One of the central insights of Afreeism is that no one is morally responsible for past actions. I have written about Afreeism elsewhere (please see Medium articles How to Live Without Guilt and Why I Don’t Believe in Forgiveness), so I am going to give just the bare bones here. Afreeism is an evidence-based philosophy that concludes that there is no free will. Afreeism is based on the idea that all events are caused and that any given event is the result of a complex chain of causation. Humans are not exempt from the laws of physics that govern causation. Every thought, every feeling, every desire, and every action is the result of a complex yet deterministic causal chain involving atoms and molecules and cells and tissue. In the brain, neurons fire and trigger other neurons. This causal chain originated long before any of us were born. As a result, every thought, every feeling, every desire, and every action has been determined. None of us could have done otherwise than what we did. Free will is just an illusion.
Moral Responsibility for Past Actions
Because we could not have done otherwise, because we have no free will, it does not make sense to hold someone morally responsible for past actions. This is something that we know intuitively. Suppose someone is driving a car and a previously undiagnosed brain tumor causes this person to drive recklessly off the road and injure someone. We do not hold that person morally responsible, because that person could not have done otherwise. Afreeism simply understands that all actions are of this sort. They are all caused by the interaction of physical forces both inside the brain and outside, forces that were in play long before the person taking the action was born. We may sometimes be doing what we want to do, but these wants are also determined by a chain of causation. Therefore, no one is morally responsible for past actions.
Punishment
A lack of moral responsibility for past actions does not imply that there should be no consequences for past actions. Afreeism depends on the notion of causation, that everything is caused. This means that actions can be deterred and thus punishment can be based on deterrence. It just should not be based on retribution, on the notion that actions or people are morally bad. Instead, we punish people as we might punish a child, to modify behavior, but we do so with a certain amount of sadness, realizing that the person we are punishing could not have done other than what they did. It is interesting that the great jurist Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. recognized exactly this, that in order to deter others, punishment meant punishing those we know could not have done otherwise. He said:
If I were having a philosophical talk with a man I was going to have hanged (or electrocuted) I should say, “I don’t doubt that your act was inevitable for you, but to make it more avoidable by others we propose to sacrifice you to the common good. You may regard yourself as a soldier dying for your country if you like.”
This strange, startling, and yet melancholy statement reflects Holmes’s understanding of the causal nature of the universe and his recognition that punishment is often justified, even though in some sense we are all always and forever innocent. (Unlike Holmes, I do not believe that capital punishment is ever justified.)
A Quick Trip Into Robot World
Some readers may believe that deterrence is incompatible with Afreeism. If all actions are determined, how can anyone be deterred? However, it is because the world is deterministic, that is, based on causation, that deterrence makes sense. Here is a thought experiment. Imagine that you have constructed Robot World, populated it with robots, and then let it go. Robots are deterministic beings. They have algorithms that convert inputs into actions. Actions are completely determined by the inputs and the algorithms. Robots can never do otherwise than what they do. It is because inputs affect outputs that deterrence works. Even in Robot World, we can imagine a society with incentives and punishments. Human society works in the same way. The only difference is that many humans believe that they are somehow exempt from the laws of physics, that they possess something called free will. (Of course, some of the robots in Robot World may harbor the same illusions.) The point is that deterrence is completely compatible with a deterministic world. Indeed, we see deterrence working in our deterministic world.
Moral Rules
Afreeism does not hold that we should not have moral rules. Rules help society function better. For example, Robot World may be a lot happier if we program our robots to follow the Golden Rule. We just cannot hold our robots morally responsible if they sometimes violate these rules, or if some of the robots are mistakenly misprogrammed without the Golden Rule.
The Damage Done
Mistakenly believing that we have free will can lead to disastrous results. Belief in free will leads us to condemn people who do bad things as bad people. As a result, punishment becomes based on retribution rather than on deterrence or rehabilitation. Prison sentences become far too lengthy and far too common. The International Centre for Prison Studies reports that 714 persons per 100,000 are currently imprisoned in the United States. U.S. prisons are barbaric, violent, dehumanizing institutions. Inmates are regularly humiliated and brutalized. The Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit that works for prison reform in Alabama reports that,
The warehousing of one in 100 Americans has all but eradicated rehabilitative programs, and the conditions of confinement in jails, prisons, and detention facilities have dramatically worsened. In 2011, conditions became so “horrendous” in California — home to some of the country’s harshest “Three Strikes, You’re Out” enhanced sentencing laws — that the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Plata required the state to release up to 46,000 prisoners after finding that its severely overcrowded prisons and grossly inadequate medical and mental health care is “incompatible with the concept of human dignity and has no place in civilized society.”
About 75,000 people in the United States are held in solitary confinement, spending 23 or more hours a day in small cells, allowed out only for showers, brief exercise, or medical visits, without telephone calls or visits from family members. The use of long-term isolation escalated after “tough on crime” policies led states to build super-maximum-security prisons in the 1980s and 1990s. Studies show that people held in long-term solitary confinement suffer from anxiety, paranoia, perceptual disturbances, and deep depression. Nationwide, suicides among people held in isolation, who make up 3 to 8 percent of the nation’s prison population, account for about 50 percent of prison suicides.
This barbarism has many sources, but retribution is primary among them. Once a person is found guilty, particularly of a violent crime, that person is deprived of her humanity. Convicts gets what they “deserve,” no matter how dehumanizing and brutal the treatment.
The Afreeist Alternative
If we understand the causal determinism of the universe, we also understand that this treatment is unjustified. The commission of the crime was determined by factors that were in place long before the criminal was born. How can persons be morally responsible for their actions? Realizing that the universe is deterministic should help us empathize with both the offender and those harmed by the offender. Rather than seek the pleasure of seeing someone get what they deserve, we would apply punishment reluctantly, grudgingly, and even sparingly. Above all, we would try to do it rationally, all the time realizing that “there, but for the grace of the universe, go I.” We would be asking what is the least amount of punishment that will produce an acceptable amount of deterrence? Can we use this opportunity to teach the offender (and others in society) moral, social, or civic values? As a last resort, perhaps the offender is dangerous and cannot be reformed. In that case, we may have to separate the offender from the rest of society. But if we do, we would do so humanely. (Additional information on Afreeism can be found on the Afreeist Society website.)
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