Exotic Journeys: A Tourist's Guide to Philosophy
brought to you by Ron Yezzi
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy
Minnesota State University, Mankato
© Copyright 1986, 1993, 2015 by Ron Yezzi
Exotic Journeys: A Tourist's Guide to Philosophy
brought to you by Ron Yezzi
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy
Minnesota State University, Mankato
© Copyright 1986, 1993, 2015 by Ron Yezzi
Topics
Introduction
Traditional Conception of Free Will
Creative Excursions
Crime and Punishment
(Author's Note: The account below, with slight modifications, is taken from Ron Yezzi, Philosophical Problems: God, Free Will, and Determinism (Mankato: G. Bruno & Co., 1993), pp. 83 - 84, 117 - 118.)
We commonly assign moral praise or blame to people for their deeds; and we often attach rewards or punishments as well. So we praise the woman who risks her life to save a child; and we blame the public official who takes "kickbacks" from contractors taking on work for the government. In a good society, we reward persons for their nobility or dedication in worthwhile endeavors and we punish wrongdoers for their misdeeds. In the process of assigning moral praise or blame, reward or punishment, we usually presume that people are morally responsible for their actions. That is, we presume that their actions exhibit their own moral accomplishments or failures for which they are to be held accountable.
Can we hold human beings accountable though, if they lack free will? In the absence of free will, we can question whether persons' actions exhibit their own moral accomplishments and failures. If they act because of deterministic forces beyond their control, in what sense are their actions really their own actions? To deal with questions like these, we need conceptions of free will and determinism, along with judgments regarding any existence and/or limitations that attach to these terms.
Statements related to free will and determinism are fairly common in everyday experience. From varied sources, we may hear: "Anybody can get a job, if the person really wants to." "You can't blame crime on society." "Blacks are victims of ghetto conditions." Such statements reflect judgments about the degree of free will possessed by human beings, and, consequently, about moral responsibility as well. The law seems to recognize differing degrees as well: persons may be charged with a lesser crime or may even sometimes be acquitted for "crimes of passion" or because of "temporary insanity"; persons may be judged mentally unfit to stand trial; and young children are not executed or given long prison-terms, if they kill a playmate. As a matter of fact, we constantly make judgments about free will and determinism and about degrees of moral responsibility. We do not however always judge consistently. For example, relatives of victims are less likely to recognize "crimes of passion" or "temporary insanity"; and the same political conservatives who refuse to blame crime or poverty on social conditions are frequently quite strict in raising their own children because they think that "the right upbringing" is very important.
In turning from common experience to philosophical treatments, we find that, traditionally, free will is associated with the capacity to satisfy the following three conditions:
(1) There must be real alternative courses of action available;
(2) Persons must choose among the alternatives; and
(3) The choice must not be forced upon them by biological circumstances, environmental conditions, or their past, personal history.
Biological circumstances may include inherited genetic traits as well as acquired physiological capacities or incapacities. Environmental conditions may include the social surroundings where persons grow up or some specific condition such as torture. Past, personal history may include the loss of a loved one, the choice of friends as a teenager, or a decision about going to college or not. At any rate, according to the traditional conception of free will, all three conditions are satisfiable. According to determinism, on the other hand, at least one of these conditions is not satisfiable. Usually, advocates of determinism deny (3), reinterpret (2), and reinterpret or deny (1). According to determinism, events occur according to cause-effect relationships (ordinarily conceived as governed by laws of nature) in which free will plays no role at all.
We begin here with separate explanations of some basic positions regarding free will and determinism. Then we turn to some attempts to show that free will and determinism are compatible, that is, that each is correctly attributable to human actions. The exposition concludes with the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's case for the issue's being irrelevant. At that point, readers have the opportunity to read my critique.
2.10 As a preliminary judgment about free will and determinism, do you think that most of your own actions can satisfy all three of the conditions in the traditional conception of free will? Try to think of some examples to make your point either for or against the traditional conception.
Criminal trials often spotlight dramatically, before the general public, the issue of responsibility for actions. In the United States during recent decades, for example, three well-publicized trials stand out where serious questions arose as to whether or not the defendants were really responsible for their actions. A cult leader (Charles Manson) and his "Family" were tried for the commission of bizarre murders; a young heiress (Patricia Hearst) kidnapped by a revolutionary group went on trial for participating in the group's robberies; a young man (John Hinckley) went on trial for permanently crippling a White House assistant and wounding three others, including the President of the United States, in an assassination attempt. In trying to understand why the crimes occurred, we ask questions that, if answered affirmatively, may well cast doubt on the defendants' responsibility for their actions. For example, were they insane? Brainwashed? Victims of a tragic social environment? Compulsive victims of some physiological malfunction?
Going back more than half a century, we find the same issue of responsibility in a sensational criminal trial of 1924. Fourteen year old Bobbie Franks was kidnapped in Chicago and murdered immediately. The kidnappers then contacted his family, demanding $10,000 for his safe return. It was cold-blooded murder followed by an equally cold-blooded attempt to prolong the agony of the Franks' family and also make them pay.
Tracked down by police, the killers confessed. What shocked the nation though was the identity of the killers. They were sons of Chicago millionaires, raised amid a life of affluence. One was a distant relative of the Franks' family. Nathan Leopold, 19, was a brilliant student, the youngest college graduate of the University of Chicago up until that time; he was headed for Harvard Law School. Richard Loeb, 18, also very bright, was the youngest college graduate up until that time at the University of Michigan. Together, they conspired to commit what they thought would be "a perfect crime." Loeb had long been fascinated by crime―avidly reading detective stories, fantasizing about leading a criminal gang, committing petty criminal acts, and thinking about a perfect crime. Leopold, at the age of sixteen or so, read and embraced enthusiastically what he took to be Nietzsche's philosophy of the "superman," a person "above the law"; he saw Loeb as just such a person. At the trial, the defense was led by the best known attorney of that time, Clarence Darrow. Darrow's and their family's objective was to save Leopold and Loeb from being executed.
In a 1902 speech to inmates at the Cook County jail in Chicago, Darrow had begun by taking this position on crime and criminals:
If I looked at jails and crimes and prisoners in the way the ordinary person does, I should not speak on this subject to you. The reason I talk to you on the question of crime, its cause and cure, is that I really do not in the least believe in crime. There is no such thing as a crime as the word is generally understood. I do not believe there is any sort of distinction between the real moral conditions of the people in and out of jail. One is just as good as the other. The people here can no more help being here than the people outside can help being outside. I do not believe that people are in jail because they deserve to be. They are in jail simply because they cannot avoid it on account of circumstances which are entirely beyond their control and for which they are in no way responsible.1
Taking this position, Darrow favored humane treatment of convicted persons. At the Leopold-Loeb trial, he focused upon similar themes. Darrow tried to show that the "boys" had "diseased minds" and thus were not really responsible for the killing. As evidence, he pointed to these factors: The twisted idea of wanting to commit a perfect crime in the first place; their almost total lack of emotional reaction before, during, and after the murder; stupid mistakes in carrying out their plans, not to be expected from two such intelligent persons; Loeb's compulsive fascination with crime; Leopold's passion for studying and embracing Nietzsche's philosophy at an age when boys are out playing baseball or doing odd jobs; and the way in which the crime seemed to be the living out of an immature, childish fantasy. Although he cites some possible environmental factors―such as the hazards of too much opportunity and advantage offered by wealth, too rigorous study at an early age, an absence of loving relationships in their lives, Loeb's long-established habit of successfully getting away with lying and subterfuge, and Leopold's encounter with Nietzsche's philosophy at too impressionable and early an age―Darrow does not claim to know all the hereditary and environmental conditions that warped their minds. But he is sure that the murder was the product of warped minds joining together to commit an act neither would have tried alone. Darrow also suggests some relevant "might have beens"―if the University of Chicago had no books or professors dealing with Nietzsche's philosophy (a policy he does not advocate, of course), if Loeb's well-intentioned governess had not been so strict, if Leopold and Loeb or their parents had never happened to meet. . . . (Darrow's summation also includes a citing of legal precedents, emotional appeals, aspersions directed at the prosecution side, rhetorical flourishes, and a denial that capital punishment serves as a deterrent to violent criminal acts.) In trying to establish an absence of responsibility for their crime, Darrow did not expect or want Leopold and Loeb to be set free; he only wanted to save their lives (which he did when they were sentenced to life imprisonment). Indeed, one reason why he took on the case was his desire to promote opposition to capital punishment.
How would you evaluate Darrow's case for Leopold and Loeb not being responsible enough to deserve execution for their crime?
1. Clarence Darrow, "Crime and Criminals," in Arthur Weinberg, ed., Attorney for the Damned (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), pp. 3-4.
(Note: The 1986 copyright was initially held by University Press of America, Ron Yezzi, Directing Human Actions: Perspectives on Basic Ethical Issues--but was then transferred to me.)
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