Abstract: 

Popular television shows, novels, and science writing about forensics and the law often rely on a widely-held intuition: that when behaviors are discovered to be caused by genetic dispositions, people consider them less blameworthy. And in real-life contexts like the courtroom, genetic information is increasingly brought to bear in order to mitigate punishments for antisocial or violent crimes. Yet, psychologists have not been able to produce this intuition in the laboratory setting as robustly as one might expect – indeed, there is very little empirical work showing any such effect at all, with most studies showing genetic information to have no significant effect on moral judgments. In this talk I present some empirical data suggesting why this might be the case. Results from recent studies show that people seem unwilling or unable to accept genetic explanations for antisocial behavior, while comparable explanations for prosocial behavior are accepted without equivalent resistance. In other words, before experimental subjects even get to the step of integrating genetic information about bad actions as part of their assessments of moral responsibility, they have already discounted its worth. My first aim is to consider what might cause this asymmetry, and what it might indicate about how common moral intuitions affect the way genetic information is received by non-specialists. My second aim is to consider some philosophical (and some practical) repercussions of these findings.