108. THOUGHT POLICE - Why Thoughts Might Matter As Much As Deeds

Imagine the police-force where you live offer you the choice of one of two officers to be your local law enforcement from now on:

1) An officer who holds prejudiced thoughts against people like you (taken to mean whatever characteristic you want it to that identifies you specifically - i.e. ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, hair colour, accent - whatever).

2) An officer who holds no prejudice against people like you.

Both officers have taken a pledge not to discriminate against certain groups of people and have received training to support this pledge. There will be sanctions in place if such discrimination happens and Officer #1 is fully aware that their prejudiced thoughts would not be condoned if turned into discriminatory action.

Which officer would you choose?

I have asked several classes of my students this question this week and, perhaps unsurprisingly, every group has chosen for their neighbourhood to be patrolled by officer #2.

I say “unsurprisingly”, but maybe it should be surprising? After all, as I point out to my students, all that distinguishes the two officers are some thoughts in their heads. In terms of their actions, both have agreed to treat people fairly and with equality, and both have been trained in how to do so. Both are aware of the sanctions in place if they break that pledge. What does it matter that officer #1 might hold some prejudicial thoughts in their heads if, in practice, we will never know about those thoughts because, in theory, the thoughts will never manifest in their behaviour?

Furthermore, I point out, as the thought experiment comes in the middle of a module we are studying on human rights and social justice, don’t we all have freedom of thought? Can’t we be allowed to think whatever we want - which is precisely what this prejudiced officer is doing - so long as those thoughts don’t cause any harm or violate the rights of others? There is, after all, an important distinction between prejudice (a purely mental pre-judgement of a person or group of people based on a particular characteristic) and discrimination (actually acting on that thought and treating people differently). If officer #1 would, in practice, treat you just the same as officer #2 would, why wouldn’t you choose them to patrol your neighbourhood? Indeed, are you not being discriminatory against them for their beliefs? Violating their right to work because of something they are perfectly free to think?

The point of the thought experiment is to highlight that perhaps the distinction between thought and deed is not as vast as some theorists might hold. That while a thought alone does not actually cause harm, what it does perhaps do is increase the likelihood of a harm being caused that would be far less likely to happen in the thought’s absence. Jesus perhaps meant something similar when he suggested that someone who looked at another in lust might have already committed adultery in their heart even without physically cheating on their partner, and Kant made a similar argument for indirect animal rights when he suggested we shouldn't harm non-human animals because it might create habits of harm which could eventually become our behaviour when interacting with humans. If we imagine cheating, or if we hold ideas that there are certain types of thing not due the humane treatment we expect for ourselves, then - both arguments go - we shouldn’t surprised when we end up cheating, or treating someone inhumanely.

The reasons my students gave for not choosing officer #1 were that they simply couldn’t trust that this officer would keep their pledge the same way that they could trust officer #2. If officer #2 suddenly abused their authority and treated them poorly it would be anomalous and unexpected. A shock. If officer #1 did it there would be no surprise. Of course they would end up discriminating against you - after all, they had a head full of hate towards you. Why wouldn’t they end up acting on it?

Prejudicial thoughts are no guarantee of discriminatory behaviour, but they are certainly more likely to contribute to the probability of such behaviour emerging. It therefore isn’t worth the risk to give officer #1 the role.

The term “thought police” has deeply sinister connotations, and most liberals would balk at the idea that people should worry about the thoughts in their head. Thoughts, after all, can be fleeting and the cesspit of the imagination can throw up all manner of dark and dreadful ideas that we might hold in mind for a moment, having no control over their emergence, and then discard. There definitely does remain a moral significance between merely thinking something bad and actually doing it. In criminal law we can see that there is no harm caused by the person who routinely imagines robbing the bank and becoming rich and the person who actually carries out the crime in real life. The fantasist might be thinking criminal thoughts, but the actual bank robber is the person holding a cashier at gunpoint and traumatising the customers before stealing everyone’s money. There is a difference. Even terrible crimes like murder, even rape, though distasteful to think about, can’t be condemned or prosecuted when they are merely a thought in someone’s mind. The person who would like to kill or rape but doesn’t still hasn’t actually harmed anyone in reality no matter how upsetting it might be if we discovered that they had thought about doing so.

But at the same time, would we be surprised if the bank robbing fantasist actually did end up robbing a bank one day when they fell on hard times? If the murdering or raping fantasist ended up killing or raping someone, we would not only be unsurprised but we might ask the question why did we not do something sooner to stop them? To try and prevent the terrible crime from taking place? Recognise that without the thoughts being there, the actions would have been far less likely…and so maybe something needed to be done to prevent the thoughts from occurring in the first place?

There definitely seems to be a likely connection between thought and deed that blurs the separation of the two and makes the distinction less clear in terms of moral judgement. The answer, however, is not coercive policing of thoughts. Thoughts can pop up unbidden and thoughts are not permanent. Thoughts can change. More importantly, because thoughts lead to action they lead to positive actions too, and any policing of people’s thoughts can create barriers to the next great thoughts that lead to the next great changes in society. We need more thoughts, not fewer. And lest we forget, for many who hold deplorable thoughts, deplorable actions may never come. A higher probability is not the same thing as a guaranteed correlation. Certain thoughts might make it more likely certain actions will follow…but the action is not entailed.

We do - if we can agree on what might constitute a “harmful” behaviour - perhaps need to look more seriously at the connection between thought and deed and work harder at challenging those thoughts which might lead to harmful behaviours in the future. If we know that prejudiced thinking is more likely to lead to discriminatory behaviour, for example, than non-prejudiced thinking then we need to work on combatting prejudices. If we know that certain circumstances (say poverty or other social inequalities) might make somebody fantasise about robbing a bank, or others (violence, the commodification and objectification of human beings, experience of trauma or abuse) fantasise about more violent crimes, and that these fantasies make enactment more likely, then we need to work on changing those circumstances that give rise to such thoughts. We also, perhaps, need to give people the tools to articulate such thoughts safely, and without threat of punishment, so that they can work on changing them. If, for example, someone realises that they have some deeply held racial prejudices, sexist thoughts or homophobic ideas, what do we currently offer them in terms of helping them change? If they tell us they are a bigot, do we offer help, or judgement? Education, or sanction? How does the bigot stop their bigotry when the thoughts are there regardless of whether they want them to be? If our response to someone’s confession of prejudice or criminality, seeking to change, is hatred and disgust, then why would anybody ever share those forbidden thoughts? And if the thoughts aren’t shared, or even acknowledged, then what hope is there to prevent the negative behaviours they might eventually bring into action?

Recent work on unconscious biases and the massive impact they have in all walks of life for all kinds of people, especially the way they have led to systemic and structural oppressions, show us that the thoughts we hold can do great harm even when we don’t even know that we hold them. So these known thoughts which make negative actions more likely are even more important to tackle. The research on unconscious bias shows us that the way we can undo the legacy of this harm is by identifying and scrutinising those biases we may not realise that we have. Expose them, acknowledge them, and work actively to overcome them, usually through exposure to the reality that contradicts the prejudice. So, if you hold certain unconscious biases about certain groups of people one of the best ways of changing that is to get to know more of the sort of people you hold biases against. This will usually undo the stereotypes you unconsciously hold and combat the prejudice until it becomes untenable. Officer #1, therefore, acknowledging their existing prejudice and signing the pledge not to act on it might actually benefit from being placed on patrol of people like you, precisely because it will show them that the prejudices they hold are wrong as they actively pay heed to them and contrast their prejudiced thoughts against the daily reality they now see.

As someone with a head full of wild and wacky thoughts, many of which are out of step with mainstream norms and ideas, I have always been someone whose knee-jerk response is that freedom of thought is crucial. I still believe that. But I think I am also starting to believe that once the thoughts are freely formed, there is nothing wrong with analysing those thoughts and holding them up to scrutiny to see if they are thoughts worth holding. While “live and let live” sounds on the surface like a philosophy of peace, if “live and let live” means creating the conditions where bad ideas can fester unchallenged - and through festering eventually lead to harm - then perhaps sometimes we need to ask more of each other than agreeing to disagree? Perhaps sometimes we have to acknowledge that the thought alone is bad enough and there are some thoughts that we might even have a moral duty to challenge if we find ourselves holding them?

I don’t know - it’s just a thought…

Author: DaN McKee

My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE  and from all good booksellers.  Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com