Let's Do The Twist

Some years ago, I'd started to notice a peculiar recurrence in my debates with people. Somewhere along the way, my interlocutor would accuse me of "twisting" their words. This is, generally speaking, an accusation of acting in bad faith, and so my initial response was one of indignation, laced with an understanding that the person I was debating lacked an understanding of how logic worked. But, as the saying goes, the one constant in all of your dysfunctional relationships is you, and so I started paying attention to what I was doing that elicited this response. And I realized that it was taking the logic of a given argument, generalizing it, and then showing that if that same logic were applied in similar situations, the outcome was one that both parties agreed was repugnant. And this became the objected-to twist.

My general argument could usually be phrased as follows: The fact that applying argument A to situation S1 to arrives at positive outcome O1 does not prove that argument A is positive if there is an easily-accessible situation S2, that while similar to S1, produces repugnant outcome O2 when the same argument A is applied.

This is still my general method of evaluating a logical argument, attempting to understand if it holds up generally, or otherwise outside of the narrow scope of the situation in which it is being deployed. Needless to say, I'm still accused of "twisting" things. But I still think it's helpful, because a primary source of unintended (and often unpleasant) consequences of various ideas is a failure to understand the broader implications of same.

And that brings me to the subgenre of philosophy that one might call "the apologetics of free will." To lay my cards on the table, I am a determinist, courtesy of a strange intersection of my own materialism and the understanding that "random" is simply another way of saying "too complicated to predict in real time." Therefore I am always somewhat amused by people who claim that we "should" believe in one side or the other. Since the current state of the Universe, including what people believe, is a function of natural laws operating on the past states of the Universe, of what importance are exhortations to believe one thing or another?

In any event, I was reading another "apologetic of free will," where the author, one Professor Kennon Sheldon makes the following argument:

Regardless of who is correct in this debate [between free will and determinism], my work has led me to a second conclusion that I consider even more important than whether we have free will or not. It’s that a belief in our own capacity to make choices is critical for our mental health. At the very least, this belief lets us function ‘as if’ we have free will, which greatly benefits us.

It's nothing that I haven't read, or heard, before. From there, Professor Sheldon goes on to lay out three reasons why he "consider[s] belief in free will to be important and beneficial." They are:

1. The feeling of having free will satisfies a need that is critical to being mentally healthy.
2. It makes one a better person.
3. It has the most integrity of the available choices.

The last one is the weakest in my opinion, mainly because Professor Sheldon creates some straw-man reasons for a belief in determinism; none of the options listed include "because people genuinely believe that this is how the Universe actually works." Because remember, Professor Sheldon doesn't claim to have solved the question of which viewpoint is correct; he advocates for a choice to believe in free will, regardless of the reality of the situation.

Generalizing the argument out, I arrive at: Regardless of the truth of the matter, the wise choice is to believe what is healthier and brings the most benefits. You can see how it's fairly simple to take a point that hasn't been settled yet (or that people don't believe has been settled) and claim that if some research says that it's the best thing to believe, that wisdom dictates that it's best to believe that.

I'm going to pluck a piece of low-hanging (if not boxed and ready to ship) fruit here and use religion as an example. It's not hard to find research that says that Christians are happier, and many Christians will rattle off reasons why non-believers fail to be believe that scrupulously avoid engaging with the idea that they genuinely don't believe in deities (or at least in the Christian conception of what a deity should be).

In a regime that says that one's understanding of the truth of the world around them should be dictated by a cost-benefit analysis, rather than honest assessment of their lived reality, it's easy to fall into one of any number of traps that demand belief in certain ideologies. Should minorities in the United States be counseled that since they can't definitively prove that the system is stacked against them, that they have just as much access to opportunity as the mainstream? One could certainly make the argument that not seeing oneself as marginalized and at risk from the broader society is better for one's mental health. And there are plenty of Conservative Americans who would say that someone who believes in the promise of America is a better person and subscribes to a belief with more integrity than someone who doesn't. So does Professor Sheldon's logic hold there? If not, why not? History?

It's possible that the professor's book on the topic goes into the subject in enough detail that it allows for selection between different circumstances. Having read books with the expectation of finding such nuance and having been disappointed up to this point, however, I'm not so sure. In any event, Professor Sheldon's Psyche article struck me as a call for judging belief based on what effects come of that belief. Which is reasonable, but one can see where it might easily become more than a little twisted.