Iain McGilchrist
Inner Space
Alien Landscapes? Interpreting Disordered Minds
By Jonathan Glover
Harvard University Press/Belknap Press 433pp £25 order from our bookshop
Does the fact that a violent psychopath’s brain is likely to show deficits in the right ventromedial frontal cortex ‘explain’ his behaviour or is this just a description of a bad person’s brain? If it does explain it, in a causative sense, does it excuse the individual from moral responsibility? If so, can it also excuse his crimes at law? Assuming the condition could be treated, should it be? And if it were possible to screen for it, should such a person not be born?
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