In the Mind there is no absolute, or free, will, but the Mind is determined to will this or that by a cause that is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so to infinity. Spinoza, Ethics (1677, IIp48 – see Nadler, 2013).
The conceit of free will, however defined and across all its incarnations – libertarian, compatibilist, reactive-attitudinist, illusionist, semi-compatibilist, and hard compatibilist – involves us all in censorship, error, hypocrisy, prejudice, and dissimulation. So what really are the costs of such error and dissimulation, and who pays the greatest cost?
“Motive becomes almost irrelevant; because, in a world without free will, ‘luck swallows everything’ – Strawson, 1998 – one effect of denying the electorate such knowledge is to pretty much ensure that the lucky stay lucky while the unlucky remain unlucky” (Miles, 2013, p.209).
Thomas Halper showed in a 1973 Polity essay that attitudes to poverty – including our corresponding compassion towards the poor or lack thereof – have always depended upon our views of personal merit and choice in one’s position, but Halper’s most worrying conclusion comes when he describes how the main reason for the great longevity and influence of the notorious distinction of the deserving from the undeserving poor “was its profound legitimating power” (1973, p.76). When some are identified as deserving their station through choice rather than luck or accident it becomes not only an excuse not to do anything to help them but, perhaps even more malignantly, it is given as proof that such a society is just. The conceit of free choice not only takes away any moral impetus to assist the less fortunate, as their lowly station is no longer seen as misfortune, but the myth then acts to legitimise the whole social order from the very bottom to the very top. The social historian Steve Hindle likewise argues (2004) that the pre-nineteenth-century growth in compassion for at least some of the poor appears to have been matched by the growing reliance on the belief that choice produces the varied stations of poverty. In other words there was now a clear division of the poor into those who are poor through their own choice and continue to deserve no sympathy and the new recognition of those who are poor through no choice of their own so deserve sympathy, with the latter recognition at the same time serving to validate contempt for the former group. And Robert Haggard (2000) actually suggests that the development of the early British welfare state was only possible due to a declining belief in poverty through choice, and the recognition of just how many are at the bottom of the social order because of nothing more than misfortune.
In more recent years the recognition of a substantial deserving poor has declined again, and in June 2009 the Joseph Rowntree Foundation published research showing that up to 83% of Britons think that “virtually everyone” remains in poverty in Britain not as the result of social misfortune or biological handicap but through choice (Bamfield & Horton, 2009, p.23). Because of their belief in the fairness of “deserved inequalities” such respondents were discovered to have become almost completely unconcerned with the idea of promoting greater equality, while at the same time asserting that Britain was a beacon of fairness that offered opportunity for all. According to the JRF report there was a “clear sense” across all the groups surveyed that an individual’s situation “is largely of his or her own making”. Anyone can make it if they “really try”, the great majority of participants asserted (pp.23-24). The 2010 British Social Attitudes Report also found that there had been a fall in those supporting any form of wealth redistribution, from 51% in 1994 to 38% in 2010: sympathy was now limited to those who did not choose to live in poverty (NCSR, 2010). Citing this second report, BBC Radio 4’s Analysis interviewed politicians and commentators to highlight a tendency within the welfare debates to distinguish between those who are poor through bad luck and those who are poor “because of personal choices” (Bowlby, 2010). Free will may just be the primary excuse that many use to legitimise a contempt for the poor which would exist independently of their professed belief in free will, but free will assertion nonetheless provides the ethical fig leaf for such contempt that would be far harder to rationalise (and therefore tolerate) without the myth of free will. The myth of free will doesn’t just excuse indifference to poverty. It creates and maintains much of that poverty in the first place.
The influential American Pew Research Center for the People and the Press has concluded that successive Pew Global Attitudes polls “find that at every income level, Americans are far more likely than Europeans to believe that individuals, not society, are responsible for their own failures, economic and otherwise” (Allen & Dimock, 2007). Returning to Haggard’s point that the development of the British welfare state required a somewhat declining belief in poverty through choice, then by inference it is at least plausible that the United States lacks a working welfare state in large part because of an even more strongly inculcated belief in the existence of free choice than in Britain. Mink and O’Connor’s encyclopedia of the historical, political, and social background to poverty in America tells us that mainstream public discourse since the early nineteenth century has made the distinction between the deserving poor and the undeserving: has raised the issue of worth and merit. Moreover, the book notes that both women and racial minorities have been substantially excluded from the ranks of the deserving poor (2004, p. 226), while the growth in the US of the idea of the undeserving poor coincided with the period of mass immigration of those of non-WASP stock. It is not just adults who are targeted under the free will conceit. The US Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society includes an entry by social historian Peggy Shifflett asserting that, among other things, the distinction between the deserving poor and the undeserving poor has even been applied to the population of homeless children in the States, estimated to range from five hundred thousand to more than two million (2008). Early twentieth-century runaways – who were viewed, Shifflett tells us, as having chosen to leave their homes – were generally categorised as the undeserving, while she cites studies suggesting that more recent attitudes have not been significantly more tolerant.
In 2009 Jasmine Carey surveyed over 250 undergraduates and found that those who believe in unrestrained free will were significantly more likely to believe in a just world for themselves and others, with just world here defined solely as the tendency “to believe that people deserve the things that happen to them” (2009, p.8). As Carey noted, “the responsibility of free will is necessary for belief in a just world” (p.20). Even those who are trying to defend the free will conceit have provided evidence for the malignity of the myth. The libertarian and social psychologist Roy Baumeister, writing with Andrew Vonasch, unconsciously demonstrated the harmful effects on the poor: “The narrative of the deserving versus undeserving poor is a staunch perennial feature of public debates about welfare, but its only relationship to free will beliefs is that those with higher free will beliefs feel more sympathetic to those who really are trying to lift themselves by their bootstraps” (2013, p.224). If you feel more sympathy towards those trying to lift themselves you are by definition less sympathetic towards those not trying to lift themselves out. Such people are using a myth, a fiction, to discriminate between the two groups in favour of one and – almost by definition – to the detriment of the other. “People with higher beliefs in free will were more likely to say that ‘personal choice’ is a cause of poverty [and] people with high belief in free will… actually felt more sympathy towards the person working hard to try to get out of poverty” (p.224). Again, such people are feeling more sympathy towards one group based on an incorrect belief that the other group’s members could actually do something about their situation when – in a universe without free choice – they can do literally nothing without assistance. Some have even suggested that blame and a corresponding belief in freedom of choice have, at least in America, been used to move the debate beyond a distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor and into the territory of whether we ever need feel compassion for the poor. Monica Potts, who writes on poverty and opportunity for The American Prospect, writes that the “political and policy discourse about the poor in the United States has centered, to a considerable extent, on whether and how the people who can’t make it into the middle class are to blame for their own plight… It’s as if the political debate [Michael] Harrington helped ignite has calcified, and we have only two choices: ‘You should feel sorry for the poor’ or ‘You shouldn’t’” (2014, pp.103-4).
Free will appears to be the legitimating excuse that is used to ignore the plight of the most unfortunate. Under the free will conceit the world is not now examined to see if it is just, but instead is simply assumed to be just. Henry Ward Beecher, the American nineteenth-century minister, wrote that no man in the United States suffers from poverty “unless it is more than his fault, unless it is his sin”, while the early nineteenth-century English politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote that in other countries poverty was seen as a misfortune “but that for Englishmen it was viewed as a crime”. Under the mindset epitomised by Beecher and Bulwer-Lytton the existence of poverty is used as proof of a failure of free choice. Referencing the research of Thomas Halper again, some churchgoers have traditionally argued that there are no worthy poor as a just God would not have consigned them to such a horrible fate “if they did not deserve it” (1973, p.75). The poor and unlucky can never win at this game because, thanks to the idea of free will, the existence of poverty becomes the legitimisation of such poverty. As desert morally requires free will, the existence of a segment of society struggling at the bottom is given as proof of free will: they wouldn’t be struggling if they did not deserve to be. Such a Kafkaesque inversion of logic brings to mind the contemporary philosophical “proofs” of almost perfect social and economic fairness by the simple expedient of eliminating from the calculus anyone being treated unfairly. And senior figures in the free will debates have often been surprisingly happy to concede that the free will myth blocks both social equality and social justice. Stephen J. Morse is Ferdinand Wakeman Hubbell Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania, and has for three decades been the doyen of legal compatibilists; the doyen of those who argue the law must be blind to questions of freedom of choice. Yet, according to Morse, if society were to admit that no one freely chooses their position in life it would necessitate “the wholesale reform of society” (1976, p.1257) and “massive social reforms” (p.1261), “a massive redistribution of wealth” and “social engineering… inconsistent with our system” (1976a, p.1276). Morse tells us that those who wish to query the law’s position on free choice are motivated by the desire for “a truly egalitarian democracy” (1976, p.1260), and wish for social reforms “not compatible with a [economically] libertarian and capitalist society” (p.1261). All of which raises the question: under our self-fuelling belief system is poverty less accident than inherent design?
What causes poverty and social and economic misfortune? In every sense it is being dealt a bad hand. Perhaps it is being dealt a bad biological hand but often it is being dealt a bad environmental hand. In a world without free will luck swallows everything, but now we have a system that feeds on itself and legitimises and enhances suffering at the bottom, while privileging those at the top. So what are we to make of platforms that suppress or dissemble over knowledge of what causes poverty and social inequality? Surely, if you refuse to fully recognise what causes poverty – nothing more than a poor biological and, more pertinently, poor environmental hand – you make combating poverty and social exclusion more difficult. We, the fortunate and influential, create the conditions that allow poverty to continue to exist. Then we, the fortunate and influential, create and sustain the public myth that excuses our turning of a blind eye towards that poverty. We continue to run our social systems, including our responses to poverty, from “within limits we take care not to examine too closely”, as the philosopher Dan Dennett puts it (1984, p.164). Free will is a belief that hurts the poor and acts to advantage the rich and powerful. It is crass not to recognise the unfair advantage the myth of free will may be giving to some segments of society, very much at the expense of others.
It was the free will compatibilist Dan Dennett who told us (2012) that his work examines – and, by extension, justifies – all social and economic outcomes: from deprived childhoods to privileged childhoods; from good fortune to bad fortune. It was the free will libertarians Roy Baumeister and Andrew Vonasch (2013) who admitted that people with higher belief in free will saw personal choice as a cause of poverty and felt little sympathy for those seemingly unable to climb out of poverty. Dennett advances the paradigm that we need feel little sympathy for those we naively label the less fortunate because we all get approximately the same breaks in life, and luck averages out in the long run. Gary Watson advances the slightly different social equality argument that “we” all get approximately the same breaks in life because we need not consider that other form of human which just might have received fewer breaks in life.
“Dennett does not argue that our moral responsibility system is fair; rather, it is fair enough… Dennett seems comfortable with ‘fair enough’, and he can champion such a system and not blink” (Bruce Waller, 2012).
It is the winners, not the losers, who invent the meta-ethical rationales that end up justifying – whatever the original intent – the winners’ good fortune and enhanced social position, and not just others’ misfortune and social exclusion. It is the winners, not the losers, who see personal choice as a cause of poverty; who argue against luck and for there being two forms of human; who advance arguments that “there is room for the thought” that the lucky can take credit for not having been born with club feet and that the unlucky are to blame for having been born with club feet. It is the winners, not the losers, who can settle for “fair enough” rather than fair. The winners here get to write not only the history books but the philosophical and theological primers that define the very terms equality, freedom, opportunity, and fairness; all of which you would have thought runs directly counter to our expressed values. The injunction Do unto others as you would have them do unto you has been known as the Golden Rule since the seventeenth century, although the ethic goes back much further than this. Often seen as inseparable from Christianity, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is a maxim that dates back well over two and a half thousand years. Even Confucianism, frequently regarded as more storytelling and homily than a form of virtue ethics (and sometimes seemingly a system promoting obedience to one’s social betters) still grounds such obedience in virtue. Rulers, said Confucius, will be obeyed to the extent they govern with virtue, and central to such virtue was how rulers treat their underlings. When Confucius was asked by Tzu-kung whether there was a single word that could be a guide to conduct throughout life, for rulers and the ruled, Confucius replied “shu” (reciprocity): do not impose on others what you would not desire to have imposed on yourself (c.5th BC/1979, p.135). And Do unto others is a maxim central to Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and Islam. It is even apparently found within Scientology, and the teachings of L. Ron Hubbard. The idea of Do unto others is and always has been central to philosophical concepts of virtue. “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction”, the first formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative famously states. In other words: don’t do unto others except as you would have them do unto you. And while Kant was deeply influenced by Christianity, the same ethic becomes central to secular moral philosophy, such as when in the twentieth century John Rawls (re)introduced into philosophy the concept of behind-the-veil.
Under Rawls’s analysis a system could be fair if all players were forced to wager from behind the veil of ignorance, not knowing where they would start from. It is a lot easier to argue, as does semi-compatibilism, that there is no duty to be fair to the less fortunate when one is guaranteed of not being among their number. Human nature will push most to urge consideration of the less fortunate if there is a chance they may end up as part of the less fortunate. Hence the purpose of behind-the-veil thinking is to promote real consideration of all positions and points of view, given a lack of knowledge of where one will start. The practical problem, of course, is that we can rarely have such a system, and never in the free will debates. In the free will debates we never start from behind the veil: we always start from different positions of knowledge and power, and therefore many are unlikely to consider fairness from all points of view, specifically when considering fairness from the point of view of the less fortunate. Life’s winners, including most senior philosophers, have little incentive to buy into the fairness of behind-the-veil consideration, or even an ethic like Do unto others, as they already know they start ahead. They already know whether, to quote Dennett, they were “given a head start or held back at the starting line”. They already know that no one can do unto them as they would do unto others.
Within cognitive theory and social psychology there is at present much research into empathy, and our empathic responses to one another. While a very tiny group of humans seem to lack empathic responses entirely – we will later be mentioning research into psychopathy by investigators such as Paul Babiak and Jim Fallon – and a larger group have diminished empathic responses often linked to abusive upbringings, a very common problem found in human groups is where the empathy “gap” is partial and situational. Religions and political ideologies are particularly good at switching off normal empathic responses in specific circumstances (promoting feelings of contempt towards a particular targeted out-group, which drowns out the possibility of empathy). A situational lack of empathy is arguably one of the problems besetting the free will debates and can be seen to exist across a number of the traditions – particularly, perhaps, compatibilism and semi-compatibilism. Hence Gary Watson tells us that the suffering very often endured in childhood by those who go on to lead lives of violence “gives a foothold not only for sympathy, but for the thought that if I had been subjected to such circumstances, I might well have become as vile… This thought induces not only an ontological shudder, but a sense of equality with the other” (2004, p.245). Watson tells us that sympathy, along with outrage, is the appropriate emotional and moral response, and that justice demands that we simultaneously view with sympathy and outrage – “the sympathy toward the boy he was is at odds with outrage toward the man he is… each of these responses is appropriate… Harris both satisfies and violates the criteria of victimhood” (p.244). Yet despite informing us of our binary emotional and moral duty Watson then completely discounts the empathic duty. He tells us that “unless one knew Harris as a child or keeps his earlier self vividly in mind, sympathy can scarcely find a purchase” (p.245). But this does not abrogate the moral duty to feel sympathy, any more than it abrogates the Western law’s duty to recognise the offender’s status as victim when passing sentence (something it manifestly refuses to do). Watson admits that he has the moral duty to temper outrage with sympathy, but he makes a conscious decision to abandon sympathy (empathy) for pure outrage. Watson is behaving partially, even under his own analysis.
We have seen that essentialists like Gary Watson refuse to treat the offender with the consideration – the ideals of fair play – that they claim for themselves. We have also seen that essentialism is almost certainly not right where it describes the offender as a different form of human. It shouldn’t take much to convince us that essentialists, often descended from those settlers that the Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn termed America’s barbarous white savages, could once have been induced to commit every atrocity – torture, mutilation, rape, murder – committed by the most shocking serial killer or putative example of that not-so-perfect form of human. It is also not true that it is the offender who “managed to turn himself into a monster” (Dennett), or that the offender “could have acted differently” (Jonathan Jacobs). We need have no particular compassion for the offender to be able to accept that he must still receive the same basic levels of fair play and consideration that we claim for ourselves, and that he has the right not to have people tell untruths about him, just as we demand that people not tell untruths about us. If nothing else, when we refuse him fair treatment – when we refuse to tell the truth about him – it says something deeply worrying and morally unattractive about the rest of us: we, the supposedly perfect form of human. The absence of empathy for others’ misfortunes – biological and environmental – is overwhelming within the free will debates. We have already cited the work of the philosopher Richard Double, who has identified what he calls the moral hardness of free will libertarians: their unwavering faith in the righteousness of their worldview no matter the lack of any objective evidence and the pain caused to others. Surely, though, such a judgement of moral hardness – including an absence of empathy or even basic respect for truth, equality of opportunity or fair play – must apply equally to compatibilism, semi-compatibilism, attitudinism, and even free will illusionism? I have already mentioned that I find Dennett’s “tough love” excuse for his not-fair-but-fair-enough stance both unconvincing and insincere, with little evidence of even the most basic consideration of others, and an outright refusal to acknowledge his own great good fortune and privileged background or the far greater misfortune of others.
A diminution of empathy and an indifference to cruelty are not the same thing – but they can be linked, perhaps particularly when such diminution of empathy appears ideological in origin. It is important to acknowledge here that even those with a profound biological deficiency in empathy are often still capable of being both kind and highly moral. Cambridge University’s Simon Baron-Cohen, one of the world authorities on autism, notes that this is the case for some people with autism and Asperger’s, which generally involves diminished empathy. Ritual, rule following, and concepts of fairness are often deeply important in the confusing world that presents itself to those who suffer from these tragic disorders. Returning, though, to our main subject, it has long been recognised within Christian doctrine that the just infliction of suffering becomes very problematic with the absence of freedom of choice. As the great sixteenth-century theologian Erasmus put it, “Why, you ask, is anything attributed to the freedom of the will, then? It is… to prevent calumnies attributing cruelty and injustice to God” (1524, p.93). In other words God could inflict suffering given the existence of free will, but God would appear barbaric (cruel and unjust) if He maintained the torments of Hell in the absence of free will. Just suffering presupposes freedom of choice. Yet the problem remains that Western social and judicial systems often seem to glory in the infliction of degradation, humiliation, and suffering, and in the palpable absence of freedom of choice. Poverty relief is still regularly tied to the denigration and the humiliation of the poor, almost as it was a few hundred years ago, when those receiving poor relief were first badged to mark them off from normal society, and suffering plays a primary role in the Anglo-American penal systems. Yale’s Dan Kahan states clearly that the infliction of degradation and suffering on offenders is a major goal of the US penal system, but Kahan is not decrying such a state of affairs: he is a utilitarian who openly celebrates the contempt and violence of the US prison experience. As Kahan writes, “by inflicting countless other indignities – from exposure to the view of others when urinating and defecating to rape at the hand of other inmates – prison unambiguously marks the lowness of those we consign to it” (Kahan, 1998, p.1642). Mark Kappelhoff of the American Civil Liberties Union has referred to the current enthusiasm for shaming punishments as “gratuitous humiliation of the individual” (see Book, 1999, p.655), while the criminologist Dan Markel has noted that public shaming is designed to humiliate and degrade an offender in public (2007).
Due to decades of indifference (and even quiet encouragement by the authorities) rape is now an epidemic within the US prison system. The legal theorist Anders Kaye at the Thomas Jefferson School of Law – and who has himself tied belief in free choice to both anti-egalitarianism and enhanced suffering – quotes David Siegal’s Stanford Law Review paper on rape in prison and AIDS. “In 1974 it was estimated that of the forty-six million Americans who will be arrested at some time in their lives, ten million will be raped while in prison” (2007, p.416), which would mean that you are many hundreds of times more likely to be raped when incarcerated within the American prison system than you would be outside its walls. Prison rape is such an epidemic that President G.W. Bush was forced to convene a commission to try to stamp it out. According to surveys from both the federally-convened National Prison Rape Elimination Commission and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS, an agency within the Justice Department) a large proportion of the rapes are perpetrated by corrections staff, particularly against women, gay men, juvenile offenders, the mentally ill, the physically small, and those new to life behind bars. In fact some of the most recent BJS reports covering both adults and juveniles (3rd edition NIS, 2nd edition NYSC) conclude that the majority of sexual abuse is committed by corrections staff, and that this is particularly the case within juvenile facilities. Challenging another stereotype, boys are also more likely to be raped by female staff than they are by male staff. All those jokes about dropping the soap in the showers should really become jokes about American taxpayers eager to fund paedophilia and the rape of children. “Americans now recognize sexual abuse as a violent crime with life-changing consequences. Yet the public has been slow to incorporate that perspective into its understanding of sexual violence in correctional environments. Many still consider sexual abuse an expected consequence of incarceration, part of the penalty” (NPREC, 2009, p.25).
The above does not prove that belief in free choice drives these human behaviours of torture, rape, and cruelty but Jasmine Carey has, as noted, provided empirical evidence that belief in free will leads to harsher and more brutal punishment (Carey, 2009). Free will libertarian social psychologists openly admit that reductions in the capacity for free choice, including whether the rule-breaker could have acted differently, “constitute valid reasons for reduced punishment” (Baumeister et al., 2009, p.260). There is an entire philosophical tradition, the reactive-attitudinism of P.F. Strawson, which takes it as read that we need to maintain belief in free choice in order to maintain blame and justifications for suffering. The fear of the reactive-attitudinists that loss of belief in free will means a loss of justified suffering seems supported when Shariff, Baumeister, and Clark claim to have demonstrated that countries with higher beliefs in free will have both higher rates of incarceration and a greater appetite for violent retributive punishment (Shariff et al., in press).
“Consider the biography of any ‘self-made’ man, and you will find that his success was entirely dependent on background conditions that he did not make and of which he was merely the beneficiary… And yet, living in America, one gets the distinct sense that if certain conservatives were asked why they weren’t born with club feet or orphaned before the age of five, they would not hesitate to take credit for these accomplishments.” (Harris, 2012, pp.61-2).
Belief in free will means never having to say “Thank you”; means never having to acknowledge your own great good fortune, or the far greater misfortune of others. In a world that reduces to nothing more than biology and environment you can axiomatically have no “self-made” men: all successful men and women are the product of the biological gifts they inherited and the privileged environments they were born into and raised within. Even if you have struggled to make the most of what nature has given you, says the neuroscientist and anti-free will campaigner Sam Harris, you must still admit that your ability and inclination to struggle is part of your inheritance. How much credit does a person deserve for not being lazy? None at all, Harris notes. While it is right to encourage people to not be lazy, and right to discourage laziness, it is morally wrong to blame a person for their laziness when the blind lottery of biology and environment is all that separates the diligent from the indolent. The philosopher Bruce Waller makes similar observations, including how philosophers often overlook this and overwhelmingly fail to point it out. “Typically, we started with advantages – very early childhood education, strong family support – that resulted in more early rewards, and that pattern of reinforcement shaped strong work habits” (2011, p.139). And it is not surprising, says Waller, that those who were nurtured by the moral responsibility system, and who have been very well rewarded by that system, would be outraged by those who wish to look a little more closely at the system and explain that philosophers can actually claim no credit for their strong work ethic.
As the free will illusionist Saul Smilansky has recognised, the hard determinist understanding promotes a sense of equality, a sense of empathy with the less fortunate, and a sense of gratitude for one’s privileged position in life: “Realization of the lack of libertarian free will can check harmful forms of feelings of superiority, for this realization presents the anti-luck ‘here but for the grace of God’ thought overwhelmingly” (1997, p.95). Yet this unwillingness to acknowledge the role that luck plays in life is a siren call to almost all, perhaps for very defensive reasons and no matter the harm it does to the less fortunate. When one fully internalises the understanding that everything in life comes down to biology and environment, and that we can probably expect little help from biology, one faces some disturbing home truths. Abraham Lincoln, that great determinist and critic of the doctrine of free will, once said that Northerners couldn’t feel too morally superior to Southern slaveholders because “if we were situated as they are, we should act and feel as they do; and if they were situated as we are, they should act and feel as we do; and we never ought to lose sight of this fact in discussing the subject” (Guelzo 2009, p.39). Similarly, Bruce Waller has noted that given his Southern Baptist upbringing and deep respect for figures of authority he could easily see a younger version of himself as an obedient tormentor in Stanley Milgram’s famous psychological experiment, or even as a Nazi prison guard or Abu Ghraib torturer (2011, p.161). Yet such honest self-appraisal is rare among both lay people and philosophers, with the latter (especially) having a tendency to conceit and a feeling that they can do – and always could have done – everything better than everybody else. Philosophers hold privileged and very comfortable positions in society: “we like to think we justly deserve those special benefits; we’ve accomplished much, and we are delighted to claim credit for it” (Waller 2011, p.307).
In Neil Levy’s phrase (2001), advocates of free will and moral responsibility inflict a “double dose of unfairness” on the less fortunate, while simultaneously “double dipping” on reward when we are not only lucky enough to benefit from great good fortune but we seek to claim that such good fortune was somehow always due us. For reasons we have examined we can exempt hard compatibilism from second stage opprobrium, yet the other five free will apologist traditions – libertarianism, compatibilism, illusionism, reactive-attitudinism, and semi-compatibilism – either unconsciously or consciously act to bring about both the first and second doses of unfairness. It is one thing to be indifferent to the problems of the less fortunate, as each of hard compatibilism and the five other traditions mentioned tend to be. But morally it is quite another thing to then seek to blame the problems of the less fortunate on the less fortunate – the second dose of unfairness that Levy refers to. In ethical language it somewhat parallels the distinction between what is called the sin of omission and the sin of commission: the distinction between those whose only sin is failure to stop an act and those whose deeper sin is the commissioning of the act. In another sense it is perhaps the difference between refusing to work in a soup kitchen and standing outside the soup kitchen jeering at and ridiculing the unfortunates who need to use the kitchen to survive.
There is something deeply nasty in that second dose of unfairness, which may at least be avoided in the first dose of unfairness. While belief in free will means never having to acknowledge your own great good fortune or the greater misfortune of others, belief in free will also means ingratitude in a further, even nastier sense, when it encompasses acting to enhance and extend that very misfortune to others. Indeed, Levy may be underselling his case. Both Bruce Waller and the author have shown that the conceit of free will and moral responsibility in a universe without freedom of choice has had a multitude of negative effects, including the lack of genuine opportunity for large segments of society and a meaner support system for the least fortunate. As Bruce Waller argues, it is in large part thanks to the myth of free choice and moral responsibility that most children born into poverty in the United States will die in poverty, with few real opportunities for social or economic advancement. The first dose of unfairness is therefore the unfairness of poor initial developmental luck. The second dose of unfairness is the unfairness of claiming that the person was somehow responsible for their first dose of unfairness, or at the very least that blame and suffering are their just deserts. But a third dose of unfairness is that this same conceit is then invoked so as to widen social inequalities: to deny opportunity to the next generation, to make developmental conditions still worse for the rest in poverty or want, and to actually drive many others into poverty and want. The third dose of unfairness is where the logical outcome is that the net worth of the top 1% of households ends up accounting for more than the net worth of the bottom 95% of households put together. This is not just refusing to work in the soup kitchen; this is not even jeering at those using the soup kitchen; this is deliberately acting to expand the very need for soup kitchens in the first place.
There is something deeply hypocritical about our attitude to misfortune and, in particular, victimhood. Where there is no free will, human behaviour is the product of the interaction of biology and environment. Let us assume, to simplify the lesson, that most antisocial behaviour is the product of poor environment. We shall later be considering rare traits, such as psychopathy, that may have a significant biological component, but even with psychopathy the evidence seems to be that poor upbringing is key to triggering extreme violence and self-destruction. For the moment, though, and for convenience, let us assume a model where antisocial behaviour is the result purely of toxic environment (which will allow us to ignore the extra complication of biology). This assumed, we start to see something very strange when it comes to our understanding of victimhood in a world without free will. As a population we in the West seem to have considerable sympathy for victims, with powerful victims’ rights groups, political and tabloid press lobbying, and so on. However, this sympathy seems to disappear the more they become victims. In other words, we have great sympathy for people who are often moderately victimised, but very little sympathy for many (although not all) people who are completely victimised.
In our world without free will, and where antisocial behaviour is hypothesised as largely the product of environment, let us take a character who has been 40% abused, recognising that such percentages are wholly artificial but are being invoked purely to make a point about how we feel empathy with some victims but not others. This is the traditional surviving or escaped victim, whom we tend to feel huge sympathy for. But as 40% of the environment is abusive, this person still lives in a world that is 60% non-abusive. As the psychological profiler Paul Britton told us earlier, this person comes from a pretty bad start – say very poor parents – but still has grandparents to turn to, teachers who help him/her escape, and so on. We consider these people victims when they receive a lesser amount of abuse. (Asserting lesser is meant in no way to downplay their suffering, but is only contrasted to highlight our blindness to even greater suffering.) So what happens when these people, and particularly children, receive far more abuse? We know they receive more abuse because in a world without free will – where behaviour comes down solely (for this hypothesis) to environment – they are the ones who weren’t brought back into the fold; weren’t lucky enough to get those other options of fine grandparents and excellent teachers. They are, self-evidently, the ones in the 100% abusive environments (bad parents, bad grandparents, bad teachers, useless priests), not the 40% abusive environment (bad parents, good grandparents, good teachers, good priest or social worker). They axiomatically had to be 100% abused because they didn’t get any of the ameliorating factors that would have turned their lives around, would have set them on a better path – and we know this because their lives didn’t turn around. The others at least benefited from some crucial ameliorating factors and so cannot be said to have been raised in as abusive – as toxic – environments, at least in our hypothetical situation which ignores biology for the moment. Recall the serial killer Robert Harris, who as a child was tortured by his sadistic father, hated by his mother, bullied by merciless classmates, then repeatedly raped from the age of fourteen in an American prison for children. By anyone’s reckoning this is as close to a 100% abusive upbringing as you are likely to read about, yet the philosopher Gary Watson feels troubled at his (brief) sense of equality with Harris, his “ontological shudder” and brief feeling that he might have turned out like this had his life been a lot less privileged than it was. Michael McKenna, in contrast, refuses to dwell on the thought that he might have turned out differently, refuses to dwell on the pure luck of biology and upbringing (“the ontological shudder which Watson alludes to has little force”; 2008, p.216). For Harris there were no good grandparents to offset the despicable parents, and although his siblings did feel for their brother they were too terrified of their monster of a father to intervene. For Harris there were nothing but worthless teachers who did not bring the bullying to an end. This was no movie of the week where the priest and the social worker stop the rape and get the warden fired, yet now our sympathy has fallen to zero. We feel sympathy for the 40% abused child, but not the 100% abused child who has already turned, to use Watson’s term, “vile”. So let us not pretend that we support victims per se. We generally only support victims who were lucky enough to be only partly victimised.
It is emphatically not that we recognise they are victims who have been so extremely and relentlessly victimised they have been turned into dangerous beings: instead we tend to refuse to accept they are victims in any way, shape, or form. They are instead, according to essentialism, now another form of human. As Gary Watson writes, when mentioning the early life story of Robert Harris, “the sympathy toward the boy he was is at odds with outrage toward the man he is… each of these responses is appropriate… Harris both satisfies and violates the criteria of victimhood”, and “an overall view simultaneously demands and precludes regarding him as a victim” (2004, p.244). The morally key words here are “violates” and “precludes”. We view victimhood, according to Watson, as digital, not analogue. Violates does not mean that we reduce, water down: that we balance out our sympathy. Precludes means that he has now lost any right to our sympathy or the considerations we still expect, including for people to tell the truth about us. Sympathy, for Watson, is either on or off: digital, not analogue. There is a clear admission from Watson that at some level justice demands that we recognise the victimhood of the offender, because such offenders meet the criteria necessary to be regarded as victims, but at the same time there is the admission that Watson, and most of the public, refuse to view the serious offender as a victim. When offenders (or the poor) are seen as not like us, it doesn’t matter how much they have been victimised (beaten, hated, bullied, and raped): we completely and deliberately close our eyes to the fact that they too are victims. Indeed, close our eyes to the fact that it was such victimisation that wholly turned them into what we despise – because we shall see later the evidence that even with the most biologically atypical, destructive behaviour almost always requires an environmental trigger. In order to convince ourselves that they are not like us, or that our children could never have been raised to be like that, we tell ourselves stories that are almost certainly completely false. We indulge in the essentialist myths: myths that try to convince us that we never could have been like them, and even that they could never have been like us.
We have already seen Jasmine Carey’s study linking belief in unrestrained free will to strong belief in a just world. Just–world beliefs have been extensively studied by psychologists and are sometimes known under the abbreviation BJW – belief in a just world – which means that adherents don’t believe the world should be just but instead that the world around them – and contrary to much of the available evidence – already is just. BJW may seem a very strange mindset to many readers but there are well-known psychological triggers to this quite widespread belief, only some of which revolve around religion and the need to believe in a just God having designed a just world. But Bruce Waller (2015) goes further when he discusses five of the many academic studies which have demonstrated that the more people subscribe to BJW – the more they believe the world is just – then the more they tend to blame victims. The logic is quite unsurprising, and quite vile. When you believe the world is just because, for example, your religion relentlessly tells you it is so, then you will bend over backwards to try to “prove” the world is just by airbrushing victims out of the picture. Hence people begin to believe that the poor deserve their fate, because God’s world wouldn’t be just if they didn’t deserve to be in such awful poverty – and so, as Carey and Baumeister both found – they must largely have chosen to be poor of their own free will. Non-religious BJW includes what psychologists term biological essentialism, which incorporates the finding that economically and socially successful individuals are often motivated to seek genetic justifications for their elevated social positions in order to avoid feeling sympathy for the less fortunate, and to excuse their society as just and fair. Biological essentialism has been well studied, particularly in America, though also within the Indian caste system, with one finding being that such essentialists were more likely to display prejudice against out-groups and low-status minority groups (research summarised and extended in Kraus & Keltner, 2013). Integrity really does demand that we stop this quite hypocritical talk about victims’ rights and recognise that we are interested only in the rights of certain victims: victims who are like us, or those whom we allow ourselves to consider that we might have been like. We touched on an associated hypocrisy earlier when we considered P.F. Strawson’s “offended parties” (2008, p.21/62): we argued that in a world without origination and choice there is a deep ontological problem with simplistically and capriciously dividing the world into the offenders and the offended-against. The author also made the further observation that if violent retribution and delight in the suffering of others is both moral and a reassuring virtue it is not immediately obvious why P.F. Strawson, Dan Dennett, and Saul Smilansky couldn’t legitimately be turned into hamburger by those degraded and unjustly treated under their professional prescriptions.
A story comes to us through Aristotle that Thales of Miletus, the first recognised philosopher and one of the Seven Sages, got so fed up with his compatriots asking what was the point of brilliance if you don’t have two towels to rub together that he decided to shut them up once and for all. Hence he turned to forecasting the long-term weather, bought up all the olive presses he could find, and made a killing on an otherwise-unexpected bumper olive harvest. The point was, according to Aristotle, that Thales was proving that philosophers could be rich, influential, and powerful if they but wanted to be. It is just they can’t be bothered, as theirs is a higher and more noble calling. But the sentiment behind this story is complete rubbish. It takes a very different set of skills to be exceptional in business or good on the financial and commodity markets, skills which the vast majority of philosophers do not possess. It takes, for example, interpersonal skills, the ability to sell yourself and a product, the willingness to take risks, a memory for people and minutiae, and (perhaps above all) a certain hunger for economic success. Philosophers become philosophers at least in part because they don’t possess these characteristics, but they do possess intellect and an aversion to heavy lifting, and were beneficiaries of stability, relative wealth, and expensive educations. And yet to this day most philosophers would believe Aristotle’s story of Thales, and feel that they could be millionaires or top politicians if they but bothered and that – similarly, and again largely incorrectly – their native intellect alone would have saved them from ever having been one of Milgram’s unquestioning tormentors, or a Southern slaveholder, or one of Zimbardo’s swaggering teenage brutalisers or cowering victims. Philosophers, these keepers of the ethical keys, all too often lack self-awareness while nonetheless possessing a surfeit of conceit – even up to the belief that they were, in Gary Watson’s argument, “fated” to succeed in life. They regularly evince little gratitude for their comfortable backgrounds, their involved parents, and their good educations. Philosophers show little willingness to display human fellow-feeling, or “a sense of equality with the other”, nor to recognise that others very often are not as blessed as them, nor the vast role that luck, contingency, chance, and privilege play in human life.