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Last updated: Sat, Feb 22, 2025
An' some you win, an' some you lose
An' the winner's all grin and the losers say:
"Deal the cards again
"Won't you deal the cards again."
According to Pinker1, and certainly I agree, much of the opposition that people feel to the idea of man-as-mechanism has to do with free will. Few of us, in the pride of our youth, could have imagined that in our own futures we could be laid low by mere pain. I would be too strong for that. I would not let it happen.
Pain, like any serious illness, certainly humbles man. We like to attribute our successes to our will, and our failures to external circumstance.
Few of us would care to deny that will has its limits. (I think of the sword fight in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail.") Yet we love stories of the triumph of will over adversity. The message is that we are not victims awaiting a banana peel and a pratfall. The athlete who comes back from serious injury, the common person who survives cancer, the soldier who pulls himself back together after hideous trauma, are all stories we like to hear. Not so the story of continuing inescapable agony, reduced usefulness, reduced pleasure from life, dependence on paid helpers. Not so the story of failure to improve despite continuing effort.
On the flip side of the triumphant will is responsibility. We most of us have strong feelings about personal responsibility. Those who have thought about it realize that responsibility is based on ability. It is futile to expect anyone to be responsible for something of which he isn't capable, not to mention that it is unfair.
Those who have studied it (including evolutionary psychologists, game theorists, and latterly economists) have noted that we have quite a high level of concern over responsibility, whether we think of it in terms of cheating, malingering, committing crime, sinning, shirking, name it what you will. Just as it makes sense that we should have a capability for inferring others' goals and beliefs, it makes sense that we should have a sensitivity to cheating, selfishness, and the like. Pinker quotes Martin Daly and Margo Wilson on this:
The enormous volume of mystico-religious bafflegab about atonement and penance and divine justice and the like is the attribution to higher, detached authority of what is actually a mundane, pragmatic matter: discouraging self-interested competitive acts by reducing their probability to nil.2
However that may be, we seem to have a strong sense of the importance of personal responsibility; a desire to believe in the power of the will; a watchful eye out for the overgrasping of others. There seems also to be a strong sense that there are advantages to the role of disabled person (Secondary Gain). Might these beliefs combine to create an exaggerated sense of the role of the will in the creation or maintenance of disabilities, particularly those that aren't visually obvious?
The staff of the emergency room thought that 40 percent were making "a terrible fuss," nearly 40 percent were "denying" pain, and 20 percent gave the "appropriate" answer. It is obvious there is something fundamentally wrong here.... 3
One crucial aspect is that patients are not only assessing their private misery but also making a public display. Their private misery is not necessarily about the pain.4