Introduction 3that it is at least preliminarily hard to imagine how we would be able to think of
ourselves or others without relying upon this assumption.
But along with the above presuppositions, there are other presuppositions also
embedded in our everyday thinking that are in tension with those having to do
with human freedom. These have to do with the facts of our lives, with the
causes impinging upon them. To explain, consider again Corwin’s LA Times
article. Corwin does not fix only upon Robert Alton Harris’s terrible deeds. He
also explores his terrible history. As Corwin recounts it, Harris was born prema-
turely when his mother was kicked in the stomach by her jealous husband, who
accused her of infidelity, claiming Harris was not his child. The father twice sex-
ually molested the sisters and beat all of his children, often causing serious
injury. Harris’s mother became an alcoholic, and was arrested several times.
Harris had a learning disability and speech problems, none of which were
addressed, and he lived through school feeling stupid. He was frequently teased
by his classmates. According to his sister, Barbara Harris, even as a young child
his mother would not permit him to touch her. And she recalls one occasion
when his mother bloodied his nose for trying to get close to her. His sister
remembers him crying as a young child when Bambi was shot. He loved
animals. By the age of 14 he was sentenced to a federal youth detention center
for car theft. There he was raped several times and slashed his wrists in
attempted suicide. Released from federal prison at 19, the boy who once cried at
Bambi’s death tortured and killed dogs and cats with mop handles, darts, and
pellet guns. Once, he stabbed a prize pig more than 1,000 times.
Ask yourself now, reader, what you feel about Harris the criminal, now that
you are aware of Harris the child and of his youth leading up to his adult years.
What do you think Harris deserves for his crimes now that you are aware of his
history? If you are like many, you are not sure what to think; you have become
ambivalent (Watson, 1987), toggling between sympathy on the one hand and
antipathy on the other. It is not implausible to explain your ambivalence, if
indeed you are ambivalent, in terms of the thought that the causes shaping
Harris’s life made him into who he was, and that in some way they impaired or
strongly shaped his character and his understanding of the world. His ugly
history determined him to be this man and do these things. This thought, it
seems, is at odds with our thinking that it was after all up to him whether he
murdered those boys. It appears to be at odds with thinking he could have done
other than murder; rather, there is the worry that the ugly history shaping him
and moving through him settled what he would do then so that he really could
not have done any differently. And likewise, it seems that his life was not his
own making. It was made out of hatred and violence, of ridicule, self- loathing,
and rape.
These competing assumptions about human freedom on the one hand and on
the other about the causes shaping our lives are not just at play when we think of
extreme cases like the Harris story. They apply in all sorts of situations and in all
sorts of contexts. They might just as well apply when it comes to our thinking
about our own lives, or about the lives of moral heroes, like Martin Luther King,