Determinism: accepting all behavior, thoughts, and feelings as being the inevitable--lawful--outcome of complex psychological laws describing cause and effect relationships in human behavior. Understanding the causes of any behavior helps us accept it.
The
ideas of free will, determinism, personal choice, moral responsibility, and
scientific prediction are old ideas, but in this century they have not been
discussed seriously. Too bad, because we need a much clearer
view of reality. Sappington (1990) believes some interest is being
revived. He believes free will can be compatible with science. So do I.
A
recent publication by Bruce Waller (1999) is a clear, readable, convincing
discussion of "will power" and the sense of personal responsibility
that accompanies the notions of personal freedom and choice. Free will, as most
people think of it, is a term describing the vague, mysterious process by which
we come to some decision about what to do or think. While we have no way to see
how our mind comes to any given decision, in the case of "free will"
it does seem to us as though decision-making, while guided by some of our
thoughts, is a rather autonomous and sometimes almost magical process.
"Our" decisions certainly seem to come out of our head and often seem
only distantly connected to outside or historical causes or influences. No
wonder choices and decisions are assumed to be our responsibility. But the
question is: Are we totally responsible or are many complex uncontrollable and
often unknown factors--inside and outside of us--involved with what merely seem
to be our "free choices?"
Waller
says one reason for a culture keeping the concept 141d311b of "free will," a
common notion which has never been scientifically explained, is so society (and
each of us) can hold the actor "morally responsible" for his/her
actions. Our system of punitive control of bad behavior is mostly built on this
assumption. We think: the murderer deserves to die. The rapist should be
severely punished. The drug dealer and chronic criminal should just be locked
up, perhaps forever.
Moreover,
we think the person who doesn't "help himself" deserves what he gets.
The drunk who refuses treatment is responsible for his behavior; he is
"weak willed" or wants to drink and fall in the gutter. The
15-year-old girl who becomes promiscuous and then pregnant "should have
known better" and deserves to be a poor, uneducated, ostracized mother.
The abused woman, who knows there is shelter and help available but stays with
her abuser, is "making her own choice" and is "morally
responsible" for her own pitiful condition. The unmotivated worker or
student is "lazy" and has to assume responsibility for his/her being
fired or failed. They are getting their "just rewards." The anxious
person who has lots of physical problems the doctor can't understand is
"neurotic" or "sick" or "crazy"
or "all messed up." Even the psychotic homeless person sleeping under
cardboard on the street is assumed to be to blame for his/her condition, at
least "no one else is to blame!" Our explanatory labels given to
these people convey no deep understanding of the origin of their problems. Our
thinking simply uses "free will" to blame the victims.
Waller
also points out that many Behaviorists believe that "free will" and
"moral responsibility" are intellectual cop outs, i.e. convenient and
easy excuses for not looking deeper into the person's history--the
environmental causes--for understanding. Why would we do that? If we can pin
the responsibility on the victim, we can quickly dismiss the importance of
unequal education, wealth, health, trauma, child care, social-family
conditions, etc. If the immoral, addicted, criminal, incompetent, emotionally
upset, and psychologically disturbed are "responsible," then why
bother with exploring their history/environment/thought processes to understand
what has happened to them? Sounds like a mind-set to prolong ignorance to me.
Although
society assigns undue responsibility to the actor (often a victim), relatively
little research has been supported to enhance the control an individual might
have over his/her behavior. As discussed in chapter 1, how many schools or
colleges offer courses in self-direction or self-control or self-help? These
skills could be taught to everyone. But once we start thinking in terms of
teaching coping skills, the concept of "free will" loses some of its
power to blame the actor. This is because as we teach self-control to others it
becomes more and more obvious that outside-the-actor factors (environmental,
educational, and historical) have influenced how every human being behaves.
Consequently, assigning "moral responsibility" exclusively to the
individual becomes harder and harder to do.
Research
has studied why some people are industrious and others are lethargic. The
results included interesting concepts: "learned industriousness" and
"learned helplessness." These traits turn out to be clearly the
outcome of the individual's reinforcement history, often occurring in early
childhood, and not the result of some innate trait, not just a character flaw,
not intentional decisions, and not "free will." The lethargic
("lazy") or oppositional ("argumentative") person is
certainly not "morally responsible" for how he/she was rewarded and
dealt with as a child.
In
short, the evidence is weak for the belief that "free will" is
largely responsible for what we do. If we don't have "free will,"
then we aren't totally "morally responsible" for what we do (but
maybe we are partly responsible). Similarly, we should question the beliefs in
a "just world," that everyone gets his/her "just deserts,"
and that everyone has access to a level playing field. All these beliefs may be
convenient delusions for the advantaged and the successful, who want to avoid
responsibility for making it a better world.
Waller's
article focused primarily on the philosophical and social justice implications
of believing in "free will." While that is very important for a
society, my focus in this section is on the personal use of thinking as a
determinist in terms of self-acceptance and tolerance of others.
Everything
has its causes. Things don't happen by magic. According to
determinism, there is nothing that "just happens," no
"accidents" without a cause, no arbitrary divine intervention (or, at
least, very rarely), no unavoidable fate, no mystical "free will" and
no predetermined destiny. Furthermore, all events or actions are lawful, i.e.
based on universal, ever present cause and effect relationships between
antecedents (the past) and outcomes (the present). Gravitational pull is
lawful, as is a rocket engine to counteract gravity. There are reasons, i.e. it
is expected or "lawful," for an acorn to become an oak, not a pine
tree. Likewise, in human behavior, it is predictable, presumably based on
complex "laws," that most people will seek love, that behavior
followed immediately by a reward tends to be repeated (called the law of
effect), that frustration arouses a response (aggression, assertiveness,
passive-aggressiveness or whatever), that unpleasant experiences tend to be
repressed or suppressed, that negative self-evaluations are related to low
self-esteem, that most humans can learn, with knowledge and training, to
control their future to some extent, etc. Thus, life is "lawful."
All
scientific efforts attempt to discover and understand "laws"--basic
dependable cause and effect relationships. If there were no order (laws) in the
universe, then there would be nothing to learn (except that nothing is stable
and, thus, understandable). The opposite seems to be true; every event has a
cause and this cause-effect connection is potentially understandable. I'm not
saying we scientists understand everything right now (far from it) nor that we will eventually be able to predict all behavior.
That's nonsense. Yet, I have a belief that we will be able to understand and
control many of our own behaviors in 1000 years. It is our doubts about this
matter that causes our reluctance to earnestly search for and use scientific
knowledge about the laws of human behavior. Our ignorance about behavior keeps
us preparing for and fighting wars; suffering hunger, preventable illness, and
ignorance; making poor choices about careers, marriage partners, child rearing;
having many avoidable emotional problems; etc. In short, discovering
"laws" through wisdom and science, and using laws to improve the
human condition is, I believe, the great hope for the future. Knowing psychological
laws does not require us to be super smart; it is just
understanding what's happening.
Much
human behavior is unquestionably very complex, but it is reasonable to assume
that all behavior is potentially understandable, i.e. a consistent, logical,
to-be-expected outcome resulting from many causes. One way of looking at this
is to say, "If I knew all the laws that are influencing your behavior, I
would understand you perfectly. I would see that given your genes and
physical condition, given the effects of past events and your memory
(perhaps distorted) of past experiences, and given your view of the
present situation, I would do exactly what you are doing, no matter how
saintly or how evil. " If true, that is
an awesome statement or belief.
If a person can learn to think this way, i.e. that all human
feelings and actions are caused by psychological laws, then all behavior
becomes, in a sense, "acceptable" because it is, at the moment,
unavoidably lawful. The truth is everything is lawful, so far as science
knows. Thus, all behavior, your's and everyone's, is the natural, inevitable
outcome of the existing causes. No other outcome was possible given the
circumstances (causes and laws). Such an attitude leads logically to tolerance
of yourself and others --of all that has happened in the past.
Moreover, a deterministic orientation offers hope that
scientists and other careful observers, including you, will discover more and
more useful knowledge ("laws") for changing the future.
Accept yesterday, influence tomorrow.
A
great deal of benefit can result from analyzing in depth the causes of some
action--called causal attribution--and/or from changing one's views of the
causes. Examples: rape victims can be helped to see the situation realistically
and press charges, interpersonal conflicts can be reduced easier if the reasons
for each side's position are understood, fighting couples can benefit from
seeing the causes as external and temporary (not because the partner is an
incurable jerk), and self-esteem can be raised if one can learn to feel
personally responsible for many successes, capable of improving, and not
responsible for all our failures (Baron & Byrne, 1987).
Determinism
has been mentioned already in "the helping philosophy" in chapter 3,
in the section on overcoming guilt in chapter 6, and briefly in the list of
methods for reducing anger in chapter 7. Changing how one explains one's
failures is important in coping with depression (chapter 6) and a poor
self-concept (method #1 above).
Purposes
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