"Free will is an illusion," Harris says. "None of us choose our brains. And we are not the authors of our thoughts or actions."Of course we do not choose our brains, but if there is no such thing as free will, then there is no such thing as personal responsibility!
Is our biology our destiny? No, says Anthony Raine, a University of Pennsylvania criminology professor, who has written a book entitled "The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime." The Post writers quote Raine as advocating for things like better nutrition and meditation for violent offenders. Oh yeah, give them a banana and an apple and some quiet time. That'll cure evil!
Is evil something that is within all of us? The authors interviewed University of Virginia religious studies professor Charles Mathewes, who researches and lectures on evil and sin.
Do we choose evil, or does it choose us?
"If we start identifying people as evil, we better not do that in a way that leaves any of us out of it," Mathewes says. "Evil is not an alien force that comes from Mars. It's alarmingly intimate to us. Most evil is mundane, even banal. It's selfishness, lying and letting evil happen all around us. None of us recognizes our own savagery."
Simpson and Draper conclude their article by quoting Stephen Diamond, a forensic psychologist who writes a blog called "Evil Deeds" for Psychology Today.
"With Freud and the advent of psychoanalysis, everything became reduced to psychology for awhile," Diamond says. "And so this pendulum swing is a corrective, if you will, a counteraction to that, a recognition of the biological reality of behavior and mental illness.
"But the truth of the matter is somewhere in between."
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