The Theory and Practice of Raising a Criminal
Sins of the Mother, Part 2: What Sam Bankman-Fried's ethicist mom believed about human freedom and criminal guilt.
A Note To Readers: This is part 2 of Sins of the Mother, a draft chapter in my book about the ideas, conditions, and movements that fed the FTX catastrophe. Part 1 of Sins of the Mother can be found here.
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“Severe Deprivation”: Barbara Fried’s Theory of the Criminal Child
“Sam will never speak an untruth … It's just not in him.”
Barbara Fried
It’s useless to deny the schadenfreude in conducting an autopsy of Barbara Fried’s philosophical corpse. She spent an immense amount of energy on theories about what makes a criminal – only to have those theories proven ridiculously off-base by the actions of her own son.
In “Beyond Blame” (which we began unpacking in part 1) Barbara Fried posits that a determinist universe makes the idea of moral blame incoherent. She instead encourages us to view people who commit crimes as having something like a mental illness – in fact, she conflates criminal behavior and mental illness quite freely. But at the same time, in the absence of any theory of choice, she seems forced to root criminality almost entirely in the circumstances of a person’s upbringing. This makes focusing attention on her as the mother of a historically nefarious criminal not just a gratifying “gotcha,” but an important rebuttal with much deeper stakes.
The irony is specifically rich because Fried envisions only one kind of background that leads to criminality: growing up poor or abused. According to her, criminality is a clear outcome of “the severe deprivation most prisoners faced growing up” – which, again, she treats as practically interchangeable with mental illness in terms of how we assign responsibility for crimes. That is, she appears to argue that the 15 percent of prisoners with symptoms of psychosis are morally equivalent to those who grew up poor.
Race, class, and education are strongly correlated to the odds of being incarcerated, often for unjust reasons. But that’s emphatically NOT the same as claiming, as Fried does, that the “severe deprivation most prisoners faced growing up” shaped their little robotic brains into criminal algorithms. In fact, her formulation lets the broader system off the hook: a Black man who grew up poor could have a perfectly happy and healthy upbringing; could adopt a firm, clear, morality; could even (with some luck and a lot of grit) get a good education. But he’d almost certainly still be at a higher chance of incarceration because the world around him is designed to put him in prison.
That is, Fried’s determinism, deployed in support of a progressive prison reform argument, still seems to reflect an intensely privileged worldview – it emphasizes how the actions of an individual are determined by their background or circumstance, rather than thinking about how a particular background can rob an individual of any agency whatsoever.
Further, Fried’s moral focus on the poor obviously does’t reflect the full spectrum of the backgrounds of people who wind up in prison – a truth that, again, her own son would drive home a decade after she penned these words. This adds to a substantive argument against determinism – after all, people with very similar backgrounds wind up taking wildly different paths through life.
Compatibilist Calvinism
Before we go on, let’s lay out the specific point of contention at the heart of the debate here: do human beings actually have free will?
As I discussed in the first half of this chapter, Barbara Fried moves quickly past this question by reference to neuroscience research (and the boldly confident prediction that future research would prove her position even more thoroughly). The most widely-known neuroscience research on the topic has found something far less concrete than determinism – what researchers have actually found is that not all decision-making is conscious, or that decisions are made before we actually experience them as decisions.
Fried seems to regard compatibilism as a kind of cowardice, characterizing it as “equivocation.” A more generous, curious mind might instead consider compatibilism a provisional attempt to reconcile two very complex, counterbalanced truths.
Findings of this sort only pan out to pure determinism if we conflate the conscious mind with the entirety of human function. That is, Barbara Fried’s leap to determinism from current brain science hinges entirely on assuming that there is no such thing as unconscious or pre-conscious thought. These concepts were most famously developed by Sigmund Freud, who we’ll encounter again in a bit. Significantly, Freud is absolutely loathed by, and has been the target of a sustained campaign of discreditation by, the precise sort of rationalist and scientistic thinkers of which Barbara Fried is a sterling representative.
(“Scientism” is a very important word in our current moment. It means not simply “belief in scientific inquiry,” but a belief that scientific inquiry is the only valid mode of inquiry and the only valid form of knowledge. Effective Altruism, with its love of made-up probabilities and pseudo-logical word games, is the absolute epitome of debased scientism, and Bankman-Fried’s destructive downfall is a real-world rebuttal of its narrowminded approach to understanding.)
The problem that Barbara Fried was tackling was this: Once one accepts a deterministic universe, and specifically deterministic human behavior, there can be no such thing as morality or ethics. Moral judgment is only meaningful if an acting subject is free to choose differently than they do.
Of course, this presents a severe practical problem for, you know, having a society. As Fried herself essentially argues, it makes no sense to blame or punish human beings for violating social or ethical norms if we are all effectively robots. Instead, she essentially argues that we should conceive of punishment as strictly a reform function – sometimes you have to reprogram the robot, but there’s no such thing as a bad robot.
But this is unpalatable to most people, even if determinism itself were on more solid evidentiary grounds. As Fried reviews in her essay, this has led to a large body of thought on what’s known as “compatibilism” – efforts to reconcile morality with determinism. For her part, Fried seems to regard compatibilism as a kind of cowardice, characterizing it as “equivocation.”
Despite an increasing awareness of humans’ social and biological dependencies, we experience our own existence as a series of choices, and sit at the far end of a 10,000 year legacy of holding individuals responsible for their actions.
A more generous, curious mind might instead consider compatibilism a provisional attempt to reconcile two very complex, counterbalancing truths. On the one hand, neuroscience aside, we can’t deny we are heavily embedded in our environment, guided by genetics and society and other things we can’t control.
On the other hand, there are very strong reasons that, as Fried says, “the majority of contemporary philosophers writing on the subject [of free will and ethics] are compatibilists.” Despite an increasing awareness of humans’ social and biological dependencies, we experience our own existence as a series of choices, and sit at the far end of a 10,000 year legacy of holding individuals responsible for their actions. Here again, as Peter Bloom put it, we give up too much if we reject this massive, concrete evidence for at least some form of validity for both free will and, in turn, blame.
Instead of grappling with this deeply challenging but fascinating loggerheads, Fried addresses what some might call a straw man – the 16th century theologian John Calvin. Calvin preached two seemingly incompatible theological positions: predestination, and sin. Predestination was the idea that certain people were flagged to go to heaven before they were even born – an early articulation of determinism. Sin, on the other hand, is an ethos of blame and individual responsibility.
Calvin is just one example, though. “The compatibilist position,” Fried writes, “has been around for a long time, with the role of determinism played variously by fate, luck, the gods, God, and social and biological forces.” Here again one sees in Barbara the hubris that marked Sam Bankman-Fried for disaster: yes, humans have struggled with this puzzle since the dawn of conscious thought. But I alone can fix it.
(At the same time, Fried does not seem to reflect much on the fact that she, a materialist atheist, has the same reductive view of human nature as a 16th century religious fanatic who had never heard of a germ.)
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