Behavioral Genetics and Attributions of Moral Responsibility.

Behav Genet

Center for Research on Ethical, Legal and Social Implications of Psychiatric, Neurologic and Behavioral Genetics, Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University Medical Center, New York, NY, USA.

Published: March 2019

While considerable research has examined how genetic explanations for behavior impact assessments of moral responsibility, results across studies have been inconsistent. Some studies suggest that genetic accounts diminish ascriptions of responsibility, but others show no effect. Nonetheless, conclusions from behavior genetics are increasingly mobilized on behalf of defendants in court, suggesting a widespread intuition that this sort of information is relevant to assessments of blameworthiness. In this paper, we consider two sorts of reasons why this kind of intuition, if it exists, is not consistently revealed in empirical studies. On the one hand, people may have complex and internally conflicting intuitions about the relationship between behavior genetics and moral responsibility. On the other hand, it may be that people are motivated to think about the role of genetics in behavior differently depending on the moral valence of the actions in question.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6525787PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10519-018-9916-0DOI Listing

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