Treat People Like People or Treat People Like Robots?

Getting out of bed sucks. It’s usually the worst part of my day. I have to drag myself out of bed every morning. I imagine I’m not the only person who feels this way. So how do others respond to the same experience?

David and Drew feel equal amounts of dread the moment their alarm clocks go off. David forces himself out of bed, gets through his morning ritual, goes to work, and has a stellar career because of his self-discipline. Drew repeatedly indulges his impulse to hit the “snooze” button, or just turns off his alarm entirely and goes back to sleep. As a result, he is repeatedly out of work, and when he does find work it’s in a marginal part-time low-skilled job.

How should we describe these diverging paths? I might say that David chooses to endure some pain because he knows the payoff is high. I might describe Drew as choosing to indulge his lust for sleep. I could even place a judgmental spin on it: David is exercising bourgeois virtues and showing his good work ethic while Drew is being a lazy bum. But even supposing I place value judgments aside; perhaps Drew is perfectly happy with his mix of leisure and income just as David is. Value judgments or no value judgments, think I’d describe them as somehow choosing their paths. I’d describe them as deciding how to live.

I used to have interminable discussions with someone who would have none of this. The concept of choice was an illusion, because we’re all meat robots. If I want to use terms like “decide” and “choose” I must strictly define my terms and explain how this process of “making a decision” happens. My pedestrian concept of “choice” was an illusion because David and Drew are both operating in a world governed by deterministic physics (or random quantum physics, which doesn’t exactly resurrect “free will”). Everything is outside of these men’s power to control. Perhaps Drew and David have different thresholds for “unpleasant stimulus.” Or perhaps they experience “waking up” differently; it is simply too painful for Drew to endure while David experiences it cheerfully. Or Drew simply has a subroutine running in his meat-brain that says, “Stay in bed when the alarm goes off” while David has one that says, “Wake up despite the unpleasantness.”

It doesn’t actually matter to me (or to anyone else, frankly) what’s going on in Drew and David’s brains. I don’t really care whether they are deterministic robots or free-willed avatars complete with a soul. I don’t care whether the stuff driving their behavior looks more like clockwork or more like free choice. I don’t even care if David and Drew are created unequally, such that David was born with “more willpower” while Drew was born with less inherent ability to resist temptation. What matters to me is how society’s judgments and expectations affect these men’s behavior. Drew may intrinsically have difficulty motivating himself because of things within his constitution beyond anyone’s control. His “laziness” might not be “his fault.” But if he lives in a world that’s infinitely forgiving, a world that treats him like an automaton simply responding to internal clockwork, he will behave worse than if he lives in a world that’s more judgmental. David’s constitutional makeup might make him more inclined to behave virtuously, but he might indulge more Drew-like behaviors if he is treated with the same infinite forgiveness. Even if we suppose people are software running on the hardware of their brains, that software contains many “respond to incentives and expectations and social norms” subroutines.

But what do I know? I’m just another meat robot running deterministic subroutines inside my brain. Some of those subroutines say “punish mild vices with mild social censure”; others say “punish severe vices with harsher social censure”; others say “help people a lot for problems they didn’t create themselves; help people less for problems of their own creation”; others say “punish actual crimes with something harsher than social censure.” We all have these, and we all know that everyone else has these. Such “subroutines” running in other people’s heads are part of our environment. We are constantly updating our expectations, judging various transgressions, and trying to avoid judgment, even punishment, ourselves. Such a being can be “deterministic”, but there is enough recursion and uncertainty to make it look like free will. Close enough that it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference.

You may disagree with me, but why bother arguing? I’m just a meat robot. I can’t choose to think otherwise. 
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Of course we may want to temper our judgment given people's observable abilities. I had written everything above over a week ago, and since then was confronted with a few challenging cases. I met a person who has only one arm, which plainly limits one's choices. I spoke to someone who suffers sometimes-debilitating back pain. (Is back pain something that just happens to you? Or is it something that we can usually avoid by staying in better shape?) Some people are born with intellectual disabilities; it is unfair to accuse them of "choosing" not to become doctors or engineers. And some people are crippled by mental illness that has nothing to do with the intellect. I met the blind son of a former colleague who wants to be an actuary; he is able to navigate Excel by audio. And this reminded me of Walter Oi, a blind economist with an incredibly successful career. I think it's fine to talk about how some people are born with a wider range of choices than others. But I think it's daft to obliterate the concept of "choice" altogether. I'm more in the "We are the authors of our own destiny" camp than I am in the "Stuff just happens to you and you don't have a say in it" camp, for reasons outlined above. Denying the existence of choice, and denying that successful people caused their own success, does a disservice to people who overcome their disadvantages. It just seems churlish to react to the story of a blind person becoming a successful professional by saying, "Meh, that just kind of happened to him because he had natural ability. He didn't 'choose' to be successful." This is why the "inequality" framing of any social problem is philosophically bankrupt; this framing is by definition grouping people by outcomes. A more useful framing would be to group people by their professed goals and effort expended, and seeing how much "inequality" results after controlling for those factors.

I recently re-read an old Facebook thread where my interlocutor challenged me repeatedly to "define choice," and I repeatedly challenged him to "come up with a scenario where changing the definition of choice changes the outcome of an argument." I think many writers get bogged down by their worst trolls, and maybe this is my own example. Scott Sumner (at least on his Money Illusion blog) often inserts hedges and preemptive responses to commenters, which sometimes distract from the flow of a great post. I think Scott Alexander sometimes does the same thing. I don't interact with that person anymore, but because of his nagging I still hesitate to use words like "choose" and "decide" in the way that we all understand them. Maybe that's wrong and I should just speak freely.