Good or Evil?

Regular readers will be aware that I watch a lot of tv - no rubbish you understand and most of it as a selfless act conducted as research for this blog. So it was in this vein that I recently watched a repeat from last September of an episode of Horizon, the long-running and distinguished BBC 2 science programme.

Entitled 'Are You Good or Evil?', it discussed the disturbing advances in science that were making it possible to identify a gene that basically dictated whether we were likely to be either 'good or bad'. Now this whole idea ought to be very worrying indeed to all right-minded people and probation officers in particular. It's pure Orwellian in my view.

All probation officers of my vintage will have covered in training that old chestnut neatly summed-up as 'nature or nurture?' as a way of helping to understand why people do certain things, and especially what might be politely-termed, very nasty things. In essence the argument boiled down to whether a person committed a crime because of their character and personality - they were basically 'a wrong 'un' - or whether it was because of their background and upbringing? For some reason a myth has persisted in some quarters that PO's are just about 'making excuses' for people and their behaviour in order to 'get them off' when their day in court arrives.

Of course this has always been a grossly simplistic distortion of what we're about. It ought to be self-evident that a person's reasons for doing anything are many and varied. Much more the case in terms of offending behaviour. We are not all able to exercise free will all the time and without reference to our surroundings or influences. A PO's job is to dig around and explain those factors and reasons, not to excuse them. Throughout my career I've found it useful to remain firmly on the fence and hedge my bets in terms of the argument.

So it was enormously re-assuring to discover that the scientific conclusion at the end of the programme was that, although it might be possible to identify a 'psychopathic' gene, it was environmental factors that largely decided if a person was going to cause murder or mayhem in later life. Phew! 

Not only is it sometimes great to have your personal beliefs re-inforced, a lot of world leaders, politicians and business tycoons can breathe easy knowing that their psychopathic personality type alone need not necessarily give the rest of us excellent reason to lock them up. Of course on the other hand such research does possibly lead the way for better diagnosis and assessment of people who have committed very serious and disturbing offences. I can't see it helping in either the detection or conviction of psychopathic offenders though.