Jim Farmelant : I don't assert that. But it's evident that you don't understand Skinner. From that I don't draw the inference that everybody else doesn't understand him.
"My repeated point is that behaviorism of some sort underlies various institutions and practices in the US and around the world--education, criminal justice and prisons, etc." <
Those institutions may well draw upon certain behaviorist ideas but not Skinnerian ideas. Those institutions are all based on punitive approaches to crime and other social problems. But Skinner demonstrated why such approaches will not work and cannot work. This is what makes Skinner closer to prison abolitionists like Angela Davis even though he started off from different premises than her. Jim Farmelant http://www.linkedin.com/in/jimfarmelant/ http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant http://www.foxymath.com Learn or Review Basic Math Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.riseup.net To change your options or unsubscribe go to: https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/marxism-thaxis Help us maintain the infrastruct Jim Farmelant › To: marxism-thaxis@lists.riseup.net › a-list@lists.riseup.net › Reply To: farmelantj@juno.com › Today at 2:16 PM [marxism-thaxis] Beyond Excuses: What a Fully Deterministic Moral Framework Would Actua lly Require https://medium.com/@jimfarmelant/beyond-excuses-what-a-fully-deterministic-moral-framework-would-actually= require-620344a6fcf0 <
Charles Brown comment ( Full article by Jim Farmelant below ) Poverty determinism is a good excuse . It’s capitalism’s fault .
Or NRA gun “freedom’s” fault : Republicans’ fault NRA: no lives matter
A gun murder : another sacrifice on the altar of gun capitalists profits
One of rationals of criminal laws they give in law school is deterrence . Does that avoid the above dilemma ?
Deterrence is the theory that criminal penalties do not just punish violators, but also discourage other people from committing similar offenses. Many people point to the need to deter criminal actions after a high-profile incident in which an offender is seen to have received a light sentence.
(()) In criminal law, deterrence is the theory that the threat or application of punishment discourages individuals from committing crimes. It is a "forward-looking" or utilitarian philosophy aimed at preventing future harm rather than simply seeking retribution for past acts. On Feb 13, 2026, at 2:16 PM, Jim Farmelant
On Feb 13, 2026, at 2:16 PM, Jim Farmelant
https://medium.com/@jimfarmelant/beyond-excuses-what-a-fully-deterministic-moral-framework-would-actually-require-62b344a6fcf0
As I argued in in The abuse excuse: determinism and moral responsibility, B. F. Skinner’s claim that human behavior is shaped by environmental contingencies rather than free choice continues to unsettle people because it exposes a deep tension or contradiction in our moral thinking. We increasingly explain action in causal terms, yet we continue to judge it as if agents were metaphysically free in the libertarian sense. The contemporary debate over the so-called “abuse excuse” brings this tension into especially sharp focus. We allow causal explanations to mitigate blame in some cases, while still relying elsewhere on a broadly retributive conception of responsibility. Skinner’s concern was not merely that behavior is caused, but that our moral practices have never fully absorbed what that fact implies. We want determinism to explain conduct without forcing us to abandon the familiar language of choice, desert, and culpability.
Discussions of the abuse excuse often proceed as though the philosophical stakes were modest. Acknowledging the causal role of childhood abuse is presented as a humane qualification within an otherwise intact framework of moral responsibility. Abuse, on this view, explains without excusing, mitigates without exculpating, and leaves the basic structure of moral judgment untouched. The difficulty is not that abuse fails to explain criminal behavior, but that once explanation is permitted to do real work, it becomes difficult to confine its implications. Determinism does not operate locally. To the extent that abusive upbringing weakens attributions of responsibility by revealing the causal antecedents of action, so too do genetics, social environment, ideological formation, neurobiology, and sheer contingency. The appeal of the abuse excuse lies in its attempt to halt this slide: it grants causal relevance in a narrow class of cases while preserving intact, elsewhere, a largely retributive conception of moral desert. This selectivity reflects our moral preferences more than our philosophical commitments.
Discussions of the abuse excuse often proceed as though the philosophical stakes were relatively modest. Acknowledging the causal role of childhood abuse is presented as a humane adjustment within an otherwise intact moral framework. On this view, abuse explains without excusing, mitigates without exculpating, and leaves the underlying structure of moral judgment undisturbed. The problem is not that abuse fails to explain criminal behavior. The problem is that once explanation is permitted to do real work, it becomes difficult to contain its implications. Determinism does not operate locally. If an abusive upbringing weakens attributions of responsibility by revealing the causal antecedents of action, then so do genetics, social conditions, ideological formation, neurobiology, and sheer contingency. The appeal of the abuse excuse lies in its attempt to stop this slide — to grant causal relevance in a narrow class of cases while preserving, everywhere else, a largely retributive conception of moral desert. This selectivity reflects our moral preferences more than any coherent philosophical principle.
If determinism is taken seriously, the central question is no longer whether abuse should count as an excuse. The question is what a moral framework would look like once causal explanation is allowed to do its full work. A genuinely deterministic account cannot simply add new exceptions to an otherwise familiar moral landscape. It requires rethinking the very concepts that organize our judgments of wrongdoing, beginning with desert.
Retributive punishment, understood as moral payback, accordingly loses its foundation. If actions are the predictable outcomes of antecedent conditions, then punishment cannot be justified as the balancing of a moral ledger. What remain are forward-looking considerations: deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and social protection. These do not presuppose metaphysical freedom. They presuppose only that behavior is causally responsive to social arrangements and institutional practices. A deterministic framework does not eliminate punishment, but it reframes it as an instrument rather than a moral verdict on character.
The first casualty of such a framework is the idea that individuals deserve suffering or reward because they are the ultimate originators of their actions. Desert presupposes a form of authorship that determinism denies. To say that an action was causally determined is not to deny that it caused harm, but it is to deny that suffering imposed in response can be justified as something owed. Rejecting desert does not entail leniency, indifference, or moral quietism. It entails rejecting a particular story about why punishment is justified.
Retributive punishment, understood as moral payback, therefore loses its foundation. If actions are the predictable outcomes of antecedent conditions, punishment cannot be justified as the balancing of a moral ledger. What remain are forward-looking considerations: deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and the protection of society. These aims do not presuppose metaphysical freedom. They presuppose only that behavior is causally responsive to social arrangements and institutional practices. A deterministic framework does not eliminate punishment; it reframes it as an instrument rather than a moral verdict on character.
The same shift applies to blame and praise. In a deterministic setting, blame cannot function as a judgment of ultimate moral worth. At most, it operates as a social tool for signaling norms, regulating behavior, and coordinating expectations. Praise likewise becomes a form of reinforcement rather than a recognition of metaphysical virtue. This may sound deflationary, but it simply makes explicit assumptions that already guide much of our thinking about human behavior. We routinely appeal to incentives, conditioning, and structural reform even as we continue to speak the language of desert. Determinism forces us to confront this tension rather than manage it through selective exceptions.
Abandoning desert does not require abandoning responsibility altogether. It requires replacing a metaphysical conception of responsibility with a practical one. Agents can be held responsible not because they are uncaused causes, but because they are points of leverage within a causal system. They are locations where reasons, sanctions, and social responses can have their effects. Responsibility, on this view, is not a judgment about ultimate authorship but a recognition of where intervention is appropriate and effective.
This thinner conception of responsibility is already familiar. We hold institutions responsible for failures without imagining that institutions possess free will. We assign responsibility in regulatory and civil contexts without appealing to moral desert. Even in criminal justice, much of what actually occurs — risk assessment, sentencing guidelines, parole decisions — is implicitly forward-looking and instrumental. Determinism does not require abandoning these practices. It requires only that we stop justifying them with a moral vocabulary that no longer fits.
Given the strength of the case against desert, the persistence of retributive thinking itself demands explanation. Its resilience is better understood psychologically than philosophically. Retribution satisfies a desire for moral symmetry and reassures us that wrongdoing reflects something fundamentally different about the offender rather than differences in circumstance, constitution, or luck. It draws a sharp boundary between the normal and the deviant — a boundary determinism threatens to erode. The abuse excuse is tolerable precisely because it localizes causation. It allows us to acknowledge that this person was shaped by forces beyond their control while quietly reaffirming that most others were not.
Retribution also persists because it is rhetorically efficient. Desert offers simple answers to difficult questions: Why punish? Because it is deserved. Why this amount? Because it fits the crime. Determinism provides no such shortcuts. It demands continual attention to aims, outcomes, and social costs. The appeal of retribution lies less in its coherence than in its convenience.
There may also be an evolutionary explanation for its persistence. Retributive responses may have emerged as adaptive solutions to coordination problems in small groups, where rapid blame and punishment served deterrent and signaling functions. If so, it is unsurprising that these intuitions survive even when undermined by deterministic explanation. What is more surprising is our continued tendency to treat them as guides to moral truth rather than as artifacts of a cognitive architecture shaped for very different conditions.
Compatibilist responses typically attempt to blunt these conclusions in one of two ways. The first insists that responsibility has merely been redefined, not eliminated: to be responsible is simply to act in accordance with one’s reasons or character, even if these are causally determined. But this move sidesteps the central issue. The question is not whether we can continue to use the word “responsibility,” but whether doing so preserves the justificatory role it has traditionally played. A notion of responsibility that no longer grounds moral desert may be perfectly serviceable, but it is not the notion on which many defenses of the abuse excuse rely.
The second reassurance is that abandoning desert drains morality of meaning. This worry conflates moral seriousness with metaphysical depth. Norms, reasons, and values do not disappear once we relinquish the fiction of contra-causal freedom. What disappears is a particular way of justifying suffering — the idea that it is morally earned rather than imposed for reasons. A deterministic framework does not abolish moral evaluation; it abandons retribution as its organizing principle.
The debate over the abuse excuse is often framed as a conflict between compassion and accountability, or between explanation and excuse. That framing obscures the deeper issue. The real tension lies between an expanding commitment to causal explanation and a lingering attachment to retributive moral concepts that such explanation steadily undermines. Abuse is neither philosophically unique nor morally anomalous. It is simply one vivid instance of a general fact about human action in a deterministic world.
In The Abuse Excuse, I argued that causal explanations cannot be selectively invoked without incoherence. Here I have tried to extend that claim. If determinism is true, the task is not to refine our excuses but to reconsider the moral framework that makes excuses seem necessary in the first place. Until that reckoning occurs, debates about abuse will continue to function as proxy battles over a deeper unwillingness to relinquish a conception of responsibility that explanation has already outgrown.
In writing this essay, I drew upon B. F. Skinner’s Science and Human Behavior and his Beyond Freedom and Dignity. I have also drawn from the essays on Thomas W. Clark’s website Naturalism.Org, including in particular the following essays: “Fully Caused: Coming to Terms with Determinism”, “Determinism and Responsibility”, and “What Should We Tell People About Free Will?”
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant https://substack.com/@jimfarmelant899387 http://www.foxymath.com Learn or Review Basic Math Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.riseup.net To change your options or unsubscribe go to: https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/marxism-thaxis Help us maintain the infrastructure for these lists: https://riseup.net/en/donate
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