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One man shoots another, he's caught.

Normally we might think that the punishment should depend on how much the killer was to blame.

And blame rests on the notion that the man had free will.

He had a choice.

He could have chosen not to shoot.

But according to neuroscientist David Eagleman, the more we understand how the brain works, the more we realize how choices are actually made, the more the notion of free will is undermined.

This has radical consequences for how we should think about punishment.

David Eagleman, welcome to Philosophy Bytes. for how we should think about punishment.

David Eagleman, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Hello, great to be here.

The topic we're going to focus on is morality and the brain.

In one sense, it's obvious that there's a connection between the two because most of us believe that the brain has a fundamental role in our behavior.

But neuroscientists today are making discoveries it seems to me which are changing our fundamental

understanding of how we make decisions about the things that matter.

That's right. I mean I think when we look at morality we have lots of intuitions about what we might mean but

Mother Nature has been running experiments for thousands of years where people get brain damage

either because of traumatic brain injury or degenerative disorders things like that and we can see

that morality is something much more fragile than we ever imagine and after brain

damage people can have completely different kinds of behavior.

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