I came up with this twist on the whole manner in which we hold off placing responsibility on people for their unconscious choices. I want to see how it goes down in a discussion.
We say that people can’t be held responsible for their choices if they are made unconsciously. But I think this is a confusion. It is to confuse unconscious mental content with volition. It is our mental content which is made unconscious–content like thoughts, desires, emotions, awarenesses, memories–but choices are not the kind of things that can be made unconscious. You are always conscious of the fact that you act deliberately. You may be unaware of the reasons for your actions, or perhaps you confabulate false reasons for your actions, but it does not follow from this that your making a deliberate choice to carry out those actions is also unconscious.
You may also choose to carry out those actions without actually thinking “I will now choose to act thus”–such as turning the steering wheel when turning at an intersection–for we do this quite deliberately yet without formally thinking consciously “I will now turn the steering wheel.” Just because we are not officially thinking these thoughts as a precursor to making choices does not mean our actions our out of our control. Usually we say such “unplanned” or “unthought” actions are still deliberate because we still had the freedom to preempt or intervene in these actions if we wanted to. It wasn’t out of our control.
The only kind of action that I would consider truly out of our control would be one such that if we deliberately attempted to stop it, we couldn’t (as though we were possessed or if a neurosurgeon stuck electrodes into our brains and forced the motor cortex to initiate some action).
But I don’t think that so-called “unconscious” choices are like that. They are the kind of choices that, though we are unaware of our reasons or motives, are carried out either with a conscious (but false) justification or in the manner of turning left at an intersection without thinking about it. This being the case, I don’t think we can say that just because we are unaware of our true reasons for making these choices that the choice itself (i.e. that it was free) is also unconscious. Therefore, I don’t think that just because the reasons or motives are unconscious that we can get away with making wrong or immoral or irresponsible choices with the excuse that we did them unconsciously or that we weren’t aware of our true reasons for making them.
EDIT: I almost forgot–I consider it a choice to make certain mental content unconscious. Denial, repression, reaction formation, projections, are all deliberate mental actions. This is important.
Gib: I think there are facets to an argument or responsibility. The first one is your differentiating a conscious and an unconscious choice. Here is the first problem either classifying your mental content either as a conscious or unconscious one, there may be semi conscious states, an example which comes to mind is twilight sleep in a dentist office, where you are under the influence of a sedative, or an anesthetic, and you may do something regrettable, such as yanking the dental equipment out of your mouth. How deeply you were under, determines the amount of awareness of what you were doing.
The second thought comes to mind, is, when you realize the reasons for your actions, ostensibly to act upon those reasons, but either you ignore the reasonableness of them, or you do not comprehend those reasons. You do it anyway, perhaps because it is the thing to do.
But if the reasons as a choice are also to be taken as in an unconscious state, let’s say you know the reasons, and they are reasonable, and you chose to act on them, they too (the reasons) be unable to act reasonably, even to the extend of being able to understand them, or not even seeing them.
The fact that all those thoughts, projections, dis placements, denials tie in with your reasons, it shows that those psychological functions, may or may not be contingent to the matter of choice.
When you deny something, it may be a conscious manifestation, however, the reasonableness of using them seems to indicate in-it-self, that their usage is not understood.
My point is, that awareness or knowlege of the reasons can be unknown, and hence unconsciousness of these reasons excuses them for responsibility for choosing them.
That’s an excellent distinction you made about volition. One’s unconscious is not merely a matter of emotions, but also a matter of underlying attitudes. No, we don’t hold people responsible for reflexes. Yes, we do hold people responsible for personal beliefs that are excessively judgmental.
Dactoria: I am not sure, if You were referring to Gib's OP or my comments, however if it was meant for me, it was probably directed to my unedited version. Upon re reading it I felt it was unreadable hence I edited it. In that case, I apologise for the confusion.
Yes, but in this case, you can’t help the effects of the drug. It is something out of your control. Denial and other such defense mechanism, however, are completely in your control.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying here. To ignore the reasonableness of your true reasons is just another defense mechanism. To not comprehend them seems strange to me, for I’d question how they ever came to consciousness in the first place.
Can you rephrase this? I really don’t understand it.
But they are your reasons–unconscious or not–for they are what motivates you to act. Anything you tell yourself consciously is just covering it up. My point is that because you cover it up deliberately, you can’t use that as an excuse to go ahead with the act.
Gib: covering something up consciously is reprehensible. But covering defensively as a psychological mechanism and then projecting it is usually not blameworthy for the following reasons:
The first thing that enters the mind is, that I want to act, but first I have to find whether the act would be reasonable given the facts. There may be a mistake made along the way in assessment, reasoning, and I can go ahead, or desist, whether I think the reasons given are valid or not.
If I am honestly mistaken as to the reasonableness of an impending action, then I may not be held responsible for a bad but honest choice…
I am not talking about people who have no capacity to reason, since they are obviously relieved of responsibility. Believing an unreasonable course of action when it’s thought to be reasonable–has ramifications toward intent. If I acted in good faith, thinking my action was reasonable, than I really didn’t intend to cause harm, for which to be responsible for. That’s what I tried to express. Intent, is the key when conscious choices are chosen in furtherance of reasons to do them.
Now on the level of the unconscious, reasoning may be evaluated the same way: the level of unconsciousness will determine the level of control over actions. Where there is absolutely no control over unconscious choices,we can not form a conscious intent.(To harm) a conscious intent to harm is reprehensible,an unconscious is not.
Example: how would this sound? I I hit him, but I didn’t know why,? (This type of hidden, unconscious reason) is not reprehensible. It usually is indicative of a lack of capacity.
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In case of the use of defenses, a deliberate conscious denial of accepted and true facts would be reprehensible, on the other hand an unconscious denial may not, since unconscious denial of facts may not show an intent to falsify facts , causing intentional harm.
As a consequence, some unconscious choices are not reprehensible.
If I am unconscious, I usually can’t form reasons: unconscious reasons are not known to the person , so he can’t be known to act intentionally–so he cannot be found responsible for actions arising from his conduct. (An example ot this is “I didn’t know I was acting out of self defense”. Here the reason given is not much more than saying “I acted intinctually to protect myself”
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It’s like a man who hits another man, din’t know that he had buried hatreds to cause him harm, says “I don’t’ know why I hit him”. If the validity of that statement can be found, and it can be proven he didn’t intend to harm him, he may not be found responsible.
Having peripherally analyzed the OP, I would like to get to the crux of the argument which on closer examination is this: Can we choose unconscious choices, where the choice is indicative of a sense of responsibility?
The prior post is a legalistic spinoff of this issue, and I believe adequately disposed of.
When we say we deny certain mental content, is this denial a conscious or unconscious process? I would say, it is an unconscious effort to deal with otherwise impossible conscious content. The effort perhaps starts with the realization, that in no way can a consciously satisfactory way could be found to resolve it, this process, this may be a conscious realization. But the process of turning this content, reasons included into an unconscious mental state, is not necessarily based on a conscious schema, in other words the content including all it’s baggage at one point, turns unconscious.
Gib: using the defense mechanisms as part of the unconscious, is mixing the un-conscious with the subconscious. I think the difference is very slight definitionally, for both deal with “unknown” content.
So what turns the “known” unacceptable content into “unknown” and at what point can it be said that the known is differentiable from the unknown"? I think that’ question begs for an impossible answer, just like in dreaming whenever really know , at want point we actually fall asleep.
Now for the heart of the argument, how can we tell by a similar token, whether, it is by conscious choice, that a decision is made to deny the content of our state of mind? Is it the realization of a successful conscious solution? Consequently ,then is the answer "I choose to place this mental content into my subconscious, or unconscious, so that I don’t have to deal with it? Or is it an automatic responsive reaction which has little or nothing with choice? This is equally problematic, the latter seems like the more likely, since the subconscious, with its types and archetypes is much more prone to define the process than it is our active participation.
Gibb, I am intrigued by sleep studies, sleep interpretation, surrealism and psychic phenomena, and that is why I took the liberty to go into analyzing Your Op in depth.
I agree with you here, but I think it raises the issue of what responsiblity means or what holding someone responsible means. In any case, I agree. If I know someone who has impulse control and flies off the handle and hits people, I will not let that person hang around with my kids, and likely me either. I treat the entire organism as choosing to do something that I dislike.
That’s how I would tend to focus on the issue.
For the person who acts it may seem like they are not responsible since they identify with some fraction of themselves, but for the rest of us we identify them with the whole organism. How can we not hold the organism responsible for its acts.
We may feel a certain kind of sympathy for them we would not for someone who plans to hit us because it gives them pleasure and is conscious of the whole process, but I would still hold the unconscious hitter responsible.
I agree with this. If you don’t hold people responsible for this, then it makes you responsible for it. That’s a quick gut reaction, but I think it holds in practice.
Note that I didn’t say such actions are necessarily blameworthy, just that you are responsible for them.
What you’re describing here sounds like someone who just made a mistake in assessing the situation–as though someone recommended some kind of religious ritual as a cure for cancer as opposed to going to a doctor–which of course has very little to do with the unconscious. I don’t think we can blame people for making mistakes, but I still think they bear a certain responsibility if their ill-formed assessments lead to some serious negative consequence. If the person who recommends the religious ritual for curing cancer promises the sufferer that he will get better, and then he dies, I think the one who recommended the ritual owes, among other things, the family an apology.
It gets more complicated if the one who recommends the religious ritual actually knew it wouldn’t work on an unconscious level, but he liked his religious beliefs too much to ever admit it, then I would hold him responsible for that too. But again, I say it is important that the denial of the fact that the religious ritual wouldn’t work is done purposefully.
This description treats the conscious and the unconscious, along with the choices each decide to make, as though they were two ‘selves’ in the same body, almost like a possession. If, in a fit of unconscious rage, I hit someone, and the action took me completely by surprise (like I wasn’t expecting myself to do that at all), then maybe I could get away with saying I didn’t mean it and that I had no control over it. It would have to be something like temporary possession though, like some foreign force took over your body.
But another way I imagine this is that the rage that you are denying gets built up to the point that you can’t deny it anymore and it overtakes you–not as one ‘self’ taking control of the body despite the other self’s intentions or knowledge–but as a whole person. You hit the person. A few seconds later, you realize what you did, the rage subsides, and you go back into denying that you are actually angry at the person. In that case I say you were responsible. It was you who did it. You decided to do it in the moment. You may have had a change of heart afterwards, but that doesn’t absolve you of responsibility. And again, note that this doesn’t necessarily make the act blameworthy. Maybe the guy deserved to be hit. Maybe the fact that you were repressing dangerous levels of rage indicates that the guy’s just an incredible asshole.
I’m not sure there is such a thing. Denial is what makes the content unconscious. What then makes the denial unconscious? I believe that denial, repression, and other defense mechanism are willfully used on one’s self, and the volitionary nature of these acts makes you responsible for them. They need not come along with a conscious thought process: “I am now going to deny that I’m angry”, but is just done–like the way I might scratch an itch on my head–I wouldn’t think about it first, nothing necessarily goes on in my conscious mind about my head scratching, I just do it.
Another way to say this is that volitionary acts are not the kinds of things that we can describe as conscious or unconscious. They aren’t ‘felt’ in quite the way mental content (like thought, emotions, memories, etc.) are felt. So it doesn’t make any sense to say whether they are conscious or unconscious. But what makes them volitionary, and therefore subjects you to responsibility, is that 1) they come from you, and 2) you could have chose otherwise. Insofar as defense mechanism like denial are freely chosen mental acts, these points apply.
Yes, that’s more or less what I had in mind.
If we have absolutely no control over the use of our defense mechanisms, then we cannot be held responsible for them, but this would have to be something like a reflex of the brain, not the kind of control we usually exercise over our own thoughts. And even then, you’d have to be sure that the actions these unconscious mental content end up illiciting are also completely out of your control, like some force suddenly taking over your body.
I typically think the use of defense mechanisms is a choice we exercise on ourselves, but again it need not be accompanied by any conscious thinking or recognition of the choice. I take these defense mechanism to be an act no different than if someone told you “think about Paris” or “recite a poem in your head”–we have full control over this. In the case of defense mechanisms, it would be like someone asking us “Don’t admit to yourself that you are angry. For the next few days, don’t let a single thought into your head about the anger which, up until now, you’ve admitted to having.” If we were to comply with this, we would be exercising a power of thought no different than the ordinary everyday power we have over any of our thoughts.
I enlarged and bolded impossible because, in fact, it is more like uncomfortable. If someone is a bully, but an unconscious one, they may deny the sensory feedback from others that what they are doing is causing other pain. The awareness that this might be uncomfortable, might even make this person feel like they were doing wrong things, might raise the issue of their own anger at the pushiness of people in other situations, and so on. There is a choice by the organism to not be aware.
Now to hold some perfect, denial free state above all our heads can be rather mean, but the fact is at the edges of awareness we get hints about what we deny. To whatever extent we do not pursue these hints, and allow more and more into awareness, we are consciously responsible for allowing self-serving unconscious patterns to remain.
What we have no hints of at all, we are responsible for, because we are not simply the conscious mind. We are the whole mind. That is what others have to live with. They have to live with us and it makes sense for them to hold the organism responsible for whatever we do.
I agree with you about choices, in a basic way. But the way you frame it, if you overemphasize that, might lead to a suppression of the ability to act spontaneously. In other words, if you want to act spontaneously, without regrets, you have to consciously work to effect the unconscious wellsprings of your actions. Thus, indirect or direct doxastic voluntarism is a very important thing to consider.
The question of personal responsibility for unconscious actions is not uncommon in philosophy and psychoanalysis. I’m mainly drawing on my memory of this question being brought up. I was able to find the link above easily enough with a quick google search (keywords: unconscious, responsibility). I’m sure you could find more.
It may have this effect, but in my personal experience, reflecting on my own motives and trying to be honest with myself rarely ever stultifies my spontenaity (not that I’m any good at self-reflection ). Rather, it seems that the spontenaity happens first followed by a bit of self-reflection. Most of the time, what I find is rather inane, other times it might upset some people if they knew (but then it’s my secret), and on rare occassions, I find my motives really are of moral significance and it becomes appropriate to reconsider my intentions (and that’s a good thing). In short, the self-reflection usually happens along side the spontenaity, not in place of it.
So if you and an old woman are in the middle of the street and a bus is about to hit you both, you allow your spontaneous thoughts to occur, then you reflect on them, then you undertake some considered action (I will save myself, I will save the old lady, I will save myself so I can continue to live and benefit others, this old lady unfortunately needs to be sacrificed in order to do that…)? I think reflecting on your own motives and being honest with yourself is an excellent undertaking. But I don’t think it’s good practice to tune up your car every time you take it for a drive.
I don’t think there’s any such thing as “spontaneity…followed by a bit of self-reflection”, unless you mean that the self-reflection occurs after the action and not before the action. Is that what you mean?
I’m all for learning from my own mistakes, and allowing for spontaneity to occur guarantees that plenty of mistakes will occur. But doesn’t it make sense to consciously address the unconscious wellsprings of our actions? It’s efficient, at least. I realize some people don’t think such a thing is possible, and that other people think you’d be messing with your authenticity or something. But I’d disagree with both assertions. I think the fact is, even the most deliberate of us act spontaneously more often than we think. Probably 99% of our actions aren’t deliberate. I don’t know, I made up that number. Anyway… “You are responsible for your unconscious choices.” Qualified against an extreme interpretation of this (for instance I don’t think it’s wrong to experience a dream in which you are violent), I agree. I don’t think it’s necessary to place the responsibility in a dedicated position in-between unconscious motivations and action. We can take action in such a way that we can shape our unconscious motivations. One relatively passive method is to simply bring those unconscious motivations into consciousness. That in itself tends to change things, such that you begin to respond to situations with more integrity, meaning with your whole being.
I’m all for learning from my own mistakes, and allowing for spontaneity to occur guarantees that plenty of mistakes will occur. But doesn’t it make sense to consciously address the unconscious wellsprings of our actions? It’s efficient, at least. I realize some people don’t think such a thing is possible, and that other people think you’d be messing with your authenticity or something. But I’d disagree with both assertions. I think the fact is, even the most deliberate of us act spontaneously more often than we think.
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I would add that the glide into reflection can be spontaneous or not. I think a category must be introduced for this to make any sense, and that is ‘habit.’ One can do things without reflection, but it isn’t necessarily spontaneous due to habit. What happens is that the range of responses is cut off - because of judgments about reality, what being good is, about oureslves, self-image and so on (and all the attendant fear underneath this). We can hesitate instantly to do something and the opportunity is lost. But this hesitation while instant and without (conscious) reflection is not quite spontaneous, but rather the result of habit.
Or a dream where one is not violent, but ‘should have been’ - intervening in a gang rape, for example. In dreams the doing is not necessarily the same. Violence or non-violence being in fact other things there.
). Rather, it seems that the spontenaity happens first followed by a bit of self-reflection. Most of the time, what I find is rather inane, other times it might upset some people if they knew (but then it’s my secret), and on rare occassions, I find my motives really are of moral significance and it becomes appropriate to reconsider my intentions (and that’s a