Black Box Justice or “Why free will concept is obsolete”

Why and how people should be judged is a hot topic dating back to the time that people started living together. The main concept that is used for a long time is the free will concept, and it is actually not a good model, it was just working close enough for a while till the paradigms started to shift with the discoveries around how brain parts work. We need a simple and flexible model that explains the essence of justice to make it work with coming changes in the society.

Think that you were living in an island that doesn’t have any other intelligent beings. Would social norms have a meaning for you anymore? Why do we have laws and social norms? What kind of a problem do they solve?

To answer that, we first need to understand the fundamentals of how we interact with our surroundings, and why we do it.

Think that you want to open a door. What you need to do is, using the handle right? How did you come up with the idea that you need to use the handle? You have seen somebody opening the door using the handle before. So you captured this memory, somebody uses the handle, and door opens as a following event. Therefore, using the handle causes the door to open. So whenever you want to open the door, you should do the same, use the handle.

The life that we are living in, is about having an interaction with the objects surrounding us. We have expectations from the future, and to reach that expectations we take decisions and actions. That decisions and actions are based on what happened before, and what might follow our actions.

Would you have a trust level for the door? Maybe some of you will be puzzled with the idea of “trusting the door”. Think that the handle of the door is a little bit off. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t work. Now consider what you thought before, I think now we can say that “You don’t trust the door”.

We expect the same actions to cause the same results. Sadly, sometimes we do the necessary work but we can’t get what we expect as a deserved outcome. Effort with unexpected result is not fair and makes us feel desperate, sad, anxious, angry. Whatever negative, unwanted feelings. What do we want to do? We want to get out of that mood.

The best way to deal with the unreliable door is, fixing the handle. As a result it starts behaving as we expect when we make the necessary effort, using the key on it.

Now suppose that you have a friend Güven. You need to clean the dishes, you come up with an idea, half will be washed by each person. So you do your side of the work, but rest of the dishes are never washed. You had an agreement, which means you knew what to do to cause the expected behavior which is washing rest of the dishes. You did the necessary action, but it just didn’t happen. It is not fair right?

Unlike the unstable door, you can’t just open and fix Güven’s brain and make things happen in a more determinable way. You need to delegate the fix since only he can change his own behaviors. What would you do first? You would first need to convince him that his behavior was wrong right? You need to tell him what he needed to do, what consequences this behavior had (why), and how he can change himself.

“Why” part is very important because it will let us know how we will start the process for fixing the behavior, but it is also very complex.

Here is an idea that you could use with a person that has an idea about what is “fair”. You could just say “Look, you broke your promise”. You could say “My trust is broken because it doesn’t make sense to rely on you anymore”. This would mean you wouldn’t be able to fix problems together anymore because there is no causational relationship between his behaviors (washing the dishes) and your interaction (agreement) with him, like the door that sometimes opens and sometimes doesn’t open.

The problem we talked about happens with normal people, let’s think of a situation that we would not stumble upon frequently. Think that you know Adil. You know Adil for a while, you haven’t seen him doing something weird before. One day he showed up with a piece of chocolate and he told you that he stole it.

You are a person with somewhat justice feeling, you know that this behavior is wrong and it needs to be fixed. Would it be possible to convince such a person? Most probably he is missing a very fundamental fact about how to behave, maybe how ownership works, so you can’t build your case using any argument that would be valid for a normal person.

It doesn’t need to be the reason always, but some people commit crime because they miss some functional parts in their brain. As an example, psychopaths don’t have the center in their brain that filters antisocial behaviors from possibility of actions that they can take. If there is a competition against somebody on chess, and they need to win, they will also see the possibility of even killing the person but they just won’t take that action whereas a normal person will not even see that option because his norm receptor just blocked it.

As another example, some people are not able to see abstract behavior patterns. You might have hard time trying to explain why Güven needed to keep his promise and wash the dishes, but the next time he makes a promise about watering the plants together, he would break his promise again because he would be considering these two promises as different things. Not as two instances of the “To achieve success together, one must make the effort he promised” norm.

Some people are bad at math, some people are bad at literacy. Interpersonal skills are much more complex than anything else since there are lots of hard-to-guess parts.

The capacity of working with norms, or justice feeling has lots of levels, like math skills also have levels. Some people may not get social norms at all, some people might recognize social norms but they may not understand their reasons. Some people might understand the reasons, but they may not have the capacity to define new social norms. Some people might be able to define new social norms, but the norms might be so rigid that it starts having problems in some edge cases. Some people might be good at all, and they might be even capable of defining norms of norms.

Reductio ad absurdum, reducing problem to an extreme case might help us understanding why things might go really wrong. Then we can build up our model from there. Let’s talk about the people that have absolutely no idea. They can’t even understand the basics of interpersonal collaboration. If you definitely know that the behavior is wrong, but some people are so broken that they just can’t understand even ground rules of the society, what do you do? It is obvious that you can’t reason and explain, because everything you use to construct your argument is not understood because of a capacity issue. It is like a physicist trying to explain string theory to a random person. It just doesn’t work!

Marcus Aurelius has a good advice:

“Learn to be indifferent to what makes no difference.”

Unlike a normal person, we need to convince the potential offender that he is not capable of understanding even basic rules, so he just needs to listen to the society. So what is the solution in this case? Well, you object to it firmly saying it is not open for discussion, it is just wrong. Everybody he faces do the same, so person in question understands that his view is not important, it is just wrong and everybody knows it. The consequence of even discussing this is clear: Ostracization. “You remember the guy that was constantly joking about beating people? Let’s not invite him again”. This is what we do as human beings about stealing, killing, sexual harassment, all other things that are universally and factually wrong. These are things that you can’t even make jokes about, it is just not pleasant. If people feel like your jokes are a way of opening it into discussion, you are out. Of course this way of handling problems is only applicable for antisocial behaviors, for people that don’t get social norms at all. As an example if we were talking about convincing somebody to be more punctual in certain cases, that would need a constructive explanation to fix the problem. Because a good explanation doesn’t only fix one instance of a problematic behavior, but also fixes future alike-problems, instead of solving each by “Do this do that” approach.

Did telling people that killing is bad work in the past though? There are lots of well produced documentaries about the mafia in US back in the time as an example that you can learn a lot about how things worked without technology and good education, i would definitely suggest you to watch some of them. People would be killed or tortured, body would disappear and even in the case that the perpetrator was known, he wouldn’t be caught because there would be no evidence left. There were no fingerprint matching technology, no cameras, no information about average people since there was no social media or complex electronic governmental systems. It was a time that serial killers could continue what they are doing for years.

All these were happening just 50 years ago, can you even imagine what could have been happening in ancient times in the cities? No technology to catch offenders, people are as illiterate as a stone. How would you be able to fix that? Apparently the problem arises from the fact that you just don’t get caught. Why don’t you get caught? Because “Nobody is watching”. What if somebody was actually watching?

Epicurus has an interesting idea:

“We need to set our affections on some good man and keep him constantly before our eyes, so that we may live as if he were watching us and do everything as if he saw what we were doing.”

Well, a good idea but this will not make majority of the people to follow the advice since it doesn’t include a fear factor for those who are not seeking justice.

I will try not to get into the discussion of if the religions are right or wrong, but here is the thing. The idea of a god was very useful in this case. There is a god, he watches you even while sleeping. He says stealing, cheating on your wife, lying et cetera is bad, end of discussion. What will happen if you steal? You will go to hell, and believe me you don’t want to be there. There are plenty of pineapple pizzas!

So people don’t want to go to hell, that’s why even if they can’t understand why they shouldn’t steal they don’t steal, but is this end of the story? Well, this created its own problems. People quickly figured out that there are people that just can’t help themselves doing wrong things, because they were literally crazy. If you are not free to choose your actions, would it be fair to be judged by that? It didn’t take a long time till they found an answer. One of the solutions was saying “Well, if you don’t have control over your actions, you are not responsible for it”. So the crazy people started to be put under rehabilitation instead of prisons. Well, there were also practices of burning those people claiming demons possessed them but let’s not make it controversial here.

People were aware of environmental conditions’ effects on our decisions for a fairly long time, so this “Well, if you don’t have control over your actions, you are not responsible for it” got more and more detailed questioning by time, and it had different philosophical reflections in different parts of the world. It started to be known as the free will. It was an important subject because it determined if you will suffer or be happy eternally. Also it determined if you should be punished on earth or not.

Think that there is a fountain in a village, and after generations, people realized that it is actually poisonous. Does it matter if people stopped drinking water from that fountain because they thought it has bad souls inside or they thought it was poisonous? Both would accomplish the same expected behavior right? Think that we answered yes, it doesn’t matter. Actually bad souls version might even be better because it is scarier. But what happens if after some time somebody comes to the village and he actually knows it was poisonous because lead was used in its construction, so it should be removed and iron should be used instead? Now it makes a difference considering the acceptance of the villagers right?

Free will concept has this kind of a serious problem. Now the technology is far far more advanced, and we know which part of the brain does what, what happens when a brain part gets damaged. We know which hormone might cause which behavior when it is secreted more or less. As Robert Sapolsky gives as an example in his human behavioral biology course, there are even cases that after living a very quiet life, a person suddenly punches somebody at work, cheats his wife, then steals money from his company and just disappears as a result of a disease. If our behaviors are determined by birth and environmental effects, how can we be kept responsible for our actions?

Also, in an interesting way, because now people are watched by each other quite closely because of the technology (remember here at the end of the paragraph), the actual god concept still stays in lives of the people that believe in it, but it is leaving the judgement area, being replaced by a more secular way of dealing with things by time. Not because of some ideological concerns, but just because it works better this way. It doesn’t make sense to put somebody to prison because he committed a crime according to religion but he didn’t harm anybody right? By time, divine justice and justice system started getting further and further apart from each other, and justice system actually started sitting somewhere very near to what our model suggests as a result of cultural evolution, it was just not aware of it. This happened also interestingly in parallel with the discussion of “Do things still exist if they are not observed by somebody”. As to say, if there is a chair, but there is nobody around that observes it because it is just in a corner of the universe, does it exist? To answer this question, people said that there is an ultimate observer that sees everything, so everything exists. Nietzsche found an interesting way of solving the problem, he defined something named “Monad”, and said everything consists of these tiny conceptual elements. Because all monads are observing each other, there was no need for a global observer anymore. Sounds familiar?

Well, let’s go back to free will. Once a working model, now free will started causing problems. The solution is simple. As we explained in the beginning of this subject, we should think that wrong behavior is not punished according to the free will concept. The actual reason is that, we need to delegate the behavior fix to that person since we can’t alter his brain directly in the intended way. We can’t get into his brain and fix it like fixing the door handle because his brain is a black box for us. Human society consists of billions of black boxes. For an individual we know what is getting in (voice, smell, vision…) and we know what is the output (behaviors) but we don’t know what is actually happening inside. After observing for a while we start being able to simulate the reasoning, but that’s all.

So if we don’t know what exactly is happening inside, but we know his conclusion is deadly wrong, what should we do? We need to delegate the decision that he needs to reach, letting him coming up to it using his own way, maybe with a little bit of help that we could offer using some empathy that we have. To do that first he needs to accept the fact that he is wrong (guilt, shame) and/or he needs to realize that he is not benefiting from his action (penalty), and he needs to try to change as a result to be part of the society again as an accepted team member. He shouldn’t be an example to others, because we need to be sure that the behavior doesn’t spread like a virus to the society. Two very fundamental reasons. A properly designed justice system has the objective of making society work, like fixing lots of different sizes of gears inside a clock so that they work accordingly with each other. Of course rigid tuning can introduce its own problems, but we will discuss that under another topic.

We actually possess the groundwork for this kind of a system even biologically. People get angry when they feel they are treated unfairly and they seek revenge, they can’t even help themselves not thinking about it. And the fulfillment of revenge is generally about preventing the perpetrator from benefiting from his action. It has an unconscious reason, if an action is not beneficial, people will stop doing it. But well, since it is a biological and unconscious process, it can go wrong in lots of cases. That’s why we are interested in philosophy, to do things consciously.

Lets go back to our model’s objectives. So justice is not about divine judgement of some intrinsic moral entity that is linked with but not inside the body (soul) anymore, but it is about

1. Making a piece of the society (consciousness, individual) behave in a way that social gearwheels can work properly
2. Making individuals behave within behavioral borders (laws, social norms) that are created in a way which is accepted as ‘legit’ ground for forming consensus (democracy, gossip, what the elders say…), so that people can continue achieving their regular planned expectations from life, instead of getting a chaotic uncertainty.

Our model also solves the problem with mad people. If you can’t change by being talked or being shown that you will not benefit from that behavior, what’s the point of punishing that person? Treatment is a better option.

Especially in an age that the concepts started to drift, it will be very useful to change the paradigm that we are using.

To our day, when we were talking about consciousness, we would be talking about living beings. What will happen when real AI comes along? Current computer software are well defined. If you click the button, you see a popup. If you see something else, the code gets fixed. When real AI comes, things won’t be that simple. We will be talking about an intelligence that grew by living different experiences for a long time, and became unique. If a robot comes in the morning and starts using your space in the workplace, you can’t just throw it away. You need to fix that behavior, like how you would fix with a human colleague. People will need to start thinking of different ways to change unwanted behaviors of AI, which will be closer to how to deal with a human being.

What would happen if much later people get to a technological point that if somebody commits a crime we could just fix his brain like a machine? Since the problem is fixed without the traditional ways, would we still need to punish that person?

These are interesting topics to discuss, and well… Free will concept is absolutely helpless here.