There are some areas of inquiry where the link between behavior and the brain is better sorted out (think motor cortex, for example). It’s not all smoke and mirrors. But you are right that the non-DSM-IV diagnosis of psychopathy is too nuanced a question for neuroscience or the law to solve (for now). I thought your insights into why PETA might be appealing to “science” for political purposes were quite useful. Thanks for your post!

Full disclosure:
1) I love dogs, and subscribe to the Will Rogers quote “If there are no dogs in heaven, then I want to go where they are when I die.”
2) I’m neither a lawyer nor a neuroscientist, nor have I ever played either on TV.
3) What I know about fMRI scans and the law I’ve learned from Teneille, and I buy her take that the science connecting fMRIs to human behavior, though rapidly advancing, is not fully developed or understood.

That said, one thought that comes to mind as I read this is that, in a sense, PETA may be looking to use the brain scan as a means to circumvent the more difficult societal/moral question here. Here’s what I mean.

Suppose that the scan were to comeback and say Michael Vick is a psychopath, that he is incapable of remorse, and that he will likely be a recidivist. For good measure, maybe we could even determine that only a psychopath could have done what he did.

If that happened, and if Roger Goodell wanted to be true to his word and ban Vick from the NFL because of the remorse issue, then PETA would have a very powerful public example of how cruelty to animals can comeback to bite you in the ass (pun somewhat intended).

The convenient thing for PETA would be that we would have turned a moral issue, a judgment call on what we are willing to condone and what we are not, into a black and white issue to be solved by science. And to be fair, the research may get us there eventually. It just hasn’t yet.

So instead we are left to make a social/moral judgment. For someone who thinks that your average dog is a better person than your average person, this issue is completely black and white. And as Teneille noted above, the public can always “vote with their dollars” via a boycott of any NFL franchise that saw fit to bring Michael Vick back. If such a boycott were effective, the clear message would be “Dog fighting is unacceptable. Full stop.”

The issue for PETA is that asking people to put their money where their mouths are with regard to animal abuse and then waiting for such a boycott to emerge is a very high stakes gamble. My guess is that the folks at PETA are praying that this brain scan might render that question moot?

-Ben