Posts Tagged ‘moral luck’
Pinker on free will, and more about myself
I’m still feeling anger, after all these years, at the free will proponents who, I feel, have benefitted from a cushy upbringing and have no idea what it’s like to have had nothing like the opportunities they’ve had. Of course, it’s always a worry that we can just attribute our relative failure to that lack of opportunity, but facts are facts, and it’s simply a fact that our macro world is determined.
And so to Steven Pinker, who, in his 2002 book The blank slate, ventured a few remarks on free will. I’ve written about Pinker before, and I consider it amusing to compare my life with his. We were both born in the mid 1950s’ – he’s a bit older – but that’s just about where the similarities come to an end (though I, too, have quite a big personal library – just saying). On the free will issue, I’d be inclined to make the small point, and I think Sapolsky makes it too, that successful career people would be more inclined to believe in free will than more or less abject failures – which of course isn’t saying anything about me.
Chapter 10 of The blank slate is titled ‘The fear of determinism’, and in it he starts looking at determinism from what I would call the wrong end – what he calls ‘molecules in motion’. My own thinking on this always starts from ‘thrown-ness into the world’, at an unchosen time and place, and as an unchosen living specimen. From there we get to our own parentage, our genes and our pre-natal and antenatal development, and their epigenetic effects.
Pinker also jumps quickly into the confusion I always find when I speak to people about this topic – that between determinism and predeterminism/fatalism:
‘All our brooding and agonising over the right thing to do is pointless, it would seem, because everything has already been preordained by the state of our brains’.
Pinker highlights the fear of determinism for a reason, claiming that ‘it is the existential fear of determinism that is the real waste of time’, though it seems to me that few people suffer such fear – and this appears to be borne out by experimental evidence. When we’re primed by tricky lab-coated types to reflect on ‘victims of circumstance’, there is an effect, but it appears to be minimal and short-term.
Of course, it isn’t the fear of determinism that concerns me, but the lack of acknowledgment of its factual basis. Pinker goes on a long and rather facile discourse about lawyers, medicos and neurologists seeking to get wrong-doers off the hook on the basis of defective genes and/or brain processes. Note that Sapolsky admits to having offered his services in this way, generally to no avail. I would note, just in passing, that the USA has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the WEIRD world, by a huge margin. It’s the land of free will after all. No excuses.
Some of Pinker’s ‘analyses’ here really miss the mark badly. For example, he references Dennett, who…
points out that the last thing we want in a soul is freedom to do anything it desires. If behaviour 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 behaviour….
And so on. But this is obvious bullshit – even if you fully believed in free will, the threat of imprisonment would be a massive deterrent, especially given the horrific private prisons of the US. And so would the opprobrium directed at you for your wrong-doing, given that we’re the most socially constructed mammalian species on the planet. Others’ opinions of us massively matter. Free will doesn’t preclude a sense of right and wrong. It should also be obvious that we are determined, by evolution, to survive and thrive as best we can – so in a world of severe punishments, such as exists in the USA, we’ll obviously be determined to avoid such punishments as best we can, even given a deprived background or a shrunken amygdala.
But where Pinker goes wrong in a way that is, to me, more offensive, is in his mockery of what he calls environmental determinism. It’s the typical upper middle class response, I must say:
The most risible pretexts for bad behaviour in recent decades have come not from biological determinism but from environmental determinism: the abuse excuse, the Twinkie defence, black rage, pornography poisoning, societal sickness, media violence, rock lyrics, and different cultural mores….
This little parade of glibness doesn’t, of course, begin to address any real issues. Firstly, there’s little real difference between biological and environmental determinism. Our biology evolves in adaptation to changing environments, as every evolutionary biologist knows, and, to be fair to Pinker, there has been a revolution in our understanding of environmentally-induced gene expression (epigenetics) in the two decades since The blank slate was published. Even so, my experience of growing up in a profoundly working-class environment, in which classroom illiteracy was commonplace, as well as vandalism, neglect and police harassment, makes me flare up when I hear the life-shattering experiences of kids in the street where I lived being dismissed in terms of ‘the abuse excuse’. I also note that in mocking these ‘excuses’ his target is invariably the lawyers (his own class) that bring these claims, rather than the accused themselves, about who’s background he appears to be indifferent. It’s the same clubbish elitism that I found in the dated Berofsky collection I re-read recently, but more focussed on law than philosophy.
Another of the irritations I found in revisiting Pinker’s determinism-free will piece, is that he focusses almost exclusively on crime, ignoring the much larger issues of lives lived in struggle because of determining forces beyond their control – a Palestinian in modern Israel, a woman in Afghanistan, a Dalit in India, an Australian Aboriginal at the time of the British colonisation of that island, a Jew growing up in Germany in the 1930s, the Tainos visited by the Spanish horror in the late 15th and 16th centuries, the Scots massacred in the reign of Edward I, the East Timorese massacred by Indonesian forces, the isolated old women burned as witches… millions of people who found themselves members of the wrong gender or ethnicity at the wrong time – murdered, raped, enslaved, or simply deprived of the means to live a life in which there’s some hope of an upward trajectory. None of us got to choose our ethnicity, our class (yes it does exist), our early upbringing, our parentage, even our level of intelligence, and this is so obvious, and so overwhelming a fact, that it seems to me almost embarrassing to have to point it out. And all of this is profoundly determining. That’s why reading history, as I often do, can be such an affecting experience. It is so full of innocent victims. And of course it continues….
So, finally, it isn’t the fear of determinism that should concern us – it’s the very fact of determinism.
I’ve been lucky, on balance. I was brought, as a five-year-old, to live in one of the richest and most peaceful nations in the world. I can’t praise or blame myself for this. Certain aspects of my treatment both at home and at school resulted in, for me, a fairly extreme anti-authoritarianism, and something of an over-self-reliance, which has its positives and negatives. But I benefitted from a world-full of books in our house, which took me to places of wonder outside myself. And I’ve benefitted from a nation with a strong social safety net, a minimum wage which is the highest of any nation outside of Luxembourg, a justice system that eliminated the death penalty nationwide almost 60 years ago, and a political system that was the first in the world to grant votes, and the right to stand for parliament, to women. It also rates as one of the least religious nations on earth – which for me is a godsend.
More on determinism from me, no doubt, as I plough into the second half of Sapolsky’s Determined.
References
Steven Pinker, The blank slate, 2002
Bernard Berofsky, Free will and determinism, 1963
Robert Sapolsky , Determined, 2023
why I’m not a conservative
There are many ways of answering the above question. I might state the obvious – conservatives tend to be stodgy, boring, backward-facing selfish naysayers with a limited social conscience and little interest in, if not an outright fear of, scientific and technological development. End of story.
But of course, that can’t be the whole story. We’re not as free to develop our own views as we think. I’m a product of a particular environment, a very working-class environment, though very bookish within the family. The recent Kavanaugh kerfuffle reminds me of my rough and ready high school days, though I was more often a victim than a perp. All through high school I was the smallest and probably lightest kid in my class, male or female, so I was the target of pranks, mostly ‘good-natured’. For example, on two occasions I was held out upside-down by the legs over the first-floor balustrade by my fun-loving schoolmates. Had they lost their collective grip, I suppose I would’ve dropped head-first to probable death. Yet, though I’m sure my heart-rate was well up at the time, I had a pretty strong faith in my friends – all boys of course – and their benign intentions. I never lost any sleep over it afterwards.
I’m not suggesting this was working-class hijinx – think of Eton and Harrow ragging, etc – but there was more, including stuff I’m far from proud of, as I strove to fit in with the anti-intellectual and often nihilistically violent environment around me. The quality of teaching was pretty poor, our headmaster was an outright fascist, and I was happy to be a high school drop-out at fifteen. I got occasional assembly-line work, and my spare time was spent either failing to ingratiate myself with a gang of local vandals, or reading Jane Austen or encyclopaedia entries on Isaac Newton, etc. Not to mention wanking myself silly to fantasies of any local beauty I happened to clap my eyes on. Another great solace and opening to a wider world was the wordsmith musical artists of the early seventies I obsessed over, such as Dylan, Cohen and Bowie.
So what has this to do with my politics? Well, the region of my childhood and youth was, and still is, one of the safest Labor electorates in the country (Labor, for international readers, is the party of the left here in Australia, as it is in Britain). I can’t imagine it ever going the way of the conservatives. In Australia, the urban/suburban working-class tend to vote left, while the rural working-class tend to vote right. It’s perhaps different from the USA where the working-class in general tend to vote right (though this seems to happen here in some parts, notably Queensland). This kind of pro-union us-and-them mentality, an atmosphere of both togetherness and despair, was what I breathed in as I wandered lonely as a cloud through the streets of my town. I engaged with others in petty theft and pointless vandalism, got caught and was placed on a bond, and felt self-servingly that the law was the principle weapon of the rich to beat down the poor.
In the early seventies a downturn in the economy hit our region particularly hard, and I felt it in the air of neglect and dilapidation, the family breakdowns, the beginnings of generational unemployment. I saw a neighbourhood of victims, unable to climb out of their situation, as if they’d been sold a pup and didn’t know quite who to blame.
I didn’t hang around, I moved to a bigger smoke, and a more variegated, bohemian-student world. My problems of ‘fitting in’ didn’t exactly go away, but I was becoming more reconciled to my ‘loner’ identity. And of course I was educating myself more about politics, economics and history. But always I’ve been concerned about the most vulnerable, the least advantaged, those who ‘lucked out’ in our society. This goes with my views on free will, and on nationalism. We don’t get to choose our parentage, or the where and when of our birth. I politely decline to sing songs about how wonderful and unique ‘my’ country is, because I know that if I was born in another country on the other side of the world I’d be pressured to sing songs about its splendour and specialness. I feel lucky to be a citizen of two peaceful and developed countries, just as I feel lucky to have been born a human rather than a mosquito. I feel lucky to be alive when all this new knowledge is being uncovered, in astronomy, in neurology, in palaeontology and so much else, though I feel unlucky to have been born in 1956 rather than 1996, or even later.
But the implications of this matter of luck seem to me enormous, and they’re essential to my political views. For example, they largely define my views on education, health, welfare, immigration and the justice system. To me, one of the major roles of a political state is to do its best to mitigate, for its members, the destructive effects of bad luck.
Broadly speaking, the history of politics has ever been the battle between the left and the right – patricians v plebeians, socialists v libertarians, progressives v traditionalists, Labor v Conservative, Republicans v Democrats, with independents ranged across the political spectrum. Those who want to do more for their people v those who want to let people do for themselves, and various other polarities. Of course, not all these categories are the same on each side of the v sign, which raises all sorts of questions. Where does business and capitalism fit in? What about the environmental movement? What about globalism and its detractors?
My views on many of these matters aren’t well-formulated – or I should say, in a more self-boosting way, they’re not hard and fast. However, the application of a basic rule of thumb – ‘try to reduce the effect of bad luck’, is, I think, a useful starting point. For example, a taxation system that tries to reduce disadvantage in terms of education and healthcare is important, but one that heavily reduces incentives for businesses and entrepreneurs may ultimately affect productivity and the wealth from which taxation can be drawn. At the same time it’s dangerous to fall for the line of the ‘haves’, that tax breaks for the ‘deserving rich’ will ultimately benefit all through greater employment and opportunity. The rich, I’ve noticed, like very much to keep it in the ‘family’ – gated communities being the most in-your-face symbol of the trickle-across effect.
Governing isn’t easy, especially under the constant scrutiny of vested interests – and that means everyone. One of the major difficulties I’ve noticed is that some scrutineers, e.g. the Rupert Murdochs of this world – are vastly mote powerful than others, so money and influence are always at play – and those in most need are always those who have least influence. It’s easy to lose sight of that – though many conservatives aren’t worried about that, they often see their rich supporters as a natural elite, and the strengthening of that elite as their natural duty in government.
I know this is a bitsy sort of essay – I don’t have an ideology as such, but I do have some strong views, against ideology and for pragmatism, against adversarialism and for collaboration, against realpolitik and nationalism and for the more voiceless and lucked out members of our species – often the victims of realpolitik. I’m also for the progress of science and technology against the fearful or dismissive or wilfully ignorant naysayers. I know I’ve just contradicted myself, seemingly, in speaking for collaboration and then couching issues in for/against terms, but of course you must have core beliefs to bring to a negotiation, which you can present for consideration while considering and questioning the views of the opposition, as they question yours. And those who aren’t prepared to listen – and I can name quite a few – shouldn’t be allowed at the table.
I like the approach of Aristotle – first you work out your ethics (the particular or individual) then apply it to politics, the general. Of course, the first thing to note, as you try to work out what you should do, is that it must be in relation to others, the general. Without that ‘general’, which is life itself, not just humanity, as natural selection has taught us, we individuals wouldn’t be here. So the relationship between the individual and the general is necessarily dialectical, but it starts off with that personal question. And there is always that tension, for progressives – those who believe in pushing forward not yearning backward – between that forward movement and responsibility for the luckless strugglers, those so easily left behind. It makes for a very difficult task for those well-meaning politicians I admire. Scientific, technological and intellectual progress is happening at a more rapid clip than ever before, but it’s spreading the spectrum ever wider, not just between the haves and have nots, but between attitudes towards and against that progress, between adoring enthusiasm and hate-filled fear.
So. I’m not a conservative. I want to embrace the future, to help make it happen. I want it to improve the lot of the majority, especially of those whose lot needs most improving, so that they can share in enthusiasm for the future. I want women to rule the majority of the world, because I believe this would improve humanity, and the world. I want to avoid warfare as much as humanly possible, because the costs are always borne by those who can least afford them. I want to challenge the power of self-serving elites, and to shake their complacency. I want people to think about and recognise the consequences of their actions – especially those with power over others. The future will happen, and we can choose to face forward, and put our hands to those shaky and complicated controls, or to look away and pretend it’s not happening. It’s not much of a choice really.