Blame is so taken for granted that we never stop to ponder whether it makes any sense. Is there any justification for blaming someone for their behaviour?
As I will argue in this post, no, there is not.
In short, blame is an unjustifiable, socially-corrosive concept that stands fully at odds with science. For the betterment of all human relations, it should be relegated to the dustbin of human ignorance, to be replaced by compassion and understanding.
In so doing, gone would be the acrimony so harmful to society – children estranged from parents, siblings not speaking to one another, friendships dashed, marriages torn apart, nations at war – and all of it rooted in the false premise that we are each responsible for our own behaviour.
We are not, because we cannot be.
“In chapter 16 I will argue that it is wrong to think that understanding must lead to forgiveness – mainly because I think that a term like “forgiveness” and others related to criminal justice (e.g. evil, soul, volition, and blame), are incompatible with science and should be discarded.”
Dr. Robert Sapolsky, “Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst“
Why Blame is Baseless
Blame is rooted in the widespread misconception that:
- We are each responsible for our actions because,
- We will them to happen, and so,
- Could have chosen to behave differently.
But this line of thinking is deeply flawed for two reasons:
Reason #1: We don’t will things to happen because this is a physical impossibility. What I’m getting at here is that we simply cannot be the prime mover of the electro-chemical workings of our brain any more than we can consciously control the functioning of our pancreas or liver. Yes, we certainly have the illusion of willful choice, but that’s all it is, that’s all it can be – an illusion, a false perception.
And if you find this assertion implausible, I encourage you to read (and deeply ponder) this post on free will as well as the numerous quotes listed at the end of this article because the mistaken belief in free will is, on its own, corrosive to compassionate human interaction.
“There is never a time-zero when you decide to do something, because every neuron in the brain is driven by other neurons.”
Dr. David Eagleman, “The Brain – the Story of You“
Reason #2: If we could, in fact, choose to behave differently, we should not expect to find a correlation between behaviour and factors such as: pre-natal nutrition, childhood adversity, brain trauma, sex, hormone levels, temperature, life experiences, genetics, sleep quality, socioeconomic status, hunger, exposure to toxins, culture, age, ….. But we DO find such correlations, in spades. In fact, it is clear that human behaviour is directly influenced by innumerable factors, factors we neither choose nor control, factors which operate largely outside of our conscious awareness.
Given such circumstances, how can blame possibly be justified? Quite simply, it cannot.
“We are constantly being shaped by seemingly irrelevant stimuli, subliminal information, and internal forces we don’t know a thing about.”
“Our worst behaviours, ones we condemn and punish, are the products of our biology.”
Dr. Robert Sapolsky
Anatomy of a Behaviour
Behaviour is driven by two primary factors, nature and nurture, nature being all of one’s biology and nurture being all of one’s life experiences. To complicate matters further, nature and nurture interact and influence each other, creating untold and unpredictable behavioural outcomes.
“Almost all the research that indicates genetic or biological influences on criminal behaviour also shows strong environmental components.”
Dr. Gail S. Anderson, “Biological Influences on Criminal Behaviour“
And all of this is cumulative; what we do or say at any given moment must be, and can only be, the direct result of our biology and life experiences, right up to the moment of enacting a behaviour.
Here is a pictorial of the process:
This is a hopeful picture because it holds out the promise of us being able to develop better, more pro-social behaviour going forward through exposure to:
- Better life experiences. For example, being exposed to teachings on mindfulness, compassion, and civility. This assumes, of course, that we happen to be among the lucky ones blessed with sufficient self-awareness, interest, inclination, opportunities, and intelligence to be able to take advantage of life’s more edifying experiences. Unfortunately, as we all know, not everyone is so lucky (and through no fault of their own; they’ve simply been dealt a bum hand by life).
- New life experiences. For example, having one’s car impounded for stunt driving has at least the potential to dissuade future recurrence (again, assuming the individual is influenceable – not all are so lucky; once again, through no fault of their own). So, experiencing the consequences of our behaviour may influence future behaviour. As covered later, however, it’s HOW such consequences are delivered to the offender that hold out the promise of a kinder, more enlightened society.
You Should Have Known Better!
We typically treat people who do stupid things as if they are actually stupid, as if the thought of doing the right thing never even occurred to them.
But almost assuredly it did, even if subconsciously. Unfortunately, their brain weighed up the pros and cons based on their biology and past experiences and, in the case of a bad decision, the good rationale simply got outvoted by the bad rationale.
The result? An ill-judged behaviour – but not through choice (again, because we can’t, and don’t, control our brain’s biochemical workings – it is a physical impossibility).
“Many people on the wrong side of the law generally know the difference between right and wrong actions, and they understand the threat of the punishment – but they are hamstrung by poor impulse control.”
Dr. David Eagleman, “The Brain – the Story of You“
Here’s how I picture what goes on in our brain when a behavioural decision is made, this imagining a teenage boy’s brain weighing up the factors behind whether to drink and drive:
Yes, some part of his brain certainly knew that drunk driving is wrong. However, given the state of his biology at that very moment (perhaps under the influence of temporarily-diminished impulse control caused by poor sleep) as well as the cumulative impact of all his life experiences right up to that very second (perhaps influenced by the fact that his dad periodically drinks and drives), no other decision by him (i.e. by his brain) could have been made.
“The next choice you make will come out of the darkness of prior causes that you, the conscious witness of your experience, did not bring into being.”
“What does it mean to say that rapists and murderers commit their crimes of their own free will? If this statement means anything, it must be that they could have behaved differently – with the universe, including their brains, in precisely the same state it was in at the moment they committed their crimes.
Assuming that violent criminals have such freedom, we reflexively blame them for their actions. But without it, the place for our blame suddenly vanishes, and even the most terrifying sociopaths begin to seem like victims themselves. The moment we catch sight of the stream of causes that precede their conscious decisions, reaching back into childhood and beyond, their culpability begins to disappear.”
Sam Harris, “Free Will“
We’re All Just Doing the Best we Can
So, with blame shown to have zero justification, does this mean we just ignore bad behaviour?
Of course not. If something is truly important (and not just an affront to our personal preferences or delicate ego), then steps should be taken to prevent future harm and hopefully influence the offender to behave better next time.
But the key difference is in HOW we intervene. Gone forever should be our habitual anger, animosity, judging, and blame. These not only inflame a situation but, more to the point, are simply unjustifiable and incompatible with science.
In their place, now full in the knowledge that we’re each just doing the best we can at each and every moment given the biological/experiential hand we’ve been dealt, we substitute caring, compassion, understanding, and human kindness.
Surely this is a better way forward for this hurting world of ours.
Warmest regards,
Rob @ Living a Mindful Life
Pertinent Quotes from Learned Individuals
Dr. David Eagleman – “The Brain – the Story of You“
“Everything you’ve experienced has altered the physical structure of your brain. These indelible, microscopic impressions accumulate to make you who you are, and to constrain who you can become.”
“Simple acts are underpinned by a massive labor force of neurons. You remain blissfully unaware of all their activity, but your life is shaped and coloured by what’s happening under the hood: how you act, what matters to you, your reactions, your loves and desires, what you believe to be true and false. Your experience is the final output of these hidden networks. So who exactly is steering the ship?”
“The conscious you is only the smallest part of the activity of your brain. Your actions, your beliefs, and your biases are all driven by networks in your brain to which you have no conscious access.”
“Because the conscious mind has low bandwidth, you don’t typically have full access to the bodily signals that tip your decisions; most of the action in your body lives far below your awareness.”
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, “7 1/2 Lessons About the Brain“
“Yes, your brain is wired to initiate your actions before you’re aware of them. That is kind of a big deal. After all, in everyday life, you do many things by choice, right? At least it seems that way. But the brain is a predicting organ. It launches your next set of actions based on your past experience and current situation, and it does so outside of your awareness. In other words, your actions are under the control of your memory and your environment.”
“Everything you learn today seeds your brain to predict differently tomorrow.”
Kenan Malik, “The Quest for a Moral Compass – A Global History of Ethics“
“Without free will ….. there could be no moral judgment.”
“The very idea of morality relies on viewing humans not as machines but as conscious agents capable of making choices and taking responsibility for their actions. This conflict between scientific mechanism and human exceptionalism has haunted thinking about the human condition from Descartes’ day to ours.”
“Knowledge is liberating because the more we know about ourselves and about the human condition, the more we are able to recognize that we love or hate or find joy or feel pain, not of free choice, but of chance and history and accidental association and past conditioning. Once we realize that, we can stop blaming others for their actions, for these are absolutely determined. We can stop blaming ourselves, too, for our actions are also equally determined. Hate, envy, and guilt vanish.”
Sam Harris, “Free Will“
“How can we be ‘free’ as conscious agents if everything that we consciously intend is caused by events in our brain that we do not intend and of which we are entirely unaware? We can’t.”
“Willpower is itself a biological phenomenon. You can change your life, and yourself, through effort and discipline – but you have whatever capacity for effort and discipline you have in this moment, and not a scintilla more (or less). You are either lucky in this department or you aren’t – and you cannot make your own luck.”
“Choices, efforts, intentions, and reasoning influence our behaviour – but they are themselves part of a chain of causes that precede conscious awareness and over which we exert no ultimate control.”
“Our system of justice should reflect an understanding that any of us could have been dealt a very different hand in life. In fact, it seems immoral not to recognize just how much luck is involved in morality itself.”
“The urge for retribution depends upon our not seeing the underlying causes of human behaviour.”
“Why did I order beer instead of wine? Because I prefer beer. Why do I prefer it? I don’t know. Whatever the reason, I prefer one taste to the other. Is there freedom in this? None whatsoever. Would I magically reclaim my freedom if I decided to spite my preference and order wine instead? No, because the roots of this intention would be as obscure as the preference itself.”
“None of us enjoys the thought that what we do depends on processes we do not know; we prefer to attribute our choices to volition, will, or self-control …. Perhaps it would be more honest to say, ‘My decision was determined by internal forces I do not understand.’ “
Dr. Daniel Wegner, “The Illusion of Conscious Will“
“Detailed analytical studies of the timing of action indicate that conscious will does not precede brain events leading to spontaneous voluntary action but, rather, follows them.”
“The unique human convenience of conscious thoughts that preview our actions gives us the privilege of feeling we willfully cause what we do. In fact, however, unconscious and inscrutable mechanisms create both conscious thought about action and the action, and also produce the sense of will we experience by perceiving the thought as cause of the action.”
“In all these examples of perceived control, the perception of control is not the same thing as actual control. The point we have rehearsed to exhaustion throughout this book – that the feeling of will is not the same as the force of will – arises again here.”
“Conscious will is strongly linked to responsibility and morality. As the logic goes, a person is morally responsible only for actions that are consciously willed. Thus, the idea that conscious will might be no more than an illusion stirs up a torrent of moral worries; if conscious will is illusory, how can we continue to hold people responsible for what they do? How can we reward people for good acts if there is no doing things on purpose?”
“We experience willing a walk in the park, winding a clock, or smiling at someone, and the feeling keeps our notion of ourselves as persons intact. Our sense of being a conscious agent who does things comes at a cost of being technically wrong all the time. The feeling of doing is how it seems, not what it is – but that is as it should be. All is well, because the illusion makes us human.”
“If the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth, were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling its way of its own accord. ….. So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.”
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, “How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain“
“Trapped within the skull, with only past experiences as a guide, your brain makes predictions. ….. These neural conversations try to anticipate every fragment of sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste that you will experience, and every action you will take. These predictions are your brain’s best guesses of what’s going on in the world around you, and how to deal with it to keep you alive and well. ….. And right now, with each word you read, your brain is predicting what the next word will be, based on probabilities from your lifetime of reading experience. In short, your experience right now was predicted by your brain a moment ago.”
“Your brain also uses prediction to initiate your body’s movements. These predictions occur before you have any conscious awareness or intent about moving your body. Neuroscientists and psychologists call this phenomenon ‘the illusion of free will’. “
“You might think that your perceptions of the world are driven by events in the world, but really, they are anchored in your (brain’s) predictions, which are then tested (by your brain) against …. incoming sensory input.”
“The stimulus-response brain is a myth; brain activity is prediction and correction, and we construct emotional experiences outside of awareness. This explanation fits the architecture and operation of the brain.”
“Your cascade of predictions explains why an experience like happiness feels triggered rather than constructed. …. Your brain is preparing to execute movements in your face and body before you feel any sense of agency for moving, and is predicting your sensory input before it arrives. So emotions seem to be ‘happening to’ you when, in fact, your brain is actively constructing the experience …”
“Are you responsible for your actions? Yes, says the essentialist view of human nature. Are other people responsible for your actions? No, you are an individual with free will. …. These assumptions, born of essentialism, are baked into the law, driving verdicts of guilt and innocence, even as neuroscience has been quietly debunking them as myths.”
“Your brain’s control network ….. is always engaged, actively selecting your actions; you just don’t always feel in control. In other words, your experience of being in control is just that – an experience.”
Dr. Douglas Hofstadter – “I Am a Strange Loop“
“The pressures of daily life require us, force us, to talk about events at the level on which we directly perceive them. Access at that level is what our sensory organs, our language, and our culture provide us with. From earliest childhood on we are handed concepts such as ‘milk’, ‘finger’, ‘wall’ ….. We perceive the world in terms of such notions, not in terms of microscopic notions like …. ‘ribosome’, ‘peptide bond’, or ‘carbon atom’. …. In sum then, we are victims of our macroscopicness, and cannot escape from the trap of using everyday words to describe the events that we witness, and perceive as real.
This is why it is much more natural for us to try to imagine a war as triggered for religious or economic reasons than to try to imagine a war as a vast pattern of interacting elementary particles and to think of what triggered it in similar terms – even though physicists may insist that that is the only ‘true’ level of explanation for it.”
“I don’t know what it would feel like if my will were free. What on earth would that mean? That I didn’t follow my will sometimes? …. Thus, I might choose not to take a second helping of noodles even though I – or rather part of me – would still like some, because there’s another part of me that wants me not to gain weight, and the weight-watching part happens (this evening) to have more votes than the gluttonous part does. If it didn’t, then it would lose and my inner glutton would win, and that would be fine – but either way, my non-free will would win out and I’d follow the dominant desire of my brain.
Yes, certainly, I’ll make a decision, and I’ll do so by conducting a kind of inner vote. The count of votes will yield a result, and by George, one side will come out the winner. But where’s any ‘freeness’ in all this?”
Dr. Michael Gazzaniga – “The Mind’s Past“
“With our brains chock full of marvelous devices, you would think that they do their duties automatically, before we are truly aware of the acts. This is precisely what happens.”
“Our motor system, which makes operational our brain’s decisions about the world, is independent of our conscious perceptions. Too often our perceptions are in error; so it could be disastrous to have our lives depend on them. We would be better off if our brains reacted to real sensory truths, not illusory ones.”
“By the time we think we know something (i.e. it is part of our conscious experience), the brain has already done its work. It is old news to the brain, but fresh to ‘us’. Systems built into the brain do their work automatically and largely outside of our conscious awareness.
We are clueless about how all this works and gets effected. We don’t plan or articulate these actions. We simply observe the output.”
“Our conscious lives depend on all kinds of automatic processes happening inside our brains. Though we can’t influence them by willed action, we continue to believe that we are in control of what we do.”
“When animals’ fixed behaviours are revealed as automatic and built in, no one blinks at that. People get nervous, though, when the same sort of arrangement is suggested for human perceptual and cognitive functions.”
“Brain imaging techniques allow us to see how and where the brain is active before a behaviour is actually executed. The decision has already been made when our conscious self catches up with these activities and declares we have made a decision.”
“Our brains are automatic because physical tissue carries out what we do. How could it be any other way? The brain does it before our conceptual self knows about it.”
“The interpretation of things past liberates us from the sense of being tied to the demands of the environment and produces the wonderful sensation that our self is in charge of our destiny.”
Dr. Timothy Wilson, “Strangers to Ourselves – Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious”
“Consider that at any given moment, our five senses are taking in more than 11 million pieces of information. ….. The most liberal estimate is that people can process consciously about 40 pieces of information per second. ….. It would be terribly wasteful to design a system with such incredible sensory acuity but very little capacity to use the incoming information. Fortunately, we do make use of a great deal of the information, outside of conscious awareness.”
“John Bargh and Peter Gollwitzer and their colleagues argue that events in the environment can trigger goals and direct our behaviour completely outside of conscious awareness. Just as other kinds of thinking can become habitual, automatic, and non-conscious, so can the selection of goals.”
“Wegner and Wheatley’s provocative theory illustrates that a sense of conscious will cannot be taken as evidence that conscious thoughts really did cause our behaviour. The causal role of conscious thought has been vastly overrated; instead, it is often a post-hoc explanation of responses that emanated from the adaptive unconscious.”
Dr. Joshua Greene & Dr. Jonathan Cohen, “For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything“
“Intuitively, we want to punish those people who truly deserve it, but whenever the causes of someone’s behaviour are made sufficiently vivid, we no longer see that person as truly deserving of punishment. This insight is expressed by the old French proverb: ‘to know all, is to forgive all’. It is also expressed in the teachings of religious figures, such as Jesus and Buddha, who preach a message of universal compassion. Neuroscience can make this message more compelling by vividly illustrating the mechanical nature of human action.”
Dr. Robert Sapolsky, “Behave – The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst“
“A behaviour has occurred; what happened in everything from a second to a million years earlier that helps explain why it happened? Some themes have come up repeatedly:
- To understand things, you must incorporate neurons and hormones and early development and genes, etc., etc.
- These aren’t separate categories – there are few clear-cut causal agents, so don’t count on there being the brain region, the neurotransmitter, the gene, the cultural influence, or the single anything that explains a behaviour.
- Instead of causes, biology is repeatedly about propensities, potentials, vulnerabilities, predispositions, proclivities, interactions, modulations, contingencies, …
- No one said this was easy. But the subject matters.”
“Is resisting temptation at every turn an outcome of ‘will’, …. or is it an act of ‘grace’, where there’s no struggle, because it’s simple; you don’t cheat?
(The research found that) it was grace. In those who were always honest, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex were in veritable comas when the chance to cheat arose. There’s no conflict. There’s no working hard to do the right thing. You simply don’t cheat.”
“People intuitively believe in free will, not just because we have this terrible human need for agency but also because most people know next to nothing about those internal forces. And even the neuroscientist on the witness stand can’t accurately predict which individual with extensive frontal damage will become the serial murderer, because science as a whole still knows about only a handful of those internal forces. Shattered bone leads to inflammation leads to constricted movement is easy. Neurotransmitters + hormones + childhood + _____ + _____ + ….. isn’t.”
“Perhaps the loss of freedom that occurs when a dangerous person is removed from society must be deterrence enough. Perhaps some conventional punishment will still be needed if it is sufficiently deterring. But what must be abolished are the views that punishment can be deserved and that punishing can be virtuous.”
“The hope is that when it comes to dealing with humans whose behaviours are among our worst and most damaging, words like ‘evil’ and ‘soul’ will be as irrelevant as when considering a car with faulty brakes.
When a car is being dysfunctional and dangerous we take it to a mechanic. This is not a dualistic situation where, (a) if the mechanic discovers some broken widget causing the problem, we have a mechanistic explanation but, (b) if the mechanic can’t find anything wrong, we’re dealing with an evil car.
Many who are viscerally opposed to this view charge that it is dehumanizing to frame damaged humans as broken machines. But as a final, crucial point, doing that is a hell of a lot more humane than demonizing and sermonizing them as sinners.”
“If we deny free will when it comes to the worst of our behaviours, the same must also apply to the best. To our talents, displays of willpower and focus, moments of bursting creativity, decency, and compassion. Logically it should seem as ludicrous to take credit for those traits as to respond to a compliment on the beauty of your cheekbones …”
Dr. David Eagleman, “Incognito – The Secret Lives of the Brain“
“When your biology changes, so can your decision making, your appetites, and your desires. The drives you take for granted … depend on the intricate details of your neural machinery. Although acting on such drives is popularly thought to be a free choice, the most cursory examination of the evidence demonstrates the limits of that assumption.”
“Although our decisions may seem like free choices, no good evidence exists that they actually are.”
“The crux of the question is whether all of your actions are fundamentally on autopilot or whether there is some little bit that is ‘free’ to choose, independent of the rules of biology.
As far as we can tell, all activity in the brain is driven by other activity in the brain. …. For better or worse, this seems to leave no room for anything other than neural activity.
If free will is to have any effect on the actions of the body, it needs to influence the ongoing brain activity. And to do that, it needs to be physically connected to at least some of the neurons. But we don’t find any spot in the brain that is not itself driven by other parts of the network. Instead, every part of the brain is densely interconnected with – and driven by – other brain parts. And that suggests that no part is independent and, therefore, ‘free’.”
“Given the steering power of our genetics, childhood experiences, environmental toxins, hormones, neurotransmitters, and neural circuitry, enough of our decisions are beyond our explicit control that we are arguably not the ones in charge. In other words, free will may exist – but if it does, it has very little room in which to operate.
… free will, if it exists, is only a small factor riding on top of enormous automated machinery. So small that we may be able to think about bad decision making in the same way we think about any other physical process, such as diabetes or lung disease.”
“The more we discover about the circuitry of the brain, the more the answers tip away from accusations of indulgence, lack of motivation, and poor discipline – and move toward the details of the biology. The shift from blame to science reflects our modern understanding that our perceptions and behaviours are controlled by inaccessible subroutines that are easily perturbed.”
“… if there is a measurable brain problem, that buys leniency for the defendant. He’s not really to blame. But we do blame someone if we lack the technology to detect a biological problem. And this gets us to the heart of our argument: that blameworthiness is the wrong question to ask.”
“We may someday find that certain types of bad behaviour will have a meaningful biological explanation – as has happened with schizophrenia, epilepsy, depression, and mania. …. A just legal system cannot define culpability simply by the limitations of current technology.”
“The bottom line of the argument is that criminals should always be treated as incapable of having acted otherwise. The criminal activity itself should be taken as evidence of brain abnormality.”
“Now, there’s a critical nuance to appreciate here. Not everyone with a brain tumor undertakes a mass shooting, and not all males commit crimes. Why not? As we will see in the next chapter, it is because genes and environment interact in unimaginably complex patterns. As a result, human behaviour will always remain unpredictable.”
“Because of inaccessible fluctuations in our biological soup, some days we find ourselves more irritable, humorous, well spoken, calm, energized, or clear-thinking. Our internal life and external actions are steered by biological cocktails to which we have neither immediate access nor direct acquaintance.”
“The critical take-home lesson is that invisibly small changes inside the brain can cause massive changes to behaviour. Our choices are inseparably married to the tiniest details of our machinery.”
“Given these facts on the ground, it is far from clear that we hold the option of ‘choosing’ who we would like to be.”
“These examples demonstrate that it is neither biology alone nor environment alone that determines the final product of a personality. When it comes to the nature versus nurture question, the answer almost always includes both. …..
This is the reason people come to the table with quite different ways of seeing the world, dissimilar personalities, and varied capacities for decision making.”
Warmest regards,
Rob @ Living a Mindful Life
“It’s important to remember we always do the best we can with the information, skills, and resources we have available at the time.”
Mark Coleman, author of “Make Peace With Your Mind”
Rob, I love your posts and this one is no exception. I hadn’t thought about blame in this way – thank you.
I dont know about your other readers, but I find the yellow font difficult to read. My husband does as well. Perhaps our Ageing eyes are the reason (nature) – no blame here😊
Thanks, Rob. Very thought provoking. Appreciate your guidance. Agree with Jenny that yellow font is a challenge. Peace be with you.