Assholes, Autonomy, and the AHCA

Thesis: Insufferable assholery is a preexisting condition that ought to disqualify a person from voting on the AHCA (or any other social welfare legislation).

First, let’s get a picture of who we are talking about.

Ron Johnson is a US Senator from Wisconsin. During a telephone town hall I attended, he argued that it was unfair to make healthy people pay the costs of treatment for sick people.

Mo Brooks, a Representative from Alabama, said that we need to reduce costs for “people who lead good lives” and are healthy. Presumably in contrast to those lazy bad people who are off getting sick instead of working. These are just two instances.

Reagan gave us, “blame the poor.” Now we have, “blame the sick.”

In identifying this condition as “insufferable assholery” I am not (merely) trying to be offensive. “Asshole” is a technical term, described by Aaron James in his book,  Assholes: A Theory. James writes: an asshole, "allows himself to enjoy special advantages in social relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people." James has recently extended his analysis to the special case of Donald Trump. I’ll use “assholery” for the condition of being an asshole. But how to describe the state of assholery? It’s odd to say one “suffers from assholery” because the whole point about assholes is that they don’t suffer. They are insufferable. Hence, “insufferably assholery”. I’ll often abbreviate to IA (I notice that IA is also the abbreviation for “Iowa”. Given their congressional delegation, this is appropriate. With apologies to David Loebsack.)

People with insufferable assholery think that the bad things that happen to other people are their own fault. In contrast IAs tend to believe that any bad things that happen to them are the result of the external environment or poor luck. “If you get sick, it’s your own fault; if I (or my family) get sick, it’s a raw deal.” Moreover, good things that have happened to the IA are seen as a result of their own competence, fortitude, and general awesomeness. “I’m healthy because I take care of myself.” This habit of mind is known as “the fundamental attribution error”. The fundamental attribution error is the basis of insufferable assholery. You can see this error at work in many behaviors of the typical IA: “People like me who work hard deserve what they get (a tax break). Disadvantaged people deserve what they get (poverty).” That kind of thing.

The fundamental attribution error, and other quirks of the human mind, dispose all of us to assholery. (It occurs to me, at this point, that I may be just repeating James’ arguments. I haven’t read his books, so I apologize if I am plagiarizing his points. I don’t want to be an asshole here.) Most of us are mere or occasional assholes. The insufferable asshole, has a more severe condition. There may be a genetic component to IA, it does seem to run in families. I tend to believe the etiology is primarily environmental. The insufferable asshole is born into extreme privilege and experiences an exceptional amount of personal success (usually in business or politics). The psychological mechanisms used to interpret this experience (not just the fundamental attribution error, but cognitive dissonance, the availability heuristic, etc.) warp cognition and emotion to produce a severe form of assholery.

The big question here is: Are assholes to blame? (see this critique of James). My main point in drawing out this analysis of IA (and using it as an analogy for real forms of disadvantage and illness) is to make the distinction between “blame” and “responsibility”. Now, I am not a philosopher (I just play one in Psychology), and this distinction gets into deep waters very quickly. The main problem is that philosophers pretty much agree that all causes are material causes (not sure how strong this consensus is in Philosophy, but it is gospel in science). There is no second realm of mind that is separate from the body (material world) yet somehow able to exert causal influence on it. This poses severe problems for the idea of free will. Either material forces determine our behaviors, or there are some random elements (e.g., quantum effects) that sometimes impinge (see Dennet’s Elbow Room or this essay by Alfred Mele). Neither option seems to capture what we think of when we think of freely choosing, and this has led some to conclude that materialism is incompatible with moral notions such as blame or responsibility. We cannot be responsible for our actions if we do not choose them (freely). Others, and I’m in this camp, are “compatibilists”: Some form of responsibility is compatible with materialism (we sure hope). One wiggle for compatibilists is to say you are responsible for being the kind of person you are, but are not to blame.

So, if I get addicted to prescription painkillers, I am responsible for being the kind of person who gets addicted. I am not, however, to blame for being this kind of person. I didn’t choose to be, it’s just who I am. It’s hard to say exactly how this distinction matters. Keeping the idea of responsibility suggests that we could treat people differently. We could restrict opioid access for people with addictive personalities. What eliminating blame mainly seems to do is eliminate the idea of moral punishment. We shouldn’t be mean to people just because they happen to be the kind of people they are. We might be mean to make them change (instrumental punishment), but they don’t deserve to be punished. I guess the bottom line is: We shouldn’t be mean to sick people just because they deserve it. Pretty radical, I know.

Back to assholes. We also shouldn’t be mean to insufferable assholes just because they are insufferable assholes. We should hold them responsible, though. There are things we just do not want IAs doing. Making decisions about how to treat other people (especially people less fortunate then themselves) is one of those things. So, it’s not your fault, IA, but you can’t vote on health care.

Finally, we are faced with the problem of distinguishing the insufferable asshole (no voting on health care) from the mere asshole (aka, the rest of us). Here we can go back to Psychology, especially the work of social psychologists who study prejudice, like Trish Devine. You probably know about implicit prejudice, the kind of automatic judgments indexed by the IAT. The point is that all of us have a tendency to make biased judgments (though some more than others). What Devine and her colleagues point out is that there is a second way that people may differ, and that is in a “motivation to respond without prejudice.” Basically, the idea is that some of us are unhappy about our implicit biases and try to minimize them. If you point out bias, we try to correct it. Others don’t care. They are the bigger problem. So I’m proposing that we institute a new measure to assess competency for voting on health care: The “motivation to respond without assholery” test. If it is pointed out to you that you are being an asshole, but you don’t care, or only pretend to care (issue some mealy-mouthed statement to get the press off your back), then you are an IA and no voting. This test would seem to provide a very low bar. It is a shame that so many of our representatives fail to clear it. Someday we may find a cure for chronic IA. Until then, the best we can do is minimize the effects of the symptoms.