Tragedy and Barriers to Objectivity

In the wake of last Monday’s tragedy in Washington D.C., I have one potentially obvious, yet very important point.  We cannot enter the mind of someone else.  Neuroscientists can study the brain.  Psychologists can attempt to tease out unconscious desires, tendencies, and the like.  But barriers will always remain.  As William James, the great American philosopher and psychologist writes, “each of these minds keeps its own thoughts to itself…neither contemporaneity, nor proximity in space, nor similarity of quality and content are able to fuse thoughts together which are sundered by this barrier of belonging to different personal minds.  The breaches between such thoughts are the most absolute breaches in nature.”

I’m not saying that neuroscience and psychology are useless.  Far from it.  But this barrier is real. Thomas Nagel, another American philosopher, writes, “every subjective phenomenon is essentially connected with a single point of view, and it seems inevitable that an objective, physical theory will abandon that point of view.”  Nagel hints at the crux of the problem here: one cannot achieve objective certainty about the contents of another’s mind.  The psychologist always relies on the subject’s testimony in reaching his or her conclusion.  This testimony will always involve considerable bias, even if the subject is fully cooperative.

This contributes to our inability to identify potential criminals.  The vast majority of the mentally ill never commit crimes, but without the benefit of hindsight, we cannot accurately determine which few will.  Further, we can never know the complete picture of motives, even after the fact.  Aaron Alexis seemed to want to be a good person earlier in his life, yet he murdered twelve people.  Plenty of others have no such desire, yet they don’t commit crimes.  I am not trying to absolve Alexis of any guilt.  But far too often we try to categorize motives and tendencies into neat little boxes.  I wish I had an easy solution, but we will never resolve this problem fully.  We can continue to safeguard further against these seemingly random acts of violence; we can continue to research the brain.  But to continue to expect certainty and an easy and definitive solution is foolish.