Nothing Wrong With School Massacres?

Posted in Atheism, Morality on  | 2 minutes | 8 Comments →

By now I imagine most of us are familiar with the recent tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary. As a parent I anguish at the thought of what those parents must be going through. The thought of the never-to-be-opened Christmas presents is enough to bring tears to one’s eyes. It’s just so… wrong—unless of course you’re one of those atheists of the hard determinist type. If that’s the case, all you can say is that you don’t like what Adam Lanza did. Well, I guess you can say it was wrong, but that would be an equivocation of sorts because it could only be as “wrong” as a flood or hurricane. After all, on the hard determinist’s view, Adam Lanza is just another sack of matter blindly following the naturalistic laws of physics, no different than any other sack of matter. Right? That’s what Sam Harris is committed to: Lanza literally had no choice in the matter. It’s not just overconfident neuro-fetishists that espouse this view, either. This all follows from Galen Strawson’s basic argument.

Why embrace a worldview that necessarily commits one to a full abdication of ultimate moral responsibility, especially when it’s a philosophical position with no scientific grounding?


8 comments

  1. Matt

     says...

    Being a theist I do take some comfort it the idea that what the shooter did was wrong in an absolute sense, but even if I were not I could certainly consider it distasteful and I could take comfort in the fact that society’s collective displeasure at the actions of the shooter leads us to punish those actions. I know we could not call them wrong in an absolute sense, but we can join together in mutual distaste. Is that really that much worse?

  2. Mark D

     says...

    If we take the William Lane Craig approach to things, it could be argued that what happened, in the final reckoning, will turn out to be a good thing.

    Most of th victims, I believe, would be under the age of accountability. Therefore they will enjoy what Craig has said is heaven’s ‘incomparable joy’, just as did the Caananite children slaughtered by the Israelites.

    If these children had been allowed to live and grow up to full adulthood, there would have been every likelihood that many would have ended up eschewing Christianity and therefore eventually condemining themselves to an eternal hell.

    The upshot of the shootings is therefore something infinitely good (heaven for the majority of victims), vs something that could have turned out infinitely bad, hell.

    Taking a traditionalist Christian viewpoint, the shootings can only be considered, in the finaly analysis, to have been a very very good thing.

    Craig makes a similar point when justifying the slaughter of Caananite children.

  3. Syllabus

     says...

    Taking a traditionalist Christian viewpoint, the shootings can only be considered, in the finaly analysis, to have been a very very good thing.

    You’re conflating “traditionalist Christian viewpoint” with the idea that acts are only as good/bad as the results they produce. I think you’ll have an incredibly hard time proving that this has been the viewpoint of Christians throughout history.

    Also, to call Craig’s approach to issues such as this the “traditional” or usual approach of Christian thought throughout history is plain historical and religious naivete.

  4. Mark D

     says...

    I never said that Christians would ever consider such acts as anything but deeply immoral, but the fact is the results are incredibly good and ought to be celebrated.

    The shooter of course goes to hell, but he has in a sense sacrificed his own possibility of salvation to gain near certain salvation for the majority of his victims. This is in fact a far better than letting the kids grow to full adulthood and the very real risk that many will not be Christians and then condemned to hell.

    If Christians truly believed what they proclaim to believe, they should celebrate the outcome, while of course condemning the shooter.

  5. Mark D

     says...

    William Lane Craig so comments on the slaughter of children:

    Moreover, if we believe, as I do, that God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of these children was actually their salvation. We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy. Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.

    So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgement. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalizing effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing.

    Read more: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/slaughter-of-the-canaanites#ixzz2FxjO2GoS
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    So according to Craig, the death of a child is something that is infinitely good, and not something to be mourned, regardless of the moral depravity of those who do the killing.

  6. ThatGuyWithHippyHair

     says...

    Cl, I think it’s rather disingenuous to equate determinism with the “no moral responsibility” strawman you’ve set up here.  You mention Sam Harris as one such “atheist of the hard determinist type,” but if you’ve actually watched Harris’s lecture on the subject (or read the book), then surely you’re aware he has a comprehensive account of justice without free will.

    Let me point out at the outset that I agree that morality is illusory on atheism and, consequently, materialistic determinism.  This isn’t a moral issue I want to address, but a matter of whether, IF one takes as axiomatic for himself the value of human lives (insofar as those lives consist of sentient experience) in his desire calculus, then he can be justified in making judgments I would call moral but for the fact that most people assume morality is pluralistic and universal.

    So consider a hurricane and a psychopath (I realize Lanza may not have been a clinical psychopath, but I’m using the term here as a catch-all for someone who lacks empathy and consequently commits violent behavior).  You say that the “wrongness” of a psychopath’s mass murder of children is no different from the “wrongness” of the deaths of the victims of, say, Hurricane Sandy.  Now, let’s set aside that theism itself is deterministic insofar as the initial conditions of a human soul created by God would determine that soul’s choices as much as the initial conditions of the Big Bang would determine the occurrence of Hurricane Sandy, otherwise the skeptical theism defense against the problem of evil is moot (for if God was incapable of predetermining human behavior — regardless of whether it feels “freely willed” to us — then God was incapable of determining that this is the best of all feasible worlds and hence a world that a benevolent being would create).  I think a proper understanding of human behavior and determinism dispels the sort of mistake you made here.

    Strictly speaking, yes, in a deterministic world, what Adam Lanza did was comparable to a hurricane.  But this is key: the comparison itself lies not in the lack of free will, but in the futility of current human methods to prevent the catastrophe.  Insofar as we are not omniscient enough to predict every butterfly effect, we could not have stopped Hurricane Sandy.  Normally, human beings are different.  Acts of human “evil” have causes that, outside of cases of mental illness, we can recognize as producing such effects and hence stop before the atrocity occurs, in theory.  Even as an error theorist, I’d say this is a matter that desirism gets right: non-psychopathic people can be dissuaded from committing “evil” by social pressure, innate and learned empathy, legal ramifications, and “moral education.”  Some of those also apply to psychopaths, but if they find ways of circumventing the justice system (such as killing themselves afterwards, although I think this usually happens more as a result of mental disorder and depression than a desire to escape consequences) and if they simply don’t care about social scorn if they can sufficiently get what they want out of life without companionship, this is the point where moral condemnation becomes useless and a psychopath becomes analogous to a hurricane.  Harris has rightly pointed out that this should be cause for those of us with relatively deep/normal emotional affect to bury our hatred and vitriol for people like Lanza, and incidentally this exposure of the bankruptcy of a retribution ethic is devastating for an “eternal suffering” conception of Christian hell, which is intrinsically non-constructive.

    While determinism is thus the end of justice for justice’s sake — as many religious and non-religious people alike conceive it — this does not mean justice is useless on determinism, or that mental illness should be cause for withholding punishment from criminals.  Why?  Because punishment serves more, better purposes than sheer vengeance.  Locking up a serial killer, provided the jail is actually effective at keeping the killer from doing more harm than he would if he were running free, protects citizens who obey the social contract from being killed by this person, and the use of a justice system itself serves as a deterrent to destructive behavior.  I am no legal nor psychological scholar, but if nothing else I think I have shown that the claim that an atheistic and deterministic world results in the anarchical destruction of instrumental justice is fallacious.  Indeed, the very fact that apologists like Craig and his strawman of Dostoevsky are apprehensive about a world without ultimate moral responsibility (which, you rightly point out, only a God can provide because human justice is imperfect) indicates the utility of the very social constructs we non-psychopaths have made.  Even psychopaths themselves who may not necessarily have good reasons to kill people can profit from mutual respect of these contracts we call “rights.”

    But we can go further than this.  You may object, “If it’s utilitarian to lock up psychopaths even though their violent actions are about as preventable as those of a bear, then why don’t we punish people for causing freak accidents?  Say Bob is driving — after having taken reasonable measures to maintain his car’s stability — and he finds, while driving on a freeway, that his brakes have failed.  He crashes into a car and causes a domino effect that is fatal to at least one person on the road.  Wouldn’t determinism imply that Bob should go to jail, even though he didn’t cause the crash of his own free will?”  No, it wouldn’t.  The reason we would have locked up Lanza had he not committed suicide is that we have reason to believe his psychology is such that he would be prone to committing further acts of violence — that is, without the sort of rehabilitation and therapy that takes months if not years, during which we’d still need to imprison him outside of rehab sessions — NOT because Lanza killed those kids of his free will.  We can examine the case of Bob from this same perspective.  Bob doesn’t need to be imprisoned because we have no reasons to think the crash occurred because of anything deeply rooted in Bob’s psychology, rather than brake failure over which Bob had no control.  We would imprison Bob if we discovered that Bob, earlier that morning before the crash, had been inspecting his car and found the cause of extremely likely brake failure, yet he did nothing to remedy this.  It’s a matter of predicting further crime — original Bob is very unlikely to cause fatal crashes again, at least as far as the police know, because original Bob has no clear dispositions toward such reckless behavior that could be either (a) prevented by imprisoning him, (b) weakened by socially condemning him and depriving him of liberties he wants to keep, or (c) both.

    I’ll be the first to admit this breaks down in some legal cases, such as bloodthirsty citizens who want to have a killer executed purely out of a desire for pseudo-justice (that is in fact vengeance).  So much the worse for those bloodthirsty citizens, and so much the worse for people who erroneously assume we should lessen jail time for people with clinical mental pathologies just because of diminished free will on their part — forgoing hatred and cruelty toward criminals where such methods will be useless or excessive is one thing, misinterpreting psychology is a more dangerous beast.

    So no, Adam Lanza was not “just another sack of matter blindly following the laws of physics.”  He was a sack of matter with a human brain that, admittedly, is more comparable in culpability to that of a bear than to that of Gandhi, but this says nothing about what our legal, emotional, social, and pragmatic responses to his behavior should be — except that we shouldn’t demand a shallow version of justice, but instead we should actually solve the problems we as members of Western society would prefer to solve. Notice I have not once introduced dubiously pluralistic or universal ethics into the equation.  Although I’ll gladly admit this derives basically the same conclusions from premises mutually exclusive to the theistic “divine rights” ethics of the Constitution, I will not buy into your mistaken presumption that naturalistic determinism is impotent to serve as a source of social norms and principles that treat humans differently from hurricanes.  Humans have malleable desires, a premise I am willing to accept from desirism, even as I reject desirism’s leap from first- to third-person prescriptive statements.  As such, it would be naive to suppose we cannot distinguish between notably different “sacks of matter.”

    Maybe your misunderstanding comes from the assumption that determinism says our phenomenological experience of what we call “free will” does not exist. This is false.  Determinism, at least as far as I adhere to it, only suggests that this experience is an illusion, meaning we may FEEL like we could have done otherwise — but because of what we know about neurology and cause-and-effect in the universe (assuming substance dualism is false, although even then Harris argues convincingly that the notion of free will is itself incoherent, and the implications free will libertarians believe in are non sequitirs), it’s more likely than not that we could not have done otherwise than we have in fact done.  Indeed it would be mysticist and presumptuously dualistic to believe otherwise, so no, determinism is not a mere “philosophical position with no scientific grounding.”  It’s the only position that makes sense until dualism is proven and the logistics of how contra-causal “free will” actually works are explained.

    In short, I’ll agree that atheistic determinism implies the negation of so-called “ultimate moral responsibility,” but not only is this irrelevant to whether a theist can demonstrate that such responsibility exists, I’d like to address your closing question: “Why embrace a worldview that necessarily commits one to a full abdication of ultimate moral responsibility…?”  Because it’s true, for one, but also because it frees us from the primitive retribution ethic that demonizes human beings.  I find it hard to understand why, aside from sheer emotional catharsis, you find it so necessary to judge Adam Lanza’s actions as “wrong” in a different sense than Hurricane Sandy is wrong.  As I’ve shown, you don’t need to do so to have a coherent account of degrees of human responsibility and justice.  Why embrace a worldview that necessarily commits one to useless and dangerous assumptions about human nature, especially when it’s a philosophical position with no scientific grounding?

  7. cl

     says...

    ThatGuy…

    First off, thanks for such an extended response. I’ll address it in a series of comments as time allows.

    Now, let’s set aside that theism itself is deterministic insofar as the initial conditions of a human soul created by God would determine that soul’s choices as much as the initial conditions of the Big Bang would determine the occurrence of Hurricane Sandy, otherwise the skeptical theism defense against the problem of evil is moot (for if God was incapable of predetermining human behavior — regardless of whether it feels “freely willed” to us — then God was incapable of determining that this is the best of all feasible worlds and hence a world that a benevolent being would create). I think a proper understanding of human behavior and determinism dispels the sort of mistake you made here.

    I didn’t make a mistake there. You’ve assumed I swallow certain presuppositions of yours, for example, “that theism itself is deterministic insofar as the initial conditions of a human soul created by God would determine that soul’s choices as much as the initial conditions of the Big Bang would determine the occurrence of Hurricane Sandy.” You haven’t demonstrated that, and even if you could, it’s weight is only pressing on one who needs skeptical theism as a response to the POE. Elsewhere on this blog, I’ve argued that POE fails with or without ST. Until you refute those arguments I have no reason to blindly accept yours.

    Strictly speaking, yes, in a deterministic world, what Adam Lanza did was comparable to a hurricane.

    Glad we agree there.

    But this is key: the comparison itself lies not in the lack of free will, but in the futility of current human methods to prevent the catastrophe. Insofar as we are not omniscient enough to predict every butterfly effect, we could not have stopped Hurricane Sandy. Normally, human beings are different. Acts of human “evil” have causes that, outside of cases of mental illness, we can recognize as producing such effects and hence stop before the atrocity occurs, in theory.

    I think that’s a very weak distinction, not to mention irrelevant. That we can “dissuade” psychopaths doesn’t nullify my criticism in the OP. The very fact that we attempt to “dissuade” psychopaths shows that we have an inherent sense that they are fundamentally different than falling rocks or tornadoes. That is to say, humans innately realize that the former are “malleable” whereas the latter are not. It seems there are two ways to interpret this observation. The first is that we could consider its ubiquitousness as solid evidence of free will. The second, pace Harris, is to discredit this ubiquitousness as just another illusion.

    Or, perhaps there’s a third. Perhaps you can just say the reason for the ubiquitousness is because we know we can dissuade psychopaths?

    …this does not mean justice is useless on determinism…

    Well, just as a reminder, I’m not saying justice is useless on determinism. I’m saying it’s fundamentally unfair and inconsistent with our reaction to other phenomena we classify as “natural.” Quite literally, Harrisian determinism commits us to the statement that murderer is to victim as falling rock is to victim. But we punish murderer, for no good reason other than that we don’t like the pain murderer causes and we want to dissuade it. But falling rock also causes pain, yet, we don’t even consider the idea of dissuading falling rock. Simply put, humans ubiquitously observe a fundamental demarcation in type between murderer and falling rock.

    That’s all I’ve got for now :)

  8. ThatGuyWithHippyHair

     says...

    cl,

    Originally I was waiting for you to complete your response, but since it’s been a few days and I am not sure if your intention was to see how I would reply to your rebuttal piece by piece, you will excuse me for taking the liberty of assuming the latter.

    You’ve assumed that I swallow certain presuppositions of yours, for example…

    Demonstrating that is not central to my defense of deterministic justice, which is why I said, “let’s set aside…”  But I’ll bite.  Let me unpack that claim. Suppose God created the universe and, in his omniscience, knew every causal chain that would comprise the space-time context of that universe, along with the initial conditions of the universe.  Fairly uncontroversial, as its negation would imply God created the universe without due foresight of the consequences of his actions, something extremely reckless that a benevolent and intelligent deity would not do (even granting your defense against the POE does not require skeptical theism and I deny this).  Knowing this, it follows that even if you accept the reality of the experience of “free will” — which I do — nonetheless the actions of humans would be determined.  This is demonstrated in the same way nontheistic determinism is: considering the incoherence of the antithesis.

    If the nature of this hypothetical human soul that theism claims exists in me is not dependent on physical causes such as genetics and environment — both of which lie beyond the agent’s control (that is to say, the brain in us that has control over our destinies is itself determined/controlled by forces in the distant past) and hence imply determinism in the sense relevant to this discussion — then what is the source?  Is it what God designs the soul to be like?  Then we’ve only pushed the burden of moral responsibility and free will onto God’s lap.  If my soul is, e.g., skeptical of God’s existence by its nature that God designed it to be, or by virtue of flaws in my reasoning (hypothetically) that can be traced to bad environmental or genetic influence (both divinely caused), then it’s hardly apparent why moral responsibility lies on “my” shoulders.  You might say that the flaws in my reasoning are of my own creation, but this pushes the question back to what the source of my own self-deception is.  This source can only be, I maintain, either God’s design, genetics, environment, or my own will. The former three abdicate me of responsibility, and the latter again pushes the question back.  You see the problem.  There doesn’t seem to me any coherent sense in which “I” can be the ultimate author of my sins, if my nature is the way it is because of either divine design, the initial conditions and physical patterns of the universe, or pure randomness.  The problem is magnified still further when the moral choices for which I am supposedly responsible are ones in which the morally bad option is something I have a desire for — which can only be the fault of God or physical forces created by God.  I don’t see how introducing an uncaused cause solves the problem of where moral responsibility comes from, even if the existence of such an entity (my “soul”) disproves determinism.  If you have a reasonable alternative, I’d like to hear it.

    …it’s [sic] weight is only pressing on one who needs skeptical theism as a response to the POE.  Elsewhere on this blog, I’ve argued that POE fails with or without ST.

    I read your post “The Evidential Problem of Evil,” if that’s what you are referring to.  Let’s take a look at that.

    Now, on the outset you seem to implicitly recognize that the free will defense is insufficient.  Good.  Your thesis seems to rest on two defenses: 1) skeptical theism (because you argue that the POE begs the question in favor of suffering being gratuitous, but the suffering that is relevant to the POE can only be not gratuitous on skeptical theism, by definition) and 2) the possibility of universalism and annihilationism.

    You told me that a defense against the POE does not require ST, so if I can refute (2) then the consistent theist must adopt skeptical theism, which leads necessarily to theistic determinism and some other problems I don’t want to throw into the mix until we have the rest of this sorted out.

    We can reject universalism outright because Jesus was unequivocally exclusivist.  See Mark 16:16 (“Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be condemned”).  Of course, if universalism were true then Christian ethics would be radically different, for if everyone is guaranteed salvation, the only actions that could make sense are those that ensure the maximal joy and relief from suffering in this life.  What about annihilationism?  This would be more just indeed — I see no reason to think God should preclude those who reject him from annihilating themselves instead of enduring eternal torment, and even though your theology is (from what I gather) not annihilationist anyway, I can work with this.  Was Jesus an annihilationist?  Clearly not, for the New Testament is rife with clear metaphors for eternal suffering (not necessarily literal hellfire, but the liberal “separation from God” interpretation that still implies suffering that never ends).  See Matthew 13:49-50 (“Thus it will be at the end of the age.  The angels will go out and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be wailing and grinding of teeth”).

    Thus if Jesus was neither universalist nor annihilationist, we are forced to conclude that God subjects those who reject him to eternal and therefore gratuitous suffering (because suffering cannot be constructive if it never ends).  That refutes your defense against the POE even if we assume skeptical theism.

    That is to say, humans innately realize that the former are “malleable” whereas the latter are not.  It seems there are two ways to interpret this observation.  The first is that we could consider its ubiquitousness as solid evidence of free will.  The second, pace Harris, is to discredit this ubiquitousness as just another illusion.  

    Or, perhaps there’s a third.  Perhaps you can just say the reason for the ubiquitousness is because we know we can dissuade psychopaths?

    I opt for the second, but you’ve painted a dubiously caricatured picture of Harris’s thesis.  He doesn’t merely handwave the veridical experience of the difference between a human and a rock.  He acknowledges that difference and deems it evidence of the need for pragmatic justice, without jumping to the hasty conclusion that it in any way implies that humans are somehow capable of circumventing cause-and-effect, of being able to have done otherwise than they did in fact do.  Of course the question isn’t whether humans have free will, but if we do, what are the implications thereof?  I said before that one implication free will libertarians believe in is this mystical idea that because Bob chooses to sin freely, Bob deserves either hate (which you do not necessarily endorse, of course) or senseless punishment in the afterlife and/or denial of the bliss of those who “choose” to be saved (which you apparently do).  But I see no reason to think the logical connection between the two is real, so the issue at hand for me isn’t whether “determinism” as such is true, but whether anyone — theist or atheist, FW libertarian or determinist — has rational reasons to maintain our legal and social reactions to destructive behavior.

    I’m not sure what you’re getting at with option #3, however.  Are you saying the malleability of human nature/desires is immaterial to the question of determinism (hence the statement of what is basically “A therefore A”)?  Or are you trying to sneak in some assumption that psychopaths are actually more malleable and hence “morally responsible” than I’ve given them credit for?  If so — and I’m not granting you that, for there but for the grace of God (no pun intended) go you — that doesn’t exactly help your case.  If anything, it serves to undermine it because your naive comparison of deterministic humans to rocks breaks down.  At this point, I’m not entirely sure where you even disagree with me here.  You just aren’t seeing the logical conclusions of the facts we both seem to accept.

    But we punish murderer, for no good reason other than that we don’t like the pain murderer causes and we want to dissuade it. But falling rock also causes pain, yet, we don’t even consider the idea of dissuading falling rock. Simply put, humans ubiquitously observe a fundamental demarcation in type between murderer and falling rock.

    We don’t consider the idea of dissuading a falling rock because a falling rock is not a sentient being with desires that we can negotiate with.  I’m surprised someone as intelligent as you, based on your apt criticisms of atheists and theists alike on this blog and others, could miss such an obvious point.  I agree that we observe such a fundamental demarcation, but I deny for scientific reasons that this demarcation has anything to do with a nonphysical, God-created, “morally responsible” soul with free will.  Per Occam’s Razor, that entity is an unnecessary element when brain activity seems sufficient to explain this phenomenon.  Even if it weren’t, every account of such a dualistic explanation of which I am aware is so vague and unexplained as to be a pseudo-explanation (just like God as far as I’m concerned, incidentally).

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