The Punisher’s Brain 

by Morris B Hoffman 

(Cambridge University Press, £21.99) 

“THE big issues of guilt, innocence, responsibility, blameworthiness, apology, atonement and forgiveness impact the dirty little daily processes the law uses to make very practical decisions about how to punish,” writes Morris B Hoffman.

In addressing those issues the author of this book — a long-standing US judge — brings a combination of historical and neuro-scientific research, along with supporting examples of law in action from his own career to this intriguing and entertaining study of the “evolution of judge and jury.”

Hoffmann maintains that the human condition is essentially informed by a moral schizophrenia whereby our actions are based on opposing urges to “cheat” —  to survive as an individual — and to co-operate within the social group for the sake of mutual survival. 

This conflict, at the centre of all literature, has been increasingly rejected for generations by political philosophers like Hobbes and market economists like Adam Smith who argue that humans are relentlessly selfish creatures.

According to the author this view has been compounded by a misunderstanding of Darwin. 

Revolutionary developments in neuro-scientific understandings of the plasticity of the brain, which evolution has structured to accommodate innate selfishness to social existence, have shown this profoundly pessimistic ideology to be simplistic. 

At the same time greater understanding of the driving forces, both rational and emotional, that fuel our attitudes to crime and punishment have presented modern societies with complex problems in how, when and why we punish wrong-doers.

Hoffman points out that with the development of language human beings diverged from other primates, who share so much of our genetic heritage, by being able to lie and so to make and break promises, challenging the bonding of the social group. 

This necessitates an ever-increasing need, as these groups enlarged, to produce codes of rules and ways of dealing with rule-breakers.

Hoffman uses research evidence from socio-psychological games to demonstrate the subtlety with which mankind throughout varying cultures makes decisions that weigh selfishness against an awareness of its cost-benefits within society. 

And he demonstrates how we now know more exactly which parts of our brains control these intricate balancing acts.

The neurological findings throw fascinating light on those sides of human nature that seem to offset selfish responses such as conscience, guilt, empathy and forgiveness. 

“Morality itself is an evolved trait,” as Hoffman remarks.

All this focuses on how society has coped in the past with “the social problem” of the Jekyll and Hyde, the cheat and the social being, within our natures and questions what can be done now to manage it in a world demanding more co-operation than ever before if we are to survive.