March 8, 2010
 
MANN TALK: A Legal Entitlement to Be a Jerk?
 
By Perry Mann
 
George Will, columnist for the Washington Post, views with contempt and concern the trend to medicalize character flaws. He has read the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel of Mental Disorders and concludes that “oppositional defiant disorder,” defined therein as a pattern of “negativistic, defiant, disobedient and hostile behavior toward authority figures,” could just as well be defined as “teenager.”
 
After relating similar psychiatric language describing disorders that could just as well be denominated character flaws he writes: “If every character blemish or emotional disturbance is a ‘disorder’ akin to a physical disability, legal accommodations are mandatory.” “So,” he concludes, “there might be a legal entitlement to be a jerk.”
 
Will: “Today’s therapeutic ethos, which celebrates curing and disparages judging, expresses the liberal disposition to assume that crime and other problematic behaviors reflect social or biological causation. While this absolves the individual of responsibility, it also strips the individual of personhood and moral dignity.
 
“It is scientifically sensible to say that all behavior is in some sense caused. But a society that thinks scientific determinism renders personal responsibility a chimera must consider it absurd not only to condemn depravity but also to praise nobility.”
 
That is, even if free will is an illusion and humans’ acts are biologically and environmentally determined, people must consider the “moral derangements” of accepting as truth determinism. It’s better to ignore it, to continue to believe they have free will and to continue to judge disorders rather than to try to cure them or to excuse them morally and legally on the ground that they do what they do as a result of circumstances.
 
Humans once believed that the earth was flat. It looked to them flat so they believed it was flat and many of those who thought otherwise kept quiet until Magellan sailed the earth and proved the earth was a globe. But even today, there is a Flat Earth Society, which mocks or still believes.
 
Humans believed that Earth was the center of the Universe. But that belief was sundered by a Pole checking out Ptolemy and finding that he was wrong. Copernicus’ finding was a shocker. Humans not only believed they were living at the center of the Universe but that they were the children of a God and that they were distinct from all other life and the center of it. The Pole’s discovery was a hard truth to accept. It took a few centuries for the truth of it to be undeniable. And for the Church to admit it.
 
Humans believed that they were different in kind from all other life and that all other life was here for them to use to support their lives and allow them to live in comfort, a comfort that often depended upon the discomfort of other living things. But Charles Darwin upset that belief when he wrote that all life had a common ancestor, whose life began some four billion years ago, and thus all life was kin. That is, chimpanzees are cousins of Mary and John Doe.
 
Darwin theory has been met with dismay and much resistance. Humans find it hard to believe that they are animals and that, if they died, they would die just like animals with no future after death but dust to dust and ashes to ashes. But the truth is that they are animals. And the truth is that the Earth is not the center of the Universe nor is it flat.
 
Now mankind is, and has been faced with a major challenge, a challenge that has long been alive but has been impossible to believe by many and impossible for society to live with even if true. Even though George Will believes that it is “scientifically sensible to say that all behavior is in some sense caused,” he thinks for society to accept such a belief would be detrimental to it. That is, even if free will is an illusion and character and acts are determined, society should pretend and rule as if people have free will.
 
Just as it took religious leaders centuries to acknowledge that the Earth was not the center of the Universe and that the sun did not revolve the Earth, and also centuries before some acknowledged that evolution was a fact, it will probably be millennia, if ever, before humans acknowledge that they are determined. The social upheaval is too drastic to contemplate.
 
But in one area, society should give it some consideration. In criminal law, its basic premise is that people have free will to do right or to do wrong. If they freely chose to do wrong and are found guilty of doing it, then they must suffer imprisonment so that they will be persuaded not to do wrong again. Such a premise, if in fact people are the victim of circumstances, is an intellectual outrage. It is the equivalent of someone being imprisoned for twenty years and later being found to be innocent.
 
Since there is a belief in determinism by some and by a few philosophers and scientists, and has been for centuries, legal punishment has been mitigated accordingly in some instances. But in few; for the majority of people are so totally deluded by the illusion that their will is free and are thereby so outraged by a person who willfully robs or kills, the few fear to advocate curing instead of judging. And no legislation reflecting determinism would ever be presented, or if presented, passed into law in a society so oriented.
 
George Will is an intellectual conservative, a conservative whose views are light years in distance from, say, Glenn Beck’s. But like most conservatives, he believes that responsibility and accountability are bulwarks of conservatism. In fact, one of major differences between the politics of conservatives and liberals is that conservatives’ believe that people have free will to do good or bad and that circumstances should not be a factor in judging a person and that liberals’ believe that circumstances should be considered in judging and punishing.
 
Some century in future’s yonder, it just may be that there will be a legal entitlement to a jerk; that is, a jerk may be subject to curing instead of judging on the ground that his character was determined and not willed. And there may be a general understanding that every cause and effect from Day One of life, the very history of the Universe, is dictating what one does next.
 
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Perry Mann is a former teacher, a lawyer, a former prosecuting attorney of Summers County and a columnist for Huntington News Network. He lives in Hinton, WV.