No More Learning

The vast majority of both kinds of parents never commit abuse, so putting stepparents under a cloud of suspicion would be unfair to millions of innocent people. As the legal scholar Owen Jones points out, the evolutionary analysis of stepparenting -- or of anything else -- has no automatic policy implications. Rather, it delineates a tradeoff and forces us to choose an optimum along it. In this case, the tradeoff is between minimizing child abuse while stigmatizing stepparents, on one hand, and being maximally fair to stepparents while tolerating an increase in child abuse, on the other. 15 If we did not know that people are predisposed to lose patience with stepchildren faster than with biological children, we would implicitly choose one end of this tradeoff -- ignoring step- parenting as a risk factor altogether, and tolerating the extra cases of child abuse -- without even realizing it.
An understanding of human nature with all its weaknesses can enrich not just our policies but our personal lives. Families with stepchildren tend to be less happy and more fragile than families with biological children, largely because of tensions over how much time, patience, and money the stepparents should expend. Many stepparents, nonetheless, are kind and generous to a spouse's children, in part out of love for the spouse. Still, there is a difference between the instinctive love that parents automatically lavish on their own children and the deliberate kindness and generosity that wise stepparents extend to their stepchildren. Understanding this difference, Daly and Wilson suggest, could enhance a marriage. 16 Though a marriage based on strict tit-for-tat reciprocity is generally miserable, a good marriage finds each spouse appreciating the sacrifices that the other has made over the long haul. Acknowledging a partner's conscious benevolence toward one's children may ultimately breed less resentment and misunderstanding than demanding such benevolence as a matter of course and begrudging any ambivalence the partner may feel. It is one of many ways in which a realism about the imperfect emotions we actually have may bring more happiness than an illusion about the ideal emotions we wish we had. ~
So if we are put in this world to rise above nature, how do we do it? Where in the causal chain of evolved genes building a neural computer do we find a {166} chink into which we can fit the seemingly unmechanical event of
? ? ? ? ? ? ? "choosing values"? By allowing for choice, are we just inviting a ghost back into the machine?
The question is itself a symptom of the Blank Slate. If one starts off thinking the slate is blank, then when someone proposes an innate desire one will mentally plunk it onto the barren surface in one's imagination and conclude that it must be an ineluctable urge, because there is nothing else on the slate to counteract it. Selfish thoughts translate into selfish behavior, aggressive urges beget natural-born killers, a taste for multiple sexual partners means that men just can't help fooling around. For example, when the primatologist Michael Ghiglieri appeared on the National Public Radio program Science Friday to talk about his book on violence, the interviewer asked, "You explain rape and murder and war and all the bad things that men do as something -- if I would just boil it down -- something they can't help because of its -- it's locked up in their evolutionary genes there? "17
If, however, the mind is a system with many parts, then an innate desire is just one component among others. Some faculties may endow us with greed or lust or malice, but others may endow us with sympathy, foresight, selfrespect, a desire for respect from others, and an ability to learn from our own experiences and those of our neighbors. These are physical circuits residing in the prefrontal cortex and other parts of the brain, not occult powers of a poltergeist, and they have a genetic basis and an evolutionary history no less than the primal urges. It is only the Blank Slate and the Ghost in the Machine that make people think that drives are "biological" but that thinking and decision making are something else.
The faculties underlying empathy, foresight, and self-respect are information-processing systems that accept input and commandeer other parts of the brain and body. They are combinatorial systems, like the mental grammar underlying language, capable of cranking out an unlimited number of ideas and courses of action. Personal and social change can come about when people exchange information that affects those mechanisms -- even if we are nothing but meat puppets, glorified clockwork, or lumbering robots created by selfish genes.
Not only is acknowledging human nature compatible with social and moral progress, but it can help explain the obvious progress that has taken place over millennia. Customs that were common throughout history and prehistory -- slavery, punishment by mutilation, execution by torture, genocide for convenience, endless blood feuds, the summary killing of strangers, rape as the spoils of war, infanticide as a form of birth control, and the legal ownership of women -- have vanished from large parts of the world.
The philosopher Peter Singer has shown how continuous moral progress can emerge from a fixed moral sense. 18 Suppose we are endowed with a {167} conscience that treats other persons as targets of sympathy and inhibits us from harming or exploiting them. Suppose, too, that we have a mechanism for assessing whether a living thing gets
to be classified as a person. (After all, we don't want to classify plants as persons and starve before we would eat them. ) Singer explains moral improvement in the title of his book: The Expanding Circle. People have steadily expanded the mental dotted line that embraces the entities considered worthy of moral consideration. The circle has been poked outward from the family and village to the clan, the tribe, the nation, the race, and most recently (as in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) to all of humanity. It has been slackened from royalty, aristocracy, and property holders to all men. It has grown from including only men to including women, children, and newborns. It has crept outward to embrace criminals, prisoners of war, enemy civilians, the dying, and the mentally handicapped. Nor are the possibilities for moral progress over. Today some people want to enlarge the circle to include great apes, warm-blooded creatures, or animals with central nervous systems. Some want to count in zygotes, blastocysts, fetuses, and the brain-dead. Still others want to embrace species, ecosystems, or the entire planet. This sweeping change in sensibilities, the driving force in the moral history of our species, did not require a blank slate or a ghost in the machine. It could have arisen from a moral gadget containing a single knob or slider that adjusts the size of the circle embracing the entities whose interests we treat as comparable to our own.
The expansion of the moral circle does not have to be powered by some mysterious drive toward goodness. It may come from the interaction between the selfish process of evolution and a law of complex systems. The biologists
John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary and the journalist Robert Wright have explained how evolution can lead to greater and greater degrees of cooperation. 19 Repeatedly in the history of life, replicators have teamed up, specialized to divide the labor, and coordinated their behavior. It happens because replicators often find themselves in non-zero- sum games, in which particular strategies adopted by two players can leave them both better off (as opposed to a zero- sum game, where one player's profit is another player's loss). An exact analogy is found in the play by William Butler Yeats in which a blind man carries a lame man on his shoulders, allowing both of them to get around. During the evolution of life this dynamic has led replicating molecules to team up in chromosomes, organelles to team up in cells, cells to agglomerate into complex organisms, and organisms to hang out in societies. Independent agents repeatedly made their fate hostage to a larger system, not because they are inherently civic-minded but because they benefited from the division of labor and developed ways of damping conflicts among the agents making up the system.
Human societies, like living things, have become more complicated and cooperative over time. Again, it is because
? ? ? ? agents do better when they team up {168} and specialize in pursuit of their shared interests, as long as they solve the problems of exchanging information and punishing cheaters. If I have more fruit than I can eat and you have more meat than you can eat, it pays each of us to trade our surplus with the other. If we face a common enemy, then, as Benjamin Franklin put it, "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately. "
Wright argues that three features of human nature led to a steady expansion of the circle of human cooperators. One is the cognitive wherewithal to figure out how the world works. This yields know-how worth sharing and an ability to spread goods and information over larger territories, both of which expand opportunities for gains in trade. A second is language, which allows technology to be shared, bargains to be struck, and agreements to be enforced. A third is an emotional repertoire -- sympathy, trust, guilt, anger, self-esteem -- that impels us to seek new cooperators, maintain relationships with them, and safeguard the relationships against possible exploitation. Long ago these endowments put our species on a moral escalator. Our mental circle of respect-worthy persons expanded in tandem with our physical circle of allies and trading partners. As technology accumulates and people in more parts of the planet become interdependent, the hatred between them tends to decrease, for the simple reason that you can't kill someone and trade with him too.
Non-zero-sum games arise not just from people's ability to help one another but from their ability to refrain from hurting one another. In many disputes, both sides come out ahead by dividing up the savings made available from not having to fight. That provides an incentive to develop technologies of conflict resolution, such as mediation, face- saving measures, measured restitution and retribution, and legal codes. The primatologist Frans de Waal has argued that the rudiments of conflict resolution may be found in many species of primates. 20 The human forms are ubiquitous across cultures, as universal as the conflicts of interest they are designed to defuse. 21
Though the evolution of the expanding circle (its ultimate cause) may sound pragmatic or even cynical, the psychology of the expanding circle (its proximate cause) need not be. Once the sympathy knob is in place, having evolved to enjoy the benefits of cooperation and exchange, it can be cranked up by new kinds of information that other folks are similar to oneself. Words and images from erstwhile enemies can trigger the sympathy response. A historical record can warn against self-defeating cycles of vendetta. A cosmopolitan awareness may lead people to think, "There but for fortune go I. " An expansion of sympathy may come from something as basic as the requirement to be logically consistent when imploring other people to behave in certain ways: people come to realize that they cannot force others to abide by rules that they themselves flout. Egoistic, sexist, racist, and xenophobic attitudes are logically {169} inconsistent with the demand that everyone respect a single code of behavior. 22 Peaceful coexistence, then, does not have to come from pounding selfish desires out of people. It can come from pitting some desires -- the desire for safety, the benefits of cooperation, the ability to formulate and recognize universal codes of behavior -- against the desire for immediate gain. These are just a few of the ways in which moral and social progress can ratchet upwards, not in spite of a fixed human~nature but because of it.
When you stop to think about it, the idea of a pliant human nature does not deserve its reputation for optimism and uplift. If it did, B. F. Skinner would have been lauded as a great humanitarian when he argued that society should apply the technology of conditioning to humans, shaping people to use contraception, conserve energy, make peace, and avoid crowded cities. 23 Skinner was a staunch blank-slater and a passionate Utopian. His uncommonly pure vision allows us to examine the implications of the "optimistic" denial of human nature. Given his premise that undesirable behavior is not in the genes but a product of the environment, it follows that we should control that environment -- for all we would be doing is replacing haphazard schedules of reinforcement by planned ones.
Why are most people repelled by this vision? Critics of Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity pointed out that no one doubts that behavior can be controlled; putting a gun to someone's head or threatening him with torture are time- honored techniques. 24 Even Skinner's preferred method of operant conditioning required starving the organism to 80 percent of its free-feeding weight and confining it to a box where schedules of reinforcement were carefully controlled. The issue is not whether we can change human behavior, but at what cost.
Since we are not just products of our environments, there will be costs. People have inherent desires such as comfort, love, family, esteem, autonomy, aesthetics, and self-expression, regardless of their history of reinforcement, and they suffer when the freedom to exercise the desires is thwarted. Indeed, it is difficult to define psychological pain without some notion of human nature. (Even the young Marx appealed to a "species character," with an impulse for creative activity, as the basis for his theory of alienation. ) Sometimes we may choose to impose suffering to control behavior, as when we punish people who cause avoidable suffering in others. But we cannot pretend that we can reshape behavior without infringing in some way on other people's freedom and happiness. Human nature is the reason we do not surrender our freedom to behavioral engineers.
Inborn human desires are a nuisance to those with Utopian and totalitarian visions, which often amount to the same
? ? ? ? ? ? ? thing. What stands in the way of {170} most Utopias is not pestilence and drought but human behavior. So Utopians have to think of ways to control behavior, and when propaganda doesn't do the trick, more emphatic techniques are tried. The Marxist Utopians of the twentieth century, as we saw, needed a tabula rasa free of selfishness and family ties and used totalitarian measures to scrape the tablets clean or start over with new ones. As Bertolt Brecht said of the East German government, "If the people did not do better the government would dismiss the people and elect a new one. " Political philosophers and historians who have recently "reflected on our ravaged century," such as Isaiah Berlin, Kenneth Minogue, Robert Conquest, Jonathan Glover, James Scott, and Daniel Chirot, have pointed to Utopian dreams as a major cause of twentieth-century nightmares. 25 For that matter, Wordsworth's revolutionary France, "thrilled with joy" while human nature was "born again," turned out to be no picnic either.
It's not just behaviorists and Stalinists who forgot that a denial of human nature may have costs in freedom and happiness. Twentieth-century Marxism was part of a larger intellectual current that has been called Authoritarian High Modernism: the conceit that planners could redesign society from the top down using "scientific" principles. 26 The architect Le Corbusier, for example, argued that urban planners should not be fettered by traditions and tastes, since they only perpetuated the overcrowded chaos of the cities of his day. "We must build places where mankind will be reborn," he wrote. "Each man will live in an ordered relation to the whole. "27 In Le Corbusier's Utopia, planners would begin with a "clean tablecloth" (sound familiar? ) and mastermind all buildings and public spaces to service "human needs. " They had a minimalist conception of those needs: each person was thought to require a fixed amount of air, heat, light, and space for eating, sleeping, working, commuting, and a few other activities. It did not occur to Le Corbusier that intimate gatherings with family and friends might be a human need, so he proposed large communal dining halls to replace kitchens. Also missing from his list of needs was the desire to socialize in small groups in public places, so he planned his cities around freeways, large buildings, and vast open plazas, with no squares or crossroads in which people would feel comfortable hanging out to schmooze. Homes were "machines for living," free of archaic inefficiencies like gardens and ornamentation, and thus were efficiently packed together in large, rectangular housing projects.
Le Corbusier was frustrated in his aspiration to flatten Paris, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro and rebuild them according to his scientific principles. But in the 1950s he was given carte blanche to design Chandigarh, the capital of the Punjab, and one of his disciples was given a clean tablecloth for Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. Today, both cities are notorious as uninviting wastelands detested by the civil servants who live in them. Authoritarian High Modernism also led to the "urban renewal" projects in many American cities {171} during the 1960s that replaced vibrant neighborhoods with freeways, high-rises, and empty windswept plazas.
Social scientists, too, have sometimes gotten carried away with dreams of social engineering. The child psychiatrist Bruce Perry, concerned that ghetto mothers are not giving children the enriched environment needed by their plastic brains, believes we must "transform our culture": "We need to change ' our child rearing practices, we need to change the malignant and destructive view that children are the property of their biological parents. Human beings evolved not as individuals, but as communities. . . . Children belong to the community, they are entrusted to their parents. "28 Now, no one could object to rescuing children from neglect or cruelty, but if Perry's transformed culture came to pass, men with guns could break up any family that did not conform to the latest fad in parenting theory. As we will see in the chapter on children, most of these fads are based on flawed studies that treat every correlation between parents and children as proof of causation. Asian American and African American parents often flout the advice of the child-development gurus, using more traditional, authoritarian styles of childrearing that in all likelihood do their children no lasting harm. 29 The parenting police could strip them of their children.
Nothing in the concept of human nature is inconsistent with the ideals of feminism, or so I will argue in the chapter on gender. But some feminist theoreticians have embraced the Blank Slate and with it an authoritarian political philosophy that would give the government sweeping powers to implement their vision of gender-free minds. In a 1975 dialogue, Simone de Beauvoir said: "No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. "30 Gloria Steinem was a bit more liberal; in a 1970 Time article she wrote: "The [feminist] revolution would not take away the option of being a housewife. A woman who prefers to be her husband's housekeeper and/or hostess would receive a percentage of his pay determined by the domestic-relations courts. "31 Betty Friedan has spoken out in favor of "compulsory preschool" for two-year-olds. 32 Catharine MacKinnon (who with Andrea Dworkin has pushed for laws against erotica) has said, "What you need is people who see through literature like Andrea Dworkin, who see through law like me, to see through art and create the uncompromised women's visual vocabulary"33 -- oblivious to the danger inherent in a few intellectuals' arrogating the role of deciding which art and literature the rest of society will enjoy.
In an interview in the New York Times Magazine, Carol Gilligan explained the implications of her (preposterous) theory that behavior problems in boys, such as stuttering and hyperactivity, are caused by cultural norms that
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? pressure them to separate from their mothers: {172}
q: You would argue that men's biology is not so powerful that we can't change the culture of men? a: Right. We have to build a culture that doesn't reward that separation from the person who raised them. . . .
q: Everything you've said suggests that unless men change in fundamental ways, we're not going to have a sea change in the culture.
a: That seems right to me. 34
An incredulous reader, hearing an echo of the attempt to engineer a "new socialist man," asked, "Does anyone, even in academia, still believe that this sort of thing turns out well? "35 He was right to be concerned. In many schools,
teachers have been told, falsely, that there is an "opportunity zone" in which a child's gender identification is malleable. They have used this zone to try to stamp out boyhood: banning same-sex play groups and birthday parties, forcing children to do gender-atypical activities, suspending boys who run during recess or play cops and robbers. 36 In her book The War Against Boys, the philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers rightly calls this agenda "meddlesome, abusive, and quite beyond what educators in a free society are mandated to do. "37
Feminism, far from needing a blank slate, needs the opposite, a clear conception of human nature. One of the most pressing feminist causes today is the condition of women in the developing world. In many places female fetuses are selectively aborted, newborn girls are killed, daughters are malnourished and kept from school, adolescent girls have their genitals cut out, young women are cloaked from head to toe, adulteresses are stoned to death, and widows are expected to fall onto their husbands' funeral pyres. The relativist climate in many academic circles does not allow these horrors to be criticized because they are practices of other cultures, and cultures are superorganisms that, like people, have inalienable rights. To escape this trap, the feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum has invoked "central functional capabilities" that all humans have a right to exercise, such as physical integrity, liberty of conscience, and political participation. She has been criticized in turn for taking on a colonial "civilizing mission" or "white woman's burden," in which arrogant Europeans would instruct the poor people of the world in what they want. But Nussbaum's moral argument is defensible if her "capabilities" are grounded, directly or indirectly, in a universal human nature. Human nature provides a yardstick to identify suffering in any member of our species.
The existence of a human nature is not a reactionary doctrine that dooms us to eternal oppression, violence, and greed. Of course we should try to reduce harmful behavior, just as we try to reduce afflictions like hunger, disease, and {173} the elements. But we fight those afflictions not by denying the pesky facts of nature but by turning some of them against the others. For efforts at social change to be effective, they must identify the cognitive and moral resources that make some kinds of change possible. And for the efforts to be humane, they must acknowledge the universal pleasures and pains that make some kinds of change desirable.
<< {174} >> Chapter 10
The Fear of Determinism
This chapter is not about the boo-word that is frequently (and inaccurately) hurled at any explanation of a behavioral tendency that mentions evolution or genetics. It is about determinism in its original sense, the concept that is opposed to "free will" in introductory philosophy courses. The fear of determinism in this sense is captured in a limerick:
There was a young man who said: "Damn! It grieves me to think that I am Predestined to move
In a circumscribed groove:
In fact, not a bus, but a tram. "
In the traditional conception of a ghost in the machine, our bodies are inhabited by a self or a soul that chooses the behavior to be executed by the body.
These choices are not compelled by some prior physical event, like one billiard ball smacking into another and sending it into a corner pocket. The idea that our behavior is caused by the physiological activity of a genetically shaped brain would seem to refute the traditional view. It would make our behavior an automatic consequence of molecules in motion and leave no room for an uncaused behavior-chooser. One fear of determinism is a gaping existential anxiety: that deep down we are not in control of our own choices. All our brooding and agonizing over the right thing to do is pointless, it would seem, because everything has already
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? been preordained by the state of our brains. If you suffer from this anxiety, I suggest the following experiment. For the next few days, don't bother deliberating over your actions. It's a waste of time, after all; they have already been determined. Shoot from the hip, live for the moment, and if it feels good do it. No, I am not seriously suggesting that you try this! But a moment's reflection on what would happen if you did try to give up making decisions should serve
{175} as a Valium for the existential anxiety. The experience of choosing is not a fiction, regardless of how the brain works. It is a real neural process, with the obvious function of selecting behavior according to its foreseeable consequences. It responds to information from the senses, including the exhortations of other people. You cannot step outside it or let it go on without you because it is you. If the most ironclad form of determinism is real, you could not do anything about it anyway, because your anxiety about determinism, and how you would deal with it, would also be determined. It is the existential fear of determinism that is the real waste of time.
A more practical fear of determinism is captured in a saying by A. A. Milne: "No doubt Jack the Ripper excused himself on the grounds that it was human nature. " The fear is that an understanding of human nature seems to eat away at the notion of personal responsibility. In the traditional view, the self or soul, having chosen what to do, takes responsibility when things turn out badly. As with the desk of Harry Truman, the buck stops here. But when we attribute an action to a person's brain, genes, or evolutionary history, it seems that we no longer hold the individual accountable. Biology becomes the perfect alibi, the get-out-of-jail-free card, the ultimate doctor's excuse note. As we have seen, this accusation has been made by the religious and cultural right, who want to preserve the soul, and the academic left, who want to preserve a "we" who can construct our own futures though in circumstances not of our own choosing.
Why is the notion of free will so closely tied to the notion of responsibility, and why is biology thought to threaten both? Here is the logic. We blame people for an evil act or bad decision only when they intended the consequences and could have chosen otherwise. We don't convict a hunter who shoots a friend he has mistaken for a deer, or the chauffeur who drove John F. Kennedy into the line of fire, because they could not foresee and did not intend the outcome of their actions. We show mercy to the victim of torture who betrays a comrade, to a delirious patient who lashes out at a nurse, or to a madman who strikes someone he believes to be a ferocious animal, because we feel they are not in command of their faculties. We don't put a small child on trial if he causes a death, nor do we try an animal or an inanimate object, because we believe them to be constitutionally incapable of making an informed choice.
A biology of human nature would seem to admit more and more people into the ranks of the blameless. A murderer may not literally be a raving lunatic, but our newfangled tools might pick up a shrunken amygdala or a hypo- metabolism in his frontal lobes or a defective gene for monoamine oxidase A, which renders him just as out of control. Or perhaps a test from the cognitive psychology lab will show that he has chronically limited foresight, rendering him oblivious to consequences, or that he has a defective theory of mind, making him incapable of appreciating the suffering of others. After all, if there is no ghost in the machine, something in the criminal's hardware must set him {176} apart from the majority of people, those who would not hurt or kill in the same circumstances. Pretty soon we will find that something, and, it is feared, murderers will be excused from criminal punishment as surely as we now excuse madmen and small children.
Even worse, biology may show that we are all blameless. Evolutionary theory says that the ultimate rationale for our motives is that they perpetuated our ancestors' genes in the environment in which we evolved. Since none of us are aware of that rationale, none of us can be blamed for pursuing it, any more than we blame the mental patient who thinks he is subduing a mad dog but really is attacking a nurse. We scratch our heads when we learn of ancient customs that punished the soulless: the Hebrew rule of stoning an ox to death if it killed a man, the Athenian practice of putting an ax on trial if it injured a man (and hurling it over the city wall if found guilty), a medieval French case in which a sow was sentenced to be mangled for having mauled a child, and the whipping and burial of a church bell in 1685 for having assisted French heretics. 1 But evolutionary biologists insist we are not fundamentally different from animals, and molecular geneticists and neuroscientists insist we are not fundamentally different from inanimate matter. If people are soulless, why is it not just as silly to punish people? Shouldn't we heed the creationists, who say that if you teach children they are animals they will behave like animals? Should we go even farther than the National Rifle Association bumper sticker -- guns don't kill; people kill -- and say that not even people kill, because people are just as mechanical as guns?
These concerns are by no means academic. Cognitive neuroscientists are sometimes approached by criminal defense lawyers hoping that a wayward pixel on a brain scan might exonerate their client (a scenario that is wittily played out in Richard Dooling's novel Brain Storm). When a team of geneticists found a rare gene that predisposed the men in one family to violent outbursts, a lawyer for an unrelated murder defendant argued that his client might have such a gene too. If so, the lawyer argued, "his actions may not have been a product of total free will. "2 When Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer argued that rape is a consequence of male reproductive strategies, another lawyer contemplated using their theory to defend rape suspects. 3 (Insert your favorite lawyer joke here. ) Biologically
? ? ? ? ? sophisticated legal scholars, such as Owen Jones, have argued that a "rape gene" defense would almost certainly fail, but the general threat remains that biological explanations will be used to exonerate wrongdoers. 4 Is this the bright
future promised by the sciences of human nature -- it wasn't me, it was my amygdala? Darwin made me do it? The genes ate my homework? ~
People hoping that an uncaused soul might rescue personal responsibility are in for a disappointment. In Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth {177} Wanting, the philosopher Dan Dennett points out that the last thing we want in a soul is freedom to do anything it desires. 5 If behavior were chosen by an utterly free will, then we really couldn't hold people responsible for their actions. That entity would not be deterred by the threat of punishment, or be ashamed by the prospect of opprobrium, or even feel the twinge of guilt that might inhibit a sinful temptation in the future, because it could always choose to defy those causes of behavior. We could not hope to reduce evil acts by enacting moral and legal codes, because a free agent, floating in a different plane from the arrows of cause and effect, would be unaffected by the codes. Morality and law would be pointless. We could punish a wrongdoer, but it would be sheer spite, because it could have no predictable effect on the future behavior of the wrongdoer or of other people aware of the punishment.
On the other hand, if the soul is predictably affected by the prospect of esteem and shame or reward and punishment, it is no longer truly free, because it is compelled (at least probabilistically) to respect those contingencies. Whatever converts standards of responsibility into changes in the likelihood of behavior -- such as the rule "If the community would think you're a boorish cad for doing X, don't do X" -- can be programmed into an algorithm and implemented in neural hardware. The soul is superfluous.
Defensive scientists sometimes try to deflect the charge of determinism by pointing out that behavior is never perfectly predictable but always probabilistic, even in the dreams of the hardest-headed materialists. (In the heyday of Skinner's behaviorism, his students formulated the Harvard Law of Animal Behavior: "Under controlled experimental conditions of temperature, time, lighting, feeding, and training, the organism will behave as it damned well pleases. ") Even identical twins reared together, who share all of their genes and most of their environment, are not identical in personality and behavior, just highly similar. Perhaps the brain amplifies random events at the molecular or quantum level. Perhaps brains are nonlinear dynamical systems subject to unpredictable chaos. Or perhaps the intertwined influences of genes and environment are so complicated that no mortal will ever trace them out with enough precision to predict behavior exactly.
The less-than-perfect predictability of behavior certainly gives the lie to the cliche that the sciences of human nature are "deterministic" in the mathematical sense. But it doesn't succeed in allaying the fear that science is eroding the concept of free will and personal responsibility. It is cold comfort to be told that a man's genes (or his brain or his evolutionary history) made him 99 percent likely to kill his landlady as opposed to 100 percent. Sure, the behavior was not strictly preordained, but why should the 1 percent chance of his having done otherwise suddenly make the guy "responsible"? In fact, there is no probability value that, by itself, ushers responsibility back in. One can always think that there is a 50 percent chance some molecules in Raskolnikov's brain {178} went thisaway, compelling him to commit the murder, and a 50 percent chance they went thataway, compelling him not to. We still have nothing like free will, and no concept of responsibility that promises to reduce harmful acts. Hume noted the dilemma inherent in equating the problem of moral responsibility with the problem of whether behavior has a physical cause: either our actions are determined, in which case we are not responsible for them, or they are the result of random events, in which case we are not responsible for them. ~
People who hope that a ban on biological explanations might restore personal responsibility are in for the biggest disappointment of all. The most risible pretexts for bad behavior in recent decades have come not from biological determinism but from environmental determinism: the abuse excuse, the Twinkie defense, black rage, pornography poisoning, societal sickness, media violence, rock lyrics, and different cultural mores (recently used by one lawyer to defend a Gypsy con artist and by another to defend a Canadian Indian woman who murdered her boyfriend). 6 Just in the week I wrote this paragraph, two new examples appeared in the newspapers. One is from a clinical psychologist who "seeks out a dialogue" with repeat murderers to help them win mitigation, clemency, or an appeal. It manages to pack the Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, the moralistic fallacy, and environmental determinism into a single passage:
Most people don't commit horrendous crimes without profoundly damaging things happening to them. It isn't that monsters are being born right and left. It's that children are being born right and left and are being subjected to horrible things. As a consequence, they end up doing horrible things. And I would
? ? ? ? ? much rather live in that world than in a world where monsters are just born. 7 The other is about a social work student in Manhattan:
Tiffany F. Goldberg, a 25-year-old from Madison, Wis. , was struck on the head with a chunk of concrete by a stranger this month. Afterward, she expressed concern for her attacker, speculating that he must have had a troubled childhood.
Graduate students in social work at Columbia called Ms. Goldberg's attitude consistent with their outlook on violence. "Society is into blaming individuals," said Kristen Miller, 27, one of the students. "Violence is intergenerationally transmitted. "8
Evolutionary psychologists are commonly chided for "excusing" men's promiscuity with the theory that a wandering eye in our ancestors was rewarded with a greater number of descendants. They can take heart from a {179} recent biography that said Bruce Springsteen's "self-doubts made him frequently seek out the sympathy of groupies,"9 a book review that said Woody Allen's sexual indiscretions "originated in trauma" and an "abusive" relationship with his mother,10 and Hillary Clinton's explanation of her husband's libido in her infamous interview in Talk:
He was so young, barely 4, when he was scarred by abuse that he can't even take it out and look at it. There was terrible conflict between his mother and grandmother. A psychologist once told me that for a boy being in the middle of a conflict between two women is the worst possible situation. There is always the desire to please each one. 11
Mrs. Clinton was raked by the pundits for trying to excuse her husband's sexual escapades, though she said not a word about brains, genes, or evolution. The logic of the condemnation seems to be: If someone tries to explain an act as an effect of some cause, the explainer is saying that the act was not freely chosen and that the actor cannot be held responsible.
Environmental determinism is so common that a genre of satire has grown around it. In a New Yorker cartoon, a woman on a witness stand says, "True, my husband beat me because of his childhood; but I murdered him because of mine. " In the comic strip Non Sequitur, the directory of a mental health clinic reads: "1st Floor: Mother's Fault. 2nd Floor: Father's Fault. 3rd Floor: Society's Fault. " And who can forget the Jets in West Side Story, who imagined explaining to the local police sergeant, "We're depraved on accounta we're deprived"?
Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke, You gotta understand,
It's just our bringin' up-ke, That gets us out of hand.
Our mothers all are junkies,
Our fathers all are drunks.
Golly Moses, natcherly we're punks!
~
Something has gone terribly wrong. It is a confusion of explanation with exculpation. Contrary to what is implied by critics of biological and environmental theories of the causes of behavior, to explain behavior is not to exonerate the behaver. Hillary Clinton may have advanced the dumbest explanation in the history of psychobabble, but she does not deserve the charge of trying to excuse the president's behavior. (A New York Times story described Mr. Clinton's response to people's criticism of his wife: " 'I have not made any excuses for what was inexcusable, and neither has she, believe me,' he said, arching his eyebrows for emphasis. ")12 If behavior is not utterly random, it will have some
{180} explanation; if behavior were utterly random, we couldn't hold the person responsible in any case. So if we ever hold people responsible for their behavior, it will have to be in spite of any causal explanation we feel is warranted, whether it invokes genes, brains, evolution, media images, self-doubt, bringing up-ke, or being raised by bickering women. The difference between explaining behavior and excusing it is captured in the saying "To understand is not to forgive," and has been stressed in different ways by many philosophers, including Hume, Kant, and Sartre. 13 Most philosophers believe that unless a person was literally coerced (that is, someone held a gun to his head), we should consider his actions to have been freely chosen, even if they were caused by events inside his skull. But how can we have both explanation, with its requirement of lawful causation, and responsibility, with its requirement of free choice? To have them both we don't need to resolve the ancient and perhaps unresolvable antinomy between free will and determinism. We only have to think clearly about what we want the notion of
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? responsibility to achieve. Whatever may be its inherent abstract worth, responsibility has an eminently practical function: deterring harmful behavior. When we say that we hold someone responsible for a wrongful act, we expect him to punish himself -- by compensating the victim, acquiescing to humiliation, incurring penalties, or expressing credible remorse -- and we reserve the right to punish him ourselves. Unless a person is willing to suffer some unpleasant (and hence deterring) consequence, claims of responsibility are hollow. Richard Nixon was ridiculed when he bowed to pressure and finally "took responsibility" for the Watergate burglary but did not accept any costs such as apologizing, resigning, or firing his aides.
One reason to hold someone responsible is to deter the person from committing similar acts in the future. But that cannot be the whole story, because it is different only in degree from the contingencies of punishment used by behaviorists to modify the behavior of animals. In a social, language-using, reasoning organism, the policy can also deter similar acts by other organisms who learn of the contingencies and control their behavior so as not to incur the penalties. That is the ultimate reason we feel compelled to punish elderly Nazi war criminals, even though there is little danger that they would perpetrate another holocaust if we let them die in their beds in Bolivia. By holding them responsible -- that is, by publicly enforcing a policy of rooting out and punishing evil wherever and whenever it occurs -- we hope to deter others from committing comparable evils in the future.
This is not to say that the concept of responsibility is a recommendation by policy wonks for preventing the largest number of harmful acts at the least cost. Even if experts had determined that punishing a Nazi would prevent no future atrocities, or that we could save more lives by diverting the manpower to catching drunk drivers, we would still want to bring Nazis to justice. The {181} demand for responsibility can come from a burning sense of just deserts, not only from literal calculations of how best to deter particular acts.
But punishment even in the pure sense of just deserts is ultimately a policy for deterrence. It follows from a paradox inherent to the logic of deterrence: though the threat of punishment can deter behavior, if the behavior does take place the punishment serves no purpose other than pure sadism or an illogical desire to make the threat credible retroactively. "It won't bring the victim back," say the opponents of capital punishment, but that can be said about any form of punishment. If we start the movie at the point at which a punishment is to be carried out, it looks like spite, because it is costly to the punisher and inflicts harm on the punishee without doing anyone any immediate good. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, the paradox of punishment and the rise of psychology and psychiatry led some intellectuals to argue that criminal punishment is a holdover from barbaric times and should be replaced by therapy and rehabilitation. The position was clear in the titles of books like George Bernard Shaw's The Crime of Imprisonment and the psychiatrist Karl Menninger's The Crime of Punishment. It was also articulated by leading jurists such as William O. Douglas, William Brennan, Earl Warren, and David Bazelon. These radical Krupkeists did not suffer from a fear of determinism; they welcomed it with open arms.
Few people today argue that criminal punishment is obsolete, even if they recognize that (other than incapacitating some habitual criminals) it is pointless in the short run. That is because if we ever did calculate the short-term effects in deciding whether to punish, potential wrongdoers could anticipate that calculation and factor it into their behavior. They could predict that we would not find it worthwhile to punish them once it was too late to prevent the crime, and could act with impunity, calling our bluff. The only solution is to adopt a resolute policy of punishing wrongdoers regardless of the immediate effects. If one is genuinely not bluffing about the threat of punishment, there is no bluff to call. As Oliver Wendell Holmes explained, "If I were having a philosophical talk with a man I was going to have hanged (or electrocuted) I should say, 'I don't doubt that your act was inevitable for you but to make it more avoidable by others we propose to sacrifice you to the common good. You may regard yourself as a soldier dying for your country if you like. But the law must keep its promises. ' "14 This promise-keeping underlies the policy of applying justice "as a matter of principle," regardless of the immediate costs or even of consistency with common sense. If a death-row inmate attempts suicide, we speed him to the emergency ward, struggle to resuscitate him, give him the best modern medicine to help him recuperate, and kill him. We do it as part of a policy that closes off all possibilities to "cheat justice. "
Capital punishment is a vivid illustration of the paradoxical logic of deterrence, but the logic applies to lesser criminal punishments, to personal acts {182} of revenge, and to intangible social penalties like ostracism and scorn. Evolutionary psychologists and game theorists have argued that the deterrence paradox led to the evolution of the emotions that undergird a desire for justice: the implacable need for retribution, the burning feeling that an evil act knocks the universe out of balance and can be canceled only by a commensurate punishment. People who are emotionally driven to retaliate against those who cross them, even at a cost to themselves, are more credible adversaries and less likely to be exploited. 15 Many judicial theorists argue that criminal law is simply a controlled implementation of the human desire for retribution, designed to keep it from escalating into cycles of vendetta. The Victorian jurist James Stephen said that "the criminal law bears the same relation to the urge for revenge as marriage does to the sexual urge. "16
? ? ? ? ? Religious conceptions of sin and responsibility simply extend this lever by implying that any wrongdoing that is undiscovered or unpunished by one's fellows will be discovered and punished by God. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson sum up the ultimate rationale of our intuitions about responsibility and godly retribution:
From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, this almost mystical and seemingly irreducible sort of moral imperative is the output of a mental mechanism with a straightforward adaptive function: to reckon justice and administer punishment by a calculus which ensures that violators reap no advantage from their misdeeds.