Well Samuel Bankman-Fried has been denied bail and is currently awaiting his extradition hearing in the Bahamas so I guess he’ll be seeing another side of the island paradise.

Witnesses at the hearing report that his mother Stanford Law School Professor Barbara Fried, laughed weirdly at odd times during the proceedings. One might attribute that to the fact she and her husband are facing financial ruin for their son’s actions. She has reportedly canceled all her classes and announced her “long planned retirement.”

Bankman-Fried’s father Joseph Bankman, also a Stanford Law prof, has canceled the class he was scheduled to teach this winter.

They are reportedly trying to return the deed to the $16.4 million vacation home in the Bahamas purchased for them by their son’s company.

It’s tough for a mother to contemplate their child facing serious time, and it’s only natural to be haunted by the question, “Where did he go wrong? Is it something I did?”

In this case I think we can say, yeah it is.

I’m looking at an article by Fried in the Boston Review titled “Beyond Blame,” subtitled “The philosophy of personal responsibility has ruined criminal justice and economic policy. It’s time to move past blame.”

The article is well worth reading. There is an admirably concise review of various philosophical approaches to the problems of free will and personal responsibility. And if she heaps scorn on some she at least reports them correctly, she doesn’t strawman views she doesn’t like.

She addresses hard problems like how blameworthy is the child of a crack-addled mother who decides joining a gang and dealing drugs is the best way to survive?

How do we judge him if he kills a customer in a deal gone bad?

“An hour listening to the average lifer in prison or the average at-risk teen talk about his or her circumstances, and most Americans would never view those groups in the same way again. Unfortunately, most of us will never spend that hour.”

I agree that it’s unfortunate, but not for the same reasons. But because most sane people would have the same reaction the late comedian Richard Pryor had when he did have that conversation while making “Stir Crazy” (1980).

“Thank God we’ve got penitentiaries!”

Fried dismisses the whole idea of free will, “But its indigestible core is unchanged: we are blameworthy for doing what we could not help but do.”

Everyone knows they have free will because we exercise it every day. And everyone who has reached for that cigarette when they’re trying to quit knows their free will is constrained.

Free will is our heritage as human beings, but like our muscles it must be trained and exercised. The fact some people don’t get that training growing up is not news. Neither is the fact some grow up to be moral monsters because of their circumstances.

But Bankman-Fried grew up the child of affluent educated parents in an intact family with the finest education to nurture his impressive intellect. And ironically at his fall he has attempted to cast blame on everyone around him but himself.

He appears to be in that old English legal term, a “moral imbecile.”

But in his case it’s not the result of mental defect, it was taught.

I will be paying close attention to this case because I have the feeling this is symptomatic of a deeper rot within our knowledge class.

— Steve Browne is a longtime reporter and contributor to the Marshall Independent