The Metaphysics of "Personal Responsibility."

Previously, I have argued that "freedom" is an impossibility in the usual "metaphysical" sense in which it is employed in political discourse. In short, we have not evolved to be free; we are socially-bound, mimetically-governed animals  and we are always imposing ourselves on each other. Whatever freedom we might have is bound up by the discourse of imposition towards which our biology impels us.

The appeal to "freedom" is often accompanied by the equally metaphysical appeal to "personal responsibility." Both, however, suffer from the same failure to understand the biological and neurological basis of human behaviour. Contrary to libertarian metaphysics, we possess merely relative agency, not absolute agency. We are not fully in control of what we do. One might draw the conclusion that if we are not entirely free to act, then nor are we entirely responsible for our actions. This is partly true - but such a conclusion can only go so far. If our understanding of freedom must be predicated on our understanding of the social and mimetic nature of human behaviour, then so too must our understanding of responsibility.

There is one further aspect of human behaviour that should be discussed here, one which is pertinent to our understanding of freedom and personal responsibility. This aspect is known by many names, but it is ultimately the punishment-reward dynamic that encourages or discourages our choices and our behaviour subsequent to those choices. Put briefly, we pursue behaviours that reward us and avoid behaviours that punish us; perhaps simplistically, we pursue pleasure and avoid pain. There are numerous chemical responses inside the brain that achieve the desired outcome: seratonin, dopamine, oxytocin, et al. These are our chemical allies in pursuit of the Good.

We are socially-bound, mimetically-governed, and chemically-aided in our interactions with each other, in our common environment. Indeed, it is because we share both a common environment and a common neurological and physiological constitution that we can do anything at all. Our mimetic instinct is predicated on this common platform; to put it plainly, we can imitate because we have the same bodies, and our bodies, or rather our brains (is there really a difference?), are programmed to recognise and respond to other like-bodied entities. We are encouraged to behave in mimetically-favoured ways by our chemical allies: we are rewarded for behaviour that brings us into proximity with other human beings. The ultimate form of proximity, of course, is sex, the biological imperative. Oxytocin plays a particularly important role here.

But our chemical allies are not smart; nor, really, are our neurons. Neurons simply "fire" at the appropriate time, they do not think about it. I say they are not smart because they can be tricked, or falsely triggered. We know that addiction has a chemical basis: the false reward of synthetic stimulants is a trick, a punishment dressed up as a reward. Our mimetic instinct, driven at the level of neural activity, is also susceptible. It doesn't know which behaviour is good to imitate; it simply imitates in order to fit its environment, and if a chemical reward is forthcoming it will reproduce the behaviour. I say "it" but I mean the organism, because the organism (the animal, the human) is constituted by chemicals and neurons; we do not exist apart from them.

We are our nervous system and our organs (we are also our stories, our poems, and our songs, but that is a discussion for another day). We derive our basic values from the processes of our organism - the living animal that we are. Arguably, the most fundamental source of "values" are our emotions, and these too are derived from fundamental embodied processes, including our mimetic and chemical processes. Emotions are the product of physiological processes, yet emotions qualify our experience; we even go in search of experiences that will give us particular emotional responses.

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio explains the relationship between our fundamental physiological processes rather well. He argues, for instance, that our emotions are grounded in our homeostatic and somatosensory processes. Emotions are a kind of "survival value" that helps us make our way in the world, and are directly linked to the autonomic processes that keep our internal milieu in balanced, functional condition. Beneficial experiences are rewarded, while detrimental experiences are punished, and there are concomitant emotions that qualify, or colour, such experiences reinforcing them as good or bad - to be repeated or to be avoided in the future.

Any discussion about personal responsibility must be grounded in an understanding of our biological limitations; that we are socially-bound, mimetically-governed, and chemically-aided means that personal responsibility entails collective responsibility because we are a product of collective behaviour. We are, in fact, driven towards a sociological collectivism by our neurophysiological make-up. If we understand, however, that our neurophysiological make-up is vulnerable to subversion, through addiction for instance, then it is beholden upon us to protect ourselves as a community of like-bodied animals against it.

Because we are essentially imitative creatures, and because our chemical allies can easily be tricked into reinforcing destructive behaviour, we have a collective responsibility to minimise, if not eliminate, such negative influences. At the very least, personal responsibility must be viewed through the prism of collective responsibility. We are, ultimately, social animals, and our organism, our neurological and physiological processes, do not operate on a metaphysical level in the way that (we assume) our rational minds do.