Whose fault is it?

It being Easter Sunday, the most important day in the year for our established church, it seems appropriate to moralise. My text is lifted from the words of the late Benjamin Libet, Virtual Nobel Laureate, who said, or at least reported, something along the lines that we cannot blame or punish people for things that they do unconsciously. The context being some famous experiments which appeared to suggest that pretty much all we do is decided unconsciously, with consciousness being told about it rather after (say half a second or so) the event. A topic which remains hot getting on for fifty years later.

I associate to the Catholic consideration of malice aforethought. An act is not truly evil unless the actor knew, in the instants before the deed, that it was both wrong and something that he wanted to do. Also to the words of St. Matthew, reproduced above left.

I am reminded also of another saying, this one from our Treasury, about blame not being the point. When something goes wrong it is not who is to blame, rather who is responsible.

So if I murder some affordable in a paroxysm of rage because he has just dumped an empty vodka bottle (no doubt paid for out of his benefit) on the pavement, neglecting the possibility of justifiable homicide, who or what is to blame?

We suppose that there is no doubt that I did it and no doubt that the deed was unthinking. I did indeed do the deed in a paroxysm of rage and it all happened so quickly that consciousness - if we allow this entity any autonomy at all - did not have enough time to intervene, even if it was so minded.

It seems reasonably clear that if I have done such a thing that I should be taken out of circulation for a bit, at the very least while the dust settles. The question of malice aforethought is not relevant, is trumped by the question of safety of everybody else. Out of circulation into some kind of secure accommodation, be that a prison or a hospital. And for most people, this would also be punishment, whatever the intentions of the justice system might have been.

Much less clear how one can have any confidence that I am not going to do such a thing again if I were to be released. One angle is that I might have got a lot older, and with age it may be that the likelihood of having paroxysms of rage is diminished, along with the other, legal, urges. Another might be that I had been on lots of anger management courses and satisfied the course leaders that I now had my anger under control. Where I think we are on weaker ground, with some people who are sick in the head being very good at convincing prison visitors and other well-meaning people that they are well, that the system has just got it in for them for some reason of its own. Another might be that all will be well provided that I take my meds. But how can we be sure that I will? Maybe the meds that are strong enough to deal with the rage make me very dopey and I get fed up with being dopey the whole time. I want a bit of life. Maybe technology will ride to the rescue: that I will have to wear some sort of clever gadget which can detect rage and shut me down while I calm down. Perhaps Mr. Google is working on such things as I type.

I think where I am getting to is that the question of whether a deed was done knowingly or not is not the important question. The important questions are whether or not I did it, and if I did it, how am I going to be managed, stopped from doing it again? Perhaps even made into a better person, a person better fit to join the society of others. At least within a reasonable margin of error. And I do not go along with the thoughts of Matthew, the thoughts of thoughtcrime. All kinds of dreadful thoughts are no doubt swimming around my subconscious mind all the time and who is to say when any one of them might pop up and become felonious?

So what place is there in the world for mitigation? That yes, I did the deed, but it was all down to my dreadful parents. If I had not been brought up in that dreadful way, I would not be a dreadful person. At which point you might feel sorry for me, but it does not change the fact of my being dreadful, as many well-meaning people have learned the hard way when they have tried to befriend people in trouble.

At which inconclusive point, I feel a Horton Clockwise coming on.

PS: I had not realised until today that psychologists had felt very left out, not being a proper part of the Nobel world, so they invented one of their own at the University of Klagenfurt. See gmaps 46.616079,14.26529. It looks to be a rather pretty place, in south Austria, just north of the border with what is presently Slovenia.