All Episodes
Previous Next
March 2, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:58
1599 The Defense of Unconsciousness Examined

A practical and ethical examination of the defense 'I didn't know any better'...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey everybody, it's Steph. Oh, it's the last day of the month.
I hope you're doing most magnificently.
And I wanted to...
I feel I've always given...
You know, the podcast topics return to me like a fly to...
Let's say honey, rather than the alternative.
Podcast topics return to me when I feel I have done, at best, an imperfect job of explaining at least a coherent and rational position.
And one of the great challenges that is occurring, and it's really becoming clear to me how much of a challenge it is in talking to these psychological experts...
It is a great challenge, which is the degree to which unconscious people are responsible for their own behavior.
And this is a real challenge.
It's a real challenge.
And I've given some answers to that before, particularly if you want to do a search.
It's in the fourth feed for The Machine of Evil.
I think I took two swings at that.
It's one of the few podcast topics I've repeated twice.
But I will repeat it here because I have another way of looking at it that I hope will make some sense.
Now, why is this important?
Well, it's important because we want to be just in our moral evaluations of ourselves and of others.
And yet we face the problem that if we release other people from moral responsibility because they are unconscious, we create an insurmountable logical contradiction, which means, you know, meh, invalid, can't be done, not with the Wookiee.
And what do I mean by this?
Well... If we say that other people are not morally responsible for bad behavior because they are unconscious, because they have not done work on themselves, then what we're saying is that ignorance provides moral escape.
Morality does not apply to people who avoid knowledge.
Now, for this to be logically consistent, we would have to say that anyone who does not know the law cannot be prosecuted.
In other words, if people studiously avoid learning even the basics of the law, i.e.
theft and so on, then they can never be prosecuted for their crimes.
And again, I know I'm talking in status terms, but let's pretend it's a free society.
The reason why that doesn't work is that that would be a defense that would be taken by everybody.
I didn't know. I didn't know that this was illegal.
You would never be able to prosecute someone because you'd say, well, if you didn't know, you're not morally responsible.
So the equivalent would be to say, well, I didn't know what I was doing, I was doing the best I could.
Like, everybody would take that as an excuse.
Now, that's a bit of an argument from effect, so I'm not going to say that's a clincher.
But we all understand that we can't say to people who steal, and then those people say, well, I didn't know that stealing was wrong.
We can't say to them, well, off you go then.
Or murder, or whatever, right?
And so, if you studiously don't learn or even avoid learning these things, then I don't see how it absolves you of moral responsibility.
To take another example, let's say you have kids and you feed them just garbage, you know, just junk food and crap and candy bars and stuff which is empty calories with almost no nutritional value, and your children become sick, right?
They become functionally malnourished because they're not getting any protein or, you know, anything that's decent to eat.
If your children become sick because you're just feeding them all kinds of garbage, and then you say, I didn't know that this food was bad for them, I didn't know that there was better food for them, would we accept that as a defense?
Would we say, oh, okay, well, on your way then, right?
Well, no. Of course we wouldn't, because we would say, look, if you have children, you're automatically accepting a moral responsibility To do at least some research into their care.
So let's say you have kids and you never take them to the dentist, right?
And they grow up with those Brit registered sideways Lisa Simpson tusks, right?
Well, we would say that that's wrong.
If you have children, you have to take them to the dentist.
And if you don't, and if you can't afford it, you take them to a charitable dentist or you apply for charity or you just say to people, I can't afford to have to take them.
If you have children, you have to take them to the dentist.
And if you say, I didn't know that they had to go to the dentist, that's not an excuse, right?
So, a lack of knowledge is not an excuse if that knowledge is easily available, commonly accessible, blah, blah, blah, right?
Internet, libraries and the internet, right?
The libraries were the internet of the 19th century.
Libraries plus the internet has meant that people have access to this information.
Now, again, these are sort of arguments from effect, but I think that they're still quite powerful, right?
So, we wouldn't want to create opposing moral categories on a whim.
So, ignorance of pretty obvious laws does not absolve you of moral responsibility.
The other thing that then would be the case is that studying basic information would be against somebody's self-interest because it would render them to be liable for prosecution for noncompliance or for, you know, I guess in the DRO world for ostracism or Withdrawal from the DRO system.
And therefore, negative consequences would accrue by studying, which you could escape by not studying.
And that just seems to me kind of weird.
Another equivalent would be to say we would not compel health insurance companies in a free society to cover people who did not apply for health insurance, obviously, right?
Because that would be immoral and fundamentally, in the long run, completely impractical.
Though, of course, very practical for people who could get that way.
And so if somebody, you know, has a heart attack and ends up being rushed to hospital and gets a $5,000 bill and free society, and then they say, well, I want health insurance retroactively, we'd say no.
They'd say, well, I didn't know that I needed health insurance.
I didn't know that I needed health insurance.
I didn't know that I could have a heart attack.
I didn't know that the bill would be $5,000.
Well, we wouldn't say, well, okay then, here's your free money, right?
Because we say, look, you're fundamentally kind of responsible for getting some basic information in life.
You are kind of responsible for getting some basic information.
Now, if you're mentally handicapped, then that's another issue entirely.
But we're just talking about people with, you know, they're in the top 70% of IQ, right?
Let's just say, or 80%.
But they're functionally able to get the basics of life.
And again, the last example I'll give, not to pound it too repetitively, but if I go to a restaurant, I order a meal...
And then I profess to be shocked when I get the bill and I say, well, I didn't know I had to pay.
I thought this was a charity. I thought this was a soup kitchen with really nice decor and filet mignon steaks.
Nobody would say, well, if you didn't know, I'll pay it for you.
Off you go, right? Because this would just be something that somebody would do all the time.
So, in a very, I think, fundamental way, ignorance of the law is no excuse.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse, and I'm talking sort of common law and general societal practices.
ignorance of the law is no excuse.
And even if we accept that ignorance of the law is an excuse, we cannot accept that a blindness to the consequences of disobeying that law is an excuse as well.
So let's say that some parent knew absolutely nothing about good nutrition for her kids, but then her kids got listless and overweight and sickly and no energy and so on.
Then that parent would say, well, something's wrong.
And take the kids to the doctor and the doctor would say, well, what are you feeding these kids?
And it's like, well, you know, McDonald's and candy bars, right?
And the doctor would say, well, that's bad, right?
And then you would then be educated in a better form of, in a better approach to nutrition, right?
And the last example, and thanks for your patience, is if you didn't know that your children need to be taken to a dentist, then, well, what's going to happen?
Your kids are going to get rotten teeth.
They're going to be in pain, suffering, crying.
Their breath will stink, right?
All that kind of stuff. You didn't know oral hygiene was important.
And then you would take your kids to the doctor and say, well, they're constantly in pain.
And he'd look at their teeth and say, good heavens, get these kids to a dentist, right?
And so, there's no circumstances under which a complete ignorance of destructive or negative behavior in parenting or other things would be the case.
The other thing I think that's important is that if we say that morality is something that has to be taught, And if the person is not taught basic moral principles, then they're not at all responsible, then it's to say that morality is completely subjective, right? I mean, the words for things, other than a few homonyms, the words for things are completely arbitrary.
Why is it called a tree rather than a homonym?
Bing, bing, ole for tang to tang, bisco barrel.
Well, it's kind of arbitrary.
So that does have to be taught.
We understand that, right? But morality, at least certainly the essence of morality, does not have to be taught because it is UPB, right?
It is UPB. And it does not need to be taught any more than the basics of physics need to be taught.
I mean, they're just absorbed because they're real and objective and consistent and so on.
And morality is pretty much the same way in terms of do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
I mean, there's I mean, it's not exactly UPB, but it's pretty damn close.
And if you don't like someone stealing from you, then you at least understand that the other person doesn't like you stealing from them and blah blah blah.
I mean, these are all things that you learn before you hit the playground, right?
I mean, particularly if you have siblings, but even if you have other kids playing around, whatever, right?
So, if we say, well, moral rules have to be taught, and if they're not taught, then the person has no moral responsibility or no legal responsibility for their actions, that's like saying that physics needs to be taught, and that if you stab a guy, he will receive a wound, needs to be taught on a physics level.
And you could say, well, I had no idea that stabbing or shooting a guy would cause him harm.
I didn't know the physics behind it.
I had no idea, right? Well, that's just a plea of insanity, right?
That's not a plea that could be accepted, right?
I pointed a gun at a guy who pulled the trigger.
I had no idea that a bullet was going to come out, was going to travel at a high trajectory, and was going to splatter his flesh all over the back wall.
I had no idea that that was going to occur at a physical level.
Well... That doesn't work, right?
I mean, that doesn't work at all.
If you can formulate the argument that you didn't know, then you're competent enough to know.
So, there is a certain amount just of...
You can't.
You can't. I mean, if there's some local custom that you do a triple shimmy every time you enter a particular temple, and I'm new to that country, I could be absolved, of course, of not knowing that particular custom.
But that's not morality.
That's not, I mean, the basics of morality.
And so, moral responsibility...
It cannot be evaded simply through evading knowledge or evading the consequences of a lack of knowledge, right?
So, if you're a parent and you're abusive, then your children are going to be unhappy.
You, of course, are going to be shocked and appalled if they apply your behavior either back to yourself or to other people, right?
To other children. And therefore, you can know that it's a violation of UPB and it's a violation of do unto others that you have them do unto you and And so you are aware of all of these realities.
And so you cannot rationally claim to not be morally responsible for this.
And people say, well, but it's unconscious, right?
They're just acting out their own stuff, this, that, and the other.
Well, I don't think that's a very good argument.
I think it would be a good argument at the end of the 19th century and maybe even at the beginning of the 20th century, but I don't think it's a very good argument now, and I think there's some very, very good reasons for that, and let's talk about those.
So, before we get to the truly clinching argument as to why this is an invalid position to claim unconsciousness or ignorance as a motive or as an excuse for immoral behavior or bad behavior, The discovery of the unconscious goes back to the late 19th century.
Freud, I think, was writing in the 1880s, 1890s, something like that.
So, it's quite a long time, and I think that it's hard, if not impossible, for any reasonably educated person, by that I mean any person from the first world, to say that they had no idea that there was such a thing as an unconscious or contrary motives.
And also, I think it's really impossible for people to say that they've never heard of such a thing as the cycle of violence, i.e., if you were abused as a child, you have a higher likelihood Of abusing your own children.
That is just part of the common vernacular.
You know, it's somewhere between the earth is round and quantum physics, leaning more towards the earth is round.
It is popularly reinforced in culture and songs and movies.
The weird guy always has a disturbed background, and it is the violent guy, if he ever talks about his history, will always talk about Being beaten up.
Even in Desperate Housewives, recently there was a stripper who talked about being violently beaten by her mother as a child.
Like, when you have dysfunctional people and they talk about their past, it is always the same thing.
It is embedded in popular culture.
I mean, just think of the movie Psycho, right?
Norman Bates is a psycho killer, and he has a slightly twisted relationship with his mother.
Spoiler. So this goes back decades and decades.
Novels, you can see the same sort of thing occurring.
And to some degree, again, you've got it better than Dostoevsky.
Dostoevsky has Raskolnikov come from a loving family who then is strangely overcome by twisted ideas to the point of murder.
It's not really valid.
He would have had a susceptibility to these twisted ideas because of an abusive upbringing.
And we know this is pretty much for certain because Dostoevsky was unable to overcome his own pathologies.
In the same way that after Freud betrayed the children by transferring legitimate complaints of sexual abuse into fantasies of desired paternal and maternal rape with the Electra and Oedipus complexes, he was then unable to overcome his own addictions.
Such as cigar smoking to the point where cancer ate out his jaw and his cheek and he died in extreme pain and misery and was forced into the rather pathetic, though, I mean, I have sympathy, but pathetic explanation that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
In other words, the unconscious motives for other people's bad habits are very important, but for my own bad habits, it's just a cigar, which of course is...
is not true and was sexually abused and did not deal with it and so betrayed not only his patients but his own history of sexual abuse by transferring it into these irrational drives for sex with the opposite or desires for sex with the opposite sex parents.
But the unconscious, the cycle of violence, psychology as a whole, has been part of popular culture for many, many years.
Why is Shakespeare such a great writer?
Shakespeare is such a great writer, particularly in terms of intergenerational conflicts, because the psychology is fantastic.
The language, of course, is beautiful. The psychology is fantastic.
Dostoevsky's studies in pathology are also more fantastic than even he himself, I think, was aware of.
Dickens has some weaknesses when it comes to psychology, but also some very penetrating insights.
And if you go all the way back to the Greeks, self-knowledge, self-knowledge, self-knowledge was considered the key.
You could not be wise about the world until you were wise about yourself.
The barriers that we have to knowledge of the world occur within the self first, and then in others, and then in the world.
So we fix our relationship with ourself, which then fixes our relationship with others, which then fixes our relationship to the world.
But we can't start with the world.
So, it's really hard to accept.
In fact, I would say it's functionally impossible to accept at face value the proposition that somebody was simply, gosh, don't you know, unaware of the need for self-knowledge, say, prior to having children, right?
So, to take an example, if a man comes from a history where his parents tortured children, sorry, tortured animals, tortured animals, And then he goes out, he has a very strong desire to go out and buy animals.
Well, it's really hard to accept at face value the idea that when he inevitably, if he does lack self-knowledge, he inevitably will end up torturing these animals.
It's really hard for him to say, I had no idea that growing up in a house watching my father torture animals would have anything to do with my own desire to own animals and what might happen as a result.
I mean, that's really hard to accept as a story.
And so... Given the generalized knowledge that is talked about, I mean, Oprah talks about psychology all the time.
Dr. Phil is on for an hour every day, and I think he's in his, I don't know what, 10th or 11th season.
So you have a psychiatrist, I think he is, talking about self-knowledge and the cycle of violence and better behavior.
However... Catastrophically imperfect he is at times, in my opinion.
It's still there, right? The information is still there.
The self-help movement has been booming since the 60s.
And I remember as a kid watching on TV Leo Buscaglia, who has books called Love and talks about passion and love and devotion and the barriers to it.
John Bradshaw, Nathaniel Brandon.
I mean, you could go on and on, but art has always been about psychology.
Art has always been about Tennessee Williams, all about psychology, because without psychology, art is not interesting.
That's what's called flat cardboard one-dimensional characters, or how is it that 3D technology can animate such flat characters in Avatar?
But psychology is important, because there has to be a personal journey, and there has to be resistance.
So there has to be a point A, there has to be a point Z, and there has to be resistance through every other letter of the alphabet in order for art to have any Utility, power, depth, or meaning.
And so, because there is a journey, and there is a resistance, and there is a transformation, this is all about psychology.
So, since human beings first started telling stories, I mean, think of Aesop's fables, right?
Sour grapes. The fox can't get the grapes beyond the fence, and therefore he says, well, those grapes were really bad.
They're sour, right? And this has become a truism.
Think of all of the bromides, the clichés that are floating around, around psychology.
A stitch in time saves nine, right?
It's about focusing on long-term gains versus short-term gains, which is to oppose laziness, delays, procrastination, and so on.
This is all about psychology. You wouldn't need a stitch in time saves nine if people didn't have a resistance to doing things which were wise in the long run.
So, psychology, the unconscious, self-knowledge, and the resistance to self-knowledge, the cycle of violence, have been part of a common human culture for thousands of years, have been explicitly pursued and discussed over the past 100, 150 years, have been in the mainstream media, in the mainstream media, not, you know, some guy's blog in Lithuania, in the mainstream media for 30, 40 years, at a bare minimum.
And you could go back for women to Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and so on.
And, again, we can sort of go into more of the history of the growth of self-knowledge if people are interested.
I think it's a fascinating topic.
But that's not for this conversation.
This conversation, for somebody to claim unawareness of the unconscious and the cycle of violence and...
Resistances to better behavior is equivalent to me to somebody claiming a complete ignorance of nutrition.
I mean, you can't live in this world without gaining some knowledge of nutrition.
You just can't. I mean, if you have a TV, if you have a newspaper, it's there.
Mental health, depression, talk therapy, even medication, these things are all part of the common culture.
They're in newspapers, they're in the nightly news, they are all over the place in media and In art, in nonfiction, in news, and so on.
So you simply can't claim to be ignorant of these things anymore.
And it's been, I would say, 40 or 50 years since people have been legitimately able to claim a lack of knowledge of these things.
So since people do have this knowledge that there is a cycle of violence, then they are responsible for that.
They're responsible for that. Nobody can claim that they don't know anything about if you had a bad childhood.
The odds are much greater that you will end up Inflicting abuse upon your own children.
People simply can't be unaware of that.
And if they are, they're lying.
They're lying. They're lying. And so, given that people are aware of that, then they have responsibility to act in a better way.
They have responsibility to act in a better way.
I mean, it's not like people have to reinvent the wheel here.
If you had a bad childhood, you need to deal with that.
I suggest through therapy.
Maybe there are other things, but you need to deal with that.
You need to deal with that.
And to me, for people to say, well, I had children, I didn't deal with it, and, you know, well, that's just the reality.
I did the best that I could. But that's nonsense.
If you have no money, if you have no job, if you have no home, if you're living in an old school bus and you decide to have kids, then you're responsible for the resulting poverty.
You're just responsible.
And to me, it is exactly the same.
If you had a traumatic history, and you have not dealt with it, and you choose to have children, and you choose to not deal with your own impulses, and you choose, in a sense, to inflict, which is inevitably the result, you inflict your traumas upon them, them.
And if you then avoid the inevitable results of the infliction of that trauma on their behavior, right, in the same way that kids who are underfed will be malnourished and get rickets and crap, kids who are abused will display characteristics such as depression, withdrawal, alienation, dissociation, aggression, and so on, if you ignore the results.
I mean, you can't claim to be ignorant.
You can't claim to be ignorant.
It's nonsense.
Now, the last thing that I will say, and this really is the clincher, save the best for last, in a relatively short podcast about a very complex topic.
But this is what I would say, which is the absolute clincher when it comes to people who say, I am not responsible because I was unconscious.
And, And in fact, sorry, just before we get to that, when people say, I hit the guy in the car because I was drunk, we don't consider that to be a defense.
We actually consider that to be a more egregious crime.
So if you accidentally hit a guy in the car, in your car, and you're sober, that's bad, right?
And maybe it's careless driving and so on.
But if you're drunk, then you get careless driving plus drunk driving.
It's actually a more Significant thing to do that's problematic, right?
Because you have knowingly put yourself in a situation where your judgment is going to be impaired.
And the same thing is true if you have kids without dealing with your own history, if you have had an abusive history.
It's exactly the same as going to drive drunk.
Knowledge is common and it's worse than, you know, let's just say you lose your temper, you hit your kid.
Well, and that's not part of a pattern, that's bad.
But if you have a pathology and destructive behavior and you repeatedly hit your kids, that's even worse, right?
Because that's drunk driving. But here's the clincher.
I'll keep this very brief because it's a very clear clincher.
So, if someone says, I am not responsible for abusing my kids because I was unconscious, I didn't know any better, then what they're saying is, I am going to invoke a moral rule in order to excuse myself for moral rules.
You see, this is a normative, fundamental, self-detonating contradiction.
I am not morally responsible because Hamana, Hamana, Hamana means that there's a moral rule which does not apply to me and therefore it would be immoral to attack me or criticize me as immoral.
So you're creating a moral rule called I'm not responsible if I'm unconscious, but you are then saying that moral rules don't apply to you because you're unconscious.
But which is it? Do moral rules apply to you or not?
If they don't apply to you, if there's no such thing as moral rules in your universe because you're unconscious, then you can't create a moral rule that excuses you for moral rules called don't blame people who are unconscious.
Again, the argument is contained in the form of the argument.
So if you're creating a moral rule and an exception which applies to yourself, then you're creating moral rules which are universal, which have right and wrong, good and bad, responsibility and unresponsibility and non-responsibility.
And that's impossible to sustain.
You cannot create a moral rule that says, I am exempt from moral rules, because you're saying moral rules are then both valid and invalid at the same time.
And if you say, well, I'm not responsible because I was unconscious, then the question is, are you unconscious at the moment?
And if you're not unconscious at the moment, then you can be conscious of moral rules and therefore you can't claim unconsciousness as a defense.
If you're unconscious in the moment, then no coherent discussion can occur.
Right, so the moment that somebody advances a conscious moral rule, they cannot claim that they're exempt from moral rules because they're unconscious, because they're consciously advancing a moral rule.
The argument self-detonates before it even leaves the person's lips, and I hope that that clarifies my position.
Now, the last argument...
Against the defense of I didn't know any better and I was unconscious is a very powerful one and to me is completely and totally insurmountable.
It's a second real clincher.
See how I saved the best for last?
Anyway, so the unconscious defense clearly has differing degrees, right?
I mean, so there's more unconscious and there's less unconscious.
Or if you feel that it's black and white, and I don't necessarily feel that it's black and white, you can say that there are times when one is completely unconscious and then there are times when one is not.
And we can certainly say that the responsibility is lessened for those who are completely I believe that there's some truth in that, in the same way that the responsibility is lessened when somebody is drunk, right?
So, the responsibility for good driving is lowered when somebody is drunk, clearly, which is why it's so bad to be a drunk driver, because you are a worse driver, and you are not responsible for that.
And what I mean by that is, let's say that somebody spiked your coffee with some impossible-to-taste drug that caused you to drive as if you'd had six beers, right?
Well, if somebody spiked your drink and there was no way for you to know that this had happened, and let's just say it was some drug that you couldn't really detect even as it was running through your system, and you got into a car crash and they tested your blood and they found that you'd been spiked with this impossible-to-detect mystery drug, then clearly you would not be held morally responsible for the resulting crash, right?
And again, I know I'm sort of straight, but just for the sake of argument.
Or, to put it another way, if you ran your car into a pole and it had turned out that you had suddenly been struck with blindness beforehand, or you'd had the very first epileptic seizure in your life, then you would clearly not be held morally responsible for running your car into a school bus or whatever, right? Again, I'm not talking about the death of kids.
I don't want to make that grim a metaphor.
But where there is physical impairment, there is, without a doubt, diminished responsibility.
And it is because of that very diminished responsibility that every effort needs to be taken to ensure that you are not in that diminished state when operating heavy machinery or young children, right?
I mean, that is very, very important.
I mean, it is a tragedy if somebody's drink gets spiked and they cause a car crash that kills someone and But it's not murder.
It's not even manslaughter. It is a tragedy.
And it is a tragedy if somebody is struck blind and runs into a pole and, I don't know, loses an arm or something.
That is a tragedy. But it's not criminal because they're not in control of their faculties.
And so, to be unconscious is to have diminished responsibility, and it is because of that very fact that every effort needs to be made to stay conscious, to achieve self-knowledge, right?
So, if you can look at unconsciousness like a minor fugue state, like you're just totally out of it, dissociated, then what happens is at some point you come back from that fugue state, right?
So, a fugue state, in more technical language, again, just saying it all out as an amateur, a fugue, psychologically speaking, is when...
You just, you lose time, right?
You just, you lose time and it can happen for minutes or hours or weeks or months sometimes for people, right?
So you just, you wake up, you're in a different town in a cook's uniform and you're like, what the hell's happened, right?
You have no sense of the intervening time.
So the first time that happens, of course, you recognize that you can become exceedingly unconscious, right?
To the point where you don't have any memory of anything.
So, the first thing that you would do is you would go and get yourself checked out physically, you would go and talk to a psychiatrist and a psychologist and try and figure out, or a doctor at least, and try and figure out how you could prevent such a recurrence.
So, nobody is permanently completely unconscious unless they're in a coma, right?
So, we sort of understand that. And it's the same thing with something like an overwhelming temper, right?
So, you get really angry as a parent and you yell at her and you hit your kids, or you hit your kids.
And then afterwards, right, the sort of the fog, the red, the bloody mist, the fog clears, and you're like, holy crap, what did I do?
You return to a state of normalcy.
Then, of course, it is your duty to fix that problem as a parent, right?
You fix that problem as a parent, and you say, well, I got to go to anger management.
I got to figure out what's going on here, and I can't believe I had kids without dealing with this beforehand.
That's irresponsible and bad on my part, in the same way as it is if you go drunk driving with your kids in the back, right?
That's a bad thing. They can get injured, and the same thing occurs With yelling and spanking, except with yelling and spanking, on any consistent basis, the injuries are for sure, or at least with drunk driving, you might not get injured.
And so, when you return to a state of consciousness from a state of unconsciousness or acting out, then it is your job to say, holy crap, I was just unconscious and I need to figure out how to not have this happen again.
And you go and see a therapist or you go, you do whatever you need to do, right?
Go get a physical checkup and so on.
So unconsciousness, there's a grain of truth in the defense.
People say, well, I'm unconscious and therefore I'm not responsible.
But that to me is like saying, as a parent, if you're a chronic alcoholic, when your kids are kids, it's like saying to them, well, I'm not to blame for my bad parenting because I was drunk the whole time.
It's like, well, it certainly is true that your actions, your responsibilities diminish while you're drunk, but that does not absolve you of the responsibility of getting drunk and staying drunk.
And there are times, of course, even for an alcoholic, when you're not drunk.
You have to sleep and you have to wake up at some point, right?
Or less drunk, let's say.
And nobody would accept as a defense from an abusive parent the statement, but I was drunk the whole time and therefore I'm not responsible, right?
Because you would obviously say, well, you're responsible for being drunk and for not dealing with that problem before you had kids and certainly not dealing with it after you had kids, right?
Going into rehab, getting therapy, whatever you needed to do to get over the addiction.
And so, there is a grain of truth which is what makes it so vaguely credible, right?
I was unconscious. I didn't know any better.
I did the best that I could. Well, we don't accept that because it's a parent's responsibility just as it is for them to figure out that their kids need dental care, education, Good, healthy and nutritious food and so on.
It's their job to figure out how to raise a child well.
Just in the same way, it's your job.
If you buy a dog, then you need to feed the dog and you need to feed the dog something other than Skittles, right?
I mean, clearly, right? That would be abusive if you just fed the dog sugar and crap.
So, that argument simply doesn't work.
But even if we accept that it does work, again, as I've said a million times before, it doesn't matter.
If the argument is fundamentally unsound, you can accept all of the premises and all of the arguments but the last one, and it will still fall apart.
So, let's see what happens when we accept the argument that you are not responsible when you are unconscious, so you can't be held to account or criticized morally for what you do when you're in a state of unconsciousness, of not knowing any better, of lacking knowledge, and so on.
Let's accept that. And let's also accept That a parent is not morally responsible for remaining in an unconscious state.
So, yes, to use the drunk analogy again, yes, you are not responsible when you are drunk, and you are not responsible for getting drunk.
Let's accept that.
As a perspective and as an argument, and I guarantee you, it will still completely fall apart when it comes to parenting.
So, let's take a stroll through this ridiculous argument and see how it just falls apart.
So, let's imagine the following scenario.
So, let's say a woman has to get up in the morning for some job interview or some very important appointment.
And this woman sets her alarm incorrectly.
She does that old tragicomic AM-PM switcheroo and sets her alarm for 6 PM instead of 6 AM. And let's say, furthermore, that she is caring for her grandfather, who is in the next room and is in a coma.
Okay, let's go with me.
So she's got to get up in the morning and she makes a mistake, an innocent mistake.
It happens, right? And she sleeps in.
And so the alarm does not go off and she doesn't wake up in time and she misses her job interview.
Now, imagine how bizarre and almost funny, but so bizarre it would be not funny, how bizarre it would be if she rushed into the room next door and began screaming at and berating her grandfather, who is in a coma, for not waking her up.
Wouldn't that be just completely bizarre?
I mean, how would you even process such a thing?
It would make no sense at all.
Yelling at somebody in a coma because you yourself have slept in.
And let's say sleeping in is an innocent mistake.
I'm not saying you should yell at yourself, but let's say that you're not morally responsible for sleeping in because you just made a mistake, and mistakes happen, and it's not evil, right?
So, X happened, you slept in, but you yell at someone, and you say to yourself, well, it's no problem that I slept in.
I mean, it's a drag, but it's not fundamentally a moral issue.
I just, you know, I just slept in.
But then you yell at and call your in a coma grandfather a bad, bad, bad Bad man for not coming to wake you up.
I mean, that's morally insane.
We can all, I think, understand and appreciate that.
And so, this is a direct metaphor for parenting, of course.
If a parent asserts that unconsciousness is a valid defense against moral judgment, in other words, if the parent says, I may have done things that were not great, but I'm not morally responsible because I was not conscious, Then clearly that is a universal rule.
And the universal rule is less consciousness equals less moral responsibility.
You can't be bad if you're not conscious.
Now, I think it's fairly clear to any sane human being, in fact, blindingly obvious to any undefended and rational human being, it is blindingly obvious, of course, that children are always less conscious than adults.
Why? Well, they start off as babies, which is a completely unconscious state.
A baby has no formal consciousness as an adult would understand it because there's very little neofrontal cortex as yet.
No decision-making capacity, no capacity to restrain impulses.
They are squalling balls of need and cuddliness.
And wonderful that it is so.
So, clearly, a parent who says unconsciousness is a defense against judgment should never, ever, ever, ever get upset at a baby or a toddler.
Now, given that the parent, we assume, has a mature and adult brain, And, of course, what that means is that, you know, they're in their 20s, right?
I guess the adult brain finally matures in the mid-20s.
And let's assume that the parent is at least in the early to mid-20s.
And so, what that means is that the adult's functional brain is far superior to the, obviously, I mean, infinitely superior in terms of decision-making and the possibility of moral action.
Infinitely superior to a baby's brain, far superior to a child's brain, superior to a teenager's brain, and still superior to a child's brain who grows up into her early 20s.
So, any parent or caregiver or teacher or priest who uses the unconscious defense says the following sequence.
Unconsciousness equals diminished or no moral capacity.
And therefore, one cannot morally judge somebody with no moral capacity.
And unconsciousness equals diminished moral capacity or known moral capacity really is what they say.
And therefore to morally criticize a parent or anyone who claims the defense of doing the best that he or she could under the circumstances and not conscious and didn't know and so on.
It's the moral equivalent in this defensive strategy.
It's the moral equivalent of putting a man on trial for hitting someone in his sleep.
We all understand that to hit someone in your sleep, you're not morally responsible because you're having a dream.
Now, if you regularly hit people in your sleep and you don't do anything about it, then your moral responsibility starts to grow for not preventing something.
But I think anybody who's married or who's slept regularly with someone knows that every now and then you're going to roll over and whack someone In the noggin with a hand or something, and that you're not morally responsible.
Nobody's brought up on charges. So if this defense is valid, if it's valid, it's not, of course, but if it is valid, Then the parent who uses this defense falls into an insurmountable, innoworky, logical problem.
A logical problem, of course, I'm sure you're aware of it, is this.
If diminished capacity means no moral judgment, if it is unjust to morally judge a being of diminished capacity, Then it is always unjust for parents to morally criticize their children because those children have, relative to the parent because of the immature brain, have diminished capacity for moral judgment.
At least as diminished a capacity as the unconsciousness defense of the parent.
I've just got to run this through again because it's a challenging one to unravel.
If the parent says, I'm not responsible because I had diminished capacity for moral judgment, that defense is only valid if the criticism were never to be advanced in the first place.
In other words, we criticize our parents for being destructive or abusive, which means punishing us for, quote, immoral actions.
For defining what we're doing as defiant, as rebellious, as disobedient, as disrespectful, as whatever, right?
So they judge us negatively morally and then they punish us for that.
In other words, they're giving us full moral responsibility despite the immaturity of our brains.
And so the only reason we would ever morally criticize a parent is if that parent has morally attacked us despite our diminished capacity for moral responsibility and reasoning.
And so, because abuse is the defining of a child's actions as immoral resulting in punishment and attack and humiliation, we respect children because those children are bad, because they're disobedient, because they're disrespectful, because they don't listen, right?
These are all negative moral judgments.
And the diminished capacity of the child has nothing to do with it.
In fact, some parents would argue that it is, in fact, the diminished capacity of the child that requires a stringent physical punishment because the children can't reason and therefore they must be punished.
But if that's the case, then if an incapacity to reason is cause for physical punishment, then surely, instead of sitting down to reason through these things with their parents, adult children should just walk up and smack them and punch them.
And I'd say, well, I can't reason with you because you claim the unconsciousness defense, which means you're incapable of moral reasoning, which means I must apply physical punishment rather than attempting to negotiate with you.
Would the parents say, well, that's perfectly fair.
I mean, I punish you physically when you had diminished capacity, and so when I claim diminished capacity based on unconsciousness or ignorance, there's no point reasoning with me.
You can just slug me. Well, of course, that would never be countenance, right?
So you can't attack children who have diminished, physically diminished, not just imaginary, like, oh, it's unconscious or whatever, right?
Which is not proven. It's not provable 20 years in the past or 10 years in the past.
Parents attack children despite or perhaps because of their diminished moral capacity and therefore the parents to say I'm not morally responsible because I have diminished moral capacity because of ignorance and unconsciousness is completely and totally self detonating, invalid, hypocritical, you know, frankly repulsive.
Frankly, repulsive.
Both a sword and a shield in the pursuit of injustice.
▲
Export Selection