I just happened across this extraordinary paragraph in recent law review article (entitled "Why Judy Norman Acted in Reasonable Self-Defense: An Abused Woman and a Sleeping Man," 23 Buff. Women's Law Journal 65 (2007)), and I thought I'd share it with you all:
The prevailing belief is that individuals are independent, autonomous beings, and therefore, free to leave, to exit, any situation at any time. I disabuse the students in my Violence Against Women class of this notion on the first day by asking them if they have ever stayed in any situation – a job, a school, a living arrangement, a relationship – longer than they should have? And if so, why? I start with my own example. I have stayed at Temple Law School longer than I should have. I dislike the administration, but I like my colleagues, friends and relatives in Philadelphia. I love my apartment, which I could not afford in New York City – where I would prefer to live. The reasons we have for not leaving are an unwillingness to abandon or hurt others, lack of money, lack of alternatives, and the belief that things will get better, e.g. that the current administration will be replaced by an improved model. Students also cite fear of change – the belief that the devil you know is better than the devil you don=t know. In truth, the inability to exit is a common fact in all of our lives.
Now, this was written by a colleague of mine at Temple (as you can tell), Prof. Marina Angel, so I want to be especially respectful of the rule of avoiding ad hominem or
"I (and others) have stayed in particular situations longer than we should have. Therefore, the belief that individuals are free to exit any situation at any time is false."
That doesn't work -- that just proves the proposition "Sometimes people make bad choices," and is irrelevant to the proposition that they don't have, and don't make, choices.
And it is also off if it means to say:
"The belief that individuals are free to exit any situation at any time is false, illustrated by the fact that I would prefer to live in NYC, but I am still in Philadelphia."
I hear this sort of things from friends from time to time, and it infuriates me.
"You know what I really want to do?? I really, really want to chuck it all, leave my job and start a scuba-diving school on the Baja peninsula . . .""So why don't you?", I ask.
"Oh, well, you know . . . because I have friends and family here, and all sorts of other ties, and I kinda like my apartment, and it would be such a hassle to move, and . . ."
"So," I say, "you actually don't want to chuck it all and move -- given all the other things about your life, you have chosen to stay where you are. You have a fantasy about another life -- interesting (I didn't know you were so into scuba-diving), but not to be confused with the absence of a choice. You've made your choice: you actually don't want to chuck it all, given everything about your life (your apartment, your family, your job, your friends, your unwillingness to make others mad or unhappy, etc.) at this moment, and pretending otherwise just enables you to avoid responsibility for the choice you're making by pretending that it's imposed on you from above."
I think I can trace the moment that I became a libertarian to discussions like this in my first-year contracts class, when we were discussing "duress" (and again with "unconscionability"), when I heard so many of my classmates echoing Prof. Angel's sentiments on this matter. Perhaps Judy Norman (who killed her abusive husband while he was sleeping) truly "had no choice" -- but you won't persuade me of that, at least, if you begin by saying that that is the general condition of humankind, because it is not. Or to put it differently: if my friend really has no choice about whether to start up the scuba school in Baja, then it's pretty easy (trivial, in fact) to say that Judy Norman had no choice. But the major proposition is so deeply wrong that I remain un-disabused.
Personally I am trapped in an abusive relationship. Every week the government takes 30% of my money and I can't seem to find a way out. Because I can't, does that mean I can work to overthrow the feds?
One sense says, "Given the circumstances, it would be unreasonable for the person to choose differently than he did." This is the sense which I think the author means.
The other sense says, "The actor is actually unable to do other than he did." This is the sense that you mean.
It's like when we say something is "feasible." I might say to my girlfriend, "Oh, my love, I'd love to come meet your family for Christmas, but given my budget, it's just not feasible." Of course, it is not true that I literally do not have the money to fly out to meet my girlfriend's family. If it were life-or-death, I could find the money. What I mean to say is, "Given my situation, it's not prudent for me to spend the money to fly out and meet your family."
I would mean feasible in a difference sense if I said, "The engineers tried to build a safer airplane, but it just wasn't feasible. Technology just hasn't reached that point yet." In that sense, I mean "feasible" to say: "It just can't be done."
Both senses of these words are helpful, but conflating the two will lead to discussions like this, where one side means one sense and the other side means the other.
..Jesus, Mary and Joseph, they just got overthrown 4 days ago!....but if you want to overthrow them again, get hoppin'. Two years comes around mighty fast, and you've already wasted 4 days.
sk
More on topic, the main element that seems to be missing from Professor Angel's analysis is the inertia factor. This is broader than the fear of change point that she makes at the end of the quoted paragraph, as inertia plays a role even where people would otherwise actively choose to make the change. Overall, it seems to me that the better argument for her to make would be to emphasize the slippery slope: the more we stay in a situation, the harder it is to leave.
Strange...
Hold up a second, let's not pretend that "should" is some sort of stable concept. The notion varies not just from person to person but from moment to moment in the same psyche! There is on absolute scoring chart of "yes, stay in relationship" versus "no, end relationship". All of that baloney is perpetually being sorted, surmised, and resized in the mind.
If one is to follow her example, the only way one "should" live is a state of utter bliss in which all druthers are instantly and effortlessly had.
Now, this was very asymmetric. I was continuing studying combat martial arts, and I was very much aware of the difference between me, as a trained individual striking her and her as an untrained individual threatening me with a knife. This lead to a lot more hesitation on my part than there should have been to respond violently in my self-defence against the continual escalation of violence against me.
Eventually, I realized that my *lack* of response was helping drive the cycle. She would attack me (and sometimes inflict minor injuries), feel guilty about it, feel out of control, get out of control, attack me, etc. and the cycle would continue. I realized that if I wasn't going to leave I had an obligation to fight back so I started returning real attacks with play-fighting and this helped, but not enough.
One day, she hit me from behind on the back with a blunt object (in this case a coffee cup, but this is after having been attacked with more serious weapons). My response was very rapid and forceful. My slap knocked her glasses across the room, bent their frame, and caused her to go blind for something like 10 seconds. That was the last time she ever attacked me with a weapon.
There are a few differences here. I stayed because I felt I was less at risk by staying than she was by me leaving. And when I responded with injurious force, it was in response to an immediate attack and the threat of another (I didn't know what she hit me with and if she had a knife in her other hand). This was self-defence. Attacking someone in his sleep is not.
The concept of a deterministic universe was simply the fever dream of an Einstein hopeful he could keep the math easier? I mean, even the experiments that allegedly disprove free will can still be resisted.
Powerful private actors are able to control the benefits and costs that will follow from some of our most important decisions. I think it's quite reasonable for us collectively to decide that with respect to some decisions others should be regulated to prevent them from wielding undue influence. "Freedom" is a poorly defined term, given that we live in a world of massively networked influence. This post latches onto one meaning and reaches an unwarranted conclusion.
But the author doesn't really do justice to the position that abused women are in. She hasn't been subjected to repeated physical and psychological abuse to keep her job at Temple. I doubt the dean gives her a black eye every time she's caught looking at a brochure for Columbia of SUNY.
I agree that mere inertia isn't enough for self defense. Still, I think it's certainly possible for a person to condition another , by psychological and physical abuse, into a position where the victim is unable, practically, to exercise her own free will. Doesn't have to be a battered wife. Jose Padilla was basically unable and unwilling to assist in his own defense for months after having been able to meet with his lawyers.
The harder stretch here isn't that a woman can be psychologically trapped in an abusive relationship. The problem is that shooting the husband in his sleep is an act of resistance against this psychological trap, in the same way that running away is. The challenge is in expressing the trap in such a way that it would prevent her from forms of resistance like escaping, but not from shooting her husband.
In other words, the author here not only needs to explain why she doesn't just leave Temple. She needs to explain why she would choose to murder the dean rather than leave.
I think there is a different issue. People should be responsible within reason for the decisions they make. When I decided to stay with my violently abusive girlfriend in college, I did so because it was the only set of tradeoffs I could accept responsibly in my own eyes. I accepted that there was risk there.
I have watched a number of interviews of battered women and have been struck by the reasons that they stay (which largely, IMO, come down to ego). The most common one I have seen is "I am willing to sacrifice everything for my kids." Hence the act of staying shows that she is a good mother. However at the same time, it means that one finds value in being abused and will tend to contribute to it, or at least stop looking for ways to solve the underlying problems. I think that most men who are in that situation also find value (as I initially did) in restraint in the face of violence. Note that physical abuse of men is probably as common as that of women, and that women are more likely to use weapons in that abuse, etc.
(BTW, in part because of my experience, I told my wife prior to us getting married that if she slaps me, I won't hit back, but if she punches me or attacks me with a weapon I will, and if she attacks me from behind, she stands a good )
The key problem though IMO is the lack of moral strength necessary to make choices proudly while trying to make a happy life. This means being willing to keep looking for solutions while in the relationship and being willing to get out when that is necessary.
According to Merriam-Webster's, "entitle" in the sense of "give a title to" is over 500 years old, which is older than the sense of "give a right to." One is free to argue for change, of course, but "should be" suggests actual error, which this isn't.
Good call. Post is entitled to entitle his post how he pleases.
The question is, how did that article get published?
And that's what Angel is talking about too. It's frankly rather obvious that's what she meant. Whether or not she's *right* is a separate question, but she's not being incoherent.
Neither is your friend who wanted to scuba dive is just using an idiomatic way to express an unfulfilled desire. He/she is not complaining about a lack of free will. If conversations like that drove you to become a libertarian, I'd encourage you to reexamine that chain of reasoning.
Also, such poor analogizing invites various knuckleheads (as witnessed here) to a) miss the point or b) miss the point and conclude that if a woman being in an abusive relationship is on par with having a job you don't like, then women are merely being silly when they stay in such relationships.
On the other hand, there are always attorneys (new and old) who love to meet idiots like Prof. Angel in the courtroom, especially with juries.
Rather, it's a question of to what extent the choices open to one person are constrained, or which constraints one faces in a particular situation. The constraints on Ms. Angel's freedom of action are relatively mild compared to the constraints that I imagine an abused woman (or man) faces.
I didn't say it was. I said that some people will read Post's criticism that way.
This type of thinking is unforetunately engraved in our culture.
Perhaps the abuse should mitigate sentencing, but she is still a killer. Some murder is worse than other murder.
gattsuru, I don't understand why Libet is considered to disprove free will. At most it proves that what we perceive as our consciousness doesn't have free will, but that's a conceit. "I" am not my self-aware consciousness. This is the same error as "I think therefore I am" -- it should be "I think, therefore something is."
The greater argument, and I didn't take a single philosphy class, is what it would look like if we didn't have free will? What paths have I taken differently? I certainly thought before I acted, but how could I prove that I had any choice in that matter?
There is also the chaos theory analysis: With our limited computing power it makes more sense to analyze things as stochastic processes. If you could model every molecule of air you could determine whether this butterfly-flap will cause a wind to become a tornado; if you could model every molecule and ion in every neuron and every strand of DNA in the body, and every external force, you could predict the outcome. But you'll do well enough with rules of thumb like I'll ring the bell if I think I'll get a food pellet.
Angel isn't defending the wife because that's where the legal, moral, or behavioral logic takes her.
I believe she's defending the wife because she thinks the husband needed killing.
Vigilantism, nothing more.
2. You may get along with her famously, or perhaps she encouraged or is likely to have encouraged you to write this. I may presume too much, but . . .
Otherwise, as to her line -- "but I like my colleagues" -- now, not so much. Did you reflect carefully on this course of action? Bearing in mind, as you must have, the inevitable comments this will attract here. It is like her quoting you (in part) at, I don't know, a meeting of your ideological opposites, fanning derisive catcalls (from people protected by masks) while whispering "be nice, now" and smiling . . . and then publishing all the results. Not maximal collegiality.
Really? To the lawyer providing the best possible defense to the next Judy Norman, this is quite relevant.
I agree with those who say that "have no choice" does not mean "it is literally impossible to do otherwise." It's idiomatic for something like "it would be unreasonably difficult to do otherwise." I don't think Prof. Angel's personal situation falls into this category, though, and her assertion that it does trivializes the very real constraints other people face.
But in cases where there's a compelling reason to believe someone is going to hunt you down and kill you, killing them in their sleep seems a hell of a lot more reasonable - so much so If I believed that to be the case, I doubt I could vote to convict if I were on the jury.
Imagine "free will" as a smaller circle.
Wrapping around that smaller circle with a bigger circle called "circumstances/reality/fate/inherent limitations."
Within your circumstances/reality/fate/limiations (the bigger circle), which is what you have been given, that which isn't up to you to break beyond, that which you have no choice in deciding--you still have choices that you could make (a smaller circle) within your limitations (the bigger circle).
I think this arguement of whether we have free choices will always persist if we insist on looking as a mutually exclusive relationship. The way to resolve the argument, at least on a practical matter, may be to say that we have some choices within the choices that we don't have.
Let's say a person has an IQ of 100. That person is obviously more limited in his choices, as compared to someone who has an IQ of 140. But the IQ 100 person still has choices within the confine of his given IQ.
I know. The argument then becomes, at least from the folks who say that we don't have choices, "Well, then the IQ 100 person really does't have choices!"
Sure, we can debate this till the cows come home, because this is like debating a chicken-and-egg question. Which comes first? First, will we ever know? Unless we arrive at some revolutionary and ground breaking understanding of genetic biology and epistemeology, the chicken and egg question will not be resolved. Likewise, the argument about do we or do not *really* have choices is unlikely going to be resolved no matter how much we debate or how long we argue about it, unless we arrive at some revolutionary and groundbreaking understanding about truth.
Second, do we really need to know? That is, who cares? Life is happening away while we debate. I don't think insisting on nailing the exact definition of "choice" or "freedom" is a good use of our time or resources. Maybe I fail to undertand the important of this issue in law and politics/government, because I don't have formal training in either. But, as a lay person, I think the solution of using the concept that we have choices within the lack of choices that we have is a much more pragmatic approach.
Hilary Clinton says, "Bloom where you are planted." It seems to be working for her. She strikes me as someone who is on her way towards self-realization
And by the way, I'd love to hear a conversation between the legal scholars to talk to the mathematcians about this concept of choices. If we use the concept of the "concentric circles theorem," can we use the concept of calculus, and imagine that both the big and small circles get smaller and smaller, or bigger or bigger, approaching infinity--what would our conclusions about free choices be? I wonder if there is a mathematical approach towards the question about free will.
How are these two situations related?
1. If I leave this person, I will suffer some inconvenience, I'll live farther from the market, and I'll have to find another means of transportation, etc.
2. If I leave this person, he will hunt me down and kill or injure me or my children.
The prospect of living farther from the market is a minor difficulty to face. But the prospect of being murdered is a major difficulty to face. Both are consequences of leaving some person or persons.
Her point seems to be that although most anyone can relate to the first situation and weigh the costs and benefits somewhat reasonably, many nevertheless will find some difficulty in the decision.
But few have really experienced, and few really understand, the terror engendered by the second situation. That terror makes the decision to leave extraordinarily difficult.
Anyone who has known abused children, or adults who grew up abused, can understand that phenomenon. Abused children tend to love their parents despite the abuse. They fear leaving their parents. They just hope the abuse will stop.
Even adults have difficulty leaving abusers. Those who have had difficulty leaving a job where the boss is abusive can understand that.
Abusers prey on that human tendency. That's part of what makes their behavior abusive, and their success at preventing their targets from leaving inspires them to escalate their abuse.
That's why in some cases the defense "he needed killin'" makes perfect sense, and not just to the person who raises it.
This kind of world of meaningful choices won't exist until we get into Heaven, if such a place exists.
I forget the name of the logical fallacy which involves using a word one way in the premises and another way in the conclusion.
Free can mean uncoerced, or can mean costless. She switches between these meanings. Of course these meanings are related. "'Your money or your life!' 'I'm thinking.'"
My own pet peeve when "free" is used in ads to mean "for sale bundled with something else at a marked up price"; free donut with purchase of SUV.
This was self-defence. Attacking someone in his sleep is not. Thanks for sharing your story - good post. But sometimes attacking someone in their sleep is self defense.
It has to do with the feasibility of exit. The most dangerous time, that is, when an abused person is at the highest risk of being killed, is when they leave. And if you've made the decision that killing/disbabling the abuser is a necessary step for self-defense, doing it while they are sleeping can be tactically the best option.
Just another class/race/gender Marxist. Wouldm't it be nice if we had a genuine meritocracy in this country?
I believe the term you were looking for is "misandry".
For example, if Mitt Romney takes his son for a rural hike, and the son is stricken, and the only person within 20 miles offers to perform life-saving CPR (and to help carry the son 10 miles back to the Romneys' vehicle) in exchange for Mr. Romney's written promise to pay $500 million for the service, and Mr. Romney signs, and the stranger saves the boy, who are we to question the enforceability of that contract? Mr. Romney, after all, had a choice. He considered the trade-offs and consequences, and chose to avoid inertia. Only whining hogwash, or maybe vigilantism, would attempt to excuse him from those consequences after he has received the benefit he sought.
At least, that is how I understand some people to view the issue.
Faced with a sleeping abuser, an abused person has the choice of leaving -- and perhaps of living in hiding or else being hunted down and severely punished or killed. Escape into that kind of life (or death) might arguably be no escape at all.
And if the abuser has, in fact, made statements to that effect ("leave and I'll kill you, stay and I'll keep hurting you") -- if one reasonably believes that only killing the assailant will end the danger to one's life -- I say that killing the abuser, even in his sleep, is self-defense. It may be enshrined in local law that one's life has to be in immediate danger to plead self-defense, and so jail might be the reasonably expected outcome here---but moral right is on the side of the defender, assuming the defender honestly believed the choices were kill or be killed (eventually).
Winner!
"Why Norman Bates Acted in Reasonable Self-Defense: An Abused Boy and a Sleeping Mother"
Not quite perfect, but pretty close.
The first explanation is that, while she dislikes the administration, she likes "my colleagues, friends and relatives in Philadelphia [and] love my apartment, which I could not afford in New York City - where I would prefer to live." For reasons David Post gave, this doesn't suggest that Angel has no choice about whether to live in Philly, she actually has a choice and made the right one.
The second explanation is "fear of change - the belief that the devil you know is better than the devil you don't know." Depending on how substantial it is, we might be inclined to say that Angel has no choice about whether to leave Philly. For example, if Angel fears change the way that woman on The Maury Show fears pickles, then I'd be inclined to say she doesn't have any choice about whether to leave Philly. If, on the other hand, she were capable of stiffening her spine and hopping the Acela (i.e. if her fear of the unknown made her weak-willed, not compelled) then I'd say she does have a choice.
All in all, I think people are very rarely in the grips of a compulsion, but frequently weak-willed. It is thus rare that individuals are not "free to leave, to exit, a situation at any time," but often that they, out of laziness or some other vice, choose not to do so. And when they're weak-willed, I want to say, they (and they alone) are responsible for what they choose to do.
If you knew Prof. Angel, you'd understand that is characteristic of her. Temple now has a new Dean, and the old Dean is now, I believe, faculty. But when I was her student she was always complaining about the Dean.
- - - -
That's because I've not yet chosen to share it with you.
I had a similar situation to yours, although my crazy ex never used any weapons. Every once in a while, she'd take a swing at me, and I stuck around for about a year after the first time she tried it. I didn't fight back because I was bigger/better trained/etc. What I would do is get her hands under control and hang on until she'd calmed down, while she let out a stream of verbal abuse.
What ended the relationship was that one time she got a hand loose and actually split my lip open, and I lost my temper and hit her back. Once. Open handed, very loud slap across her cheek. It shocked the hell out of her, and she couldn't fathom why I dropped her like a bad habit the following day.
When I slapped her was when I realized that she wasn't getting any better, but I was getting worse, and if I stayed any longer, I'd go nuts.
bearing replies,
"Depends on the jury, I guess, and how the statute protecting the right to self-defense is written?"
Well, to take this out of the purely hypothetical, here in WA the relevant statute (RCW 9A.16.050) reads:
"Homicide is also justifiable when committed either:
"(1) In the lawful defense of the slayer, ... when there is reasonable ground to apprehend a design on the part of the person slain to commit a felony or to do some great personal injury to the slayer or to any such person, and there is imminent danger of such design being accomplished; or
"(2) In the actual resistance of an attempt to commit a felony upon the slayer... [emphasis added]"
In light of this, especially considering the last of the highlighted clauses, I would be appalled if any jury in WA acquitted in such a case, unless the killer were restrained or tied up in such a way that it was, literally, physically impossible to just vacate the premises while the husband was asleep.
Similar arguments have been made in other cases, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. The most (in)famous such prosecution in recent years was the Lorena Bobbitt "malicious wounding" case in 1993. In Lorena Bobbitt's instance, as anyone over the age of 12 at the time will recall, the jury acquitted on a temporary insanity theory based on a pattern of marital abuse finally causing her to snap and, um, "bob it," after John raped her and then passed out drunk.
In closing -- on the issue of "choice," a modest thought: I once had a law professor warn the class that there inevitably comes a day when each and every practicing attorney gets so disgusted with his/her/its profession that he/she/it decides it would be better to just chuck it all and go open a bar in the North Woods. But none actually do. What conclusion should one draw from that generally correct observation? Are we "trapped?" Not "free to leave?" Afflicted by "inertia?" Lazy? Comfortable? Have too many student loans to forgo the guaranteed income stream? Or maybe it's because we practicing attorneys have an understanding of the potentially devastating effect of dram shop liability, and are all too smart to go into an inherently risky business like tavern owning...
STOP FEEDING THE GOVERNMENT BEAST BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.
WE ARE REACHING THE TIPPING POINT.
WE MUST COLD-TURKEY THE GOVERNMENT!
Her point is that we do not actually have free will. An unfavorable analysis of cost-benefit equates to the inability to choose something.
This is bunk, and I have thought so since I first heard it expressed during my Frosh year at UC Santa Cruz. It was rarely explained clearly. It was an idea always cloaked in obscure jargon that made students feel ignorant. By the time the Frosh penetrate the jargon to the simply stupid ideas underneath, they had already adopted the idea as their own. Only primitive thinkers who don't read Chomsky would disagree.
She seems to neglect the valid reason that some stay in abusive relationships: they think they will be killed if they leave, versus only being beat up if they stay. Our system does a poor job of protecting peoples safety, and a pretty good job of nailing folks who commit murder. This is not encouraging to someone who wants to run from their hypercontrolling, violent and vindictive spouse.
I remember taping a guys shoulder together with electrical tape and strips of t-shirt. He had a gash about three inches long and a half inch deep from a giant glass beer stein. His girlfriend had swung for his head, but missed. He had turned on the light in his bedroom while she was napping, you see. This was her way of telling him to find his sweatshirt in the dark.
We couldn't take him to the hospital because he was on probation, and he had had a beer, a parole violation. He got probation after their last "big" fight, in which she beat him until he fled the house, and she chased him (she was naked) into their gravel street, continuing the beating. He pushed her away and she fell, just as the sheriff arrived.
We all told him to leave her then, but he didn't. I think he felt like a hero around her, for taking the abuse. She was also a real "hottie" until you got to know the evil that lived in her.
I think the was they met is emblematic of this type of relationship: He pulled her out of the surf after she jumped off a cliff attempting suicide.
He had a choice, and he knew it, that whole time.
And probably end up in jail for hitting her. After my ex- hit me twice, I told her if she did it again I was calling the cops. And then I promptly moved out. Jail didn't appeal to me.
bama1l - get out now, while you still have time and before you are hopelessly in debt. If you stay, after you graduate learn to be a real lawyer by working for the public defender or the DA for a few years. Then let us know how important law school was other than as a necessary credential. Don't know if any states allow you to "read the law" while working with an attorney before taking the bar, but that might be a better way to go.
The prevailing belief is that individuals are independent, autonomous beings, and therefore, free to leave, to exit, any situation at any time. I disabuse the students in my Violence Against Women class of this notion on the first day by asking them if they have ever stayed in any situation – a job, a school, a living arrangement, a relationship – longer than they should have?
</blockquote>
I think the second sentence disproves the first, or at the very least provides evidence to that effect. Let's assume that no one had ever stayed in a situation "longer than they should have." How would that prove individual autonomy if the instant a circumstance turned out to an individual's disadvantage, they always left? Wouldn't that actually prove that there was no free will, and we were all slaves to cost-benefit mechanisms? Does not the existence of bad choices confirm, not disprove, the notion of free will?
This is not to say that I disagree with the thesis (at least as commenter trad and anon defined it). I just find her argument bad.
I can be at a restaurant or a party or a movie and say truthfully, "I really didn't want to come here."
That does NOT mean that I was kidnapped. I chose to defer to someone else's wishes on where we went on that occasion.
i
Nick
And no, I don't believe all lawyers are parasites, but anyone who makes a living whining about oppression is. Claiming, as you do, that the members of victim groups have choice undermines this most potent of special interest groups.
Suggesting that shooting a sleeping abuser is the single viable solution does not seem to have much validity in terms of factual reality. Is it possible that a suggestion that the abused woman psychologically failed to recognize any other alternative may be true? I dunno...that's past my pay grade.
And I think that a law professor trying to equate her dilemma "New York? Philly? New York? Philly?" with an abused person trying to navigate a way out of the violence, even if intentionally facile, is pretty demeaning.
In college, I fell prey to a sociopathic sort of fellow who told me a bunch of attractive lies and who was charming and intimidating. He started to become abusive, then I found I was pregnant. He used to go through my purse and pockets and take my money, hit me, lock me in the closet, or take my car and go to bars at night, and when he got home he would hold a gun to my head and say that if he ever heard that I was complaining about him, he'd take the baby and hide him, or if I tried to leave, he would get his cop buddies to track me down, and then... *click* he'd snap the trigger on an empty chamber. He did have cop buddies, and he was an accomplished forger and con artist.
So why did I stay? Because I was the only one of us who had a job, and I was afraid not to work because I thought he would kill me if I wasn't paying the bills. Because he could and did hide the baby to punish me. Because I knew his cop friends were also abusers and would help him find me. Because it's too late, after an abuser puts a bullet in you, for a restraining order.
I did leave, actually, while he was away visiting his family (he took my car; I had to call a taxi to go to a shelter with my son). At the shelter, I was such a wreck that they took my baby away anyway, and then denied me a welfare apartment because I didn't have my son with me. They didn't let anyone stay more than three weeks, so I got kicked out. I was sitting on the side of the road in front of the shelter when my boyfriend pulled up and made me get in the car, right there in front of the shelter that was supposed to have protected me. It was not a fun car ride.
I suppose I could have been forgiven for wanting to pick up the gun while the bastard slept. But I just could not bring myself to do it somehow. For some reason I can't even force myself to so much as hit someone. If it hadn't been for one of his friends, finally disgusted with the way I was treated, helping me with money and a safe place to go, I might not be alive today.
Isn't it the other way around -- that feminists believe that only men have free will?
But what I hate worse is a bunch of lousy ivory-tower intellectuals saying someone can "just leave" a situation in which they are trapped by fear, brainwashing, and inability to see any way out that doesn't end in a worse outcome than an occasional beating.
The dogs were trapped in a room and were subjected to electric shocks, without predictability (such as a signal beforehand) or control (such as a lever, that if pushed, would turn off the shock). The dogs were shocked without a moment's notice and could do nothing to stop it. At first, they would try to escape, but rapidly learned that escape was impossible and stopped trying.
In the second phase of the experiment, the researchers took the conditioned dogs and modified the chamber: the shock still came, but now, the dogs could jump over a low barrier to safety. The escape route was clearly visible and there was nothing deterring the dogs from taking it as soon as it appeared.
However, none of the dogs did. They remained in the room, having "learned helplessness," and only after repeated trials of the researchers physically dragging the dogs over the barrier did they finally escape the shocks. Once they had been taught they could not control their situation, they stopped trying.
Of course, humans have cognitive capabilities not available to dogs. But cognition is heavily influenced by emotion, and emotions aren't rational things.
So while I personally think you have to leave. You cannot live like that. Staying wouldn't be an option for me, no matter the other consequences, I'd have to try and free myself from such a relationship, others may think they have no choice. They see themselves as between a rock and a hard place, with no good options to get out, especially if kids are involved. I wonder how many men would put up with that, without taking measures into their own hands? I realize of course that it's not always men who are abusive. A fair percentage are women, but generally the outcomes are less likely to turn more violent toward the man, when he leaves an abusive relationship.
The time for easier choices, was in the beginning of the relationship, when the signs were in all likelihood there. Which is why I probably have never found myself in this situation. I avoided overly smothering, control freaks like the plague when dating.
Doesn't look very morally equivalent to a woman who killed her sleeping husband, eh?
> how did that article get published?
Same answer as "how did a person who thinks like this become a law prof?" If you're the sort of person who inclines to teach things like "Women and Violence," academia's going to raise any kind of bar against you.
Note the name of the journal. They're reviewing submissions for ideology, not logic.
Anyone remember Ward Churchill? Phony scholar, phony author, phony doctorate, phony war hero, and ultimately phony Indian -- and the whole basisi of his shtick was his Indian "authenticity." How did he get hired? At least Prof. Angel is an authentic woman, which appears to be the basis of her (Churchillian, and not Winston) shtick.
She gives the administration (the one she likes to abuse) plenty of what they hired her for. (And they are presumably trapped in this abusive relationship. Her students, a number of whom have expressed their opinions in these comments, are even more trapped in what is probably an even more abusive relationship).
I recognize that most of the time we are in an intermediate state between perfect do-whatever-we-want-no-consequences freedom and absolute do-what-the-master-says-or-face-torture-and-death-coercion. I also recognize that the world is full of attempts to make a false dichotomy, the sort that begins by disproving that we all live our lives jammed into in one end of the continuum and then concluding that we must all be jammed into the other.
I think it's accurate to say that most of the time, society is better off taking the view that are responsible for themselves because efforts based on theories that they aren't often have negative side effects, such as moral hazard. If we believe we're responsible for our actions we'll in a better position to respond to the world than if we believe we're helpless. It's the default, presumptive position.
Like all presumptions, it can occassionally be defeated: sometimes the evidence and consequences of people not being in control of their actions are so overwhelming that acting on them is the best course of action. Thus, the matter is not based on absolute truth, it's based at best on what's good for society over the long term, a criterion we can rarely know for sure, not being in a position to actually see the long term to be able to confirm any theory we may have, and being able to look only into the past.
We're particularly inclined to create exceptions to the you're-responsible-for-yourself approach when faced with large-scale social problems. It's not likely, for example, that large numbers of New Orleans residence voluntarily decided to destroy their homes, or large numbers of workers voluntarily decided they'd prefer not to work. The people who face the brunt of consequences aren't the ones who make the choices, and the very definition of power is the ability to make choices that have consequences for others. Claiming power of this sort doesn't exist is nothing more than irresponsibility, and makes tyrants of the powerful.
That said, I think your Temple colleague made a very argument that the presumption of personal responsibility shouldn't continue to hold here. After all, if women have no ability to refrain from responding violently to their spouses, why should we think men do? And if men are acting out of impulses beyond their control, what right does the law have to punish?
That said, I've expressed disagreement with laws that attempt to make people robots of self-control on sexual matters even at extremes. Laws which declare rape if a man doesn't pull out during orgasm no matter what happened before, for example, fail to recognize or accept that being human has an instinctive, physical element that can only be pretended and wished away so far. It also gives an ugly power that can be used for injustice by the vindictive. And killing a sleeping man and calling it self-defense is an example of vindictiveness of this sort.
We have to remember that the starting point of a lynching used to be an accusation of rape. Given this history, we should think twice about legalizing lynching once more. We don't want to create a society in which all men, black or white, have to walk in fear least some stray or unthought gesture be misunderstood as out of line and lead to torture and death.
I fear that your colleague's efforts in the direction of such a society may not be entirely inadvertant. The purpose of arguments in support of lynching against one subsegment of the population and that subsegment only is usually not to achieve any justice or equality, but to put the lynchee segment of society in an inferior place through bonds of terror and to keep it there, to live in fear least it be thought out of line. There is no surer way of keeping a segment of society in subservience and keeping the other segment dominant. We've been through societies where the white woman is always believed and the black man always presumed a liar, with a right to resort to private violence - in only one direction - if going to Judge Law about the matter proves too inconvenient. We've known they've been terribly unjust and terribly repressive. Merely removing the color words and otherwise keeping the state of affairs won't fundamentally change anything.
(I agree with the early post by Sean M that clarified the two uses of 'had no choice' - one in terms of what is literally possible - i.e, I could leave - and the other in terms of the decison that resulted from the cost/benefit analysis, i.e, I saw the cost to my kids as being too high)
So for the sake of the 'free will' discussion, I do think that usually we are driven by a cost/benefit analysis to make difficult choices. Yes, outer circumstances go into the equation, but our free will to choose based on all factors remains. No argument there.
The 'battered wife syndrome' in its truest sense is a departure from free will and an argument of temporary insanity (to the extent that insanity is not an expression of free will - e.g. a schizophrenic acting on hallucinatory signals, or even more analagous, someone with ptsd attacking someone who surrprises them). For the defense to be properly invoked it does not mean that the person was in true danger justifying the action (making it an excercise of free will); but rather that the past experiences triggered an uncontrollable defensive response that mitigates the action. BWS should not be easily argued or used indiscriminately, but should not be ruled out as a defense as well (as the insanity defense in general has a place, but should not be misused). So someone with 'battered wife syndrome' in truth is not an example of free will at work, but rather a pretty rare form of temporary insanity.
To apply this to the prof's point - no, most people in abusive situations do act under free choice (in the sense that it is humanly possible to do X, but their cost/benefit analysis leads them to do Y.)
Some personal observations: Thumbs down to the poster who said exactly what they 'would' or 'would not' do to avoid getting into an abusive situation and to avoid staying in one (stay away from controlling guys, leave early on, etc etc). How smug. I'd do the same things too, knowing what I know now. However when I met my ex I was just turning 19. Had my first child early on, and his abuse (emotional, psychological, physical) escalated so slowly that it was several years before it registered on my radar -at which point he already had me convinced that everything wrong was my fault. Took me till my early thirties till I began looking at his part of the equation, and another three years before I was willing to sacrifice my family (several kids) to get out. They suffered alot, so my analyis of the costs (once I was old enough and aware enough to see the situation for what it was) were, in fact, accurate.
Thumbs down to the poster who implied that 'staying in for the sake of the kids' is an excercise in ego ('being seen as a good parent'). Shame. Some of us actually care honestly about the welfare of our children, and make personal sacrifices for their sake (in my case, my children were mistreated at times but were not in extreme danger, or I would have left immediately. As it turned out, escalating abuse on the kids was one of the major things that taught me to confront rather than appease him. The realization that even though the kids would suffer if I broke up the family, they would suffer more if I kept it together was seminal in my final decision to leave. (No happy ending there - after leaving I lost the kids when he got a lawyer while I was out on the streets on welfare trying to survive... it was a huge sacrifice to leave on all levels. Now they are older and some of them understand -while others still blame me. Dont regret the decision though - at least they have an example of someone who left - eventually. While my daughters have hooked up with abusive boyfriends, they have left them too - so the lesson was not totally lost.)
So, other than Sookie (who knows because she has been there) and Sean (who I totally relate to, as there were many times that I wanted to strike back hard, but didnt - out of a lack of desire to injure or kill another person), anyone who hasnt been in an abusive relationship can discuss 'free will' and 'free choice' on an academic level (and as I said, except for BWS which is essentially temp insanity, I agree that abuse sufferers have free choice - even though their cost/benefit analyses are heavily influenced by circumstances - as are all of our decisions), but should keep personal observations and judgments to themselves.
P.S, I eventually got off welfare and earned my phd. More free will at work - despite circumstances.
Thanks for reading this long and wordy post.
Been there, did it, got the t-shirt.
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"The prevailing belief is that individuals are independent, autonomous beings, and therefore, free to leave, to exit, any situation at any time. > I disabuse the students in my Violence Against Women class of this notion < on the first day by asking them if they have ever stayed in any situation – a job, a school, a living arrangement, a relationship – longer than they should have".
No one has ever explained to me what free will is supposed to be, and any plausible candidates strike me as obviously mythical.
People's actions are caused by their neurological processes. People's brains are governed entirely by the laws of physics. The laws of physics may not be deterministic, but that doesn't imply any meaningful ability to choose, in the sense people normally talk about.
Ward Churchill is a bad analogy here. I totally disagree with Prof. Angel's radical leftist positions on a number of issues, but Churchill had no academic bona fides (that's why he got fired). Prof. Angel, on the other hand, graduated Summa Cum Laude from Columbia University School of Law and has an LL.M. from University of Pennsylvania School of Law. If anything your beef is with the scholars who have been coming out with top academic credentials for the last 40 years.
Again, I don't want to come across as her attorney; I strongly disagree with many of her positions, and, in class, I thought she made inappropriate ad hominen attacks on both the Dean and her ideological enemies. But as far as academic credentials go, hers are stellar.
...
All of you who believe in "free will", "free choice", or something like that are just kidding, right?
No one has ever explained to me what free will is supposed to be, and any plausible candidates strike me as obviously mythical.
If you guys were correct, that would mean that you have no choice in the content of your mind. So there's no point in trying to "prove" it to you, then; the statement "I believe determinism" (the necessary flip side of "I don't believe in free will") is self-refuting, because the statement "I believe determism" is incoherent if determinism were true.
That is because concept such as "believe", "think", and "awareness" all presuppose some sort of selection, direction and specificity -- i.e. *choice*. Human consciousness is volitional by nature; a non-volitional consciousness is a contradiction in terms.
As free will is introspectively self-evident anyhow, I'd say that the onus of proof is on the determinists to demonstrate why it would be an "illusion".
If Norman's lawyers have any sense, they'll argue temporary insanity due to BWS - presenting days of horrific evidence about the abuse, and bringing in an expert on BWS for an hour. The jury probably won't understand or believe the psych. expert, but it will be an excuse for a verdict really based on, "he needed killing".
Life can beat you down.
Or some professors can do the same thing. If a woman were convinced she could kick ass and take names, she wouldn't bother with a womyn's studies class where she is taught she is vulnerable, in danger, always going to be manipulated, has no recourse, except, of course, in the classrooms of the womyn's studies department.
Same schtick in community organizing the underclass.
And in certain murder cases.
WRT women's autonomy and agency, it's why I support women's sports, the rougher the better. If only they hadn't Title Nined my dear lacrosse team--first college lax in the state--back to club status.
I mean sure we tend to be emotionally sympathetic to individuals who commit crimes because of some pressures but not because of others. However, as an intellectual matter it's unclear if the notion of "having a choice" is doing any work or merely acting as a fancy tag for our gut level emotional response.
Moreover, our sense of when a crime is less culpable because the defendant was backed into a corner is very fickle. We tend to sympathize with individuals faced with the prospect of a much lower standard of living than that we are used to having, e.g., the poorly paid worker who embezzles because it's the only way they can keep their child in college (or avoid sending them to some awful public school) even though on an absolute scale the poorest Americans are pretty well off. Yet when the very wealthy embezzle to maintain their standard of living, despite the fact they face the same social pressures and sense of shame at not being able to provide for their family, we are nowhere near as inclined to feel they didn't have a choice.
Or even more devastating is the way we tend to react to crimes committed for the sake of drug or alcohol addiction. Far from feeling the individual is less culpable in these cases, despite intuitively having less choice about their actions, we tend to feel they are more culpable.
Frankly, I think law should give up on this vague notion of 'having choice.' Not only do we not apply it coherently but our competing intuitions are revealed to be more and more incompatible as brain science evolves. Instead we should focus on questions about deterrence and the effect the law can have on behavior. After all what really matters is what results the law can bring about and if good results require penalizing people who "had no choice" whatever that means then so be it.
My real life experiences do not support your model.
I spent a year as an Army MP doing law enforcement work. We had a fair amount of spousal violence. The first thing you do is get them apart, then have someone check for the cildren to see if they are injured. (Rule of thumb, if they are his kids she hurt them, if they are just her kids he hurt them.)
Anyway, the one with the least amount of marks goes to the d-cell (jail). The military would take action on the next business day, if the person in the d-cell was in the military they would be ordered to the barracks to live under supervision, if it was a non-military person they would get ordered off the post (which would be enforced, unlike in the civvie world). The Army has a pretty good welfare and child care organization, so that wasn't a huge problem, either.
Even so, the next business day in would come bopping the victim. "I told those MPs that I fell down/walked into the door. S/he didn't hit me at all. Oh....and those MPs called him/her [some racist/vulgar term]. That's not right."
I think most folks in that sort of relationship like the relationship. Maybe not the actually getting hit, maybe just the drama, excitment, and the making up, but they do like it.
You are the one who is using words in a sense different from that which people usually do.
The argument here is perfectly intelligible and meaningful to the ordinary person using the words "free will" and "choice" in the way he usually does.
While the laws of physics may influence the activity in our brains, that does not mean that everything but physics is meaningless. Otherwise, there would be no need for psychology, etc.
I had a choice (in the sense in which people use that word) in whether to post this comment, as you did in posting yours. Both of us could have simply muttered at our computers in response to these comments and gone on to the next website.
You are the one who is using words in a sense different from that which people usually do.
The argument here is perfectly intelligible and meaningful to the ordinary person using the words "free will" and "choice" in the way he usually does.
While the laws of physics may influence the activity in our brains, that does not mean that everything but physics is meaningless. Otherwise, there would be no need for psychology, etc.
I had a choice (in the sense in which people use that word) in whether to post this comment, as you did in posting yours. Both of us could have simply muttered at our computers in response to these comments and gone on to the next website.
Absolutely. I approve morally of Norman's actions to the extent her allegations are true.
But the law provided her a better set of "choices" (stay or leave, and kill in self defense if the opportunity arises) - untenable as it may be - and the government has to stand behind that position.
I stayed around until the summer when her depression got a bit better, and then we broke up. No kids, fortunately. I will never forget how horrible those months were though. Between feeling like I was under constant threat and that she might commit suicide at any moment, that was really, really tough.
However, the violence started to de-escalate when I decided to hit back (even though most of the strikes were "play-punches" not intended to cause any pain or injury). This was a conscious, deliberate approach on my part, and a lot of people would think worse of me for it. However, the only time I struck her full force was when she attacked me from behind that one time. This choice actually made things liveable again for the last couple of months of the relationship.
Then you missed my point. The problem is not in caring about the kids but in seeing the sacrifice for them in tolerating the excuse as valuable. This happens frequently. The male equivalent is usually pride in not hitting back. Both cases come down to a pride in enduring suffering, and this is a matter of ego.
Tolerating abuse does NO favors for kids. None whatsoever. If you think that it is doing favors for the kids, you are blinded by your own delusions. "Enduring this abuse makes me a good mother" is BS all the way, as is "Enduring this abuse without hitting back shows how great my self-restraint is as a man" is.
Now, I am NOT talking about the desire to end the abuse and retain the relationship for the kids' sake. This is a very different issue. I think there are often ways to solve the abuse without losing the relationship. Sometimes counselling helps. Sometimes even studying a combat martial art or other physical discipline helps. There are all sorts of strategies, and nobody really wants to be abusive. Once again, that is outside of the scope of my comments.
Scanning the footnotes of Angel's article, it does not appear that she appeals directly to any of this or similar reasearch (although it's possible that some of her cited sources may do so).
I would also recommend reading Plato's dialog, "Protagoras" which is a debate over whether people can be taught to be virtuous. One of the points that gets brought up as evidence that they can is the Athenian legal system. I.e. you punish children and criminals for bad behavior in the hope that they will improve.
In the end, law has to be based on the idea of free will and choice regardless of the science behind the concepts. I would further point out that one of the goals in disciplining people for bad behavior is to provide a neurological conditioning so that the bad behavior is avoided. Whether or not this really is free will is irrelevant.
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