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Boston Causality Club Presentations

Forgiveness        Naturalistic Responsibility        Naturalism and Self-Control
 

On Forgiveness – presentation for Boston Causality Club 

How does naturalism inform forgiveness?  How can a naturalistic perspective enable us to be more forgiving and encourage others to forgive as well?  1) By drawing attention to the actual interpersonal causal dynamics of forgiveness, 2) By showing the physical reality of the desire to retaliate, 3) by understanding the evolutionary rationale for the urge to strike back, and  4) by using the causal story to help lessen the desire to punish the offender, and thus lead to forgiveness. 

Merriam Webster online:

To Forgive:  1: to give up resentment of or claim to requital for <forgive an insult> 2: to cease to feel resentment against (an offender): to pardon, to forgive one’s enemies.

To Pardon:  1: the excusing of an offense without exacting a penalty;  2:  a release from the legal penalties of an offense

To forgive is really to have the inclination to retaliate and punish diminish sufficiently or disappear such that the victim no longer pursues retribution.  It’s not to erase the existence of the wrong that’s been done, and it’s not to excuse in the way we excuse a child who doesn’t know better, or someone who’s unintentionally done us harm.  It’s to recognize a wrong has been done, but not to pursue retaliation or punishment.

There can be degrees of forgiveness, from a reluctant refusal to punish (you really want to strike back, but don’t), to the complete cessation of the very desire to strike back.  [Sometimes forgiveness is only possible after some punishment or sanction is meted out, or after remorse is shown.]

 It’s not always appropriate to forgive immediately or easily or automatically.  Often, we will want to make sure that certain consequences (that is, appropriate sanctions) follow destructive or harmful behavior.  So promoting the virtues of forgiveness shouldn’t lead us to suppose that violence, for example, shouldn’t be countered vigorously, or that we shouldn’t protect ourselves. 

 But why should we want to forgive?  What are the virtues of forgiveness?

 ·        One clear and extremely important virtue of forgiveness is that it cuts short the cycle of retaliation and revenge.  This has immense social value, given the cost of conflicts born of revenge.

 ·        Another virtue is that it frees the victim from being trapped in retributive obsessions.  These obsessions – wanting to take revenge -  give the offender continuing power over the victim to shape her consciousness.  So forgiveness is personally liberating.

 ·        Also, in forgiving, we demonstrate a moral virtue per se. We are setting a moral example in being better than the offender by not exacting our pound of flesh.  We are in a sense sacrificing retributive satisfactions, we rise above them, for the sake of something better, namely cutting short a possible cycle of revenge and perhaps further damaging the offender, not to mention ourselves and others as the cycle continues.

So what does naturalism and science have to say about forgiveness?  Several things:

 ·        It emphasizes the physical basis of an injury and the desire to punish:  Beyond the obvious physical effects, an injury causes psychic trauma, encoded in neurons, that’s quite real and can’t be wished away. It’s there physically in the brain.  The same is true of the desire to hit back. This is the neural reality of wanting to exact revenge in response to an injury. 

     ·        The study of evolution shows that the taste for revenge had and still has a function in deterring aggressors and threats.  We wouldn’t be here without the predisposition to retaliate.  So to forgive is to overcome a very natural reaction, and to have this neural state change in response to various influences, and this takes time and influence.  

So how do we encourage forgiveness, from a naturalistic perspective?   By telling the causal story of the offender, we can reduce retributive feelings on the part of the victim.  And by paying close attention to the interpersonal causal dynamics of forgiveness.  

First, the dynamics of forgiveness:

Sympathy for the victim.  First, we must truly and strongly acknowledge the pain and suffering of the victim and acknowledge the desire to strike back.  This is natural and understandable, and must not be pushed aside or minimized, otherwise we alienate the victim.  But of course retaliation is not necessarily to be encouraged, given what we know about cycles of revenge.  

Remorse. To help elicit forgiveness, the offender must show genuine remorse if possible.  Naturalistically understood, remorse – the expression of regret – shows the victim that the offender is not likely to repeat his offense.  He seems to have learned a lesson and doesn’t pose a threat any longer.  So forgiveness – not exacting punishment - is easier once genuine remorse and regret are expressed.  This is to say that the desire to punish or strike back tracks the situation – it is responsive to what the threat is perceived to be.  As the threat is perceived to diminish, the need and desire to punish lessens as well. 

Restitution.  Similarly, it helps greatly if the offender can offer restitution of some sort.  This paying back helps to balance the scales, and helps to heal the wound.  Restitution substitutes in a way for the damage in kind we’d like to inflict, and it doesn’t actually further damage the offender, but might actually help to rehabilitate and heal him.

 But also, for the offender to feel remorse and express it, there has to be some hope that this expression will be accepted and have an impact on how he’s treated.  If the offender feels completely excluded from humanity, with no hope of rejoining the human community, then there’s less incentive to feel or express regret – he’s simply an outcast with no hope.  [film on this:  Dead Man Walking] So having the community see the offender’s humanity is key, and of course naturalism helps with this:  there but for circumstances go I.  Of course, some are incapable of feeling remorse (defective neural structures, perhaps from brain damage), which is often why they commit atrocities or lesser violence in the first place.

Understanding how all this works will help us greatly in setting the stage for forgiveness.  But the most direct contribution of naturalism to forgiveness is in telling the causal story of the offender, which ultimately allows the victim to empathize and perhaps forgive. 

The Mitigation Response

By showing the victim the causal story behind the offender, naturalism says that the offender didn’t just choose to be the way he was.  The individual isn’t the ultimate source of action and therefore ultimately to blame, he doesn’t deserve to suffer in the way you might have supposed on the assumption of free will.  Rather, he was fully caused to become that way, and act as he did.  And so would you, had you been in his shoes.  Having this story affect one’s desire to punish is what might be called the “mitigation response”.  Understanding that people don’t simply choose to become bad helps to mitigate our desire to punish, since we see 1) that external factors are responsible for how that person became who he was and for how he acted, and that 2) we would have been them, but for circumstances.  Our response to being hurt - that is, the desire to punish or take other action - tracks the perceived causal responsibility for harm, and this responsibility gets distributed outside the perpetrator on a naturalistic understanding of ourselves.   

Answering the rhetorical question.  To help the victim understand the causal story, one tactic is to answer the rhetorical question that often comes up: how could the offender have done this?  How could he have treated me so badly?   Well, let’s really try to answer that question. 

So we try to show vividly the causal story of how the offender got to be the way they are, and show that had the victim been in the same circumstances, she would have acted similarly. 

Mary Ellen used the example of genocide in illustrating how to get people to forgive:

First, point out to the victim how rare it is that people actually resist pressure to conform to genocidal norms, to go along with blood lust. 

Then ask them: have you ever collaborated with others in persecuting or ostracizing someone?  Usually the answer will be yes.  Then ask: why did you collaborate, or stay quiet, or in other ways fail to resist?  And usually the answer will be some sort of peer pressure. 

Then, show them the continuum from what they did (fairly minor, let’s assume) and genocide or other major persecution.  In Rwanda, the failure to join in killing usually meant death.  Would they have resisted this?  If so, why didn’t the killers?  Again, show that there is a causal story here, not free will. 

This is all meant to show the person who can’t forgive that the offender was fully caused to act as they did, and had they been in the offender’s situation, they would have done the same thing.  This may help them to forgive. 

So, by understanding the physical basis of retributive feelings, their natural function, the interpersonal dynamics of forgiveness, and by using the causal story to elicit the mitigation response, naturalism can help people to forgive.  It can help them to not strike back, and thus to end cycles of revenge and retaliation and liberate victims from what’s often a dehumanizing obsession with retribution.

So this is one virtue of naturalism, of taking a scientific, causal perspective on ourselves and our behavior.

 TWC 9/5/04                           

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Naturalistic Responsibility – presentation for Boston Causality Club

How should we think about responsibility from a naturalistic standpoint?

How do we talk about it?  Can we continue to use terms like responsibility, accountability, blame, credit, deserve?  If so, how?  Can we naturalize these words, or must we abandon them? 

From a naturalistic perspective, people act precisely as they do in a given situation because of sufficient sets of causes.  Rewind the tape of history and they will behave exactly the same way in the exact same situation.

They really couldn’t have stepped outside the causal stream and behaved otherwise.

So in what sense are we to blame for anything?  In what sense can we be given credit for anything?

 TC anecdote about father falling off back deck: acute sense of responsibility. Should I have felt so bad? 

 Of course  we’re designed by evolution to be very quick to blame and praise (especially ourselves!), to have “reactive attitudes.”  We can see that punishment and rewards played a crucial role in creating stable communities which permitted cooperation that in turn allowed survival.   

So moral practices and language involving the idea of credit and blame served a natural function from evolution’s “point of view”.   They were selected for, they were adaptive.  Even the feeling that people just deserve praise and punishment might have been selected for: Tamler Sommer’s hypothesis that “When we are wronged, we experience not only a desire to punish the offender, but a conviction that the offenders ought to be punished—not for any consequentialist reason, but simply because they deserve it.   If we lacked this belief—the belief that the culprit deserves blame and punishment—we would too often fail to act aggressively (or signal to others that we will do so) when the act of aggression conflicted with our immediate self-interests.”  An empirical claim.  Raises the question of whether a naturalistic view of ourselves would make us less likely to resist aggression, etc.

So, we are inherently and powerfully susceptible to praise and blame by our very nature – we can’t escape the power of social reinforcers, even though as naturalists we know there isn’t anyone inside that could have done otherwise that deserves credit or blame. 

We have to understand giving blame and credit naturalistically as guides to future behavior.  They help determine behavior, and are crucial in shaping behavioral dispositions in favorable directions. 

• Expressing displeasure at behavior a form of punishment – creates the anticipation of future criticism if behave similarly, hence will change behavior. 

• Expressing admiration, pleasure, is a form of reward – creates the anticipation of future reward, hence will reinforce behavior, keep it in one’s repertoire.

 Flanagan expresses this in The Problem of the Soul, p. 150:

 “What the neo-compatibilist means when she says that a person is responsible for some act is, first, that the act was routed through the conscious deliberation/habit module; second, that this module is adjustable from the inside, by the agent, and from outside, by way of feedback from the moral community; and third, that by virtue of being routed through a modifiable cognitive module, the person can learn to respond differently in the future.  We might say that a neo-compatibilist agent is respons-able, (with an a, not an i) in that she is able to modify her future actions in the light of her own and her community’s responses to her past actions.”  TC: that is, she has the capacity to respond to the anticipation of future contingencies.

This means we can justifiably hold people responsible and accountable, both in terms of applying sanctions and rewards, as a way of getting them to behave properly. Law professor Stephen Morse calls this “guiding goodness”.

But, there is no agent that could have done otherwise – so our moral practices thus can’t include a categorically retributive component even though we might be designed to feel that retribution is justifiable. 

This naturalistic understanding of ourselves as fully caused helps to moderate reactive attitudes, since it undercuts the idea of intrinsic, metaphysical blame and credit.

Also, by understanding the causal dynamics of behavior, we see that we can be more effective agents and get along better (e.g. avoid cycles of retribution and blame) if we’re careful in how we apply rewards and sanctions.  That is, be smart about credit and blame as we hold people responsible.  

We see our moral language and practices as being essentially forward looking, not backward looking.  We couldn’t have done otherwise in the situation exactly as it arose, but our moral evaluations are exactly that which make anticipated future situations different, so we’ll behave differently.

Explanations vs. excuses:  all behavior is caused, and so can be explained.  But when should we excuse a wrongdoing?  What does it mean to excuse? 

Well, we excuse someone if we see that their behavior wasn’t intentional or if it was coerced, or that a person doesn’t have the capacity to have been guided (e.g., insane or too immature).  To excuse is to not apply sanctions, since we see that the person doesn’t need an inducement to behave better next time.  Or, we excuse once  we determine that the person has learned his or her lesson. 

Can we naturalize moral language, or must we invent a new language?  

A tactical decision – no absolute right or wrong here, but a pragmatic decision.  TC recommends using ordinary language, but be careful to explain what the naturalistic meaning is.  Responsibility, credit, blame, are too central to give up, and these can be naturalized. 

Does naturalism weaken our moral resolve? 

Perhaps not, since our built in reactive attitudes insure a swift, strong response. 

And, our reactive attitudes now imperil us, since we usually tend to overreact in delivering punishment and get caught in deadly cycles of violence.  Understanding causality as we do means we can look outside the individual for solutions to bad behavior and to exert control.  Less after the fact blame, more prevention, more humane culture. 

TWC 12/04

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Naturalism and Self-Control – presentation for Boston Causality Club 

How can naturalism help increase our efficacy as agents, our self-efficacy?  How might we make better choices, be more creative, be more productive, and achieve our goals?

 Clayton Tucker-Ladd:  

“Step four:  Use the faith you have in the lawfulness of behavior to plan ways of achieving your goals. You become a confident self-helper.

The greatest barrier to improving is the lack of hope that one can change. Knowing that behavior is a result of cause and effect relationships and not the result of wishing or luck or fate, should encourage us to study behavior and try out different approaches.”

Who or what’s the self in self-control?  When we say “I changed my mind,” who changed what?

The basic naturalistic insight: Not a separate, mental self that controls the rest.  Rather we exist as a system of motives in service to the overriding goal of survival and many sub-goals. We have the capacity to learn from experience, model outcomes, and anticipate consequences of behavior.  We are basically rational. Our behavior is controlled by this survival agenda and many sub-agendas that take over when survival isn’t at issue. 

So who’s in control?  Most of the time we’re in control, not any one else.  It’s our agenda that controls our behavior.  But who are we?   We’re the brain and body, character and predispositions, our agenda and our rationality.  But what controls us?  Again not usually anyone in particular, but a host of circumstances that affects our behavior, that have shaped what we are.   Bush’s bulge: suggested he was being controlled by someone else!

We might find that given our goals, we’re not acting optimally to achieve them.  We see a gap between what we want and what we achieve.  Our behavior isn’t being optimally controlled by the goals, but by other conditions and factors. 

So self-control, at the highest level, would be to act successfully on our explicitly endorsed goals, the ones we endorse after careful evaluation and thought.

Some think that causality is the enemy of control, that we have to have contra-causal freedom to create ourselves in order to be in control.  They see the fact that we are caused as evidence that we aren’t in control.

Quote from The Matrix, in which the effete French Merovingian super-programmer rejects the assumption of free will, the supposed power of the individual to initiate behavior independent of causes.  He has programmed a special dessert:

Morpheus: Everything begins with choice.

Merovingian: No. Wrong. Choice is an illusion, created between those with power, and those without. Look there, at that woman. My God, just look at her. Affecting everyone around her, so obvious, so bourgeois, so boring. But wait... Watch - you see, I have sent her dessert, a very special dessert. I wrote it myself. It starts so simply, each line of the program creating a new effect, just like poetry. First, a rush... heat... her heart flutters. You can see it, Neo, yes? She does not understand why - is it the wine? No. What is it then, what is the reason? And soon it does not matter, soon the why and the reason are gone, and all that matters is the feeling itself. This is the nature of the universe. We struggle against it, we fight to deny it, but it is of course pretense, it is a lie. Beneath our poised appearance, the truth is we are completely out of control. Causality. There is no escape from it, we are forever slaves to it. Our only hope, our only peace is to understand it, to understand the `why.' `Why' is what separates us from them, you from me. `Why' is the only real social power, without it you are powerless.”

Commentary:  The Merovingian in the Matrix says “We’re completely out of control.”  No.  Wrong.  Control is not an illusion. We aren’t “completely out of control,” since after all our stable characters and motives that drive behavior.  We are in control of our actions most of the time.  But in turn we are a function of other factors, factors which we can learn to control for our purposes.  We have means of increasing self-control.  But all this is fully caused, it isn’t magic or miraculous.

So we aren’t “victims of causality,” since we remain causal agents ourselves, active agents in the world, we have effects on things.  And to be uncaused wouldn’t add to our powers.  After all, on what basis would the uncaused part of ourselves make a decision or choice?  To have such a part would simply tie us in knots. 

So, naturalism implies that the processes underlying self-control do not transcend causality or our connections to the world, but rather depend on those connections. 

Understanding this, naturalism can empower us.

If we stick with the traditional view of who we are and we suppose the will is really metaphysically and radically autonomous, that just introduces a mystery that blocks access to creativity and successful choices.  We have to transcend the traditional notion of free will in order to discover the real key to behaving effectively, whether as artists, technicians, policy makers, researchers, or whatever it is we do.  Otherwise we’ll become victims, not of causality, but of our own myth of being uncaused.  Self-help literature, e.g., Wayne Dyer, Your Erroneous Zones, sometimes presents wishful thinking. 

We must understand the conditions of successful choice and productive creativity – knowing the causes, we can set up conditions in which creativity flourishes.  So the very deliberate design of our work environments and our play environments, the learning of techniques and skills, set up the conditions under which creativity can flourish and in which we can be productive.  Twyla Tharp:  The Creative Habit.  B.F. Skinner: be Skinnerian. 

The will, like everything else, is a function of conditions: so we have to understand the causal dynamics of motivation.  What are the conditions that will inspire me to stay on task and finish a project?   What sorts of situations are most likely to sustain motivation?    We’re not controlled by some non-physical mental agent, but we are controlled by our motives that are in turn controlled by various conditions. This gets into the advanced technology of self-control.

It’s often said that people (e.g., prisoners, addicts, the obese) have to want to change before they can be helped, as if the desire to change is itself some independent factor undetermined by conditions.  But obviously the will (desire) is itself a function of conditions, so that we can work to create conditions that can bring about the very desire to change.

Even the so-called “political will” to do things can be understood as a function of circumstances, like everything else.  So we will know better how to motivate people for a cause, which again is empowering. 

So my point is that by transcending the myth of free will, we are empowered - we’re given access to the methods and tools by which we can become more creative, be more productive, and which help realize our goals.   To do this, we have to study human nature carefully, and make sure our strategies, tactics, methods, and frameworks of understanding are based in science.

Causal Analysis Tool  and Techniques of Self-Control  (see below) 

Online resource: Clayton Tucker-Ladd’s online book, Psychological Self-Help at http://www.psychologicalselfhelp.org especially Chapter 4, http://www.psychologicalselfhelp.org/Chapter4/chap4_1.html.

Skepticism about managing one’s behavior –  Breakdown of Will (George Ainslie) shows that there is no ultimately right way to choose between long-term and short-term goals.  We’re biased toward short-term satisfaction, but feel we should work for long-term.  But if we only work for long-term, then this may not maximize satisfaction, since we’ll have missed out on current rewards.  What to do?   Laugh and make the best of it.  We are in a very curious situation indeed.

TWC 11/04

Causal Analysis Tool for Self-Control

 Step one: assume that each and every aspect of your situation is caused.  That is, each aspect has antecedents in space and time, such that if these had been different, then that aspect of your situation may have been different.  At this very moment, each aspect of you – your feelings, motives, thoughts, hopes, fears – is being caused, as is the situation surrounding you.  The causality works both ways: from you to your situation, and from your situation to you.  There is nothing in you or your situation exempt from causality, from being influenced.  And likewise, each part of you and your situation acts as a cause itself, influencing other things.

Step two: identify that aspect of yourself or your situation you wish to change.  This means taking a close reading of your current state of discomfort, fear, hope, longing, ambition, or frustration. What precisely is it that’s the problem, the desire, or the goal?  This is sometimes difficult, since often our goals, fears, frustrations, and hopes are ill-defined.  Do the best you can to pin down precisely what it is you want to change or work towards.  Note that there might be a conflict among goals you endorse, that they pull in opposite directions.  The death bed technique: imagine you’re looking back at your life.  What should you have done that you didn’t do?  What are your regrets?  This forces you to consider the big picture, which then can drive the day-to-day picture. 

Step three: identify those causal factors and influences that relate to your fear, frustration, goal, or desire.  What are the current conditions that that control your behavior and that therefore are contributing to being stuck?  Again, this isn’t easy, since many factors could play a role, including conflict between goals (see above). 

Step four:  take steps to change those factors and inflluences in ways that will permit effective behavior.  When all the information is present, the choice about what to do might be reasonably clear.  Increasing motivation, setting a clear agenda, might require that a certain goal or motive win the competition such that a real commitment arises.

A few techniques of self-control

 Create external “commitment devices”: 

• State goals publicly, creating expectations among others that will in turn have the effect of driving your behavior. 

• Agree to a deadline, with actual consequences, e.g., preparing a paper for a conference. 

 Set up plan and performance schedule to measure progress.

“Be Skinnerian” – set up contingencies to reward behavior that isn’t intrinsically rewarding.  Do less interesting tasks first, then reward yourself with what's more interesting or fun.

 For many other examples, see Clayton Tucker-Ladd’s online book, Psychological Self-Help at http://mentalhelp.net/psyhelp/, especially Chapter 4, http://mentalhelp.net/psyhelp/chap4/chap4n.htm#b.

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