Nobody Deserves to Suffer
A few days ago, I posted this on Facebook:
So much of the worst of humanity comes from our seemingly intractable sense of outrage at the idea that other people might get things they don't deserve
It reminded me that I've been meaning to write about the concept of people "deserving" things. That concept has always been kind of nonsensical to me for a number of reasons. Most notably, it's because I don't believe in free will. I believe that the choices we make are the results of physical processes in our brains which obey the laws of cause and effect just like everything else in the universe. This article from the Atlantic describes the theory:
It describes the brain as a physical system like any other, and suggests that we no more will it to operate in a particular way than we will our heart to beat. The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond. In principle, we are therefore completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.
In many contexts, it makes sense to talk about choices people make (especially when it comes to influencing people's behavior), but ultimately, even the most complicated decisions are the result of our brain receiving inputs and producing outputs according to the laws of physics.
Rewards and punishments are important tools to influence behavior. Rewarding a behavior can produce more of it. Punishing a behavior can produce less of it. Rewards and punishments are foundational to any society. They are how norms are enforced, and without them, there can be no such thing as culture. Reward and punishment are so intrinsic to society that we've developed an innate sense of justice which influences our sense of right and wrong. It is upsetting to us when virtue is punished or vice rewarded. We can feel the wrongness of the situation without even thinking about it.
Unfortunately, this reflexive sense of justice can lead to a lot of needless cruelty. On the political right, people get outraged at the idea of lazy, unproductive slackers getting paid by the government to lay around doing nothing, which leads to opposing attempts at a reasonable social safety net and all but dooms the push for a universal basic income. To conservatives, even basic necessities like food, shelter, and health care are supposed to be rewards for the virtue of hard work, and they would rather see people starve than see lazy deadbeats get free money. The most stark example of this is the number of states who have failed to implement the Medicaid expansion provisions of Obamacare. The states are being offered, essentially, free money to help provide health care to some of their poorest citizens, and eighteen states have simply failed to implement it because they'd rather people's illnesses go untreated than to reward laziness.
These impulses are emotional, not analytical. Studies showing that a generous social safety net benefits everyone don't change these views. It's not about the actual result. It's about that felt sense of justice. They just know that giving away money for nothing is wrong. It can also be seen in the push for "tough on crime" laws that increase the length of prison sentences. These policies are terribly ineffective at deterring crime, but they placate our felt sense of justice by making sure that criminals suffer.
On the left, we do the same thing with social status. Much has been written about the amount of infighting and unhelpful callouts on the left. If offends our sense of justice to see someone receiving praise and status who doesn't deserve it. The clearest case of this I can think of is David Bowie's death. Everyone was saying nice things about him, so a whole bunch of people felt the need to talk about how he once had sex with an underage girl. The discussion didn't help anyone. The "victim" always maintained that it was consensual so it wasn't for her benefit, and the offender was dead and so wasn't in danger of reoffending. But for many people, it just felt wrong for a man to have so many nice things said about him while his flaws went unacknowledged. The felt sense of justice was so strong that it required posthumous punishment. This kind of thing plays out less starkly all of the time on the left. it just feels wrong to have someone go unpunished for a perceived transgression. It can also be seen any time someone acts as though income inequality is a bigger problem than poverty. There's nothing inherently wrong with rich people being rich - the actual problem is that not everyone can be rich. Reducing inequality is good, but only if we do it by improving the situation of the less privileged. Simply making the rich less rich doesn't help anyone.
If we're insisting on punishing someone for reasons other than trying to influence (their or others') future behavior, we are not making the world a better place. We are just being cruel. Nobody deserves to suffer. Even the worse people in the world are just acting according to their brain wiring. By all means, we should punish bad behavior, but we should do it in a way that's calculated to influence future behavior. We should recognize that, if we truly lived in a just world, everyone, even the worst of us, would have everything they want. We should chill out when we see "bad" people who are doing well. We should recognize that even bad people are people and that the goal should be to help them be better, not to make them suffer as an end in itself.
I hope it's not controversial to say that suffering is bad. Admittedly, sometimes it is necessary to deter bad behavior. But I implore us to only use it when absolutely necessary to deter future behavior, not out of some innate sense that bad people deserve bad things. Nobody deserves bad things.