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February 11, 2024 - June 8, 2025
well after Vietnam, PTSD was officially viewed as psychosomatic malingering by most of governmental powers that be, and afflicted veterans were often denied health benefits to treat it.
we can subtract responsibility out of our view of aspects of behavior. And this makes the world a better place.
A detail for neuroscience fans: Axons are “myelinated,” wrapped in an insulating sheath made of cells called glia. It speeds up neuronal communication for reasons that I manage to teach confusingly in a class of mine year after year. The wrapping is fatty and whitish in color, and as a result, parts of the brain mostly made up of myelinated cables are termed “white matter,” while areas packed with the unmyelinated cell bodies of neurons are termed “gray matter.” White-matter freeways connecting gray-matter city centers,
Instead, you take the drug systemically (e.g., by mouth or by injection), which means it gets into the bloodstream and has its effect all over the brain. Give someone with schizophrenia a dopamine receptor blocker, and you decrease the abnormally high levels of dopaminergic signaling in the “schizophrenic” part of the brain back to normal; but at the same time, you decrease the normal levels elsewhere to below normal. Give L-DOPA to someone with Parkinson’s, and you raise dopamine signaling in the “Parkinsonian” part of the brain to normal but boost signaling to above-normal levels elsewhere
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the Black Plague, sweeping through Europe beginning 1347; over the next few years, nearly half the population died in bubonic agony.
Things were pretty awful even earlier in the century. Take 1321—the average peasant was illiterate, parasite riddled, and struggling for existence. Their life expectancy was about a quarter of a century; a third of infants died before their first birthday. Poverty was made worse by enforced tithing of income to the church; 10–15 percent of people in England were starving to death in a famine.
Under torture, lepers soon confessed that, yes, they had formed a guild sworn to poison wells, using potions
mobs immolated lepers and Jews in town after town in France and Germany, killing thousands.
I’ve now had the chance to work on around a dozen murder cases with public defenders, and they’re inspiring—underpaid, overworked, passing up the riches of the corporate world, losing most of their cases defending broken people who were usually already lost by the time they were second-trimester fetuses.
In sixteenth-century Europe, a variety of tests were used to identify witches, all truly awful. One of the more benign ones was to read the suspect the biblical account of the crucifixion of Our Lord. If they weren’t moved to tears, they were a witch.
The execution, which took place in a public square in Paris on March 28, 1757, was well documented. Damiens’s feet were first crushed with a torture device called the “boot.” The offending hand with which he had held the knife was then scorched with burning pincers; a mixture of molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax, and sulfur was then poured on his wounds. He was then castrated and the burning mixture applied there as well. These actions, along with Damiens’s wailing and begging for death, provoked cheers from the massive crowd that filled the square, as well as from the apartments
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Damiens, reduced to a torso and still breathing, was flung onto a fire, along with his severed limbs. When he was reduced to ash after four hours, the crowd dispersed, justice having been served.[5]
“So you’re saying that violent criminals should just run wild with no responsibility for their actions?” No. A car that, through no fault of its own, has brakes that don’t work should be kept off the road. A person with active COVID-19, through no fault of their own, should be blocked from attending a crowded concert. A leopard that would shred you, through no fault of its own, should be barred from your home.
the “truth and reconciliation commission” model, first mandated in postapartheid South Africa and since used in numerous countries recovering from civil war or a violent dictatorship.
Another model with some similarities and the same ultimate irrelevance arises from the “restorative justice” movement, which concerns the relationship between criminal and victim, rather than between criminal and state.
The approach that actually makes sense to me the most is the idea of “quarantine.” It is intellectually clear as day and completely compatible with there being no free will. It also immediately sticks in the craw of lots of people.
it’s straight out of the medical quarantine model’s four tenets: (A) It is possible for someone to have a medical malady that makes them infectious, contagious, dangerous, or damaging to those around them. (B) It is not their fault. (C) To protect everyone else from them, as something akin to an act of collective self-defense, it is okay to harm them by constraining their freedom. (D) We should constrain the person the absolute minimal amount needed to protect everyone, and not an inch more.
The extension of this to criminology in Pereboom’s thinking is obvious: (A) Some people are dangerous because of problems with the likes of impulse control, propensity for violence, or incapacity for empathy. (B) If you truly accept that there is no free will, it’s not their fault—it’s the result of their genes, fetal life, hormone levels, the usual. (C) Nonetheless, the public needs to be protected from them until they can be rehabilitated, if possible, justifying the constraint of their freedom. (D) But their “quarantine” should be done in a way that constrains the least—do what’s needed to
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public hangings were banned throughout the United States by the 1930s.
And sure as the day is long, the ubiquity of cheating drove the evolution of countermeasures to detect and punish it.
Crucially, punishment works to maintain cooperation. In economic games involving a pair of players (e.g., the Ultimatum Game), one of the two is given the power to exploit the other.
If the other player has the opportunity to punish the first player for being unduly exploitative, exploitation subsequently decreases further; in the absence of a mechanism for punishment, exploitation festers.[*22]
Moreover, treating subjects with oxytocin, a hormone that stimulates in-group prosociality, increases people’s willingness to take on the burden of third-party punishment.[19]
gods invented by cultures built on small social groups have no interest in human affairs. It’s only when communities get large enough that there’s the possibility for anonymous actions, or interactions between strangers, that we see invention of “moralizing” gods who know if you’ve been bad or good.
In other words, the kids and the chimps were willing to incur costs—to pay in currency or effort—to continue basking in the pleasure of watching the antisocial person getting what they deserved.
Good luck convincing people that blame and punishment are scientifically and morally bankrupt.
If someone makes you an unfair offer in the Ultimatum Game, your insula, anterior cingulate cortex, and amygdala activate, a picture of disgust, pain, and anger.
activation of a brain region called the temporal-parietal junction (TPJ), that region involved in perspective taking.
But then there is the crucial additional finding in all these cases: retributive punishing in any of these guises also activates the dopamine circuitry involved in reward (the ventral tegmentum and nucleus accumbens).
The circuitry activates whether you are someone who is independently meting out punishment or a conformer joining the vengeful crowd.
One commentator, who had moved beyond the Norwegians, wrote, “If Breivik’s actions on that fateful Friday were completely beyond any free will, then punishing him (as distinct from restraining him from further harm to the community) may be as immoral as our perception of Breivik’s criminal acts themselves.”
When you read between the lines, or sometimes even the lines themselves in their writing, a lot of these compatibilists are actually saying that there has to be free will because it would be a total downer otherwise, doing contortions to make an emotional stance seem like an intellectual one.
As some evolutionary biologists have pointed out, the only way humans have survived amid being able to understand truths about life is by having evolved a robust capacity for self-deception.[*3] And this certainly includes a belief in free will.[4]
According to Daniel Dennett, if there were no belief in free will, “there would be no rights, no recourse to authority to protect against fraud, theft, rape, murder. In short, no morality…. Do you really want to return humanity to [the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas] Hobbes’s state of nature where life is nasty, brutish and short?”[5]
most Americans have been educated to believe in free will and have reflected on how this produces responsibility for our actions. And most have also been taught to believe in a moralizing god, guaranteeing that your actions have consequences. And yet rates of violence in the United States are unmatched in the West. We’re doing plenty of running amok as it is.
Rejecting free will has an additional downside. If there’s no free will, you don’t deserve praise for your accomplishments, you haven’t earned or are entitled to anything.
For me, the biggest problem with accepting that there’s no free will takes the nefarious-neurosurgeon parable down a different path. The surgery is done, and the surgeon lies to the patient about no longer having free will. And rather than falling into mundane criminality, the patient falls into profound malaise, an enervation because of the pointlessness.
It’s that yawning chasm where, amid “This happened because of what came before, which happened because of what came before that…,” there’s no place for meaning or purpose. Which haunts philosophers, along with the rest of us.
“he believes that the consoling perspective he offers is the only way for any of us to maintain a healthy, affirmative, outlook on life and remain meaningfully engaged in it.” Life lived “as if,” viewed through free will–colored glasses.[8]
But there is one tiny foothold of illogic that I can’t overcome for even a millisecond, to my intellectual shame and personal gratitude. It is logically indefensible, ludicrous, meaningless to believe that something “good” can happen to a machine. Nonetheless, I am certain that it is good if people feel less pain and more happiness.
Maybe you’re deflated by the realization that part of your success in life is due to the fact that your face has appealing features. Or that your praiseworthy self-discipline has much to do with how your cortex was constructed when you were a fetus.
“Biological stuff” “Do you have grit?” Having destructive sexual urges Do you resist acting upon them? Being a natural marathoner Do you fight through the pain? Not being all that bright Do you triumph by studying extra hard?
Great news: you can still be judgmental—life’s caprices may bless some people and curse others as to their natural attributes, you say…but what really matters is your self-discipline when playing the hand you were dealt.
For example, genes code for types of taste receptors in your tongue. Hmm, is this merely a biological attribute such that even though food might taste better to you than to others, you are still expected to resist gluttony?
Hormones like leptin that signal whether you feel full generate some similar difficulties in categorizing.
The genetics of how many dopamine neurons you formed, mediating anticipation and reward. The genetics of how much pictures of appealing food activate those neurons when you’re dieting. How intensely stress produces cravings for high-carb/high-fat foods, how aversive hunger feels. And of course, how readily your frontal cortex regulates parts of the hypothalamus relevant to hunger, bringing in the ever-present issue of willpower. Once again, both sides of the chart are made of the same biology.
Everywhere you look, there’s that pain and self-loathing, staining all of life, about traits that are manifestations of biology.
Marianne about her autism: “I wished only that I hadn’t lost so much of my life hating myself.”[14]
I once spent a day teaching some incarcerated men about the brain. Afterward, one guy asked me, “My brother and I grew up in the same house. He’s the vice president of a bank; how’d I wind up like this?” We talked, figured out a likely explanation for his brother—by whatever hiccup of chance, his motor cortex and visual cortex gave him great hand-eye coordination, and he happened to be spotted playing pickup basketball by the right person…who got him a scholarship to the fancy prep school on the other side of the tracks that groomed him into the ruling class.
There is no justifiable “deserve.” The only possible moral conclusion is that you are no more entitled to have your needs and desires met than is any other human. That there is no human who is less worthy than you to have their well-being considered.[*15] You may think otherwise, because you can’t conceive of the threads of causality beneath the surface that made you you, because you have the luxury of deciding that effort and self-discipline aren’t made of biology, because you have surrounded yourself with people who think the same. But this is where the science has taken us.
