The Mitigation Response

Accepting determinism can keep reactivity in check

This is the first installment of posts on how a deterministic view of ourselves can affect beliefs, attitudes, and policies, moving them in a less punitive, more humane, and more egalitarian direction.

It’s widely supposed that your prototypical evil-doer - Trump, Biden, Hitler, pick your favorite - could have turned out otherwise had they made different choices. Crucially, it’s also widely supposed that they could have chosen otherwise at some point in their development. The second supposition makes it possible to demonize them as a self-created monster whose malevolence is purely their own doing. Their failure to form themselves correctly, to become a force for good, not evil, makes them deeply and ultimately blameworthy for having become that way, deserving of the worst sort of punishment. This might license on your part the expression of an implacable moral anger that seeks to balance the evil-doer’s crimes with the just deliverance of their equal and opposite suffering. You have moral permission to punish the monster to your satisfaction and indeed, the satisfactions of inflicting harm on perceived enemies should not be underrated. But such satisfactions, unfortunately, are themselves morally problematic and indulging them might put you at risk of becoming the monster you hate.

Fortunately, it isn’t difficult to debunk the idea of radical self-creation, that which makes the monster deeply deserving of punishment, but doing so is at odds with the belief that we humans are in some respect not fully determined to become who we are. We have, it’s thought, the capacity to have chosen or acted otherwise in an actual situation given the circumstances just as they were - the libertarian intuition. But of course it’s these circumstances, including those internal to the person, that explain why the choice or action happened and why an alternative didn’t. If someone says they could have done otherwise, just ask them why they didn’t, in which case they’re obliged to tell the causal story of what actually happened. And any randomness, indeterminacy, or probability in the situation that might have made it turn out otherwise wouldn’t be their doing, so not something they can take credit or blame for. All told, the libertarian intuition of radical self-creation is an obvious non-starter if we’re looking to actually explain how people end up as they do.

Still, if you suggest to someone that there were sufficient causes that explain Hitler’s character and behavior, that something in that causal story would have had to be otherwise for him to have turned out otherwise, you’ll likely be met with an incredulous stare. You might be accused of implying he wasn’t responsible for his atrocities, that you’re endorsing the maxim “Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner” - to understand all is to forgive all. That doesn’t follow, but a commitment to the libertarian conception of agency might make it seem that way. This is why Hitler’s formative story, biological and environmental, is sometimes suppressed: it comes across as an exculpatory excuse.

But seeing that an evil-doer could not have turned out otherwise given their formative circumstances does not license forgiveness. After all, let’s suppose, they’re doing evil right now and must be contained; they’re violating every moral rule in the book and such violations rightly inspire your anger and determination to thwart them. But what appreciating determinism might do is prevent that anger from becoming all consuming. You’ll see that causal responsibility for the monster and their transgressions is distributed among all the factors that created them. They couldn’t have turned out otherwise, given those factors. Such a realization can mitigate the moral anger premised on the illusion of libertarian agency - that they are solely responsible for being who they are, hence deeply deserving of punishment. This will make it less likely you’ll pursue unlimited retaliation when a better policy, all things considered, might be less punitive. After all, you don’t want to replicate the style of evil-doers themselves in a tit-for-tat spiral of revenge.

The mitigation response - that appreciating determinism attenuates your initial, emotion-driven tendency to demonize and retaliate - makes good, practical sense. Distributing causal responsibility for evil-doers outside evildoers themselves highlights the fact that their crimes are a function not of a radically autonomous self, but of all the circumstances that created them: their biological endowment, their parents, peers, teachers, heroes, social milieu, ideological influences, etc., etc. Such circumstances then become potential targets of intervention, and if you’re rational you’ll be naturally inclined to address them. They are blameworthy in the sense of being causally responsible for the evil-doer, which means blame for evil gets distributed beyond the agent. And what we blame we naturally and rightly attempt to intervene on, driven by the desire to avoid future harm. We can see, therefore, that the psychological effect of understanding the causal story - the distribution of blame and attenuation of moral anger directed at the agent - still holds even if forgiveness isn’t warranted. Accepting that someone could not have turned out otherwise removes the libertarian basis for retribution, opening up space for more productive, less needlessly punitive approaches to managing evil, but without excusing it.

I’ve illustrated the mitigation response with a worst-case scenario, but it applies to all of us. Most of us aren’t evil, but we’re all less than perfect, so understanding that we couldn’t have turned out otherwise given our biological and environmental circumstances can alleviate the all-consuming, laser-focused blame that we sometimes place on ourselves and others. It can increase our capacity for forbearance, making us less reactive and resentful if we’ve been wronged, or less needlessly self-critical when we screw up. It prompts us to take into account the factors and circumstances that actually explain our faults and transgressions, widening the potential targets for intervention in response to moral failures. Put more prosaically, the mitigation response allows us to cut each other more slack, and it clues us in on what’s behind the everyday injustices inflicted upon us by colleagues, spouses, and our fellow commuters.

None of this is to suggest that we minimize any harm done or forego accountability in dealing with wrongdoing; we shouldn’t confuse explanations with excuses. The person - you, me, that guy over there - is still the most proximate, salient cause of the harm, so not to hold each other responsible would fail to address all the causes of harm in play. But the mitigation response can modulate how we hold each other responsible. It can make our responsibility practices less needlessly punitive, more focused on reform and restoration, more attentive to the wider causal context that needs to be addressed to prevent future harms and, ideally, make us better people. Most basically, the mitigation response can reduce the corrosive desire to inflict equal and opposite suffering on the offender. Such emotional de-escalation allows us to adopt a less retributive, more compassionate moral perspective, one that can apply both to interpersonal relationships and the wider culture, including of course the criminal justice system (an upcoming topic).

That none of us could have turned out otherwise than we now are does not imply that we’re fated to be a particular way in the future, that nothing is to be done or can be done. That’s to make the common mistake of confusing determinism with fatalism. As we’ll cover in later installments, understanding the causal story is actually a key to more effective action, not an invitation to passivity or resignation.

The bottom line here: if we keep the causal story of a wrong-doer in mind, whoever they might be - you and me included - we’re less likely to be overrun by the retributive impulse, less like to demonize, retaliate in kind, and otherwise act in ways that put us at risk of becoming like them. Understanding that they couldn’t have turned out otherwise helps to keep our reactivity in check, a good thing if we’re looking to create a less punitive society.