Doctors theorised that the tumour had restricted blood supply to the area of the brain associated with impulse control. 
Last year the tumour came back, and so did the paedophiliac urges. He has had a second operation and, for the time being, appears to be his old decent self.
Most cultures in the world believe that virtue and vice involve an individual’s ability to distinguish right from wrong, and to freely choose one or the other – unless they are insane or acting under unbearable duress or intoxication. The laws of most societies assume moral decisions are made in the conscious, rational mind. But an influential number of brain researchers disagree. They point to cases like that of Mr C to argue that it is not people, or minds, that commit bad acts, but their brains.
As Roy Fuller, one of the men who invented Prozac, notoriously declared, “Behind every crooked thought there lies a crooked molecule.” We would say, “The man raped a child,” but the brain scientist would say something like: “A decrease in the subject’s serotonergic neurotransmission, due to a decrease in his level of serotonin, led to behaviour disinhibition.”
Believing that brains cause responsible acts, good and bad, focuses sharp attention on a rapidly expanding discipline called neuro-ethics: the brain science of morality. Are the scientists about to offer explanations – solutions, even – for crime, brutality and violence? Or are they talking dangerous nonsense?
“What the late 20th century was for molecular genetics,” says Professor Martha Farah, a leading researcher in neuro-ethics at the University of Pennsylvania, “the early 21st century is proving to be for neuroscience.” Rapid advances in non-invasive brain-imaging are enabling scientists to study moral and emotional processes, including paedophiliac behaviour, in individual brains.
We already have the drugs to enhance mood (lithium and Prozac), concentration (Ritalin) and memory (Aricept). Will we one day have a drug to regulate moral behaviour? “It brings closer the untoward potential consequences of biologically engineered morality,” says Dr Laurence Tancredi, a psychiatrist who practises law in New York.
He predicts a “new society” in which “moral” aberrations will be predicted, and corrected by drugs. “Neuro-ethics,” says Professor Nikolas Rose of the London School of Economics (LSE), “is raising important questions about how we configure the boundaries of the normal and the pathological, the treatable and the acceptable… the kind of humans we want to be.”
Crude connections between the brain and our behaviour have long been familiar. Take the railroad worker Phineas P Gage, a decent chap who in 1848 suffered a prefrontal-lobe injury when an iron rod shot through his skull while he was dynamiting a tunnel in Vermont. He survived but became a foul-mouthed lout. Then there was the 1979 “Twinkie defence” trial, in which Dan White, who had shot dead the mayor and the city supervisor of San Francisco, George Moscone and Harvey Milk, was found guilty of manslaughter rather than murder because, as the public saw it, the jury accepted that White had simply eaten too many cupcakes that day, the sugar in his brain turning him into a killer.
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