Posted: Aug 03, 2018 5:12 pm
romansh wrote:Zoon
Complimenting people? Why not, especially if it enhances the desired behaviour? It also allows us to understand we were fundamentally lucky when we get compliments or have done well for ourselves.
Can't be "good" without God?
Can't be "good" without free will?
Can't be "good" without a deterrent?
How far from you current path would you deviate if there were no deterrents? Just understanding that actions will have consequences as usual. Of course there are others who need those deterrents, not us. But the deterrents do play a role, having said that, the immediate circumstances play a far larger role. Unfair deterrents are counter productive. Hence Blackstone type formulations.
You did advocate for retributional punishment zoon (which includes suffering according to SEP), I am wondering if this includes those who could not have done otherwise. I am wondering why you have not tackled this aspect?
My intention was to argue against attempts to root out all considerations of free will or retribution from the legal system and from ordinary social life. I certainly did not intend to advocate reverting to an infantile dependence on evolved intuition alone.
As far as I can tell, Sapolsky changes his mind in the course of the quotation from his book which I posted in #12886 above. For most of the quote, he is fulminating against leaving any trace of free will or retribution in the legal system, on the grounds that they are unscientific and disastrous. Then, when he tries to follow through to ordinary life and claims that we really shouldn’t compliment people, he begins to think this is looking silly, as you point out above. By the final paragraph of the quotation he’s saying it’s not in fact feasible to take free will out of our social thinking, and at that point I’m inclined to agree with him. The final paragraph is:
Robert Sapolsky in ‘Behave’ wrote:I can’t really imagine how to live your life as if there is no free will. It may never be possible to view ourselves as the sum of our biology. Perhaps we’ll have to settle for making sure our homuncular myths are benign, and save the heavy lifting of truly thinking rationally for where it matters – when we judge others harshly.
I’m dubious about the prospect of “truly thinking rationally” (at least while we understand brains as little as we do), but if he just means bringing more of our unemotional, calculating brain to bear when the stakes are higher, then I agree with that paragraph. I also think that’s what the legal system, and common sense, both do anyway. If someone treats me with mild rudeness, I can be mildly rude back without thinking twice, and without the law coming down on me. If they are more seriously rude, I think more carefully about what may be going on. If someone punches me, then it’s illegal for me to punch them back, that’s when the rule of law comes in. A country without the rule of law tends to develop Mafia-style vendettas, as people exact retribution repeatedly on an individual or clan basis, and these are explicitly discouraged by nationwide legal systems.
I was arguing against you when I thought you were trying to take free will out of our social thinking altogether, in the way that Robert Sapolsky seems to be saying in most of the quote.
I have a feeling that Sapolsky’s main disagreement with the US legal system in its current form, is where the death penalty is concerned. Among hunter-gatherers, and up to mediaeval times, the death penalty was effectively the only way to take seriously dangerous or disruptive people out of circulation. Imprisonment isn’t possible for hunter-gatherers, and was too expensive to use for the ordinary criminal system for much of history. In the US today, a very much wealthier place, this is no longer the case; in fact, executing someone is far more expensive than simply keeping them shut up, because of all the lawsuits. I think studies show that the death penalty is also not a clear deterrent; the prospect of being caught and imprisoned for life is roughly equally effective. Retribution remains the only “reason” for keeping a penalty which is far more fearsome than any other in the legal system. I agree strongly with Sapolsky that this is an undesirable state of affairs, but I think it’s better addressed by eliminating the death penalty than by attempting to eliminate free will and retribution altogether from our thinking.
Do you consider that I’ve answered your question? Ordinarily, there is a default assumption that people should not cause each other to suffer, and retribution is one of the exceptions. This default prohibition is very much a part of our evolved intuition, I don’t think it’s a scientific or independently reasoned point. This is one reason why I’m not happy with Sapolsky’s fierce attempts to take free will out of the justice system, his reason is mostly that by default it’s not good to make people suffer, but if he’s saying we ought to forget our irrational impulses then we ought to forget about not wanting people to suffer, or at least the emotional aspect of not wanting them to suffer. He’s emotionally saying we ought to take emotion out of the system. If I’m only going with cold reason and we are to think of ourselves as machinery like car engines, where’s the problem in causing suffering? As Sapolsky says at intervals, it’s complicated. I don’t see any point in attempting any root and branch surgery like trying to take free will out of our thinking, until we know more about how it all works.
Perhaps try to answer your question again. The more I try to answer it, the more I come back to Sapolsky’s remark towards the end of his long book: “It’s complicated”. Your question, I think, assumes a fairly simple dichotomy between two psychological backgrounds to punishment:
1) The evolved, emotional background. This gives us a nice warm fuzzy feeling when an evil-doer, acting on their mythical free will, commits a crime and gets their comeuppance. Apart from the warm fuzzy feeling, there are no good outcomes for retributive punishment, deterrence is merely accidental. Retributive emotions can lead to far fiercer punishments than are required for deterrence.
2) The logical, scientific background of punishment for deterrence. The science is simple: punishment results in aversion by a Pavlovian response in the criminal, and the fear of punishment deters everybody else. No free will, just cause and effect. The logic is also straightforward: deterrence brings down crime and keeps the community functional.
I think that when Sapolsky argues fiercely in the first part of the quote that the criminal justice system should be overhauled to eliminate evolved emotions altogether, he’s assuming something like the simple dichotomy above – it’s a no-brainer, stick to the science and logic. Then he tries to apply this simple view of human nature to a more ordinary social interaction (complimenting one’s host at a dinner party), and it immediately feels ludicrous. He changes tack, and says that in practice he doesn’t think we can manage social life without making use of evolved patterns of interaction which we don’t yet fully understand. I think I’m with Sapolsky in my opinion that the dichotomy is very far from being as simple and clear-cut as I’ve written it above. For one thing, deterrence in human societies is not at all a matter of simple stimulus and response; everyone has their own internal model of how the local society works, and thinks in terms of how to influence it. For another, I suspect absolute free will is a bit of a theological red herring (it was historically central in law courts based on Christianity), and that our evolved emotions where punishment is concerned are more closely linked to effective deterrence. If a form of punishment doesn’t have a useful practical effect, such as discouraging crime, then we start to feel uncomfortable with it: this is the underlying reason why we don’t want to punish people who were coerced or mentally ill. (For example, people who support the death penalty in the US typically at least try to argue that it has a clear deterrent effect.) Our logical brains do think in terms of deterrence, and we do need to bring logic and science to bear, but I think the logic is shaped and backed up by more evolved patterns than we’re aware of. I’m speculating, I don’t have a clear answer any more than Sapolsky does.