circumstantial innocence
The title of this post is a phrase I used in my previous post, and I want to expand on the implications of it by quoting a few passages from my book on Original Sin. Read on if you’re interested.
A vigorous debate on the violence we inflict on one another has recently been prompted by a new book by Philip Zimbardo called The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. In this book Zimbardo tells, for the first time, the full story of a now-famous psychological experiment he designed and conducted in 1971: the Stanford Prison Experiment. The design of the experiment was remarkably simple. At Stanford University, Zimbardo recruited some college students, created a simulated prison in the basement of the building that housed Stanford’s psychology department, and randomly divided the students into two groups. Half of them would be prisoners, the other half guards. Those playing the role of prisoners were told to expect some curtailment of what in ordinary life would be their civil rights, along with minimal nourishment and few comforts.
The first day of the experiment proved relatively uneventful, but on the second day tensions between the two groups rose extraordinarily, and the guards began to mistreat the prisoners. Six days into the experiment, which Zimbardo had planned to extend over two weeks, the guards’ reign of terror over the prisoners had become so brutal that Zimbardo had to call the whole thing off. (Interestingly, he did so only with great reluctance: Christina Maslach, a fellow psychologist who was also Zimbardo’s lover, and later his wife, got into shouting matches with him while demanding that he send the students home.) “At the start of this experiment, there were no differences between the two groups,” Zimbardo writes; “less than a week later, there were no similarities between them.”
When psychologists debate the question of why some — but only some — people behave violently, or otherwise cruelly, to others, they often fall into two camps, the dispositionists and the situationists. The terms are self-explanatory: dispositionists believe that certain people are (for whatever reason) disposed towards cruelty, while situationists believe that particular situations produce cruelty. The prison experiment made of Zimbardo a lifelong, deeply committed situationist. Anyone, he came to believe, could be placed in conditions which would transform them into active perpetrators of cruelty, or, at best, passive accepters of it.
Yet it seems to me that Zimbardo shies away from the implications of his own experiment and his own position. He presents his key question in this way: “What happens when you put good people in an evil place?” And notice his book’s subtitle: “Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.” But on what grounds does he say that the people were good? Simply because they had not — to his knowledge, which was extremely limited if not nonexistent — done anything especially foul before being assigned the role of prison guard? Long ago John Milton wrote, “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.” But Zimbardo does just that: he is happy to call people “good” who may simply have not had the opportunity to do noticeable evil.
Similarly, when Michael Bywater reviewed the book for the Times of London he commented that “evil” is “a word so empty that it should surely have withered away” — but doesn’t Zimbardo’s book suggest just the opposite, that the word is of wider application than most of us (especially Zimbardo) would want to to admit? Doesn’t it make us wonder whether something is wrong with all of us? — that we are somehow stained, or tainted, or infected with some contagion? — that we’re all born with the intrinsic . . . well, disposition to do bad things?
ok, I can’t resist mentioning this bit from Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: “how many people who have lived long and guiltless lives may be merely fortunate in having escaped so many temptations? In the case of any deed it remains hidden from the agent himself how much pure moral content there has been in his disposition.” I don’t know if his stuff on evil figures in your book, but I think Kant is far and away the greatest thinker on original sin since Augustine.
— matt · Jun 21, 01:01 PM · #
Conrad had something to say about this, too:
— Matt Frost · Jun 21, 01:17 PM · #
I think your summary misunderstands an important nuance of Zimbardo’s argument. He did not argue that people do evil things when put in certain situations, and that if they did nothing evil then that meant they were good. Rather, he argued that the potentialities for good and evil exist in each of us, and that social situations are a primary determinant of which potential becomes an actuality. Based upon those premises, he made several related arguments.
1. We should create situations that foster the good in people, while removing situations that foster evil (eg Abu Ghraib)
2. There are numerous psychological techniques that people can use to resist situations that pressure people into being evil.
3. There is nothing inevitable about doing either Good or Evil.
He then spends the last third of the book describing his vision of the Good and how to create social situations that foster his moral ideal.
Now if you are arguing that his concept of morality is anti-foundationalist, then that’s true. But that’s a different question from whether he proposes a Good to oppose the Evil he sees, or that there is something fundamentally evil about human beings. In fact, one of the crucial points he was trying to make was the distinction between the potential and the actual. I understand why a Christian who believes in original sin would equate the potential for Evil to be Evil, but that’s not an argument that Zimbardo agrees with. So its not that Zimbardo misses your point, he just disagrees with it.
— Joseph · Jun 21, 02:22 PM · #
Three points:
1. Thanks for talking about this book. Very interesting. I’m going to purchase it soon.
2. I admit, that first point was solely so I can be on topic with this comment.
3. I noticed in the RSS feed, frequently the first graf of TAS entries are omitted. I assume that’s not intentional? Is it fixable? The introduction to this post doesn’t show up in RSS.
Thanks, guys. I really enjoy reading the variety of discussion here. It’s a fantastic resource.
— Derek · Jun 21, 03:39 PM · #
Alan, you write beautifully.
That said (and I apologize up front: this comment will be entirely ‘meta’), why be Franz Mesmer when you can be James Maxwell? Why strain your eyes trying to see when a million eyeglasses, a thousand microscopes, and hundreds of telescopes lie within your reach?
All these shadowy mysteries disappear when you turn on the light; what remain are the true mysteries of death, of being, of existence — you know, the wonderful things, the awesome things, the necessary but impenetrable givens (how odd to revisit this point in 2008). Nothing — no thing — other than these givens are fundamentally mysterious. Not morality, not love, not even dying (as opposed to Death) are truly, inescapably mysterious. They can be approached, described, and, in principle, ultimately illuminated with cool, patient, systematic reason.
Your poetry (that’s what it is) inspires your readers to feel a thought. But shouldn’t we try to cultivate the thought first? — shouldn’t isomorphism be our goal, and our watchword?
Look, we’ll likely never agree. I begin with the belief that facts within the world are accessible to reason; when looking at the physical world, no break-ins of the mysterium suggest themselves; from fermions and bosons all the way up to brain, mind, and society, there are no gaps, no jumps, that necessitate a supernatural order or a busybody God; physics into chemistry into biology, atoms into molecules into cells, each level emerging and enabling the next. Sure, questions remain; questions will always remain. But that doesn’t mean the answer is God, the force, the idea of the good, or the teleology of final causes.
If you believe this, believe that we are organisms who arise from zygotes via cell division and genetically-mandated cellular specification, who are born, mature, age, and then die, never to be repeated, never to be reborn, whose registered information, such that it is, dissipates and ultimately disappears into an endless night from which there is no appeal — well, if you believe all of this (and there’s more evidence for this than for anything else), then you know, know, that, without a scientific underpinning, without reducibility of terms into scientifically accessible constituent parts, a theory, not about the world as a whole, but about something within the world, is meaningless, unhelpful, and, at worst, a siren song of untruth to lead men astray.
But as you pointed out in the last thread, this account is unconvincing to those for whom argument, persuasion — evidence — is nothing compared to faith, intuition, feeling. Alas.
— JA · Jun 21, 06:24 PM · #
Now, that said, your post brings up an interesting question: are we innately disposed to do evil (however defined), are we helpless innocents who are vulnerable to circumstance and contingency, or, to mix the two, are we innately disposed, but not determined, to do evil, should certain types of circumstances obtain?
The last, I think.
“In a world with no law and rudimentary government, order of some sort would exist. So much is clear from anthropological studies. The order woudl appear as routine compliance with social norms and collective infliction of sanctions on those who violate them, including stigmatization of the deviant and ostracism of the incorrigible. People would make symbolic commitments to the community in order to avoid suspicions about their loyalty. Also, people would cooperate frequently. They would keep and rely on promises, refrain from injuring their neighbors, contribute effort to public-spirited projects, make gifts to the poor, render assistance to those in danger, and join marches and rallies. But it is also the case that people would sometimes breach promises and cause injury. They would discriminate against people who, through no fault of their own, have become walking symbols of practices that a group rejects. They would have disputes, sometimes violent disputes. Feuds would arise and might never end. The community might split into factions. The order, with all its benefits, would come at a cost. Robust in times of peace, it would reveal its precariousness at moments of crisis.” — Eric Posner
“The punisher’s intent is not to convert…It is to make explicit the difference between the in-group and out-group…When Petrinovich’s scenarios revealed information about identity, then subjects saved kin over non-kin, friends over strangers, humans over nonhumans, and politically safe or neutral individuals over politically abhorrent monsters.”“ — Hauser, Moral Minds
“Dangerous competitive violence reflects the activation of a risk-prone mindset that is modulated by present and past cues of one’s social and material success, and by some sort of mental model of the current local utility of competitive success both in general and in view of one’s personal situation…[such as] ecological factors that affect resource flow stability and expected life span.” — Margo Wilson and Martin Daly
“ I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation…Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.” — Stanley Milgram
Of course, as Hauser says, self-knowledge is the ultimate prophylactic. When subjects are aware of their own vulnerabilities, they are much, much less likely to be manipulated into “evil” acts.
— JA · Jun 21, 07:23 PM · #
JA, I thank you for your kind words about my writing — if they are kind words. You seem to be saying that I substitute pretty words for thinking, which I do not suppose a compliment. You simply assume that my beliefs are based on “feeling” and “intuition,” which is an odd thing for someone to do who claims that his own views are based on evidence. In fact, you don’t know the grounds on which I hold my beliefs, because I haven’t written about those grounds; nor have I defended my beliefs in these recent posts (or any others). I think blog posts and comments are poor venues for such discussions, so I don’t use this blog for such things. But I will say this: if you think the world is divided into believers who live by “intuition” and unbelievers who live by “evidence,” it’s really more complicated than that.
— Alan Jacobs · Jun 22, 01:39 PM · #
There is a two-fold over-simplification going on with this argument, and neither over-simplification, in my mind, is trivial.
Firstly, the debate about dispositionism and situationism is a variant of the old “nature vs. nurture” donnybrook, (though in this case, we mean “nurture” writ large to include any situation one finds oneself in and not just upbringing). As has been argued repeatedly, it really is a combination of the two. There are potentials we are born with that can vary wildly from individual to individual, but the actualization of those potentials, as Zimbardo argues, are influenced profoundly by our environment. Zimbardo is right, but I think he underemphasizes the innate potentials within us upon which our situations are acting.
Secondly, the potentiality and realization of that potentiality cannot possibly be characterized on a single spectrum of “Good” and “Evil.” The potentials innate within us lie upon innumerable interrelated continua for various thoughts and actions each of which can be different from person to person not only in where they are “set”, but in how they are related to one another. The vast combination forms a complex context-specific tapestry that couldn’t possibly be fully characterized on a single good-to-evil scale.
I should caution that this is not meant as a descent into moral relativism. Some thoughts and actions for which we have potentials and realizations of those potentials are absolutely good (e.g. a default love and respect for fellow humans), and others are absolutely bad (e.g. random or megalomaniacal violence or sadism), but the vast majority aren’t that way. Is the potential to prefer sports to academics good or bad? It’s bad if the individual squanders the potential to be a scientist who discovers a cure for a deadly disease, but it’s good if he goes on to be a baseball player that entertains and inspires millions and makes our lives more enjoyable. Saving lives or enriching lives? What if both potentials are true? Or neither? etc. …
— John Bejarano · Jun 22, 06:31 PM · #
Very good article. But John Milton needs to get over it. St. Paul recommends that we not give ourselves opportunities to do evil. Milton doesn’t need to praise the virtue of the person who does that, but neither is virtue some kind of tough guy sport where one puts obstacles in one’s way so they can be overcome.
— The Reticulator · Jun 23, 01:21 AM · #