“The hope is that when it comes to dealing with humans whose behaviors are among our worst and most damaging, words like 'evil' and 'soul' will be as irrelevant as when considering a car with faulty brakes, that they will be as rarely spoken in a courtroom as in an auto repair shop. And crucially, the analogy holds in a key way, extending to instances of dangerous people without anything obviously wrong with their frontal cortex, genes, and so on. When a car is being dysfunctional and dangerous and we take it to a mechanic, this is not a dualistic situation where (a) if the mechanic discovers some broken widget causing the problem, we have a mechanistic explanation, but (b) if the mechanic can’t find anything wrong, we’re dealing with an evil car; sure, the mechanic can speculate on the source of the problem—maybe it’s the blueprint from which the car was built, maybe it was the building process, maybe the environment contains some unknown pollutant that somehow impairs function, maybe someday we’ll have sufficiently powerful techniques in the auto shop to spot some key molecule in the engine that is out of whack—but in the meantime we’ll consider this car to be evil. Car free will also equals 'internal forces we do not understand yet.” EvilCriminal JusticeCriminality Author:Robert Sapolsky