Editor,
Very few people would argue that bad behavior always results from bad intent. So it is puzzling that in Friday’s Peer Review, Veena Patel claims that “The coupling of neuroscience and law allows us to update our ethical system to understand that bad behavior isn’t always bad intention.” The apparently unexamined aspect of this notion that an ethical code is in need of updating is a bit disconcerting, as is the implication that we all are in need of top-down enlightenment. That’s because knowledge not only tends to diffuse power but can sometimes concentrate it, shrouding the insidious imposition of ideology behind a veneer of supposed objectivity.
A case in point: Patel quotes neuroscientist David Eagleman, who says that “dealing with drug addiction through rehabilitation is a more humane and cost effective idea than mass incarceration of the addicted.” Doesn’t that depend on what we mean by “humane”? Notice that Eagleman doesn’t suggest that rehabilitation can or could be more humane than incarceration, he proclaims that it is so, without qualification.
But punishment is a strong disincentive to violate the law, and because no form of rehabilitation yet devised can demonstrate stellar success rates, a point Patel acknowledges, there is risk and a resultant measure of inhumanity inherent in failing to quarantine offenders, primarily in cases where incarcerated drug addicts have been convicted of violent crimes.
Thus, in Eagleman’s thrall to the frontiers of progress, knowledge becomes ideology’s handmaiden. It is hard to envision that this tendency would not also be at play in any variety of the “socially conscious effort to develop methods of rehabilitation focused on fixing behavioral problems at their source” Patel calls for.
For some, this cheery proposition might conjure the most harrowing imagery from dystopian science fiction. However, a more prosaic indication that such catechismic pronouncements from the pulpits of academia can be self-serving is embedded in Eagleman’s call for less incarceration and more rehab. Because few would deny that academia is overwhelmingly socially liberal, it is highly likely that Eagleman and other influential academics who share his high estimation of rehab as an alternative to prison strongly support the firm separation of religion and state, abhorring government meddling in matters of private conscience.
Yet any court-ordered rehabilitation program operating in the United States is either some form of 12-step program or is designed to funnel supposed addicts in the direction of such a program, and all 12-step programs are God-based, requiring participants, or, more precisely, adherents, to give their life and their will over to a higher power, which is exactly what any endeavor to tinker inside the brains of the supposedly deviant is liable to amount to.
Aaron Cress
UNM student
