Hardwired Behavior: What Neuroscience Reveals about Morality

In many areas of modern life rapid developments in science are overwhelming established norms. Brain biology, through DNA testing and advanced brain imaging techniques, has given medical scientists new insights into the functioning of the human mind. This erosion of long-standing beliefs has many implications for understanding and treating what society considers to be aberrant or immoral behavior. What medical science is indicating is that the focus of our emphasis on mental processes--particularly free will and intentionality--is shifting to recognition of the important role the physical brain plays on human thought and behavior. In Hardwired Behavior the author argues that social morality begins in the brain, for without the brain there would be no concept of morality. Individual responsibility, therefore, must be reconsidered in the light of biological brain processes. The question of whether new scientific findings destroy the relevance of free will, placing it in the context of biological forces that may operate outside the conscious control of the actor, is one of intense debate. Hardwired Behavior takes this question and moves it into the open by clearly detailing neuroscience discoveries and explaining how the ancient precepts of "morality" that have guided mankind throughout its history must now be seen through the new lens of brain biology.

Laurence R. Tancredi, a psychiatrist-lawyer, is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine and the author or coauthor of numerous articles and several books on topics in law, ethics and psychiatry, including Dangerous Diagnostics: The Social Power of Biological Information (1994) and When Law and Medicine Meet: A Cultural View (2004). Tancredi has a private practice in New York City and works as a forensic psychiatric consultant. He has consulted in dozens of legal cases involving a wide variety of psychiatric issues, from the effects of toxic environmental substances on brain function to criminal cases involving assault, rape and homicide.