Bruce Charlton likes to write about how every person is a kind of spiritual being that preexists their incarnation. He calls them “pre-mortal spirits.” He notes, rightly, that a soul by itself is lesser than a soul with a body. This is why, after we have died, we receive a resurrected body rather than merely exist eternally as a disembodied spirit in heaven. The purpose, if you will, of having a physical body of flesh here is to do what is necessary to have a spiritual body of flesh in the hereafter.

Anyway, keep this in mind as you read the following essay.

Now, let’s be careful here. The Blankslatist claims that inherent biological traits do not exist. This is different from an opposition to predeterminism. In practice, predeterminism is quite popular among blankslatists who believe that criminals are not responsible for their actions are predetermined by external influences like “institutionalized racism” and so forth. There are, so it goes, mysterious forces which cause a person to commit criminal acts.

Accordingly, when the anonymous neurologist mentioned above talks of crime being predetermined, we cannot deduce whether or not he is a blankslatist or not. Based on his research, we presume that he believes that criminality is largely genetic, but we do not know for sure. What we do see is his ideological agreement with blankslatists that criminals are not responsible for their actions.

Now if you’ve read much of Bruce Charlton’s work, you won’t be surprised by this. To become a “scientist”—and receive funding for your work—you are required to lie. This scientist likely believes that criminals are largely “born that way,” but he’s forced to parrot the blankslatist belief that this means the criminal shouldn’t be held accountable. The truth is hopelessly conflated with the lie.

The neurologist’s position—if he is a hereditarian—is not a rational one. A hereditarian would not conclude that because crime is predetermined, criminals should not be held accountable. He would conclude the opposite, judging each man according to his deeds. A hereditarian would conclude that no man that is incapable of doing good would ever be declared innocent.

In general, those on the political left embrace blankslatism wholeheartedly. Meanwhile, those on the political right tend to embrace blankslatism more halfheartedly. They know that blankslatism is wrong, but promote it anyway. I suspect the neurologist fits into the second category, but I have no way to know for sure.

Now, let’s continue the essay.

Let’s be honest about the elephant in the room. Approximately 1 in 3 black men will have at least one felony conviction over their lifetime. Approximately 1 in 20 will commit murder, and that’s ignoring repeat offenders. The chance of being the next Iryna is not a fringe, statistical outlier. Moreover, school kids are at greater risk from a fellow black student than a mass shooter, by orders of magnitude. The arguments made above are ideologically motivated by this reality.

Bug’s argument is blankslatist to the core. He believes that each man is born in a kind of blank slate, but that one’s later actions cause one’s brain to deform. The corruption of his brain follows the corruption of his mind. This is a rather clever way to try to maintain a blankslatist position. I’ll give the man props for creativity. He’s lucky we don’t (yet) have the direct evidence to overtly disprove his claim. Although, we don’t really need it.

Unfortunately for Bug, criminality is already known to be extremely heritable, as discussed in Monday’s “Blankslatism Strikes Again!” It’s not really some unknown proposition for which we have no evidence. It is a well established fact.

What this means is that even if a person exhibits biological changes over time, these are themselves highly heritable traits. After all, you are not born tall, you have to grow into it. There is no logical problem with criminality being an inherently genetically-determined degenerative condition. This means that even if you surround a predetermined criminal with a solidly good environment, like a special private school or into an adoptive high-IQ family, he’s still going to end up more-or-less the same.

Bug is a Roman Catholic who believes “the body conforms to the operation of the soul, and so we would expect to find in the body, signs of the soul’s degeneracy.” The problem is that, by and large, criminals are born that way. In other words, his blankslatist “Catholic moral theology” is imaginary and falls prey to the warning:

Bug has set himself up such that if his assumptions about brain development prove unfounded (e.g. say criminals can be predicted by AI examination of the brain scans of infants), his argument—which premises moral equality upon biological similarity—becomes an argument for moral inequality, the inherent greater relative degeneracy of the soul, based solely on one’s birth.

Obviously, this conflation struggles to match reality (hint: it doesn’t). Criminality peaks in the young and tails off as people get older. Brain-based predeterminism doesn’t account for this. Nor does it leave any room for redemption in Christ, for when one is saved by Christ, their brains do not, by miracle, transform into a non-deformed state.

As I noted in “Racism,” it would be better to acknowledge reality:

What I find most interesting is that Bruce Charlton’s view accounts for the differences that the blankslatists are struggling to explain.