We talked about the case of “Kevin” as presented by Radiolab.
What are the necessary conditions for being responsible for your actions, where “being responsible” means that you could be justifiably punished for what you did?
Incompatibilists say the necessary condition is that you are the cause of your behavior, free from any other causes outside of your control.
The law, as described by Morse, maintains that the necessary condition is rationality: you can be responsible for what you did only if you were rational when you did it. In this way, the law is compatibilist: it holds that rationality is the only necessary condition for being responsible for your behavior. If so, you can be responsible for your behavior even if it is caused. All that has to be true is that you were rational when you did it.
We started off today’s class with two more detailed statements of what rationality involves. These come from attempts to devise criteria for determining when insanity is an appropriate defense against a criminal charge.
If we use the M’Naghten Rule, Kevin is pretty clearly responsible. He wasn’t deluded.
If we use the American Law Institute standard, it’s at least debatable whether he is responsible or not.
On the one hand, there is a lot of evidence that his behavior was something that he could not control. For instance, he was in these strange cycles of downloading files, deleting them, then downloading them again; that suggests at the very least a serious struggle for control between the different parts of his mind.
On the other hand, there is quite a lot of evidence that he had control of his behavior. He didn’t do this at work, for instance.
This led to a very rich discussion. Here are some, but not all, of the points raised.
Zach asked what makes Kevin different from any other offender. It’s always the brain. Isha had a similar view. She thought that we’re looking for something deeper only because we think of punishment in retributivist terms. If it’s just a method of controlling anti-social behavior, rather than a response to what you are like at your core as a person, then we don’t need to set an especially high standard for it.
Izzy had more sympathy with Kevin. The suddenness of his condition impressed her. It suggests that it’s not really him; he is the person whose personality was established over the years and not the one who acts so oddly after brain surgery. I think this contributes to the “there but for the grace of God go I” feeling that the story evokes.
Dan, Rafael, and Brandon all expressed the disadvantages of abandoning retributive punishment and moving towards a model based on preventing or treating anti-social behavior. Dan noted that it’s desirable to allow political crimes to happen rather than preventing them. Rafael worried that eugenics would follow from attempts to predict criminal behavior. Brandon asked why we are so sure that we would continue to value people as we do if we saw them more like machines. Why not just get rid of the undesirable ones?
Bryce, however, had a more optimistic outlook. He thinks that people will always retain the folk psychology-based beliefs in free will; Izzy agreed. Given that, it’s safe for the law or other more institutions not burdened with our psychologies, to act as if we were causally determined. The result won’t be a massive social change in our attitudes towards people.
If we’re going to say that Kevin should not be punished because his brain was responsible rather than him, then we are on the road to saying that no one can be punished. After all, everyone’s brain is responsible for their behavior. At least, that’s what materialistic neuroscience seems to be on the road to showing … someday.
That said, it was notable to me that few of the people in the story said anything like that. Kevin, his wife, the judge, and the prosecutor all applied the compatibilist standards of rationality. They were primarily interested in whether he was capable of controlling his behavior in the light of his knowledge of right and wrong, which is the American Law Institute standard for rationality.
Everyone agrees on the facts of the case. What is at issue is how we understand or interpret them. That is where philosophy comes in. If we interpret the story of Kevin as showing that punishment is inappropriate because his actions were caused by his brain, we are headed towards incompatibilism. If we interpret the story as showing that the law’s normal standards for assessing rationality and insanity can be applied to a case like this, then we are taking up a compatibilist position.
Oliver Sacks wrote up a description of what appears to be the same case, just in case you would like to read more.
Some of the difficulties with the insanity defense are raised by the recent nanny murder case.
And if you would like to see someone undergoing brain surgery while playing the flute, we have you covered.