The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [134]
The key to scientism’s radical political agenda is its commitment to determinism. Above the level of the smallest numbers of fermions and bosons, the universe is almost totally deterministic. That means that everything we do is just the consequence of the laws of nature and events in the distant past. It’s not up to us what went on before we were born, and we have no choice about what the laws of nature are. Therefore, none of the present and future consequences of the ways the laws worked with the past to bring about the present are up to us. That includes all of our actions and everyone else’s, too. So, no free will anywhere.
How does determinism turn core morality into a political agenda?
Core morality tells us that important advantages and disadvantages in life should be distributed in accordance with desert (not to be confused with dessert); inequalities should be deserved. Core morality insists that gains in income and wealth should be earned, that freely exercised effort and ambition should be rewarded. That’s what the word meritocracy is supposed to convey. The same goes for disadvantages. Punishment, including the deprivation of life or liberty, must also be earned. The meritocracy is also a “de-meritocracy.” Core morality allows for inequalities in outcomes—wealth, happiness, fines, imprisonment—so long as they are earned or deserved. But all this is moot if nothing is earned or deserved.
The assumption that individuals usually have free will is clearly written into our criminal justice system. The law usually excuses people from a variety of crimes if it can be shown that they could not have done otherwise. If the act was not up to them, if they were not in full control of their bodies when their bodies harmed others, it was no crime. Crime merits punishment, but wrongs we do are not crimes unless committed freely. Wrongful acts freely committed earn punishment. This is part of our core morality.
But science shows that no one acts with free will. So, no wrongdoer ever earns punishment. That is an unavoidable conclusion that scientism draws from applying determinism to core morality. Once scientism leads us to give up free will, we need to completely rethink the moral justification of punishment. We need to rethink criminal law generally. That doesn’t mean that scientism requires us to give up the law, the police, the courts, and the prisons. But scientism does give us good reason to rethink these institutions. If punishment needs a moral justification from core morality, it will have to find it in some principle other than the obvious one that freely committed wrongdoing earns punishment.
Of course, we may not need a moral right to deprive people of their freedom. Few people admit this, but scientism would have no trouble with such an admission. There are other parts of core morality that permit or even require locking people up—for example, to protect others and to deter, reform, rehabilitate, and reeducate the wrongdoer. But if we have to have a moral justification for inflicting pain, suffering, and other deprivations on someone, punishment’s justification can’t include that morally they deserve to be deprived or otherwise made to suffer. Desert requires free will, and there isn’t any.
In effect, scientism’s view of crime is like its view of disease. It must secure the reduction and elimination of crime the way medicine attacks illness. The prison, in our view, needs to be as much like a hospital as possible—with capacity for the incurably ill, the treatment of the curable, and the isolation of those who might spread their infection. But punishment is excluded. The problem for scientism is “preventive detention.” Core morality and legal codes, for that matter, tell us that