A Conservative Paradox

The Punishmnent of Loki, Louis Huard

Something I've never understood about conservatism has always been the way it seemingly embraces both a behaviorist/determinist, and at the same time a free-will view of human behavior.
 
Conservatives often talk about rewarding or punishing good or bad behavior, and yet at the same time speak of the importance of personal responsibility: people being "self-made" or only having themselves to blame.
 
They often refer to social welfare programs as the "Nanny State", invoking dynamics of the citizen being treated as a child by a coddling, feminized government figure.  Instead, they would presumably favor the strong hand of a masculine figure who performs tough love by forcing them to go it alone.
 
This parenting metaphor relies on a theory of learning, more specifically, operant conditioning, in which bad behavior becomes habit through a process of reinforcement and is extinguished through punishment.  Aside from the fact that behaviorism as public policy is far more complex than this simple equation, what is striking is how conservatism then throws this deterministic view out the window. When it valorizes the idea of "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" as the morally justified way of earning one's fortune, or speaking of crime or poverty as being the result of poor personal choices that people could have made otherwise, they are relying not on a theory of learning but rather a notion of free will that requires only one's innate desires and reason to make good instead of bad decisions.
 
The only way I can make coherent sense of this is if they follow a sort of compatibilism in which a behaviorist account is responsible for part of one's decisions, with free will making up the rest.  The problem with compatibilism, apart from it not being based in any science or empiricism, is that it allows one to basically pick and choose how to establish the causality of any human action.  Where do you draw the line between determinism and free will?  Is there an age at which one gains this special innate efficacy unrelated to environment or learning history?  Or does one gradually develop it until, maybe by adulthood, when it is fully formed?  But then how much of it do you have?  Under what conditions would you ascribe all or part of an action to free will, and not determinism?
 
Rather, it feels like an arbitrary myth that, given the complexity of any one individual's environment and genetic learning history, you can sort of toss out as a reasonable hypothesis that you can get a free pass on to justify your particular justification as to why someone is deserving or not of any specific circumstance.  A millionaire can have made his money through freely choosing hard work and sacrifice, and so deserves to keep it as property.  A poor man chose not to work hard and thus deserves his poverty.  But if the government provides welfare (using part of the rich man's wealth to pay for it), the poor man's bad behavior of sloth and vice will be reinforced.  If a criminal is not punished he will not learn to change his ways.  If the government allows a man to keep his riches, it will reinforce his strong work ethic, but if he is taxed, his behavior will be punished.
 
The beauty of behaviorism is that it has decades of strong research supporting its conclusions about human behavior as determined by learning history.  Sadly, it is poorly understood by the public, not just by conservatives but by liberals as well.  However, because liberalism is far more concerned with fairness and equality than traditional and hierarchy, it is less allergic to being clear eyed about structural, environmental contingencies that undermine libertarian free will - if not in belief, at least in practical social policy.
 
 
 
 
 

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