The Ponies Made Me Do It

[dan_edge]

By [email protected] (Dan Edge) from The Edge of Reason,cross-posted by MetaBlog

From The Undercurrent Blog:

Former NBA official Tim Donaghy was sentenced to 15 months in prison last week for gambling on NBA games, some of which he himself officiated. The interesting thing about this case is not the question of whether or not the defendant was guilty. This was not a “whodunit?” case; Donaghy openly admitted his guilt at the trial. The interesting thing was his argument for why he should not go to prison.

Donaghy’s defense: he is a gambling “addict.” In a statement filed in a Brooklyn court, treatment counselor Stephen Block said Donaghy “could not stop himself from gambling.” (See here.) According to Block, gambling is an “illness,” a “hidden disease” which compels its victim to break the law against his will. This kind of testimony was the cornerstone of Donaghy’s defense.

This view is very widespread, and is not limited to gambling. Drug abusers, alcoholics, porn fanatics, and wife-beaters all claim that their self-destructive behavior is a result of forces beyond their control.

Whatever the facts of this particular case, being an addict does not exempt a person from the law because an addict still chooses his actions.

Consider a pedophile who is sexually attracted to young children and abuses children by acting on his attraction. Whatever the cause of his desire, there is nothing inherent in the desire that necessitates his acting on it. Whatever psychological obstacles—and they may be significant—such a man has to overcome to rehabilitate his desire, he still retains the choice of whether to act on it or not.

No matter what a man’s habits or emotional state (leaving aside the truly insane), he is always capable of making a choice. The desire to commit self-destructive acts does not compel one to act. Desires can only rule the man who allows emotions to dictate his life.

--Dan Edge

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[fletch]

Drug abusers, alcoholics, porn fanatics, and wife-beaters all claim that their self-destructive behavior is a result of forces beyond their control

This sort of thing has always struck me as being the other side of the collectivist coin. Positive things like success, wealth, achievement, happiness are often said to be the result of 'luck' or other forces beyond an individuals control. So it is, in a way, consistent to say that negative things and self-destructive behavior are beyond ones control as well. The whole of society has to share in the wealth of those individuals who produced it, so by the same token, the whole of society often has to share in the blame for the evils of the individuals within it. It strikes me as just another way to melt away the idea of the individual into the puddle of the collective.

[John McVey]

Positive things like success, wealth, achievement, happiness are often said to be the result of 'luck' or other forces beyond an individuals control. So it is, in a way, consistent to say that negative things and self-destructive behavior are beyond ones control as well. The whole of society has to share in the wealth of those individuals who produced it, so by the same token, the whole of society often has to share in the blame for the evils of the individuals within it.

Yup. That's also what Miss Rand noted in "Stimulus and response", regarding the anti-volitional creed of B F Skinner and his attack on "autonomous man" to make man more tractable and moldable to suit collective ends. ("Stimulus and response" is a single essay in PWNI, also in four parts in the Ayn Rand Letter comprising volumes 8 to 11.)

There is a kind of veiled, subterranean intensity in Mr. Skinner's tired prose whenever he stresses the point that men should be given no credit for their virtues or their achievements. The behavior of a creative genius (my expression, not Mr. Skinner's) is determined by "contingencies of reinforcement," just like the behavior of a criminal, and neither of them can help it, and neither should be admired or blamed. Unlike other modern determinists, Mr. Skinner is not concerned primarily with the elimination of blame, but with the elimination of credit.

She then goes on to note that someone said that use of Skinner's work should be kept minimal, which she suggests is say to prison reform - presumably, that would include substance-abuse reform.

JJM