RICHARD DAWKINS ON SCIENCE AND RESPONSIBILITY
From the page:
“But doesn’t a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused’s physiology, heredity and environment. Don’t judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?
“Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.”
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This page has an interesting discussion by Richard Dawkins on whether the ideas of human responsibility and culpability make sense from a scientific point of view. Dawkins points to the example from the British comedy “Fawlty Towers” of a man beating his car when it won’t run. The more logical thing to do, obviously, would be to examine the car, find the defect, and fix it.
Dawkins then suggests that we ought to take the same approach with persons. Rather than assigning blame when a person robs or murders, we ought to treat them as we would a car: examine them physiologically, figure out what is wrong, and fix/treat them.
There is one problem with this analysis – it assumes that we know when a person has acted wrongly. In other words, Dawkins tacitly acknowledges that robbing and killing are wrong (or at least defective behaviors) for human beings. How does he know this?
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