The New Republic has published a rewritten version of my piece from yesterday on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his lack of free will. The TNR piece is called “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s Crimes Were Terrible, But Morality Has Nothing to Do With It“.
For sure I’ll get it in the neck for this one, for they used “morality” in the title rather than “free will” or some variant of “agency.” (I don’t get to pick the title.) But if the readers don’t like it, they can take a number, get in line, and . . .
Those of you who read it yesterday, especially those who disagreed with me, might go over there and see what the commenters are saying.
Excellent. People need to hear this often.
As I look, the comments over there are zero.
There are some now. Someone who thinks Jerry is a moron thinks Jerry’s reasoning means he should think that Tsarnaev should be killed because the murderer genes he has developed could get dispersed into the gene pool, creating more murderers. He also wants to know why we should trust a scientist because another scientist will have a different opinion. SMH.
Very bad scene over there. I think that’s why Ben’s comments below and also correct. I think it is something teachers are often heard saying. You must have something to work with or you are just spinning your wheels.
Are we as people in this culture and society not as bound by those constraints and therefore not subject moral evaluation for our actions? Do we have the freedom to chose?
For what it’s worth, I think you’ve made the right choice by continuing to freelance occasionally for TNR rather than moving house to BeliefNet. Seems to me you’ve got the best of both worlds.
b&
I gather you were looking at some of the comments over there. A bit of an ugly scene I would say. Even someone by the name Artemis — must be Greek by g*d.
If I read you right, any act can be disowned simply by saying the equivalent of “Not my fault, the devil made me do it.” As I see it, a far better argument against the death penalty for Tsarnaev is that to spend the rest of your life starting at his age in a maximum security prison is a far more horrible punishment than a relatively merciful (or even agonizing) death.
No, you don’t understand me right. If an act were disownable, the person wouldn’t go to jail. I didn’t say that, did I? I said that people can’t freely choose (in a libertarian way) to perform ANY act. Did you read what I wrote?
“In some sense all criminals are cognitively impaired, for, like the rest of us, their actions were determined completely by their genes and environment; at no time, were the tape of life rewound, could they have behaved differently.”
In regards to your sentence above that I quote, I wonder about something. It has been said that evidence given by witnesses in trials is undependable because, unwittingly, over time, the witness changes details. I’ve read of studies in which witnesses were interviewed over a period of time, such as every five years, and the evidential details did not remain the same.
Even between the time of witnessing whatever and the trial, witnesses unintentionally change stories. I understand that humans modify their self histories over time, perhaps without being aware that they’ve done so. If/when some elements of the story are not accessed, they may no longer be available for recall as they may have been erased if related brain neurocircuits aren’t used enough to keep them active.
So, if the stories we tell ourselves and others
changes over time, why would this not affect our memories and rationales for our actions?
Genes and environment do determine who we are and how we behave. I don’t know that genes always remain the same(continued mutations, epigenetics, broken telomeres, etc.), but environment changes as long as we live and new information from the environment constantly influences in our thinking. Why else do we try to educate ourselves and attempt to reeducate prisoners in the hopes of being able to return them, safely, to society?
After discussing your Tsarnaev article with my husband yesterday, who agrees with the evidence for determinism, I must upgrade my knowledge by reading more current scientific literature on the human brain.
Fun Fact:
Whenever you remember something for a second, third, fourth time etc., you’re not actually remembering the original event, you’re remembering the previous time you remembered it.
Yes, I think if the person did not commit a crime at this time and another 5 or 10 years go by. At this time, due to environmental changes he would not necessarily do the same. On the other hand, there will be no change in the genes in one life.
To me, the most interesting thing about this Free Will issue – illustrated in the comments to Jerry’s article – is how people cannot understand even what Jerry is saying. A lot of the commenters seem to focus on the idea that because of determinism, therefore we should all give up. I don’t think the idea has penetrated that determinism doesn’t mean that external forces cannot affect another person’s behavior (assuming I understand the theory correctly) it is possible to teach people or influence them, and then they take that new information into account when “deciding” how to act, and it can affect them. Determinism does not exclude influencing people to do good instead of bad, it just means that once a person is on the cusp of doing something (to avoid the use of “decided to do something”) the die is cast and he really doesn’t have latitude to change his actions. I think the next time someone takes a crack at publicly making this argument, a deeper or more convincing explanation of this aspect would be useful.
What I’m seeing, in some of the replies on that site, is the reaction I would expect to a position (Jerry’s argument) that seems incoherent.
Notice the immediate reaction to the article seems to be “Well, if you are saying we shouldn’t punish this defendant because he couldn’t have done otherwise, and this derives from the wider fact none of us can do otherwise…then why are you writing AS IF WE DO OTHERWISE? Why ask us to do otherwise, when you’ve started by declaring no one can do otherwise.????
It doesn’t make sense to some portion of the readers, it seems self-defeating. And I believe they are right.
The reply is usually “But you’ve read me wrong, I am NOT saying you can’t change your behavior, my argument can change your behavior! Which is why I’m providing the argument.”
But this doesn’t really solve the problem.
Let’s say “Ted” declares: “We’ll NEVER get through this metal wall digging with just these toothpicks. But that doesn’t mean we ought to give up!”
Susan, hearing Ted say that replies “Well, given what you’ve said, we may as well stop using toothpicks to dig through this wall.”
But Ted replies: No, you didn’t you hear what I just said? I said we SHOULDN’T give up on the toothpick strategy.
Well, that reply doesn’t solve the problem; it highlights the problem. That Ted is saying BOTH THINGS doesn’t mean he has made them logically fit together. And Susan is rightly picking up on the fact that Ted’s initial premise seems to justify one conclusion while Ted is declaring another. Susan isn’t necessarily wrong about this.
This is what keeps happening, I believe, when Jerry (and other incompatibilists) first pull the rug out of our belief in “being able to do otherwise”
and banish it to the world of illusion or fiction,. And THEN start prescribing WE DO OTHERWISE in the next paragraph. People immediately pick this problem up. To reply “but it’s not my position we should stop arguing for change” doesn’t really solve the incoherence. It just re-states the same problem: two positions that don’t seem to fit together comfortably.
If we DON’T really have a choice, then it doesn’t make sense you prescribing that we do otherwise. To do so violates the normal understanding of ‘choice.” You have to make the very act of arguing/prescribing a different course of action coherent given
the stance “we can not do otherwise.” And that coherence never seems forthcoming.
But then if you want to say “Well, actually you DO have a choice…and I want you to choose leniency over the death penalty” then why do you talk as if your audience has a choice,…but for some reason the defendant is excepted on the basis of “not having had a real choice”? That doesn’t make sense either.
So I believe that the case that Jerry is making, while certainly containing some truths, isn’t hanging together as a whole. The dotted lines between the things he has espoused in that article aren’t filled in, and it’s noticeable to commentators.
And this brings us back to one of the core issues debated between incompatibilists and compatibilists here. The debates generally begin (or began) with incompatibilsts declaring that free will of any kind was just flat out incoherent, even compatibilism.
But once the discussions get going, often the incompatibilist side (including Jerry) will end up conceding “Ok, so maybe YOU are using the term “free will” in a coherent way, within the context of determinism. But THAT’s NOT the free will people actually believe in. If you retain the term Free Will you will just perpetuate confusion in people, who will continue to associate it with spooky dualism.”
Compatibilists reply that it actually does capture much of the free will most people care about, and that we should disabuse people of just the spooky part about which they are mistaken. The incompatibilist stance seems to end up essentially “No. The rest of the world won’t understand it and will remain confused if you keep the term.”
Which, ironically, seems to be a “little people” argument 😉
But even more to the point, compatibilists have been pointing out that given two directions: promulgating a concept of free will devoid of dualism, or declaring free will doesn’t exist, it’s no slam dunk that the latter is more workable than the former. Once you declare “Free Will Is An Illusion” you have a TON of stuff to clear up and make sense of for your audience, some real ground-up building of everyday concepts. So you better have it all figured out.
And I think you can see just this arising in reaction to Jerry’s articles.
Gave it a click!