Good guys and bad guys

When decisions to perform actions appear to be taken after the actions have already started, it’s no longer right to say that we decide to act. This is the conclusion drawn by many philosophers from Libet’s experiment discussed in my blog last week. However, I contended that, although we cannot say that we decided to act at the moment we started to perform the action, it is still possible that the decision to act then and there has been taken some time before the action concerned took place. Nonetheless, Libet’s experiment and other research made Wegner and others conclude that there is no free will. What we call a decision is only a kind of confabulation that fits the action. Actually it is so then that an action determines the decision to act and not the other way round.

But let’s suppose that my view is false and that there is no free will. Indeed, it is so that many of our actions aren’t really free, because they are determined, for instance, by our character or our physical constitution. For example, our character may change after a stroke or a severe damage of the brain caused by an accident. Sometimes it seems then as if the victim has become another person. Maybe it is not so that a stroke or brain injury directly determines our individual actions (which are, for instance, also dependent on the situation we act in and on the options we have), but they determine at least the range of actions we choose from. An illness that affects the brain can change a decent man into a sexual pervert. Considerations like these made Stijn Bruers remark in his book on moral illusions that, if there is no free will, then maybe we are simply destined to follow moral rules or to interfere when we see something bad happening. This raises the question, however, whether there still is room for ethics. For if there is no free will but people simply do, does valuing and judging actions and so punishing crime and other bad actions still has sense? According to Bruers, yes it has. Let’s see why he thinks so. However, before I go on, I must say that many philosophers who think that there is no free will, argue in the same way, and I discuss just Bruers’s view only in order to make my point clear.

In the end, all crime finds its cause in the brain, so Bruers, and one cannot punish a person for that, for it is nobody’s fault that his brain is structured in a certain way. Nevertheless, some kinds of punishing can make sense, if they influence a criminal that way that they discourage criminal behaviour. For often brains are made up thus that they tend to avoid bad behaviour if it is followed by punishment. Therefore it is useful to punish criminals in order to re-educate them, so that they don’t relapse into criminal activity. Likewise rewarding good behaviour makes also sense, albeit just because it stimulates pleasant feelings. So ethics doesn’t need a free will, as long its aim is to stimulate good behaviour, so Bruers. Metaphorically we need to see criminal behaviour like a kind of illness: dangerous behaviour that happens to a person and that needs to be cured, if possible. The administration of justice is then a kind of health care. Of course, in trying to cure a criminal, we have to follow the latest insights of neuroscience and psychology.

So far so good, and if there is no free will, it seems that the best we can do (and also the best we must do) is a kind of criminal justice based on the view just expounded. Nevertheless, to my mind there is a problem with such a reasoning: With the exception of a short remark  – “maybe we are simply destined to follow moral rules or to interfere when we see something bad happening”; see above – the reasoning leaves out the practitioner, i.e. the therapist who treats the criminal. But isn’t this practitioner in the same way the victim of his brains as the criminal is? The only difference is that the practitioner is on the good side, while the criminal is on the bad side. Then, just as a criminal commits a crime, simply because he “has to”, also the therapist treats the criminal just because he has to. In the no-free-will scenario it cannot be that the practitioner chooses a method to treat a criminal: His brain determines him to do so. In other words, who manipulates the manipulator? Brains that are brain mechanisms meet other brain mechanisms. Some tend to be on the good side and others on the bad side. There are good guys and there are bad guys, but it’s all determined and there is no ethics. The view that there is no free will leads to the view that the whole world is a complicated machinery of interacting mechanisms. A subpart of this world is the human world, consisting of interacting human mechanisms called men. In this world there is no sense; there is no meaning; there is no ethics. Maybe this is really the world we live in. I’ll no deny that it’s possible. However, if free will is an illusion, it is also an illusion that we can guide, steer or manipulate the behaviour of others. Everything simply happens.

Reference

Stijn Bruers, Morele Illusies. Antwerpen: Houtekiet 2017; pp. 66-71.