The recent hubbub over magnets influencing moral judgement is bothering me. We live in a society that puts a lot of stock in the idea of the soul, of each human being as an independent entity.

This isn't actually true, of course. Law and society recognizes that you can be compelled to do things against your will, that the circumstances of childhood can shape a person, that it's possible for human beings to not be whole- the retarded and the insane. Even the idea of the soul is now more of a linguistic construct, a verbal tic that has been drained of meaning.

Those exceptions aside, we still think of people as independent, and in control. "Free will" is the proper term. The march of science is slowly dropping a wrench into the works though: as we understand more about the brain, we get closer to being able to model it accurately. When that happens, everything breaks down.

The murder trial is my favorite example. A murder conviction requires malicious intent- otherwise it's manslaughter. Malicious intent is wrong because it is a thing entirely under the control of the soul who generated it, and so we punish it more severely. In some brave new world where we could turn a crank and model a human brain, you could prove that the malicious intent was not entirely under the control of the killer, that given those set of circumstances, any soul in that place would have broken the law and taken a life.

Now what? Does murder lose all meaning, because the murderer lacks responsibility? Maybe on a long enough timeline, this could all get sorted out, but as a pessimist who believes in broken and incomplete models, all I can think of is a twenty first (or twenty second) century mental eugenics, the malicious leading the credulous.