A brand new Substack blog, Ringside at the Reckoning (very much worth your time), calls attention to a paper by a progressive law professor who unapologetically espouses the idea that moral responsibility doesn’t exist, from which he concludes that although “society must obviously protect itself from dangerous people”, it ought not to punish them for their misdeeds. I quote the abstract, which, as the saying goes, must be seen to be disbelieved:
Modern criminal justice presupposes that persons are not morally equal. On the contrary, those who do wrong are viewed by the law as less worthy of respect, concern and decent treatment: Offenders, it is said, “deserve” to suffer for their misdeeds. Yet, there is scant logical or empirical basis for the law’s supposition that offenders are morally inferior. The usual reasoning is that persons who intentionally or knowingly do wrong are the authors and initiators of their acts and, as such, are morally responsible for them. But this reasoning rests on the assumption that a person’s mental states, such as intentions, can cause physical effects (bodily movements) – a factual assumption that is at odds with the evidence of neuroscience and whose only empirical support rests on a fallacious logical inference (post hoc ergo propter hoc). There is, in fact, no evidence that mental states like intentions have anything to do with causing the bodily movements that constitute behavior. Nonetheless, the mental-cause basis for moral responsibility, though it rests on a false factual inference, has enormous implications for criminal justice policy.
While society must obviously protect itself from dangerous people, it does not have to torment them. The imperative to punish, a dominant theme of criminal justice policy, is not supported by evidence or logic, and it violates basic moral equality.
So what does cause our actions? Some force, evidently, external to ourselves of which we are unaware. If that is so, someone who inflicts punishment is no more responsible for his actions than is the criminal being punished. Therefore, it is absurd to chastise him for violating “basic moral equality”.
The author is, in fact, aware of this objection and addresses it briefly at the end of his paper. He offers two arguments: first, that acts can be moral or immoral even if the actors have no responsibility for them; second, that humans “are conscious beings that have rich phenomenological lives” and therefore are different from puppets.
Neither of those points impresses me as pertinent.
No one attaches moral significance to events, such as hurricanes, volcanic eruptions and meteor strikes, that have no morally responsible agent as their cause. If a thunderstorm isn’t blameworthy, because no conscious agent caused it (unless you believe in Zeus or Thor), and if crime and punishment are likewise without conscious cause, what sense does it make to assign moral categories to them?
The second argument is simply beside the point. If a man’s mental states don’t cause his acts, what difference, from a moral point of view, does the quality of those mental states make? Suppose that a human being with a rich phenomenological life, one immersed in complex thoughts and feelings, murders a child or executes a murderer. Suppose that a lion kills and devours a gazelle. If the human’s thoughts and feelings did not cause his acts, can he or they be judged differently from the lion and what it did?
Moreover, we have no evidence of the nature of mental states other than our own. How do you know that you are not the only conscious, self-aware being in the universe? The others may be robots with no inner feelings at all. In any case, their putative mental states, rich or impoverished, do not, on the author’s view, cause anything and can give no moral color to any act.
While I won’t claim that the author doesn’t believe his own argument – men believe all manner of bizarre notions – I am very confident that he doesn’t live his life as if it were true. No one could. If we do not believe that we are the makers of our own deeds, we have no reason to care what we do, for all of our acts are merely things that happen to us, over which we have no control. It is impossible even to imagine believing that; indeed, the belief would be indistinguishable from madness.
I'm reminded of a rather silly book I read as a teenager, The Dice Man, which made me laugh and almost impressed me at the time.
I'm sure you're aware of it, being the story of a man who lives his life by rolling a dice to make his decisions for him.
I recall from it only two things. First an excerpt on the back cover that read (I think): If I roll a six I'm going rape Arlene, which I'm sure would not pass muster nowadays as a back cover incentive. The second was the ending which I think found him clinging to a cliff via a plant, having got there by running from the cops, and thinking to himself, Ah! Another choice
Posted by: Tom Hunter | Tuesday, May 24, 2022 at 03:31 AM