My Faith in Reason

I generally avoid talking about why I’m in prison because I despise the idea of being seen as someone searching for sympathy, forgiveness, or rationalization.  I want none of those things.  But one thing I do want is for a crime like mine to never, ever happen again.  No one should ever have to be victimized in any way, especially not in the worst way imaginable: murder.  Murder is evil.

As a practicing existentialist, I think that good and evil are most likely creations of mankind, that the root of altruism is nothing more than a genetic predisposition.  This doesn’t devalue morality, however; this makes it infinitely more precious.  I also think that faith is nothing more than the opinion of the person having it, but I do have faith that murder is evil.  And considering that I’m a convicted murderer, it would follow that I myself am evil.

I can’t disagree with that.  I’m not saying murder is bad because I’m suffering the consequences of doing it – I’m saying it’s evil, pure and simple.  I regret what I did because it was tragically unjust to my victim and his family.  As a person who continuously deals with the fact that I am literally the lowliest of human beings and always will be, that I completely deserve to be where I am, I also consider myself a person who aspires to be moral.

To that en, I should not only be punished for what I did, I should try to prevent it from happening again.  I see no way of doing that while incarcerated, other than trying to examine why I committed my crime and revealing that information to others.  When I committed my crime I possessed two traits that I think are shared by almost every convicted felon: a lack of personal responsibility and a lack of the ability to reason.  So if I accept that the mindset that led me to rob a man and subsequently kill him is a common one among people who do similar things, then examining that mindset – especially how and why I discarded it – can possibly be useful in preventing it in other young people.

I think it’s likely that there is no such thing as an objective yardstick of good and evil (a God with commandments, for example), so therefore it is completely and utterly my opinion that murder is evil.  That’s all, my opinion.  It doesn’t county for anything.  It shouldn’t, but that’s what I think.  Furthermore, if there is no objective good and evil, then a statement such as “Murder is evil” can never be anything but a collective opinion of human beings.

I’m pretty sure there aren’t going to be any consequences when I die, that I’ll only be held accountable for what I’ve done here on earth, by worldly forces.  Maybe this is unfair.  Possibly I deserve eternal damnation.  Regardless, I don’t think I’ll receive it, because I don’t think there’s any evidence to support such a fairy-tale notion.  So what business do I have thinking that murder is wrong?  Why should I feel guilt?  Many Christians have told me that since there is no absolute of morality, it is inevitable that I should only be concerned for my own life and no one else’s.  I should refrain from victimizing others solely because there are earthly consequences, not because I think it’s evil.  These Christians consider such a paucity of morality to be the inescapable net result of existentialism.

I completely reject that sort of pop psychology stereotyping.  It’s intellectually lazy.  My opinion stands.  And I may also add that I committed my crime when I still had faith that Jesus Christ had died for my sins.  It is only since I have become a de facto existentialist that I have truly understood why murder is evil, and indeed, what evil really is.

I have concluded the opposite of the Christian values impressed upon me as a child.  Rather than thinking that I’m beloved of God and deserving grace and forgiveness, I’m basing my opinions of morality on the realization that I am not special, that I never was.  I have always been and always will be nothing more than an ordinary human being, the exact same as a billion others.  A creation of natural selection, a primate with a big brain and pretensions.  I’m not saying human beings are worthless creatures of muck; I believe in the power of the individual and the preciousness of every single life.  I’m just saying that no one’s life is worth more than anyone else’s life.

This is so because such humility is a necessary component of a rational mind.  Reason leads us to this conclusion.  It is simply irrational to think that you have more value than another of your human cousins, just as it is irrational when racists assign more or less value to a person because of something arbitrary like the amount of melanin in their skin.  If we are all equal in value, that means we are all entitled to the same things.  For instance, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Victimization is evil because it deprives another person of that right.  Victimization is evil because any potential victim is equal in value to the potential victimizer.

I say “potential” because once you victimize, once you attempt to elevate yourself to having more value than other human being, you forfeit your self-value.  By subscribing to the illusion that you have more value than others, that your rights are more important than the rights of others, that your needs are greater than the needs of others, you become evil.  You become a victimizer who thinks he can do whatever he wants because he is either selfish, powerful, or both.  This is an irrational position because, again, your need to victimize cannot possibly outweigh any other person’s need to not be a victim.  No one has the right to take away the rights of others.

Of course, I am an idiot.  Almost everyone lives their life without every significantly victimizing someone.  Most people have no need of hearing what I’m saying now – what I should have realized as an eighteen-year-old.  Most people are probably saying, “No shit, Sherlock,” or some variation thereof.  I have no excuses.  I’m not saying I should have been given special instructions or that I needed extra attention to keep me away from committing a crime, or that my parent didn’t raise me correctly.  I had the same knowledge of the difference between right and wrong as anyone else did; I simply didn’t use it.  This is solely my fault.

But the fact is that people like me have done these things, and people like me continue to do them.  Punishing us is necessary and just, but it’s only the first step.  It must be prevented from happening in the first place.  Punishment won’t do that.  People have been “deterred” by prison, retribution, and even the death penalty throughout all of history, and they still commit crimes.

If the promise of a very harsh punishment won’t stop a criminal from committing a crime, it stands to reason that an abstract rule certainly isn’t going to do a great job of it.  For some people, a rule is not a good enough deterrent, and neither is a punishment for breaking the rule, or a reward for adhering to it.  Everyone knows that robbery and murder are against the rules, but people still do these things anyway because thier reason for doing them has more value than the victim’s right to be left alone.  They need to be taught that this is not so, that it’s pure stupidity to think in such a way.

In my case, I never truly understood why robbing someone to get money was wrong until much later.  I thought that if I could get away with it, that was all that mattered.  I was thinking only of myself.  I believed that my life and my desires had more value than anyone else’s.  That was precisely the heart of the problem.  That’s what led me to do it, even though I knew that it was explicitly against the rules.

It is my opinion that had I been capable of rationalizing morality in this manner when I was a teenager, I never would have considered robbery or any other form of victimization to be an appropriate act.  I would have recoiled – as I do now – at even the thought of becoming a victimizer.  Victimizers represent evil; they should be battled and restrained and modified.  To prevent someone from attaining the mindset that allows them to victimize, or to correct such a mindset, reason is needed.  Not blind obedience, but reason.  Using reason imparts to us the gift of a rational mind, which is by necessity a humble mind.  And humility negates any justification to become a victimizer.