Free Will and Violence

Spinoza Versus Buddhist Scripture: Fight! .... But Nonviolently

In a sutta (discourse) of the Pali Canon—the oldest still living Buddhist scriptural tradition, transmitted by the Theravada school— the Buddha is presented as lampooning the views of a contemporary school of his that he disagreed with. This school, the Ajivakas, believed— according to this critical account— that people bore no moral responsibility for their actions, no matter how heinous.

This Buddhist sutta caricatures their view, saying that even if someone were to slaughter masses of living beings it would not be one’s fault, nor would one bear any blame.

I am not fond of the rhetorical move here. The sutta argues against this point of view by presenting it in its most extreme— and probably unfair— form. The Ajivakas lived ascetic lives and pursued moksha, or liberation, so they could not have been the caricature of fatalistic indifference presented here. The few available sources we have for this once popular school suggest they believed in determinism, the atman (eternal essence, or soul, of the person), a life of asceticism and the natural ripening of freedom, and that— in some unclear sense— they did not accept ideas of universal moral law or karma that Jains and Buddhists affirm.

Rather than a reasoned rebuttal, the strategy seems to be to get the reader to reject their stance out of hand out of sheer revulsion, as opposed to careful examination. It reminds me a bit of those who say something like “Socialists want to pay people to do nothing!” I would like to think this strategy is not the Buddha’s, but those of his later followers concerned with rebutting their competitors¹.

It is another implication of this argument I want to look at here though. I think this sutta means to imply that those who hold this view are more likely to be violent themselves. After all, they are not at fault if they were to do so. The irony is that I think this argument is wrong— moreso, I think it is the opposite of the truth.

Spinoza

As Spinoza argued— about which, more below— believing in free will actually increases the likelihood of violence. The reason for this is that anger thrives on blame, and blame thrives on the idea of free will².

We can see this in the simple phenomenon of how we react when we believe someone has freely chosen to do something that impacts us negatively— speaking harshly, being late, or forgetting something important, for example— versus when we believe they did so due to illness or severe distress, say, or the recent loss of a loved one.

Another example: they way we view a violent criminal who came from a cozy, wealthy background versus one who came from a background of severe deprivation and abuse.

Yet if there is no free will, then it makes no sense to blame one person and excuse the other— all people, all the time, are simply acting the way they do because they have the capacities and character that they do, and that character and those capacities were not chosen by them. Rather, they were given to them by a combination of biology, upbringing, childhood experiences, culture, and a billion other factors outside of their personal control.

Those factors, whether they arise seconds before their choice, or minutes, or hours, or days, or centuries— were not chosen by them. As Spinoza said (paraphrase), “We believe ourselves free only because at the moment of choosing we do not perceive fully all of the factors which conditioned our choice, but only some of them.”

We’ll return to that point, but for now, let’s look more at the relationship between seeing people as deliberately responsible for their choices and the consequences: blame, hatred, and anger.

Blame and Demonization, Subtle and Blatant

How do our feelings change when we see someone as freely responsible for the behaviour we think is wrong? As having deliberately chosen it?

What if we regard their behaviour as being a result of many sources both inside and outside of them? How do we feel then?

In the first instance, they become a hated and evil object in my mind. In the second, my feelings cool. I may feel compassion for the conditions causing their behaviour. At the very least, I see them as part of a larger web of causality.

If that web is causing suffering, I’m free to ask what factors in it could be changed, and if there are any I can change.

My attention is drawn more to my own processing, and my own potentials for action.

When we understand a person’s choices as part of a larger context, we don’t feel anger. When we see their choices as stemming from them, that means we are blaming them. The more malevolent intentions, the more deliberate choices, we can ascribe to them, the more hatred and anger we will feel.

How does a demagogue speak when they want to stir up anger and violence against a person, or group of people?

They present those people as ill-intentioned and deliberately engaged in evil behaviour. It’s not just that they have a different opinion about American politics, for example— its that they “hate America.” It’s not that they configure their opinions about the rights of women and unborn children differently, it’s that they are misogynists, they hate women, and so on.

It’s not just that something they are doing feels threatening to you, it is that they want to threaten you. They intend to threaten you. That’s their deliberate choice and purpose. Psychologically, this both emphasizes how much we should be angry at them, and how much they are to blame for what they are doing. The solution is obvious: silence them, disempower them, or even destroy them if possible.

In other words, violence.

In the domain of crime, this means that we don’t just separate the offender from those they might hard and try to help them not commit a crime again, it means they need to be punished. Maybe they even need to be killed.

Ironically, the Buddha was absolutely opposed to violence. If he did dismiss these determinists, it appears his claim is that their view led to violence, while understandably, is probably the opposite of the truth. I suspect, though, that he did not say this and its appearance in the Canon is part of an attempt on the part of later scribe-monks to solidify their identity and difference from other sects.

What Spinoza Says

Spinoza argues that when we understand that people act due to the ideas in their mind and state of their body, not because of some separate act of deliberate free will apart from these, we will be freed from hatred, contempt, anger, and envy.

Spinoza’s argument against free will is simple and classical: every choice we make has causes, and these causes lie in what we believe, how we feel, and what our capacities and information are. These factors also have causes, as do those, trailing back into infinity. The only reason we believe we choose freely is that in the moment we only see how we feel and what we believe to be true, but are ignorant of the causes for those things. Our minds are like spotlights which only illuminate a small space while the rest remains in darkness, unless we investigate it.

But Shouldn’t We Take More Responsibility For Ourselves?

Yes, we should. Spinoza actually thought we generally live our lives passively, and need to learn how to live them actively.

We all know people who are always blaming circumstances and other people for their problems. Aren’t I arguing they are actually right to do so?

No, I’m not. The people who do that are, first of all, not really failing to blame themselves, and secondly, they are still engaging in myopic blame.

To the first point, have you ever noticed those people are not happy go lucking pillars of self-esteem, living free of guilt, agitation and remorse?

That’s because contrary to the way things appear on the surface, those people are actually desperately blaming themselves, and obsessed with their own guilt. It is the pain of that— and its unbearability— which leads them to blame others and events outside of their own control.

Second, they are incorrect that the way their father treated them, or the shame they experienced at school, or the job they lost, or the relationship they didn’t (or did) leave is responsible for their misery.

Those things may play a role, but they are part of a vast web of causality, and also cannot be blamed.

It is also the case that in focusing on those factors— factors they cannot do anything about in the present— they are diverting their attention from what they can affect— the present moment, and its effect on the future.

Is it their fault that they are doing this?

No.

Can they— can we— be taught to change, and to relate to our experience differently? Theoretically, yes, and practically, maybe. All there is to do is try.

Spinoza thought that we generally think, feel and act according to the states our bodies happen to be in, and the random associations of ideas that form in our minds depending on that, as well as the experiences we have and beliefs we happen to hold. He called this passivity.

He argued that when we begin attending to our own internal reactions and thoughts and beginning to actively guided them with reason, choosing to react not based on how things appear, but on how reason reveals them to be, this is activity.

In a seeming paradox, when we understand that everything comes to be as part of a vast causal matrix, that is understanding things under the aegis of reason, not simply as they appear to be. This allows us to free ourselves of the hypnotic pull of praise and blame and its attendant dramas. It allows us to focus on how the lights of attention and reason can help us understand the causes of things, and where there might be leverage. Where we can actually make change.

Out in the field beyond praise and blame.

It is not impossible that violence might be involved in what needs to be done, but that violence will become less frequent, less chaotic, grounded in reason, not hatred, ans the very last resort, since as Spinoza argues (E4P46), the sage guided by reason will strive as much as possible to return love for hatred and benefit for harm.

1. In the oldest suttas, the Buddha is in fact on record discouraging his students from debating others, disparaging their views, or asserting their own as superior.

2. A quick note: what I mean by free will here is that one freely choose to act in a certain way, and could have freely chosen differently. I do not mean that people don’t make choices. We do, the type of information and motivation we have will affect our choices, which is why I do philosophy. The choice we make at any moment, however, is determined by who we are, i.e. the state of our body, the information we have or don’t have, what happened to us that day, what happened to us our whole life up until that point, our genetics, how we were raised, what culture we live in, and a vast assortment of other factors.