USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20011004.1701 (Crew, this is the Captain): There is a political position which has appeared in certain quarters in the wake of the WTC attack that ultimately this was a side effect of decades of American foreign policy, and that we just reaped what we had previous sown. Not too many people subscribe to this viewpoint wholely, but there seem to be many leftists who at least consider it to be somewhat true. But it occurred to me today that in its most extreme form, it is deeply contemptuous of those outside the US and deeply ethnocentric.

If "right" and "wrong" mean anything, they can only apply to situations where someone has a choice. If you have no choice at all, then your situation is morally neutral. So the claim that "it's all our fault", coupled with the unspoken assumption that those who attacked us were ultimately manipulated into doing so as an effect of our policies, makes the assumption that we act but everyone else in the world reacts. We make decisions, they simply respond. We bear moral blame for what happens; they don't because they're simply responding rationally to the evil we have committed.

But this is actually an extension of a broader feeling which appears in a lot of places. When a couple of kids go berserk and shoot up a school, the search is on for what caused them to do it: was it violent video games? Mistreatment by their parents? Mistreatment by fellow students? Movies? Who is responsible? Um, how about the kids themselves?

When are we not morally responsible for our own actions? There is an ethical theory called "psychological hedonism" which is one of the first theories we studied in my ethics course in college. It states that we are programmed to seek pleasure and avoid pain and could not do otherwise even if we wanted to. The problem with it is twofold: what is "pleasure"? And if it is true, then how can any act by anyone ever have any ethical value at all? First, pleasure comes in a lot of forms, some direct and some extremely subtle and indirect, and when you analyze it, biological hedonism comes down to an extended rationalization session trying to find some way in which every act ultimately benefits the guy who did it: someone gives a lot of money to the poor -- but they get pleasure out of doing so from the fact of having done a good thing. Someone joins an extreme sect and gives up all worldly goods and lives in poverty -- but they're getting psychic pleasure out of doing so. And so on. If you look hard enough, it turns out that everything we do can be explained this way, but like all worthless theories it doesn't permit predictions. It's unfalsifiable; anything that happens can be explained with it, and thus nothing is impossible. For example, if the guy who gave money to the poor had not done so, it could just as easily have been explained as him spending the money on himself giving himself pleasure that way instead.

The other problem with it is that it posits that we're all machines and that we don't actually have free will. It ventures to provide an explanation for everything we do, and claims that the explanation is biological. We act as we do because of our genes and biological makeup. But if that is true, then none of us is morally responsible for anything because none of us is actually physically capable of making a choice -- free will is an illusion, and "ethics" becomes a null set.

Yet on some level explanations like this appear all the time. Someone goes bad and does something horrible, and some people start searching for an explanation in their past: were they mistreated by their parents? Maybe they have some sort of mental illness? There is some level of validity to this but not as much as some people would like, for again it assumes that the person is an automaton with no free will themselves. The point of ethics is to assume that we do have the ability to make decisions, that we are not automatons, and that there is an ethical value to the decisions we make. (Then the arguments begin on how that value is determined.) If a criminal becomes a criminal because he was mistreated in the past then he isn't responsible and therefore what he did wasn't "wrong". But is that valid?

Brain tissue isn't invulnerable, and the psyche can be badly damaged. The real question is not whether the guy was subjected to evil influences (all of us are), but whether he was so badly damaged by them that he no longer has the ability to understand right and wrong and actually make a decision for himself. If so, we judge him "insane" and permit that plea in court, but we confine him afterwards, for if he could not make a decision before then he still cannot and remains dangerous. If not, then even in the face of a horrible past we must hold him responsible now for what he does. As long as he has a choice and has the ability to make it, then he is responsible for doing a wrong thing irrespective of what happened to him in the past.

And that is also true for the people who made the attack in NYC and DC, and those who worked with them to set it up. Regardless of whether they were inspired by sins committed by the US in the past, in its foreign policy or economy policy or cultural policy or any policy at all, the fact is that they had a choice and understood the choice and made the choice to attack and kill people in the US. The choice was theirs, and therefore they are ethically responsible for it no matter what happened to them in the past. They are 100% responsible for it. No other point of view is acceptable. We can study their circumstances to try to learn why they decided to do what they did, but we do so to learn what to change to prevent it in future, not in order to apportion blame. It's a form of cultural epidemiology -- and it doesn't imply that we are ourselves even slightly at fault.

Moreover, the problem with that argument is that it is mostly being used in an effort to try to argue against an armed response by the US. But either way you slant it, it fails. If our attackers are automatons with no moral responsibility, then they are mad dogs, and so we should fight back, for if we don't they will surely attack us again.. If, on the other hand, they have free will, then we are justified by their acts in visiting punishment on them -- and killing them anyway. Neither point of view justifies pacifism on our part.

And if they are responding to things we did, then would we not in turn be responding to things they did? If they are not culpable for attacking us, how would we be culpable for responding in kind? If their attack on us was ethically neutral because they were responding to things we did to them, then our counterattack will equally be ethically neutral because we will in turn be responding to things they did. Ultimately no-one is responsible for anything, and ethics again becomes a null-set.

Deep down this theory assumes that we are not the same as them. We really can think, we really can make decisions, but they ultimately are stupid creatures who merely respond to their environment. It is deeply chauvinistic. It is only by assuming a gargantuan moral inequivalency that this argument stands. (discussion in progress)