The tyranny of the Organism. Criminal liability between anthropology, morality and neuroscience

This text focuses on the theme of criminal responsibility in Italian legal science at the end of the 19th century, when the development of new sciences such as comparative medicine, anthropology and sociology, favoured by the rise of positivism and Darwinism, radically changed the concept of criminal liability. In the following pages, I discuss the denial of free will in favour of the determinist theses expressed first by Cesare Lombroso and his criminal anthropol- ogy, and then by a series of jurists who prefer to hold that crime is generated by social factors, and that this being the case, the moral order of a society must be taken into account, which is the only way to maintain the notion of guilt in the penal system. In the end, a final mention is made of the impact of neuroscience, which once again seems to compress the freedom of the human will.