The Sociopath as Character Type

Exhibit A?

I find psychopaths fascinating. I’ve known one or two in my time, as most likely have you, since best estimates are that psychopaths comprise somewhere between 1 and 2 percent of the general population. Being in the presence of a true psychopath is an experience which, once you realize it’s happening, is not quickly forgotten, even where the realization is not the result of having been harmed or ripped-off by one. To be alone in a room with a psychopath is to be, well… alone in a room. I once owned a boa constrictor for a brief period, and it projected about as much presence as a psychopath generally does. I imagine the experience is much like the feeling the PMO Chief of Staff gets from being alone in a room with Stephen Joseph Harper.

Psychopaths are people almost without qualities. Take Gillian (this is not her real name, but it is one of the actual aliases she uses). Over the course of the many years I knew Gillian, she never once laughed genuinely at anything except the misfortunes of others. She smiled when she needed to, and a few times she laughed in a very controlled fashion at her own ill attempts at humour (while others cringed). But the humour or joy of others never seemed to positively affect her in the way that their misfortunes, their pains, and their humiliations did.

Although I have thankfully lost touch with her, if I wish I can still track Gillian’s dubious activities online, through the fake presence she has created for herself there: the many blogs she begins but never continues for more than a post or two, and on which she posts material she has cut and pasted from other websites and passed off as her own; her narcissistic, shallow and puerile online philosophical musings, obviously cribbed and bowdlerized from the latest self-help books; her multiple profiles on LinkedIn, each with its own fabricated CV (despite the fact that Gillian is a high school dropout); her Facebook accounts under multiple aliases; the online chatter of web users warning each other about her cons; her criminal and demi-criminal business ventures. What little I know about how she earns her living makes me want to know less.

I heard Gillian lie so often, so brazenly, so incoherently, so pointlessly, that I stopped even trying to keep track of what was true and what wasn’t. It was safer simply to assume that whenever she spoke she was lying. So many were her lies in fact, that to this day there is a sense in which I’m not really sure if there is a real existing Gillian. Once all the lies are peeled back like the layers of an onion, it is doubtful that anything that is truly Gillian would remain. She is all persona and no person — a person without qualities.

Even her tastes could be described as quality-less: she liked whatever current tunes were in the top forty at any given time, simply because, being unable to respond affectively to any kind of art, she simply “liked” whatever songs the charts told her that a reasonable facsimile of a person would statistically like. The same goes for her tastes in reading. Her “personality” only seemed capable of being projected through brands, through her choice of clothes, purse, smartphone, or sunglasses. And she would quickly let you know what these brands were, just in case, like me, you couldn’t care less and therefore failed to give her the respect she thought she deserved for possessing them. Someone whose only way of differentiating their character is through mass produced items is someone who fails to have a character at all, at least insofar as character individuates a person.

Gillian aside, my interest in psychopathy is as much academic as personal. My doctoral research was in moral psychology, and in particular, the moral psychology of character. Central to the concept of moral character is the notion of integrity. Since integrity is something conspicuously lacking in psychopaths, I’ve always seen them as a limiting case of lack of character. This is in contrast to lay views of the psychopath as a person of single-mindedly evil character. Even single-minded evil is a form of perverse integrity, and psychopaths lack even that. I contend that a necessary condition for the possession of character is to have the well-formed capacity to experience the so-called “emotions of self-assessment”, pride, shame, and guilt, for example. Since for the most part psychopaths lack this capacity, they are largely incapable of possessing moral character. Indeed, it’s an open philosophical question whether they can even be considered moral agents at all.

In what follows, I will give you the draft of a paper I have long given up hope of finishing. I simply lost interest in it. Since it was intended for an academic audience, I apologize for the unsociable scholarly apparatus of footnotes and bibliographical citations. It is very rough. For instance, you’ll notice that it doesn’t have a proper introduction, and I’m no longer even sure what the intended thesis was. It was never even given a title. It was stillborn. However, it may contain a few arguments and observations which may serve to divert the interested reader. Since I don’t know what else to do with it, I give it to you.

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DRAFT

First off, we must clarify our terminology. Generally “sociopath” is used interchangeably with “psychopath” in psychological literature. If there is a difference it tends to lie in researchers’ differing beliefs as to the etiology of the phenomenon. Those who study psychopathy tend towards biological explanations of its causes (Hare 1999: 23-24). However, such academic disputes need not detain us here. For our purposes, I prefer “sociopath”, simply because it is relatively free from distorting media-generated preconceptions invested in the term “psychopath”.

A sociopath, in lay terms, is often described as a person who knows the difference between right and wrong but does not care. “Knowing the difference” between right and wrong is here intended in the purely intellectual sense: they know what is considered by people generally to be right and wrong, but that is not to say they understand the concepts in the way we understand them. It is the phrase “but does not care” in the definition that most interests us. Sociopaths lack the moral scruples that constrain the rest of us; particularly, they seem to lack what have been called emotions of self-assessment (Taylor 1985). Thus, they do not feel guilt or shame at having done things that would cause the rest of us to lose sleep. Again, like their “knowledge” of right and wrong, they “understand” emotions only on an intellectual level. They may spend much time and effort learning to simulate emotions that they do not actually feel. Their emotional deficits have been demonstrated experimentally (see for example Levenston et al. 2000). Because they are not constrained by moral sentiments, they can at best be constrained through fear (of the consequences of getting caught doing bad things). In fact, part of their intellectualized concept of “bad” is “things people tend to punish”. Thus, constraint may come from fear of punishment, not from an aversion to shame, which they are incapable of feeling. And even when they are caught and punished, they feel no remorse, only perhaps resentment at having their intentions thwarted.

Conceptually speaking, we could divide sociopaths into two types: a) those who lack moral constraints and do bad things, and b) those who lack moral constraints but do not do bad things, or at least no more so than the rest of us. I have never seen the existence of type b) remarked on in the literature on sociopathy, but it is at least a logical possibility. Such a person would be prevented from wrongdoing only because, for whatever reason, he lacks the sorts of desires commonly associated with such wrongdoing. Owen Flanagan alludes to a similar phenomenon in his discussion of Plato’s famous example of Gyges and his magic ring (Flanagan 257-259). The figure of Gyges was used by Glaucon in the Republic to show that if a person were to have all external restraints removed, he would no longer attend to justice, and that therefore, justice is a merely artificial virtue. Given a magic ring, we are all Gyges. Flanagan argues that the conclusion does not follow. Gyges’ motives for wrongdoing are underdescribed (indeed, they are not described at all). Why does he seem to have so many evil desires in him that he instantly acts on when he gets the opportunity? Why does he perceive his self-interest to lie only in such antisocial ends? And why should I believe that I would do no differently were I in his shoes? It is at least conceivable that not everybody who had Gyges’ magic ring would behave so deplorably, for the simple reason that they lack the same antisocial desires Gyges seemed to have. Perhaps it is also possible that a sociopath lacks Gyges-like countermoral desires, and so would commit no wrongs, even though they are morally uninhibited. I suppose such people, if they exist, do not come to the attention of psychologists because they do not cause anybody any trouble. [1]  Let us return to the other, full-blooded wicked sociopath.

The moral sentiments, including the emotions of self-assessment, can serve to lend integrity to our agency, making our actions intelligible and reasonably consistent. They enable us to pursue our ends across changing circumstances. Thus, we should be able to predict that someone who lacked the capacity for such emotion is apt to be impulsive, flighty, seemingly unable to focus on longer-term goals, unable to meet obligations, unable to form emotional bonds with others, and less likely than most to keep promises (making them untrustworthy). These are exactly the kinds of qualities characteristic of sociopaths: “Psychopaths tend to live day-to-day and to change their plans frequently. They give little thought to the future and worry about it even less. Nor do they generally show much concern about how little they have done with their lives” (Hare 1999: 59). They tend to drop out of school, to be unable to hold down jobs, or to think beyond immediate gratification. Indeed, even their criminality tends to lack consistency. One of the characteristics of the sociopathic criminal’s arrest record is its diversity: petty theft, burglary, assault, drug and weapons offences. Contrary to the media images of single-minded serial killers, the criminal sociopath is typically not a specialist, nor is he particularly good at what he does.

One of the conspicuous things people notice about sociopaths is their unshakeable belief in their own cleverness. They honestly tend to believe they are the smartest people in the world, despite all objective evidence to the contrary, such as the lack of accomplishments, the steady string of failures, the lack of intimate relationships, the long arrest record. Whatever goes wrong is someone else’s fault, never their own. This is all to be expected of someone who lacks the emotions of self-assessment. Someone who, for example, never feels guilt or shame lacks the “early warning system” that most of us have, which tells us that we are about to do something for which our conscience is apt to bite us; a sociopath’s conscience never bites. And because he feels no shame, he has no inkling that anything about himself is in need of change. [2]  This singular lack of capacity for honest self-assessment has led some researchers to recommend that resources not be wasted on trying to rehabilitate sociopaths. As a matter of fact, such rehabilitation may have the effect of helping the sociopath to become more skilled at manipulation (Hare 1999: 192-205).

It is hard to tell whether this sort of self-delusion should be properly characterized as a rational or an emotional deficit. It is likely a bit of both: it is a rational deficit aided and abetted by an affective deficit. Even if the sociopath is candidly apprised of his shortcomings by a third party, because he will be unable to feel the bite of conscience, he is likely either to rationalize his conduct, or to infer that the third party is mistaken. We will have more to say on the relation between rationality and affectivity below.

Media images often portray the psychopath as an alternative character type, an evil but sometimes slightly glamorous one. What I wish to contend by offering the above rough sketch of the sociopath — and I may as well be frank about it — is this: Sociopaths lack character. They are not an alternative character type. They are not characters at all. They represent what we might call the limiting case of the person without character. I shall offer some reasons why.

First, let us bring to mind for a moment the notion of a character in the literary sense. It has been remarked on by some that sociopaths are singularly uninteresting as literary characters; they are too thin. Robert Hare, the foremost expert on these people, tells the following story about how he was a consultant on a Hollywood film project about a couple of sociopathic serial killers:

The filmmakers had great concern for accuracy and had researched the subject as thoroughly as they were able. But the scriptwriter phoned me one day in near desperation. “How can I make my character interesting?” he asked. “When I try to get into his head, try to work out his motivations, desires, and hang-ups in a way that will make some sort of sense to the audience, I draw a blank. These guys … are too much alike, and there doesn’t seem to be much of interest below the surface.”

In a sense the screenwriter had nailed it: As portrayed in film and story, psychopaths do tend to be two-dimensional characters …. The philosophy of life that these individuals espouse usually is banal, sophomoric, and devoid of the detail that enriches the lives of normal adults. (Hare 1999: 140-141)

If we take the poor screenwriter’s words at face value, the sociopathic “character” lacks enough depth for it to perform the individuating function that the concept of character plays. Similarly, if the screenwriter for a Star Trek episode were to take the implications of the “character” of a Vulcan seriously, without deviating from it (as happens all too often), she would find it difficult to differentiate one Vulcan’s character from another’s, short of dressing them in different coloured uniforms. There is no depth, and therefore room for a character ascription that points to the agent’s identity as a person.

Not only that. The screenwriter’s comments offer the tantalizing possibility — which would take another complete study to explore — that some depth of character is a requirement for the mere intelligibility of others’ complex behavior. Without being able to attribute complex and essentially human motivations to others, we find ourselves unable to understand or explain their actions and practices. With sociopaths, it is not that they are too complex to understand; rather, they are too simple, too reptilian.

Second, sociopaths lack the integrity or unified agency that enables them to form and carry through longer-term goals and projects. This is shown in the fact that, though they often express extremely grandiose intentions, few of them ever bear fruits, usually because the effort required is too much for them. The result is aimlessness, lack of concrete accomplishment, and lack of close relationships like marriage and parenthood, which require a large investment of time and effort.

Third, because the sociopath lacks the capacity for self-assessment, both emotionally and intellectually, he is incapable of moral progress. We all do bad things from time to time, but the psychopath typically does not learn from his mistakes. If he were participating in the Milgram experiments, he is the obedient subject who would feel no remorse; indeed, he may even feel a twinge of sadistic pleasure (because he has never learned to associate causing pain to others with shame or guilt), and if so, he might even be that rare bird who would shock again on a reiteration of the experiment. He has not acted out of character when he has shocked a subject. He has no character. Nor is he likely to follow what I call the Characterological Imperative:  “Always choose a course of action as if you were setting a precedent or laying down a law for your character”. He is unlikely to do so because he cannot honestly or accurately assess what sort of person he is or what sort of person he would like to become. Instead, he can at best decide what sorts of things he would like to do and have — at least until other sorts of things usurp them.

At this point someone might wonder what difference it makes. The sociopath cannot see that he is wrong, and cannot be made to see it. If he is satisfied with his life and does not care what we think, then, character or no character, so what? The sociopath seems to undermine the claim that character is, all things considered, a good thing to have. He seems to bear witness to the possibility that character is a moral concept that does no work. We may be justified in doing what we must to protect ourselves from him, but what we cannot do is truthfully claim that we are right and he is wrong, morally speaking. This is because whatever moral arguments we could possibly offer him would be to no effect. At best, we could convince him using prudential arguments that appeal to his present interests — a sort of Parfitian Present Aim Theory applied to sociopaths (Parfit 92). [3]  What can be said in response to this?

First, I would say that the objection is absolutely correct in a certain respect: we probably cannot convince the sociopath that he is morally wrong. But why should that undermine morality? I do not know where the burden of proof should lie here. I confess, it is not immediately clear to me that it is our duty to justify morality to such a creature, any more than he perceives it as his duty to justify his amorality to us. Either way, we would be talking past each other. If he is incapable of understanding morality, then the deficit is his, not ours. We understand something that he does not, much as I understand morality in a way that my cat does not. My cat does not make me question my commitment to morality, so why does the sociopath? This seems like a case of the tyranny of the weak over the strong.

But even if I should feel the need to futilely engage with the sociopath on this point, I might point out to him a peculiar incoherence in his position. So many of the games that sociopaths play, such as the grasping for power and advantage, the preening, the joy at the pain and sorrow of others, the egoistic desire for praise and esteem at all costs, all of these I say, depend on the existence of other people. It is the attention of other people that he wants when he seeks attention. It is the pleasure derived from being richer than others that drives him to steal. All his games are played with (or at the expense of) other people. He does not play them with rocks and trees. Therefore, we ought rightly to ask the sociopath why we matter so much to him. And if we matter so much, then why are we treated with such contempt?

Sociopaths are not the perfect example of people who utterly lack moral sentiment; they are merely the closest that we can get, empirically speaking. For instance, they are able to experience certain emotions, anger and resentment being conspicuous among them. But if morality is a sham, then why should one feel resentment at another? Imagine feeling resentment at the actions of another, and thinking “How could he do that to me?” while at the same time not believing in the possibility of moral wrong. It takes some doing. That is perhaps part of what makes sociopaths incomprehensible. They suffer from a kind of blindness, caused by their inability to empathize. For example, a sociopath is capable of suffering “injustice”, which he might define as “that which is done by others against my own interests”. The blindness here consists of an inability to see that others can also feel injustice at the things that he does. [4]  We should not waste time convincing the blind of the existence of colours, nor should we waste time convincing sociopaths or amoralists of the existence of morality. We can argue over its content, but not its existence.

In any case, the sociopath will not be convinced. His lack of sentiment contributes to his inability to be convinced by any non-prudential argument for morality. This in turn illustrates one aspect of the necessity of the moral sentiments to the moral life.

Before taking our leave of the sociopath, I should clarify my position with regard to a certain debate in the literature on sociopathy (among both psychologists and moral philosophers). The debate is between those (e.g. Nichols 2002) who see sociopathy as a phenomenon involving primarily an emotional deficit, a deficit in affective capability, and those (e.g. Maibom 2005) who view is as primarily a systematic deficit in practical reasoning. For convenience’s sake, we may call the former “sentimentalists” and the latter “rationalists”.

At the risk of seeming bland, I fall somewhere between these two positions. In the foregoing I have stressed, for purposes of my own, the sentimental side of things, characterizing sociopathy as a systemic failure of emotions of self-assessment. However, it is not so easy to separate sentiment from rationality. For one thing, emotions are often — if not always — heavily laden with cognitive content. Second, there are complex connections between sentiment and reason that are often overlooked and which the study of phenomena like sociopathy can shed light on in interesting ways. For example, it was noted above that the sociopath has the tendency to believe that he is much cleverer than the regular run of mortals. He overestimates his talents and abilities. Put another way, he is blessed (or cursed?) with a tendency toward positive self-delusion. As such, we could categorize this as a deficit in practical reasoning, as it involves blindness to certain pertinent facts, which will tend to lead to other mistakes in practical reasoning (for example, irrational risk-taking). It is exactly the sort of deficit that supports the rationalist position.

However, to complicate matters, we can also say that the sociopath’s inability to feel emotions of self-assessment is implicated in the persistence of his lack of capacity for psychological insight. He lacks the emotional “alarm-bells” that might direct his attention to areas of his personality that might not be perfect. People who are positively self-deluded but who are not necessarily sociopathic also lack insight, but the world from time to time “corrects” them through means of mistakes and subsequent negative emotions like regret and shame, which may (though not always) lead to psychological insight. The sociopath, lacking such emotions, lacks an important means of self-improvement. Thus, at the same time that the sociopath believes himself to be clever, he leaves in his wake a trail of failed relationships, incarcerations, lost jobs, and lost opportunities that put the lie to this belief. More to the point, his lack of capacity for shame or guilt manifests itself in an unhealthy lack of cognitive dissonance between his self-assessment and his actual accomplishments (or lack thereof).

Even a supposed rationalist like Heidi Maibom admits that there is room for both sentimentalism and rationalism. [5]  Indeed, I would go a step further and assert that a plausible characterization of the disorder must involve both, and my stress on the emotional deficits of sociopaths should not be taken as a repudiation of rationalism. Antonio Damasio characterizes sociopathy as an “example of a pathological state in which a decline in rationality is accompanied by diminution or absence of feeling” (Damasio 178). In fact, I would say that the rational and emotional deficits do not just happen to accompany one another, but are in fact related to each other.

Much, much more could be said about the relation between reason and sentiment. For example, while we often normally think of them as in some way diametrically opposed, there may be models of emotions available which close the gap quite dramatically. It is worth briefly mentioning one of these, as it may be a useful antidote to the possibly crude picture of the emotions of self-assessment I have laid out thus far.

Using guilt as an example, Jon Elster (p. 303 ff; see also Tesser and Achee 1994) proposes a “catastrophic” model of emotion. Rather than thinking of guilt as a dark, irrational — or at least arational — feeling that wells up from some unknown place inside us (a common lay view), we ought rather to think of it as the experience of a perception of dissonance between our conduct and our values. Here, guilt is experienced as a sort of alarm bell (that metaphor again) bringing to our attention the possibility that all is not well. It is the awareness of dissonance. However, because behaviour tends to be path-dependent (i.e. we tend to continue in a set pattern of behaviour based on previous behaviour), an agent will tend to continue on a course of conduct, looking for reasons to support it. If such reasons cannot be found, the tension caused by the dissonance increases until a behavioural “switch” occurs. Such path-dependency followed by sudden switching is what I call “moral hysteresis”. It could be the subject of another paper on its own.

On the simpler “cost-benefit” model, an agent engages in some conduct, experiencing displeasurable guilt as a negative utility. On this model, provided the guilt is felt strongly enough, we should expect immediate change in conduct. On the other hand, the catastrophic model accounts for the path-dependent nature of conduct: there is delay while the agent rationalizes his current course; meanwhile tension builds up, precipitating a switch — that is, unless the tension can be resolved by rational means. I have oversimplified the model, but its implication is clear: practical reasoning is not trumped by a strong emotion. Rather, reason and emotion work hand in glove.

Elster rejects the cost-benefit account of emotions in favour of the catastrophic model, by reasoning along the following lines: if guilt were merely experienced as a disutility, as an experienced or anticipated cost, then if guilt prevents me from, say, stealing a book (which I otherwise desire to do), I should be willing to purchase a guilt-erasing pill. But someone who is capable of feeling guilt will also feel guilty about buying and taking the pill, because “taking the pill in order to escape guilt and be able to steal the book would be as morally bad as just stealing it” (Elster 303). It just turns stealing the book into a two-step rather than a one-step operation. If I feel guilty about having stolen a book, thereby experiencing tension, I would — where possible — prefer to resolve the tension not by taking a pill, but rather by finding reasons not to feel guilty. Guilt is, on this model, an integral part of practical reasoning, not an epiphenomenon to be dealt with by erasure.

Before ending, since we have been discussing the sociopath, a brief glance at his fictional cousin, Hume’s “sensible knave”, might be in order. Perhaps much of what was said about the sociopath can be said about him. But we might be able to say more.

Hume introduces the knave as follows:

And though it is allowed, that, without a regard to property, no society could subsist; yet, according to the imperfect way in which human affairs are conducted, a sensible knave, in particular incidents, may think, that an act of iniquity or infidelity will make a considerable addition to his fortune, without causing any considerable breach in the social union and confederacy. That honesty is the best policy, may be a good general rule; but is liable to many exceptions: And he, it may, perhaps, be thought, conducts himself with most wisdom, who observes the general rule, and takes advantage of all the exceptions. (Hume 1957: 282-283) [6]

I would characterize the sensible knave in this way: he differs from the sociopath in that though he understands morality, and for the most part is motivated by it in the way the rest of us are, yet, he is overall better off than us because on the occasions where morality does not pay (in terms of overall personal utility), he can disregard morality. He is morally motivated like the rest of us, except where he can get away with something without getting caught. In this sense, he is more complex and troublesome than the sociopath, because we cannot simply write him off as morally blind. In fact, it could be argued that his sight is better than ours, more evolved.

Hume attempts to meet the challenge by in effect saying that such a knave would not always get away with his cavalier attitude to morality. However, Hume speaks as if the knave is more or less equivalent to our sociopath, in that he is not motivated by morality (“If his heart rebel not against such pernicious maxims, if he feel no reluctance to the thoughts of villainy or baseness…”, etc.). My construal of the knave is as someone who is motivated by morality the way we are, but only when it pays. When immorality pays, he can turn his conscience off. So Hume’s rather weak reply will not do.

I believe that such a creature as I have described is probably empirically non-existent, or at least very improbable. For one thing, we must ask ourselves how one could become such a person. One must first become the sort of person who can participate in morality at all, in order to become the kind that can turn it off. But part of becoming a moral person involves the sort of development and habituation that makes violating morality difficult without experiencing consequent feelings of shame and guilt. In other words, before we can become a sensible knave as I have described it, we must become inculcated in morality. This will involve at least two things.

First, it will involve a degree of habituation to moral conduct that may then be harder to break. One will occasionally break it, as we all do. But we do not all do it in the systematic way the sensible knave is supposed to do it.

Second, it will likely involve an internalization of the morality he has learned in such a way that he will not be following it merely from self-interest. Self-interest is not his main moral motivation. This makes it highly implausible that he would systematically violate that morality on the basis of self-interest. If he has properly internalized his morality, he believes that moral conduct is not based on mere self-interest. So self-interest cannot be a motivation for violating it, at least not in a systematic way. And not without emotional consequences. Morality does not come with an on-off switch. Even if one could turn morality on and off at will, I suspect such an agent would more often than not, like Hume’s version of the knave, be tempted to use the switch too much, making fatal mistakes and ending up violating morality more than is helpful. He would be a sub-optimal sensible knave.

Furthermore, it is still difficult to see how having received anything like a proper moral training, he could escape the negative moral sentiments like shame and guilt that come with violations of morality, once he turned his moral switch back on again. Such sentiments would, at least, represent a considerable disutility that would have to be factored into his moral calculations, or at least factored into our assessments of his overall flourishing. The only way around this would be to imagine that there is a radical discontinuity between the knave when he is morally “switched on” and when he is “switched off”. Basically, the former would have to be either unable to remember the latter’s deeds, or else would have to be “disengaged” enough from them to essentially regard them as the deeds of another agent. Either of these scenarios describes a condition of agency which can only be characterized as pathologically dissociative.

A related observation applies to a person of evil character, such a person being one whose values are largely the inverse of ours, but who still has the capacity for the moral sentiments, and has achieved a certain (perverse) integrity, of the kind outlined in this chapter. Such a person would not only desire and value evil things, but would also feel guilt or shame at having been weak-willed enough to, say, miss an opportunity to harm or cheat someone.

We would have to ask a couple of things about him. First, where might his uncharacteristically kind impulse have come from, that leads him to act “shamefully” by refraining from harming or cheating? Perhaps it is randomly generated akrasia (weakness of will), pure and simple, a nervous tic of the will, and thus is not really a “kind” impulse at all. But if his practical reasoning was accompanied by even a momentary thought like “perhaps this is not quite right”, then this is what we call conscience. Might this betoken some “sparks of better hope” within him, as Shakespeare might describe it (Richard II V.iii.21)?

Second, how did he manage to avoid all of the training and character-enforcing messages that we all receive, even the most dissolute among us, if only by accident in the course of our development? There is something perverse in his ignorance, something willful about it. He would somehow have to have systematically failed to acquire the most basic moral training that we are all exposed to in our lifetimes. And not only this, but to separate him from the mere sociopath, he must have somehow, learned the opposite of what he was taught, to have somehow ended up attaching his moral-affective responses to exactly the wrong things. When a student of any other art, science, or skill does this, we say he is extremely stupid. We shrug. We cannot explain it.

Maybe this is the essence of the evil character; he has an original seed in him that makes him averse to what we consider to be the good. I admit I cannot explain such a person. But perhaps just as tellingly, I have also never met or heard of one living and breathing. R. M. Hare once considered a literary example in Milton’s Satan, who famously said, “To do ought good never will be our task / But ever to do ill our sole delight” (Paradise Lost I.158). However, as Hare pointed out, Satan would have had to play for both teams before he could switch from one to the other (Hare 101). At the risk of sounding Platonic, I cannot imagine him wishing to make such a switch after truly having had such knowledge of the good, unless he was never a committed member of the good team to begin with. But my lack of imagination is no argument against its possibility. All I can say is that, if Satan knows what is good but consistently prefers evil (and if he is not a sociopath — whom we have already considered), then he is responsible for this character. He will possess integrity of a kind, according to the scheme of this study, and he may accrue whatever advantages go along with that integrity. But we will tend not to like him, and we will do what we can to ensure that he does not flourish. Speaking counterfactually, his life may very well have gone better for him overall if he had any talent for goodness. But we will be unlikely to convince him of this.

Before we take our leave of the moral sentiments, an apology should be made to the reader. We have merely scratched the surface of an important topic; much about the role of emotions in the moral life had to go unsaid. For example, we have mainly focussed on a particular kind of moral sentiment, what were called emotions of self-assessment. Obviously, the moral emotions run in wider circles than this. The reader might, for example, be dismayed by a lack of attention devoted to that major moral player, sympathy. Obviously, sympathy will have a large role to play in the functioning of moral character. Just as obviously, it is a capacity which the sociopath also conspicuously lacks. And historically speaking, much has been written about sympathy by moral philosophers. However, I was more interested in the emotions of self-assessment, mainly because of their close connection with integrity, which, as I have hopefully made clear, I see as being at the core of the concept of character. I therefore apologize to those who hunger after more, but some matters had to be sacrificed in the name of economy.

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FLANAGAN, Owen. Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and Psychological Realism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.

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HUME, David. An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals (2^nd edition). L. A. Selby-Bigge (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957.

HUME, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

LEVENSTON, Gary K. et al. “The Psychopath as Observer: Emotion and Attention in Picture Processing,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 109 (2000), 373-385.

MAIBOM, Heidi L. “Moral Unreason: The Case of Psychopathy,” Mind and Language 20 (2005), 237-257.

MILGRAM, Stanley. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.

NICHOLS, Shaun. “How Psychopaths Threaten Moral Rationalism, or Is It Irrational to Be Amoral?” The Monist 85 (2002), 285-304.

PARFIT, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.

RICHELL, R. A. et al. “Theory of Mind and Psychopathy: Can Psychopathic Individuals Read the ‘Language of the Eyes’?” Neuropsychologia 41 (2003), 523-526.

TAYLOR, Gabriele. Pride, Shame, and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.

TESSER, Abraham and John ACHEE. “Aggression, Love, Conformity, and Other Social Psychological Catastrophes,” in Robin R. Vallacher and Andrzej Nowak (eds.), Dynamical Systems in Social Psychology. New York: Academic Press, 1994.

Notes

[1]   However, these people would seem pathological in other ways. For one thing, they would be unable to form any close relationships with others that are based on sentiment, the capacity for which they would lack. On the other hand, it is unlikely they could be made to see that they might be missing out on something that the rest of us enjoy. But to others, they would seem a rather empty and one-dimensional figure. Aside from criminality, many of the characteristics of criminal sociopaths would still apply to them: lack of depth, impulsivity, coldness, underachievement, etc.

[2]   I am aware that another of the emotions of self-assessment is missing from this picture, namely pride. I presume that sociopaths have the same capacity for this emotion as the rest of us, though researchers do not devote any attention to it, mainly concerned as they are with the sociopath’s morally salient incapacity for shame and guilt, which tends to get them in most trouble. If sociopaths have the same capacity for pride as non-sociopaths, then this shows that they are not exactly the limiting case of the person without character I have made them out to be (though they are still closer to that end of the spectrum, and therefore still make for a good case study).

[3]   The Present Aim Theory of agency, according to Derek Parfit (1984), says that my future self at any given future time has the same relation to me as another person does at present. Thus, a future desire has less of a claim to normative priority than a present desire does. This is because my present desire is my desire, whereas my future desires are in relevant respects the desires of some other agent(s): “when we are considering theoretical and practical rationality, the relation between a person now and himself at other times is relevantly similar to the relation between different people” (Parfit 191).

[4]   Some have framed this phenomenon in more technical language by claiming that sociopaths lack a “theory of mind” (Dolan and Fullam 2004). I would avoid such terminology as being overly rationalistic and because there is research disputing the claim (Richell et al. 2003).

[5]   “Since it is clear that psychopaths have emotional deficits of the sort relevant to sentimentalist view of morality [sic.], the question I will be concerned with is whether they also have deficits in their practical reason…. I will argue that although psychopathy supports sentimentalism it does not speak against rationalism” (Maibom 238).

[6]   There is a similarity of form between Hume’s sensible knave and his account of the artificial virtues. An artificial virtue (like justice) has the general tendency to contribute to the overall good, while on particular occasions it can actually be detrimental to it (Treatise 3.2.2; Buckle 259-260). The sensible knave recognizes that virtue may be generally to his benefit, but takes advantage of those occasions where it is not, by acting counter to virtue. In both cases, the problem turns on how to keep people loyal to virtue even in the face of seeming exceptions to it.

Moral Eugenics

Exterminate the brutes?

The Spectacled Avenger has his moments of misanthropy. Sometimes it is difficult to look upon this human comedy and call it good. In my lighter moments, I can at least view it all as a sort of vast carnival of rutting monkeys — very undignified, but undeniably funny. At other times that lighter side of things is much harder to see.

A typical occurrence of the latter happened the other evening on a crowded subway train, as I watched a repulsive little rat-man of dubious moral and genetic quality aggressively elbow a very pregnant woman out of his way in order to beat her to a vacant seat. This low specimen of humanity caused me to wonder how it is that “eugenics” ever became a dirty word. At such times I cannot help but entertain the notion that a little thinning of the social herd might do little harm and much good. It sometimes seems as if the vile and baseborn are crowding out the more noble exemplars of our species. You see, when I’m in my misanthropic mood, when the human comedy seems more like tragedy, I am more prone than usual to reflect on eugenics with indulgence.

Speaking of thinning the herd, consider this story, perhaps a sign of the times, recounted to me by someone whom we had over for dinner last week. She told us of a couple who are of her acquaintance, and who recently made an appeal over Facebook for their friends to contribute to a fund to help them pay for their fertility treatments. No doubt they are possessed of very superior genes and wish very much to grace the world with their continuance, believing furthermore that you and I ought to be willing to pay to ensure that they are passed on.

Of these would-be philanthropists to humanity, I cannot help but think the following: First, if they cannot afford their own fertility treatments, perhaps they cannot comfortably afford to support a child either. Second, adoption might be cheaper and might do more for the common good. Third, if they are unable to see the utter tastelessness of their financial appeal, then I humbly submit that the quality of our species would likely be the better for their not reproducing themselves.

This story is an example of that human comedy — of the rutting monkeys variety — I spoke of. But in such farce lie the seeds of deeper pathos, which becomes evident when we reflect upon the following paradox: much as Plato said that the ideal ruler would be the man who had no desire to be ruler, I am led to think that perhaps the ideal people to continue our species are precisely those who least value doing so. This paradox, from a God’s eye point of view is doubtless very humorous, but from an intelligent human’s viewpoint it is tragic. For what does one see all around one, but the spectacle of the lowest specimens of our genetic and moral stock spreading their seed to the four winds, while their betters, who have other priorities, or other more worthwhile contributions to make to society, have their genes gradually snuffed out over the course of generations?

In that vein, I’m afraid I cannot help but express some degree of sympathy for the following words of Herbert Spencer, that grand old man of Victorian Social Darwinism:

“Fostering the good-for-nothing at the expense of the good, is an extreme cruelty. It is a deliberate storing-up of miseries for future generations. There is no greater curse to posterity than that of bequeathing them an increasing population of imbeciles and idlers and criminals. To aid the bad in multiplying is, in effect, the same as maliciously providing for our descendants a multitude of enemies.”

(Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology (9th edition). London: Williams and Norgate, 1880, p. 400).

In other words, by allowing the transgenerational proliferation of Morlocks, we ensure the future misery and ultimate extinction of the favoured Eloi. Of course, in the eugenic universe, it is almost always left unexplained how it is that supposedly degenerate and “inferior” Morlocks are always threatening to outbreed and swamp the “superior” Eloi. After all, in the natural kingdom ruled by natural selection, “superiority” is cashed out in terms of reproductive success. Reproductive success is the only good coin in the evolutionary realm, and by this standard, it is the Morlocks who are clearly superior and the Eloi inferior.

In any case, Spencer’s is an interesting recasting of typical 19th-century laissez-faire arguments against welfare schemes to help the poor. The typical argument holds that the poor are undeserving of such help, because they are somehow morally undeserving, or because it would be pointless to help them, as they are essentially inferior and can never be improved, and/or that it would be economically inefficient to do so. Instead, Spencer characterizes welfare redistribution as an instance of intergenerational injustice: by helping the poor, we are enabling them to breed in greater numbers, at the expense of our morally healthy and more deserving descendants.

There are of course at least a couple of glaring flaws in Spencer’s reasoning. First, he hasn’t shown that the qualities that make for moral superiority are genetically heritable. Notice that in the slippery wordplay of the Social Darwinists, there is constant equivocation between the descriptive language of physical and genetic inferiority, and the normative language of moral inferiority. Hence Spencer’s “aiding the bad in multiplying” could mean aiding the genetically defective, or it could mean aiding the morally defective. Genetic defects are heritable; moral defects are not obviously so, or not in the same way.

Second, Spencer assumes that policies that will alleviate the lot of the supposedly inferior will also cause them to have more children. Again, the evidence for this claim is lacking. True, other things being equal, in the natural world the longer a creature lives the more offspring it is statistically likely to produce. But among humans, who are capable of procreative choice, a different dynamic may apply. There is some empirical support for this, since development economists will tell you that raising the living standards of the poor tends to reduce their fertility rates rather than raise them, at least in the longer run, perhaps by giving them options for living a meaningful life beyond the mere production of offspring.

(Trivia: the term “proletariat” comes from the Latin proletarius, which was the lowest class in the Roman census. The proletarii were the ones who produced proli — “offspring”. Hence, the proletarius was a mere “producer of offspring”. Since the proletarius owned nothing, his children, his proles, were the only “property” that would be recorded in the census, as they were the only things of value he had to offer the state. They were legion fodder.)

Of course, in reply to this latter point, it is enough for Spencer’s argument if the inferior are enabled to have any offspring as a result of such policies. Welfare needn’t increase their birthrate; that they have any children at all is an evil to be avoided. If the inferior have a birthrate no higher than that of their superiors, say two children per female, but welfare enables them to live long enough to have those two children when they would otherwise die without reproducing, then Spencer could argue that welfare would be socially mischievous. There would exist two more inferiors than should by rights exist, to compete against our healthy descendants for resources. Such is the brutal and inexorable logic of Social Darwinism.

I truly wish that people like that little rat-man on the subway didn’t exist. But sterilizing such vermin wouldn’t solve the problem, because his failing is moral, not genetic. We could sterilize him, but once he had healed from his surgery, he would be back on the subway, pushing pregnant women around. Meanwhile, other genetically “healthy” people would still be passing their bad morals on to their offspring. You see, bad morals can be passed on from parent to child much as bad genes can be; but bad morals don’t reliably track bad genes, nor do they reliably track lack of wealth. This is another of Spencer’s mistakes, for whenever he uses the royal “we” (e.g. “maliciously providing for our descendants a multitude of enemies”), he seems to imply those who are affluent or at least solidly middle-class; in effect, he speaks to those who were capable at the time of buying and reading his books, and who were more likely to believe in their contents. To these people it must have been flattering to be counted among the “healthy” or “superior” types. But, Victorian assumptions aside, being solidly middle or upper class is not equivalent to either genetic or moral superiority.

The fact is, the rich are just as capable as the poor of moral inferiority. The main difference is that the rich have material advantages that deflect many of the worst consequences of their vices. The poor are not so lucky — their vices tend to stick. Vices that cause fits of unhappiness or, at worst, depression in the rich, may be utterly life-destroying for the poor. Vice is a luxury the rich can often afford and the poor cannot. The rich substance abuser can pay for a bed in a private rehabilitation clinic. The poor substance abuser will find his bed in a prison or eventually in the gutter. The difference in the two cases is one of circumstance, not of the moral quality of the abuser. Similarly, when the rich neglect their children, they often do so with the aid of nannies and boarding schools. Since the poor cannot afford nannies and boarding schools, poor parents who neglect their children may be thrown in jail and are likely to have their children taken away from them.

Actually, if we must compare the two kinds of viciousness, we might go so far as to say that the viciousness of the rich is worse. Since the rich are less often exposed to the full consequences of their bad behavior, they grow confirmed in their bad habits, less likely to learn from experience they never acquire, and — what’s worse — they encourage such bad behavior in the poor by their seemingly glamorous and consequence-free example.

We cannot discuss sterilizing the morally inferior until we get better at identifying them. As a society we are very good at identifying a subset of the morally inferior — namely those who are poor. These tend to be visible, which is why it was so easy for Spencer and his ilk to see them. He was less good at identifying the ones that were sitting in the House of Commons or the boardrooms of the nation.

Once we have developed better methods for identifying moral degeneracy, we must not shrink from calling it what it is. We must get better at denouncing the morally degenerate. The ability to feel shame was given to us for a reason. Shame is a great teacher; the morally inferior ought to be made to feel it more often.

In an ideal world, each of us would be equipped with a chip embedded inside us, along with some kind of transmitter with a button (perhaps it could come in the form of a phone app?). The latter would be used to administer a small but painful electrical shock to people like the rat-man, who violate those small social norms that the criminal law does not concern itself with. The purpose of the embedded chip would be to receive these electrical shocks from others. In such an ideal world, the rat-man would have received separate shocks from all those on the train who observed his sub-human behaviour. I’m sure it would be a lesson he would not soon forget. And the anticipation of such unpleasant sensations would tend to keep us more aware of the effects of our actions on others. We would have a very concrete incentive not to be the source of displeasure.

If everybody came thus equipped, perhaps we could eliminate the most common forms of incivility in fairly short order. And since I believe practice of the smaller virtues conditions us for the exercise of the greater ones, I can’t help but think we might end up with a better society. It would certainly be a more amusing one.

Opium Dens as Public Policy

After all, it worked so well for the Victorians, right?

The Spectacled Avenger is not in the habit of recycling his blog posts, and he has only done so once before. However, he is about to do so again. Now, as then, his purpose is not merely to fill empty space; he has not run out of time or inspiration to write something new. Rather, he wishes to direct attention to an issue that has become pertinent again.

Back on May 3, 2011 I wrote about Insite (“Insights from Insite”). Insite is a safe injection site in Vancouver’s drug-blighted Downtown East Side. Therein I took what was — and remains — an unpopular position on publicly-sanctioned shooting galleries. I realize that mine is very much the minority view on the subject, at least if the mainstream media is any indication. I counseled caution, arguing that even if we accept the dubious claims about Insite’s immediate efficacy, in the long-term the program, and others like it, may end up doing more harm than good. I am returning to this issue because of a recent recommendation that three sites be set up in Toronto and two in Ottawa. That represents quite an acceleration of the program. Thus, with the possibility of shooting galleries popping up like mushrooms all over the country, I will once more advocate a “go-slow” approach.

I wrote what I did in the belief that the current Canadian government (which, incidentally, I despise with a rare passion) had done a lousy job of articulating its opposition to Insite. Since this is possibly the only issue on which the government and I are in agreement (although for different reasons), I thought I would attempt to make a more coherent case. In short, there are respectable arguments against Insite; one needn’t be opposed to it out of a reactionary conservatism or some instinctive hatred of junkies.

In any case, I still stand by my arguments in that post. These are:

1.     Even if you agree that Insite keeps junkies (relatively) disease free and “healthy”, the empirical evidence about the further claim that it brings more junkies into treatment programs is unproven and likely false, if for no other reason than that the limited availability of treatment programs remains unchanged, meaning that it is mathematically impossible for more addicts to be entering treatment programs, because there are not more treatment spaces available for them to enter than there were before, and those programs were already operating at capacity. In fact, it’s likely that fewer addicts are entering treatment, because since the 1990s the available spaces in Canada for them has been declining, at least according to the few figures I’ve seen.

2.     Insite and programs like it are predicated on the disease model of addiction, which I believe to be mistaken, internally incoherent, empirically unverified, and demonstrably unhelpful in treating addiction — as the poor success rates and abominable relapse statistics bear out.

3.     The disease model and treatment programs based on it view the addict as a patient, when it is his activity rather than passivity that is the core of his problem and also the core of his problem's solution. In this sense, if addiction is a disease, it is what was once upon a time referred to as a “moral disease”.

4.     If addiction is a moral disease in the above sense, then in the long run we can expect a program like Insite to do more harm than good, through the inconsistent moral messages it gives to addicts, and through its removal of motivational incentives to quit using and their replacement with incentives to continue using. However, note that this too is an empirical claim, and one that can only be tested in a longer time frame, which is another reason for avoiding rapid proliferation of safe injection sites.

To these arguments, I only wish to add the following two considerations: First, I urge those of you who profess to be so enthusiastic about the sites to ask yourselves whether you would be comfortable with having one situated next door to your home. If you are not comfortable with it, then you are probably a hypocrite. If you are enthusiastic about them being located in poor or drug-infested neighbourhoods only, then my reply is that the poor are no less entitled to live in decent neighbourhoods than the rest of us.

Second, I am sympathetic to the notion that if it is wrong for me to do something, then it is generally wrong for the government to do it on my behalf — barring a few obvious exceptions. Similarly, if my conscience tells me that a certain action is wrong, then it is probably wrong for me to pay the government to do it on my behalf. I believe that it would be wrong for me to open my home as a safe shooting gallery for junkies. No improvement is made in the moral status of this belief if I were to instead offer money to the government to open a safe shooting gallery somewhere on my behalf.

People like me, who believe it would be wrong to open our own shooting galleries, resent being put in the situation of being forced to pay for such shooting galleries through our taxes. And calling such shooting galleries “safe injection sites” changes nothing in this regard. By all means, let us use that money to create more spaces in treatment programs, if it can be demonstrated that this would improve the situation of addicts. But don’t expect me to cheerfully hand over money to create a comfy space for them to continue to shoot up in.

Without more ado, here is my earlier post…

*          *          *          *          *

Insights from Insite

For someone like me, who is of mildly conservative leanings, the application of public policy can be visualized as the dropping of a stone into a calm pond. Much like ripples, public policy has social effects that radiate outwards from the centre of social action. The most proximate effects are the ones that tend to get noticed, these being more pronounced and closer to the point of impact. The concentric circles further out are less pronounced and eventually fade away into imperceptibility.

However, while those inner ripples are fewer in number, the outer ones are more numerous and widespread. Thus, like ripples, the greater overall effects of a policy might just be those that we least take notice of. Herein lies the task of the conservative social policy analyst. Where others might be tempted to focus only on proximate effects, she must look to the long-term and often indirect effects, to that which is hidden. She must do this not out of a reflexive impulse to pooh-pooh any measure that smells like change. Rather, she must do it out of a desire to urge us to slow down, just a bit, and to consider for a moment whether we may not be creating unintended consequences through the best-laid plans of mice and men.

For some time now, there has been a social experiment going on in Vancouver’s drug-blighted Downtown East Side. It is called Insite, a program that provides a safe injection site for junkies to shoot up in. The main aim of Insite is to cut down on the rate of drug-related deaths by users. A recently-released study indicates that, by this standard, the program is a clear success. There is now talk of expanding the program to various other cities.

However, the current federal government here in Canada has always hated the idea of Insite and has bent over backwards to try to get it eliminated, to no avail so far. They don’t like the idea of coddling a group of citizens they consider to be little better than criminals, and they have gone to some lengths to provide their own counter-evidence purporting to show that Insite is actually a failure.

The government is on firmer ground when it appeals to an economic justice argument, for the fact is, Insite technically subsidizes junkies to shoot up, using funds presumably provided by taxpayers. If a convincing case can be made that taxpayers don’t want to subsidize junkies, then this to me represents a compelling case not to do so. On the other hand, if the program works, and if taxpayers can be convinced that it’s worthwhile, then, Insite is economically defensible. And if Insite relied only on charitable donations rather than tax funds, then no economic injustice would be committed. But I have a gut feeling that the current government would still hate and oppose the program in either case, so their aversion to it really has little to do with economic justice as such

I loathe the current federal government, so it pains me to find myself in ― qualified ― agreement with them. I have grave reservations about Insite. However, my reservations are not based on the federal government’s preconception that addicts are ipso facto criminals rather than persons. Thus, in what follows I will address their problems as if they were upright citizens deserving of just as much respect as you or me, albeit they happen to be citizens with a very serious health problem.

Also, my grave reservations about Insite are not based on any skepticism about the validity of the study indicating Insite’s success. I am willing to grant that the available studies are correct: Insite has been successful in its stated goal of reducing drug-related deaths in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side.

However, the successes focused on in these studies are what I was referring to above as the inner ripples of policy, its immediate or proximate effects. But what about the outer ripples, the ones that are harder to see or to measure? I heard an interview on the radio last week with a senior administrator of the program (unfortunately I didn’t catch his name). He stated that the goal of Insite was to “keep addicts disease-free until they are ready to make the decision to seek treatment for their addictions” (I’m necessarily paraphrasing here, but pretty accurately, I think).

The evidence indicates they have indeed been kept (more) disease free. This I won’t dispute. But it begs a larger question: What warrant do we have to assume that untreated addicts reliably make the decision to seek treatment? Evidence here varies, but most of what I’ve seen is not encouraging. That is one of the unseen ripples of the policy.

We can also follow the ripples a little further out. For example, what warrant do we have to assume that untreated addicts reliably make the decision to seek treatment when they receive services that enable them to continue using drugs relatively safely? If Insite facilitates addicts’ safe drug use, might it not be the case that a very strong incentive to quit ― the high probability of disease or overdose ― has been removed? This question was screaming to be answered in the interview, but neither interviewer nor interviewee seemed much interested in addressing it. On the interviewer’s part I imagine this was motivated by an implicit desire to display his social liberal credentials to a mostly like-minded CBC audience.

Defenders of Insite have argued that the availability of information and professional consultation available at Insite will help guide users to treatment options. Perhaps this is the case, but again, it is an empirical claim for which we want evidence. The report touting Insite’s success simply tells us that addicts using it are more likely to remain disease-free. It is (tellingly?) silent about how many of them end up seeking treatment. Until we have information on this, the claim that addicts who avail themselves of Insite’s services are more likely to seek treatment remains an unproven hypothesis, not a fact.

There is further reason to doubt this claim’s validity: most professionals in the “addiction services industry” (I don’t really know what else to call it) will tell you that there is a shortage of spaces available in treatment facilities. There are too few spots to service current demand, let alone an increase in demand.  Logically, this means that it would be impossible to treat more patients given current resources. So Insite cannot be leading more addicts to treatment, because the treatment isn’t there for them to be led to.

Obviously this is not an argument against Insite’s claim to efficacy in bringing addicts closer to treatment. If anything, it’s an argument for an increase in resources devoted to addiction treatment. Again, however, we must consider the policy ripples a little further out. Might it be the case that the increased access to addiction treatment information is at least somewhat ― if not entirely ― offset by the convenient and comfortable drug injection environment offered by Insite? At the very least, we must admit that mixed messages are being sent here: “We’d like you to consider getting treatment for your addiction. Here’s a brochure. And here’s a clean needle and a comfy room to shoot up in.” A junkie could be forgiven for taking away from this the message that his addiction is not so bad for him after all, and that treatment is not imperative.

Much of one’s attitude toward programs like Insite will depend on the views one has about the nature of addiction itself. Addiction is a puzzling phenomenon. Once upon a time, it was simply viewed as a matter of lack of willpower, and was thus regarded as a moral problem, a moral failing. We could call this the “moral disease” view of addiction. It has to a large extent fallen out of favour among researchers (along with many other things that employ the term “moral”). Speaking very broadly, the moral disease view has largely been replaced by either of two currently popular models of addiction. Fortunately, my reservations about Insite are unaffected by whichever of these views one happens to hold.

The Disease Model

Probably the most widely accepted and fashionable paradigm for understanding addiction is the disease view, which treats it as if it were a medical condition on all fours with, say, diabetes or cancer. Of course, there is a large psychological component to this particular disease which differentiates it from purely physical conditions, but for treatment purposes, addiction on this model is seen as a medical condition, a psycho-physical sickness beyond the control of its victim. This is the operational viewpoint of most Twelve Step programs.

From what little I know about the history of addiction treatment (and it’s probably more than the average person, for personal reasons I don’t wish to expand on here), the disease model was developed in the treatment of alcoholics in the early 20th century for at least two reasons. One was that clinicians noted that chronic alcoholism had a more or less definite disease pathology, a natural progression or history of symptoms, when left untreated. Another was the hope that by seeing alcoholism as a medical condition, people would be less judgmental of alcoholics, and alcoholics would be more willing to seek treatment once the stigma of their condition was removed. In other words, it was specifically hoped that the disease model would replace the old moral disease view with its accompanying social stigma.

Both of these were valid points to some extent. Chronic and very acute alcoholism does have a fairly well-defined physical pathology. And probably more problem drinkers have ended up seeking treatment than they otherwise would have once the social stigma attached to the “disease” was mitigated.

On the other hand, not all problem drinkers fit a disease profile that was originally developed with the most advanced late-stage alcoholics in mind. It was a one-size-fits-all model that has not proved very helpful in understanding the “disease”, if disease it be. And although more people sought treatment, the treatment programs based upon this disease model have been notable only for their abysmal success rates. Alcoholics Anonymous has been around since 1939. It does not track its success rate in treating alcoholics. You’d think they would want to. But there is probably a good reason why they don’t. Others have done the studies on their behalf, and the general consensus is that Alcoholics Anonymous is a failure at keeping people sober. There are far more failures than successes, and even among the “successes”, relapse rates are sky high. If alcoholism is a disease, and if A.A. is the “cure”, then as a doctor, I’d consider taking my chances by prescribing a placebo to my alcoholic patients.

Long-time members of A.A. will counter by saying that the organization is not supposed to “keep people sober”. Alcoholics are supposed to keep themselves sober; the responsibility for recovery always lies with the alcoholic herself. But doesn’t this seem in tension with the notion that addiction is a disease for which its sufferer is not responsible? A.A. members will also tell you that failure or relapse happens because an alcoholic can’t be treated unless he “is ready” to recover, or has hit bottom and decided to give up the drink. But again, this seems in tension with the disease model’s stress upon the notion that alcoholism is not a function of the alcoholic’s lack of willpower.

Sooner or later it seems, every treatment scheme predicated on the disease model runs up against this tension. The disease model may be better at luring the addict into treatment, but at bottom, the treatments themselves end up stressing willpower and the addict’s own inner resources for recovery. Alcoholics Anonymous is no exception. As a matter of fact, their entire program of recovery can be viewed as a conscious attempt to instill in the alcoholic a transformational revolution of character, the beneficial moral effects of which will hopefully mimic those of intense religious conversion. It is no coincidence that Bill Wilson, co-founder of A.A., was greatly influenced by William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience. It is important to stress that such an approach works on the internal resources of the alcoholic’s own moral agency, which seems rather at odds with the disease model of addiction. After all, we don’t cure cancer or diabetes by relying on the character or willpower of the patient.

In a true disease model, the patient is just that ― a patient. But addiction treatment almost always ends up (as it must, I believe) treating the patient as an agent. Perhaps the success of such programs might be improved if they were to be honest about this from the beginning. Maybe we must fess up and admit that kicking addiction is a matter of willpower after all (helped along, of course, by a certain degree of moral support from others). Obviously, putting it this way grossly oversimplifies the phenomenon of addiction. But then again, so does the disease model.

The Rational Choice Model

The other school of thought ― the rational choice model ― is less popular than the disease model, at least among clinicians. The rational choice model has been adopted mainly by behavioural economists because it fits well with the observed behaviour of addicts. In a nutshell, this model views the addict as a rational consumer, in almost all respects the same as you or me.

Generally speaking, when the price of a good increases, consumption of that good tends to fall. The rate of decrease of demand will vary from one good to another, and from one agent to another, but the general trend is obvious. The addict’s consumption of drugs is, in principle, no different. If you lower the price of cocaine or heroin, addicts will tend to increase their consumption of them, and some people will begin to consume these drugs who otherwise might not have.

The fact that the addict is addicted to the drug simply means that his demand for the drug is inelastic relative to other goods. If the price of heroin goes up, before he considers cutting down his consumption, the junkie will instead often forego food or rent. This seems like an irrational consumption choice, but if each of us were to systematically examine our own consumption choices, we would often find similar though perhaps less harmful patterns. I once knew someone “addicted” to electronic gadgets; he absolutely had to have the latest thing, spending well beyond his slender means, even if paying for it meant that he didn’t know how he would make his rent or pay off his ridiculous credit card bill. My wife might say that my penchant for book collecting meets this description. There just happens to be no self-help group akin to Alcoholics Anonymous that I know of for my particular form of consumption aberration (if there were, I’m sure my wife would have left a brochure on my pillow by now).

The rational choice model views the addict as making choices about consumption, based on what they believe will best satisfy their overall preferences. To the third party observer, these choices can seem downright irrational, but to the person making the choice it seems perfectly rational: they have a (very strong) desire for a drug, which gives them pleasure or ― what amounts to much the same thing ― relieves their pain. Any approach to treating the addict should treat them as rational persons making choices based on a preference set and an information set. Such an approach would work on improving their decision-making by modifying their preferences and providing them with information. Inevitably, there will also be situational and environmental factors standing in the way of better decision-making, things such as easy availability of the drug, hanging out with the wrong crowd, etc.

The point is, rather than approaching the addict as a powerless patient whose addiction is an external force majeur that strikes him through no fault of his own (the disease model), the rational choice model treats the addict as an empowered, decision-making agent, responsible for his own conduct. He ought to be praised for his good choices, especially when, as in the case of addiction, good choices are difficult choices. And he ought to be held responsible for his bad ones. The prevailing view that addiction seizes and controls the addict, as well-intentioned as it might be, is probably misguided. It is one part of an overall tendency to “medicalize” conduct that is moral in nature. I will illustrate this medicalization of moral conduct with an anecdote from an essay by Theodore Dalrymple.

Dalrymple was a prison psychiatrist. He was interviewing an inmate who was in prison for viciously beating up his girlfriend badly enough to put her in the hospital. This was not unusual behaviour for this particular inmate. Dalrymple asked him why he beat up his girlfriend. He replied to the effect that he had difficulty controlling his anger and she had made him really angry. Not really his fault, you see. The general gist of his answer was that he was in prison due to a problem largely beyond his control ― he had “anger management issues”, to use the parlance of our times. He simply couldn’t help beating his girlfriend to a bloody pulp. Dalrymple then asked him how it was that since he had been in prison he had managed to be well-behaved, with no outbursts of anger or violence. He replied that the guards didn’t let prisoners get away with that kind of bullshit in prison.

The prisoner had ascribed his violent behaviour to a quasi-disease model of anger, which he probably picked up by osmosis from the liberal claptrap he was hearing around him. Working from within the disease model, the prisoner’s subsequent good conduct behind bars makes no sense. But working from the rational choice model, it makes perfect sense. He was able to modify his behaviour in the presence of a strong incentive, namely getting the proverbial tar beaten out of him by a prison guard. Research on addiction done by behavioural economists bears this phenomenon out.

This has obvious implications for programs like Insite. When we ask ourselves what motivation Insite offers addicts to quit, we mostly come up empty-handed. Again, yes there are brochures and addiction counselors, but there are also the clean needles and the safe and comfy shooting galleries that cancel these out. The rational choice model predicts a poor long-term treatment prognosis for users of Insite. I hope someone will do the research to test this hypothesis. It represents one of those outlying ripples of this particular social policy, one of those rare ones that is, in principle, empirically measurable. And the test should probably happen before the program is expanded, not afterward. That is how conservative policy analysis should work.

Bad History Hits a Red Light

Syphilis, medieval style

In my previous post, I took historian Michael Bliss to task for committing a certain type of error I chose to call the “Has been-Ought” fallacy, or the fallacy of deriving an “ought” claim from a statement about how things were in the past. In this post I’d like to present some more shoddy argument by another who makes her living in the historian’s trade.

It begins with a story that has been in the news here in Canada for the past couple of days. It involved a court challenge to our criminal laws surrounding prostitution and the sex trade. Prostitution per se is not illegal in Canada, but many of the surroundings of the trade are. The challenge to the current laws insists that since having sex for money is not an illegal activity, the other legal prohibitions surrounding it create harmful working conditions which pose a threat to women, and are therefore unconstitutional. The challenge made it through Ontario’s highest court, so now it will presumably make its way to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Although I have my own opinions on this case, I shall not try your patience with them here. Suffice to say, I believe the decision was a bad one, on much the same grounds as I believe the earlier Insite decision was a bad one — both cases make pronouncements on issues of public policy (not within the court’s mandate), and because they uphold victim culture and further erode the notion that persons are responsible for their own behavior. But enough about my unpopular and possibly mistaken opinion on the matter.

In any case, no sooner had the decision come down, than we were entertained with a flurry of excited articles extolling the economic and social benefits of an industry in legalized brothels in Canada, most of them written in a tone of lurid speculation and hushed excitement. One thing these enthusiastic articles have in common is that they are all written by men. Men, it seems, or at least male journalists, cannot wait to have legalized brothels. The opinions of women, including prostitutes themselves, on the subject are considerably more mixed.

I should say that there was at least one article, written by a female historian, which offered an unusual defense of legalized and regulated brothels. Penned by Professor Jacqueline Murray, and cleverly titled “The Whores of Yore”, it made the argument that the people of the Middle Ages had it right in their attitude towards the sex industry. Prof. Murray seems to be a historian of a rather revisionist bent. According to her, in the Middle Ages legalized brothels were the norm. She further contends that they provided legitimate career options for women who had fallen through the cracks of a society devoid of social safety nets. She also argues that they provided two further benefits. First, they made prostitution healthier, by enabling authorities to conduct health inspections, and by giving prostitutes access to medical care. Second, legalized brothels provided men with an outlet for their sexual urges, which would otherwise find expression in the accosting and potential rape of respectable wives and daughters.

In each of these claims, Professor Murray is dead wrong, and laughably so. Let’s examine each claim in turn.

Legalized Brothels:

Prof. Murray claims that legalized brothels were the norm in medieval times. As an example, she cites the case of the Bishop of Winchester’s ownership of London’s Southwark “stews”. She is right in claiming that brothels were commonplace. But to claim they were legal is quite a stretch. And with regard to the canard about the Bishops of Winchester, sadly, it seems the learned professor has fallen for the historical equivalent of an urban legend.

First off, we are in no doubt of the Church’s official position: prostitution is a sin, for both buyer and seller. This means that, as far as canon law was concerned, prostitution was illegal.

As for Southwark, yes, the land formed part of the manorial lands of the Bishops of Winchester (or more appropriately, the corporation of the Bishopric of Winchester). There would have been a variety of businesses situated on those lands, all of them paying some rent to the bishop. Some of these businesses were “stews” — taverns in which prostitutes customarily plied their trade. The bishop would not have been a pimp or procurer of women, as those who reproduce this story seem to imply. He would merely be a landlord, a receiver of rents from the many tenant businesses, stews included. I suppose this technically means the bishops lived off the avails of prostitution, but they had no direct hand in running brothels. Therefore, Prof. Murray’s claim that “the ‘stews’ of Southwark, now the South Bank of London, were owned and operated by the Bishop of Winchester” is misleading, to say the least.

For a fascinating and thorough history of the Southwark stews, I cannot recommend highly enough Henry Ansgar Kelly’s article, “Bishop, Prioress, and Bawd in the Stews of Southwark,” Speculum 75 (2000), 342-388. You will quickly learn that there is no basis, in medieval London at least, for the claim that brothels were legally-sanctioned operations. They were illegal, notwithstanding that the local authorities often turned a blind eye to them. If that makes them legal, then by that definition an underground dogfighting league is legal so long as it keeps paying off the cops. And in fact the stews of Southwark were shut down by the authorities from time to time. And whores were punished, much more severely than they are in our society. Then, as now, there were occasional moral panics interspersed among periods of official indifference.

In short, Prof. Murray’s high claims of legal prostitution in the Middle Ages are essentially rubbish. At best we can say that in some areas, for some periods, prostitution was de facto legal, but it was never so de iure.

Economic Opportunities for Women:

This argument can be hastily disposed of. I’m sure prostitution did provide incomes to women who were outcast. I suppose if such a woman had cut off an arm or a leg and begged in the streets, then that too would have provided her with an income. Does that make it good social policy to encourage it, or to tax it? Can we really not do better for our women than the medievals did (or rather didn’t) for theirs? Let me ask you this: If you had a daughter who had fallen on hard times, would you prefer she had the “option” of prostituting herself, or would you prefer a proper social safety net to help her get back on her feet? (I know, I’m suddenly raving like a socialist. Chalk it up to my inner Red Tory.)

Part of what makes destitution a bad thing is that it limits freedom by compelling people to do degrading things against their preferences and better judgment. Prof. Murray seems to speak of prostitution as a solution to poverty, when it should be viewed as a symptom of it. She doesn’t seem to realize it, but her views betray a chilling lack of empathy for the poor that makes even a cold soul like mine shudder. This is truly “let them eat cake” thinking at its worst. And yet, ironically, I imagine she prides herself on her liberality, tolerance, and kindness.

Sexual Outlets for Men:

Professor Murray is far from the first person to make this claim. This has been argued since time immemorial. Some medieval theologians thought prostitution was a necessary evil, and a minority claimed that it deterred homosexuality. In short, this line of argument says that men — or some indeterminate subset of them — are lecherous by nature, and that if it weren’t for the sexual outlet that prostitutes provide, they would be busy raping respectable women, or else having sexual congress with men or animals or ripe fruit. This argument is more than a little dubious. What’s more, it manages to be degrading both to men and women at the same time.

Supposedly, a certain proportion of men who visit prostitutes would rape women if prostitutes were unavailable. This is an empirical claim, and to my knowledge it has never been empirically verified. But even if it could be verified, I doubt very much that it can support an argument for legalized prostitution. It implies a reductive view of men as utter slaves to their sexual drives. Furthermore, these sexual drives cannot be controlled, trained or sublimated. If this were true, then it seems to me a more natural answer would be castration, not legalized prostitution. Instead, we’re told by people like Prof. Murray that the only way of dealing with these men is to provide poor women for them to use as sexual “outlets”.

And they must be poor women, mind you, fallen women. After all, we don’t want these men touching the daughters of decent people, respectable people. And here methinks I spot the latent schizophrenia in much “progressive” philosophizing about prostitution: On the one hand, we are to believe that there is nothing wrong with prostitution, and that we should legalize it, tax it, and make it safe for women. Women who engage in it are to be called “sex workers” and are to be treated as if they are skilled tradespeople who have freely made a valid career choice. On the other hand, of course, you would be hard pressed to find people who would approve of their own daughters entering this supposedly respectable trade. What would be your feeling if your daughter's high school guidance counselor suggested she take up this trade, or that she had an aptitude for it? In other words, it seems to be implied by the ruling progressivism on the subject that prostitution is a valid career choice only for the daughters of others, preferably for the poor, or for the daughters of the poor. These are the appropriate outlets for potential rapists to let off a little steam with.

It’s Healthier:

Professor Murray makes the claim that prostitution in the Middle Ages was rendered healthier through legalization. Prostitutes working in brothels were subject to medical inspection, or so she claims. Given the prevailing state of medical science and practice at the time, I can only imagine what these “inspections” consisted of. We can safely assume that they were invasive, degrading, and open to abuse.

We are also told by Prof. Murray that the brothels brought prostitution into the open, and made medical services available to the women. Again, given the state of medieval medical science, I can only wonder what sort of help they could expect to receive from a medieval doctor.

I once wrote an article on the history of syphilis. It was a fascinating subject to research. The mainstream consensus is that syphilis arrived in Europe from America in the 1490s; in other words, it arrived at the tail end of those sexually enlightened Middle Ages that Prof. Murray extols. It is hard to overestimate how the arrival of syphilis ravaged a society that was unprepared for its onslaughts, and one of the main vectors of transmission was through baths and brothels. Read up on the arrival and initial spread of AIDS in North America and you will find the parallels are eerie; many cities in the early 1980s shut down their bathhouses. And much like AIDS in 1980, for the late medieval syphilitic there was no effective medical help to speak of, other than quack cures like mercury. The syphilitic would have mercury baths, causing her teeth and hair to fall out and making her drool uncontrollably. The “cure” was a form of poisoning that was as likely to kill as the disease itself.

(Incidentally, we get our word “quack” from the Dutch kwakzalver, a hawker of salves. The Dutch word became popular in English because it sounded much like “quicksilver”, the most popular quack treatment for syphilis. But I digress.)

The fact is, throughout pre-modern literature, the whore is a byword for short life, as it still is today. Medieval history provides no support for the notion that prostitution ought to be legalized.

Addendum:

It is often argued (for example, by feminist intervenors and amici curiae in the famous Canadian case of R. v. Butler) that the availability of pornography causes men to rape and should therefore be banned. Others argue that pornography provides an outlet for men, and therefore makes women safer. In the absence of any sound empirical evidence, it seems one can make unverified empirical claims either for or against a thesis.

Might not a similar phenomenon be happening with the back and forth regarding prostitution? One side, as exemplified by people like Prof. Murray, will argue that prostitution provides an outlet for men’s sexual urges. But since there is no evidence one way or the other, it can just as easily be argued that access to prostitutes might actually irritate and enflame those aberrant sexual urges and actually cause more men to rape. And after all, if society takes a winking attitude towards using women as sexual outlets, perhaps pushing the envelope a bit is not such a terrible crime? Or at least that is what such lowlifes might be led to think to themselves.

Of course, there is a relevant sense in which much prostitution is akin to a kind of indirect rape. If the typical prostitute is driven to the sex trade through poverty or addiction or literal slavery, then she suffers from a compromised will. Therefore, perhaps the sex she engages in cannot be characterized as entirely consensual. The man who pays to have sex with her perhaps does not physically overpower her and pin her down. Rather, her life circumstances do that dirty work for him.