I spontaneously picked up Theodore Dalrymple’s “Admirable Evasions – How Psychology Undermines Morality” as an Amazon suggestion because I was grabbed by the subtitle. “Finally,” I thought, “someone to bridge the gap between the psychological description of behaviour and the moral prescription of behaviour”. I’ve made no secret of my amateurish fascination with both pop-psychology and moral philosophy, and it’s always seemed obvious to me that each was lacking the other in its attempt at explanatory completeness. A good combination of the two should provide knowledge of how and why we act and suggest the best ways of responding to that knowledge. Unfortunately – and this has been the struggle with every science that encroaches on morality – the two domains of inquiry seem to operate in different realms, under distinct and incompatible assumptions.Behavioural psychology takes a cause-and-effect perspective of human behaviour, where the action of the subject is the termination of a long chain of events both inside and outside the body, events which can be identified and used to predict future action. Moral philosophy takes the individual as the starting point of decision-making and places value on the contribution of this individual to the resulting action, enabling what we call moral responsibility. The contradiction between the two modes of thinking should be clear: if behaviour is primarily a product of extenuating circumstances then the contribution of the individual can be shrunk to the point that is disappears; alternatively, if the moral agent is to be held fully responsible, his behaviour should not be predictable by forces outside of those he marshals to make the choice to act. This contradiction has itself been challenged, and I hope to write about the efforts to dissolve it another time. However, I’ve yet to come across what I would consider a seamless resolution.
I googled Dalrymple after placing the order for his book and experienced a moment of apprehension. His list of previously published titles, including but not limited to “Life at the Bottom: The Worldview that Makes the Underclass,” “In Praise of Prejudice,” and “Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality” triggered the alarm bells of my Left-leaning intuitions. I read about his earlier career as a prison doctor and psychiatrist and wondered how this might have influenced his moral opinions. The book's arrival presented yet another concern – at a slim 119 pages it was hardly long enough to do justice to the title. Nevertheless, I jumped in excited to discover some miraculous turn of phrase that would both assuage my suspicions about the author and illuminate some aspect of the aforementioned conflict that I had missed.
