as racist and homophobic killings of women. This said, however, most of the research discussed in this chapter homes in on either marital femicide (wife or partner killing, often called uxoricide) or the much rarer ‘lust driven’ serial killing of women by men. The rate of general homicide overall in England and Wales is relatively low – 15 per million of the population, with men showing higher rates of victimisation than women at all ages. On average 70% of homicide victims in England and Wales are males and 30% are females. Women less frequently kill and they are much more likely than are men to be killed by a partner. On average in England and Wales, two women are killed by male partners or ex-partners each week (Criminal Statistics, 2001).

INTRODUCTION: FROM ANXIETY TO DEPRESSION AND BACK

As portrayed in pharmaceutical company advertisements, the typical nervous problems seen in both psychiatry and general practice from the 1960s through to the early 1990s took the form of an anxious woman in her twenties or early middle years. The exhortation was to treat her with benzodiazepines (such as Valium), marketed as tranquillisers. In contrast, during this period, advertisements for antidepressants typically featured much older women. However, in the 1990s young or middle-aged women with nervous problems were portrayed in the advertisements as depressed, with the exhortation to treat these problems with selective serotonin reuptake inhibiting (SSRI) antidepressants such as Prozac. By the end of the 1990s anxiety seemed all but forgotten by the advertisers. But, post 11 September 2001, the ‘typical’ woman is once again likely to be viewed as anxious, with exhortations to treat her with SSRI drugs, which seem now to have become anxiolytics. What is happening here? Are the biological bases of nervous problems really changing so quickly, or is this a matter of marketing of available new drugs, along with changes in nomenclature and fashion? There is arguably more to this than just a matter of changing fashions in the labels we put on nervous problems. In the past decade or so, pharmaceutical companies have developed abilities to change the very language we use to describe our most intimate experiences.

We are discovering more and more about human genotypes and about the connections between genotype and behaviour. Do these advances in genetic information threaten our free will? This chapter offers a philosopher's perspective on the question.

Whether or not genetic discoveries do really threaten free will, many feel threatened, and it is not difficult to see why. If genetic advances enable us to predict with increasing accuracy and reliability what people will do, this seems to undermine the pretensions of individual autonomy and agency. In what sense do I choose for myself what I do, if you can say reliably in advance what that choice will be?

The free will dilemma is a hardy philosophical perennial. After thousands of years of work there is still no generally accepted solution, no clear demonstration that free will really is possible. A philosopher may well wonder how new genetic knowledge could make things any worse, or indeed make things any different.

The sceptical dilemma and diminished responsibility

To see why a philosopher might suspect that genetic information could not possibly make the problem of free will any worse than it already is, we need to consider the classic free will dilemma, an argument with three very plausible premises and a depressing conclusion. First, everything that happens in the world is either determined or not. Second, if everything is determined, there is no free will.