Read Online Assholes by Aaron James - Free Book Online

cultural flow like almost everyone else. Maybe he even shaped his own process of development. Still, that won’t amount to his having had “full control” over the outcome. Who one becomes is generally not in one’s control in the way it is in my control, say, whether or not I raise my arm (with no one holding it down, etc.). 9
    To press the point, we can ask: When would this free choice from a position of full control supposedly have occurred? Many assholes are teenagers who never grew up. But a
teenager
can hardly be said to have at some point stepped out of his egocentric predicament and cast a free vote in favor of staying or becoming an asshole instead of developing into a fully cooperative adult. More likely, the thought of doing things differently just didn’t occur to him. He went in the direction of defensiveness instead of personal growth mainly because this seemed to work out pretty well for him. He mostly got what he wanted out of this. Perhaps his surrounding culture didn’t send him strong competing messages, or even ushered him along the asshole’s path.
    Perhaps, however, we needn’t be able to identify a previous stage of life in which “full control” was exercised. It is enough, one might say, that we are each now fully in control of ourselves by virtue of powers that everyone beyond the age of reason enjoys: after a certain age, we may say, persons are suited to wholly determine their conduct, from a place outside culture and nature. That, we may say, is what freedom of will consists of. To the extent culture or nature has an influence, it merely shapes what we Freely Choose through and by our own Freedom of Will.
    The capitalized words are necessary here because it is notoriously difficult to specify in further terms what the suggested powers would be. That isn’t a fatal blow (in the end, not
everything
can be explained). The more important point is that, if we really want to underwrite our right to blame the asshole, this is not the surest guarantor. We can dogmatically assert the existence of powers of Freedom of Will, pounding the table with our fist, but then dogmatism is all we are left with. When we thenask for a philosophical account of what is going on—even just a plausible sketch—it is pretty easy to be skeptical about whether anyone actually has powers to act into the order of nature and culture from someplace outside. In effect, we would have to be, like God, prime movers unmoved. 10 But is that really necessary? Should we really say that the asshole
must
be a prime mover simply in order to be appropriately blamed for an insulting remark? Maybe this breathtaking view of human nature will turn out to be true. But it is a tall order to insist that it
must
be true in order for us to be rightly pissed off at an asshole who parked his luxury car in two parking places.
    That, at any rate, is reason to look into less dramatic proposals about the basic preconditions of blame. The asshole must indeed have freedom of will. But this is just to say that he must be the sort of person who is properly
credited
with his acts as his own. His behavior must be properly attributed to
him
, rather than to the world around him or to so many subpersonal forces—whether homunculi or states of his brain—at work in his head. Here it won’t suffice that the person
behaves
in certain ways, whether in the spontaneous and “free” ways that all animals move or in involuntary bodily functions or knee-jerk reactions. The behavior of my arm going up only counts as my
action
—as
my
raising my arm, instead of my arm’s being pushed from behind—when it reflects my intentions. My intention to raise my arm will usually be based in what I take to be some sort of reason, a reason I could often give you if you asked why I did what I did (e.g., I raise my arm in order to reach for a jelly jar orin order to vote “aye” in a meeting). But, we suggest, to be the kind of person who is suited for such