Tuesday evening our Socrates Café met at the Mayfield Road Phoenix Coffee House and the question we pulled from the box was:

Is our ability to reflect upon our actions pointless and even detrimental?

The initial reactions were no, reflection often offers benefits. Upon further reflection, however, we discussed instances where instinct or training ought to drive actions and not reflection which led us to examine potential differences between decision making and reflection.

I wanted to make the case that reflection required post-action thought and that thought before action was more in the realm of considered decision making. That there was a potential for reflection before a decision is possible, I just don’t see it. To me, reflection ought to be tied to the image that the word evokes: that of our studying ourselves in a mirror, studying our reflection as if we were outside of ourselves in some sense.

We also spent considerable time on concepts of decision making and Free Will was thrown into the mix as well. As we continue to develop our understandings of brain chemistry and neurology, it becomes increasingly difficult to make the case for classical Free Will in the sense of conscious decisions to act or not act.

To the classical philosopher, the dilemma was the Pre-Modernist vs. the Modernist points of view: god is in control vs man is in control. Today the focus has shifted to the Modernist vs Post Modernist question: man is in control vs no one (or physics/chemistry) is in control.

We did not discuss this last evening, although I wish we’d had the extra time, but a post-modernist view changes our understanding of responsibility and justice. If no one is in control, those still holding to a Modernist or even Pre-Modernist view want to argue that punishment becomes meaningless.

I would argue that justice and punishment shift from being a socially corrective or protective paradigm to a repairative function. If are actions are the sum total of our genetic and experiential makeup, then aberrant behavior, however that might be defined by society, ca be corrected through the appropriate experiences.

In this sense, justice can become even more meaningful because we set aside revenge and punishment in favor of rehabilitation.

Sadly, there will be those individuals who are so broken as to be, in the absence of genetic manipulation, unfixable and justice would demand that they either be separated from society, for the protection of that society, for the length of their life or their life terminated.

The choice there is a whole other discussion.