RALEIGH – I don’t always agree with the iconoclastic psychiatrist and libertarian writer Thomas Szasz, but he has an excellent piece in this month’s Reason magazine that demolishes the defense of child molesters (and others accused of perverse and criminal acts) that their “disease” excuses them from criminal responsibility.
You can read the piece here.
Szasz makes the straightforward point that even if one has, due to genetic or environmental factors, a predilection for behavior such as taking sexual advantage of children, this cannot be a defense in either a legal or moral sense. Human beings have free will. That is not only a fact, which you are free to debate with me if you like (hint, hint), but it is really a precondition for the idea of morality itself. As Szasz puts it, an action “that affects other people is always, by definition, a moral issue, regardless of whether the actor chooses the proclivity to engage in it.”
For example, some argue that there is a certain segment of the human population composed of those who are “sexually attracted to young people.” When we run across these individuals, the proper emotion to feel towards them is pity, not righteous anger, because by the luck of the draw they have inherited or developed a perversion beyond their control.
That’s just bull. “The issue is not sexual attraction; it is sexual action,” Szasz writes. “A healthy 20-year-old male with heterosexual interests is likely to be powerfully attracted to every halfway pretty woman he sees. This does not mean that he has, or attempts to have, sexual congress with these women, especially against their will. The entire psychiatric literature on what used to be called ‘sexual perversions’ is permeated by the unfounded idea – always implied, sometimes asserted – that ‘abnormal’ sexual impulses are harder to resist than ‘normal’ ones.” He concludes, based on the available evidence, that this is false.
Moreover, as the Locke Foundation’s longtime academic friend John Staddon of Duke University has written, even behaviorists should decry the attempt to downplay the need for criminal punishment in cases where, it is argued, harmful or immoral behavior is the result of deterministic processes. After all, the prospect of criminal punishment should itself be one of the prods that conditions the human mind to reject wrongful behavior in favor of moral behavior.
As Szasz concludes: “A priest who has sex with a child commits a grave moral wrong and also violates the criminal law. He does not treat himself as if he has a disease before he is apprehended, and we ought not to treat him that way afterward.”
It’s pretty sad when one of the world’s great religious institutions gets a stern – and deserved – talking-to by a psychiatrist.