Chad Doerman, Facing Reality One Year Later, In Light of Sapolsky’s Killing of Determinism.

A year ago I wrote a long post (in comment) about Chad Doerman, who killed his 3 kids aged 3, 4 and 7, then peacefully surrendered to the police, confessed the crime, and said he dragged one of them back to the house before shooting him. The crime was premeditated, months in the making.

This writing is better read if you read the other one first. Go. Actually I’ll just copy it here:

2023 June begin

“In arguably the worst crime I’ve seen in quite a while in terms of how mean it seems. Chad Doerman executed his own sons age 3, 4 and 7 in his home and surrendered to police, confessed and said he dragged one of them back when he tried to run away before shooting him and that the crime was premeditated.

He didn’t seem very emotional when being arrested but was very emotional during the pre trial or whatever that’s called. Could be adrenaline but could also be indication of psychopathy and not having normal emotional centers. Most people would be emotional I suspect if their kids died even if they were the killer.

The only motivation that makes sense in my head would be to take revenge on the mum. This could be say because she was misbehaving, because she threatened to leave with the kids and he was not going to let her one up him, because she cheated, or because she told him or he found out the kids were not biologically his.

This last hypothesis has a counter argument because his step daughter was not killed. If he was doing some variation of the gorilla lion behavior of eliminating other male offspring to incite fertility in a female it would be the reverse. He spared the one who isn’t biologically related to him.

So this makes me guess he thought she had nothing to do with his relation to the mum and it made no sense to kill her. He was trying to take back from the mum all that she didn’t deserve that came from him. But no more than that.

So my guess is that it was a moral crime. He thought the correct retribution for some action by the mum was to get back what he gave her and she didn’t earn or lost. Their children and the prospect of having a life raising them.

He didn’t try to kill her probably because the punishment felt harsher if he didn’t and again the proportionality clause. Whereas her life wasn’t his to take, he was well within his right to take that which she would never have without him to begin with (in his mind, I’m not crazy). So it was only fair that he would kill his three kids.

Neighbors say he was a very angry man normally. So we might have a tumor near the amygdala or some other anger-inciting thing physically going on in the brain.

I can’t really decide if I think he wanted to prevent her from taking the kids away – strongest piece of evidence being the nice Facebook pictures of the kids you can see since I tagged him in this post, and her screaming in the video that he took her life away from her – combined those indicate that he probably liked the kids and so did she. He wasn’t ok with being separated.

Or the pictures were part of the premeditation though 3 months is kind of way too long to plan how to literally take candy from children as well as everything else they would ever eat or feel.

So maybe he cried in the trial because he loved his kids and didn’t like when the prosecutor or whatever said that this was the worst crime he had seen and hoped to ever see in his lifetime.

Confessing indicates he felt a moral debt was due by the woman. The woman paid the debt. And now he should pay the consequences for his chosen punishment. Resignated. He knew this would happen and had accepted that price.

It’s hard to premeditate the murder of children on the basis of cheating or some other offense like that.

So my number one guess is “If I can’t have them no one will” followed by “You thought you could have your cake and eat it too, but you can’t”

My guess is that he was under massive numbing and adrenaline, that he is not ASPD.

He may have brain cancer, but if he doesn’t, he’s really a one-of-a-kind level of immoral crime, and he’s not insane or has much any other excuse.”

2023 June End

2024 June
I called it the worst crime I’ve seen in a long time, and the most immoral crime I was aware of.

Then I read Sapolsky’s Determined (2023).

Sapolsky cold-bloodedly and premeditatedly assassinated Free Will. He had 54 years to premeditate the crime as he stopped believing in free will age 13. I stopped liking soccer at age 9 when I stopped believing in Free Will. I have been aware that Free Will doesn’t exist for a long time, and despite writing a book about Dennett who wrote the Elbow Room 1989 and Freedom Evolves 2003 , and agreeing with him about 98% of things, I understood the game Dennett was playing in Freedom Evolves to be a game of semantics, he created a concept that fits existing reality (deterministic or randomly undeterministic), allows for responsibility, and preserves a notion of merit. Freedom within a narrow range of counterfactuals. My stance was like “Ok, I get what you’re doing here, I’ll let you do it, but I won’t stand behind it”. Sapolsky was less kind, he was like “I am gonna blow this place up before I let this pedantic obfuscation of a narcissistic lie concocted so you feel you deserve your 0.05% lucky life as merit, you f-ing a-hole.” I don’t think Sapolksy ever said anything remotely this offensive in his life, but that is how I read it, as someone who read 7 books by both of these Titans.

Although I’m personally not particularly excellent of moral character outside utilitarian metaethics, being just a normal guy, I identify as an excellent judge of moral quandaries, far above the norm, among other things because I understand the structure of biology, neuroscience, evolution, motivation, evolutionary psychology, causality, the anthropology of justice, and the philosophy of metaethics and ethics better than 99.999% of people. That’s just a professional benefit of being both a philosopher, an altruist, a pluralist, and an anthropologist. Comes with the territory. So the first time Chad came into the public eye, I tried to demonstrate how my belief on this being the worst crime was deeply embedded in him not having any distractors, alibis, or explanations at a biological level for his actions. It didn’t seem like a biological flying wheel spinning in vain, because he had plentiful opportunity to kill his stepdaughter, and chose not to, he only shot his own Darwinian foot, so to speak. He seemed unusually oriented and aware of his surroundings when arrested, and, as the law says “capable of distinguishing right and wrong.” It was truly, seemingly, this case of a guy who was like “Maybe I should plan for 3 months to kill my three beautiful boys that I love and who did nothing wrong”

The strongest confounder I could come up with at the time is that he was trying to punish the mother, “If I can’t have them, neither can you” if she was separating him or “You cheated and don’t deserve this” or “You don’t treat me well enough”. A hard case, no doubt. And of course, all the bio confounders, he was an angry man, and that spells cancer or brain malformation, he snapped for physical reasons.

So in my entire writing, if you just read it, was me trying, grasping for straws, trying to find a way to causally, biologically, neurologically, to innocent Chad Doerman, to see his behavior as not the fault of his proverbial soul, but as the accident of a malfunctioning genetic entity.

More data came forth in this year. I was looking at the wrong domain of evolutionary malfunctioning flying wheels. I should have looked at memetics. He was a biblical guy, and said the bible says “you have to kill your first born first, and then second
and third, but you have to kill your wife first, and I didn’t kill my wife.” Ahá. He didn’t have a cancer or a tumor in the amygdala. He had a tumor in the metaethics! That’s why it was so hard to see! It was divine command theory all along! Chad Doerman, alongside everyone else, from Kazinsky to Shaulgin, from Hitler to Stalin, is innocent, we, the enlightened spirits who can see reality for what it really is, fight to see another day! All is well. The man who killed, dragged, and killed his own little kids, who trusted him with the world, is, like all of us, and to the same degree as all of us, innocent. Oooof, that was close.

Yeah, I know. You probably don’t think like that, and you wish I had taken Dennett a little more seriously when he invited us to pretend Free Will means could have been different in nearby counterfactuals. I get it. But if I am to follow Sapolsky all the way, to where he wants me to follow, I cannot stop there. I have to say “Huh, what an unlucky guy this Chad Doerman, he got a tumor right in the prefrontal metaethics, and then bam, now everyone hates him and he’s gonna have to hang out in a cage until someone with nothing to live for decides to be judge and executioner, and takes him out of here. It’s so sad he’s unlucky like that, and I’m so happy I’m not him, but I feel bad for the poor man.”
Wow.
Yeah, Sidarta got nothing on me.

(I admit that Sidarta and Tomasik have a stronger hold on empathizing with mosquitoes than I do)

Recently I got into some friendly banter with
@Michael
Pearson precisely over this question type. He was advocating for more revenge and more punishment. I was saying our punishment system is way more draconian than it needs to be and we should be trying to make it causally minimally efficacious – make it punish the exact minimal amount needed to suppress future misbehavior and atrocities at a low cost.

Sapolsky calls this the “Quarantine Model.” Astronauts didn’t do nuffin wrong but we keep them in a nice cage 40 days anyway. Or Covidians, or kids with measles.

Divine Command theory is a tough type of metaethics. If your book is the bible, you’re usually fine, if it’s the Torah, it could go really badly, because the Old Testament God is, rather mercurial of inclination. If it’s the Book of Mormon you might get away scott-free. But to 2 billion of us, it is the green book of evil. Divine command theory suffers from the problem that some books, like the Green book of evil, are evil. And that’s bad. (notice how if X causes 20% of people to be Evil, then X is evil, regardless of the 80% to whom X is innocuous or moderately benefic)

Notice also how Evil is not located in my axiology in things rather than people. The evil thing isn’t the horny prophet, but the Green Book. I think that’s how we can escape the mistake of following Dennett and blaming people while keeping our commitment to reduce the amount of evil in the world in the long run. Destroy the causes of evil, IFF they are not people or sub-parts of people that those people would endorse on reflection. I may hate your green book, I may hate your amygdalar cancer, but I don’t hate you anymore. Hating you makes no more sense than hating a water stream.

In my picture of the case, as I see it today, Chad Doerman probably had one or another brain problem, that is what made him an angry person to begin with. He probably had some developmental problem in the constitution of his organized persona where his wife played a larger role than she should have. He depended on her more than would be ideal, like a man who can’t get out of bed if his wife doesn’t respect him, or doesn’t hawk-tuah him. He had a cancer in the metaethics too, like literally 400 million green book domino cascade people. People missed his cancer because Biblism has a very low incidence of metaethical metastasis, but never zero (camera zooms in on a bible looking menacingly at you outside previous frame).

If we are to take Sapolsky seriously, there is no merit or demerit, just turtles and turtles of causality all the way down.

Of course we should stop crime, but we should stop it like a quarantine, with Uber Eats and university courses.

Breivnik is instructive here: That’s the brilliant Nazi guy who obliterated 73 innocent teens who liked communism a bit (if Breivnik had read Sapolsky, he would know it was not the kids fault that Marx seems appealing to humans as young and ignorant as they were). He did university after being imprisoned for 21 years (max in Norway) and regularly chats by mail with people. If he was deemed fit to reenter society, he could be free in 10 years. The American mind cannot comprehend.

So, if the American Mind is putridly infected with barbaric ape-throwing feces level of stupidity behavior, maybe we may want to examine why it is so. Why are Americans, of all people, so disgustingly wrong about morality, punishment, retribution, and how to manage evil?

You probably guessed half of it. Half of it is Christianity, and the other half is the South. Which one did you get? Anyway let’s look at them:

Christianity made people deliriously believe they have a soul, and free will (neither determined nor random, but a third, weirder thing) which they are responsible for, which exists causally separate, and precedent, to the body, and which is exhaustively sufficient to inhere personal responsibility on. Needless to say, every part of that is wrong. There is no soul. There is no free will. You are not responsible morally for your actions (see Sapolsky 2023), nothing we know of indicates phenomenology precedes physical causality, and personal responsibility doesn’t seem to be supervenient on phenomenology or self.

The South inherited the culture of Scottish and Irish highlands (Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Sowell 201x) assembled a pastoralist culture of honor, and spread it in the great African American diaspora after the second world war to the rest of the USA, promoting retributive justice, like slashing a slave for not picking enough cottons, or killing a guy who kissed your wife, into a sanctified event. Honor culture, like the green book, is evil, and for the same reason, it makes some percentage of people in it evil. And worse, it infects people who don’t come from honor culture. The entire USA these days has some influence from that catastrophic diaspora and its consequences.

Will we ever rise to the occasion? Will you ever look at Chad Doerman like I do? With pity for the hard life he lived and will have to live, sad for his predicament, thinking he deserved better? Some of you already do.

I dare say not the majority. The majority like Pearson just wants to see him burn in hell. Like they would have watched a witch burn back in the good old days, or an epileptic have demons removed from her. Some of you, I’m afraid, will never escape being a barbaric ape, it’s who you are. Some of you think even being born of a certain type is enough a crime to deserve punishment. You can’t be the wrong race. You can’t be the wrong country of birth and want prosperity and security. You can’t be gay. You can’t be born with a disparity between the dispositions of your brain and your body. You can’t this, you can’t that. Jesus man. You guys are such a bummer.

Quarantine or containment, the minimal utilitarian punishment, must rise to the surface. But it will only ever do so when you let it. When you learn to rise above your primate instincts and accept that we don’t choose how we are.

Why are these perspectives so seductive to me, but not to some? Simple, I am abnormal, and very much so. The world has been both blessing me, and punishing me, for things I have zero control over, for as long as I’ve been around. I have the executive function of a gold-fish, and I’ve lost tens of thousands of dollars, a semester in university, and at least one girlfriend because of that. I have the intelligence of a Titan, and I’ve been praised for it in every bulletin since I was 6 by teachers, peers, girlfriends and strangers alike. I have had toxoplasmosis as a kid, and I’ve been brave, impulsive, daring, and horny ever since. No choice, just causality.

For me, because of these 3 attributes that I so obviously have no control over, it is exceedingly easy to explore an ethics in a world where that is the condition of everyone. My lack of determinism is epistemically transparent. Yours might be opaque. You may be normal enough that the Christian illusion of control has some hold over your Bayesian distribution of Epistemic worlds you could be in.

So the challenge is harder for you.

That’s where drugs come in. One dose of em d em a will make you love a plushie like you never loved a woman. One dose of GLP-1 made me finally see what people mean when they say “satiety” or “feeling full”. Self-control with regards to food, it turns out, is available at the pharmacy. Love is at the back alleys though, we don’t want love to be just available legally to everyone, lol.

I invite you to leave your lizard brain inside your feces-throwing ape cocoon, and to join the pantheon of enlightened beings for quarantine.

Me and Sapolsky, beaming in pure light, are awaiting for your arrival.

You may say we are dreamers, but we are not the only ones. I hope someday you’ll join us.

Your descendants will not look kindly on those who burned witches, nor will they look kindly on those who blame Chad above the minimum necessary to prevent the genetic and memetic spreading of his form of cancer and his class of misbehavior to others.

Is that how you want your grandchildren to remember you?