Assholes by Aaron James

life should flow his way. We thus blame the asshole for his situational errors
and
for the basic error that defines his very way of being.
    Of course, the occasional asshole does change his way of being. Dickens’s Ebenezer Scrooge eventually undergoes adramatic moral transformation. 19 It is an interesting question whether assholes ever wholly transform, or whether being an asshole is more like a being an alcoholic: one is always gratefully in recovery and never finally cured. Nor would an eleventh-hour “transformation,” as death approaches, clearly qualify; it may be better to say that the dying man is understandably just not being himself. I would guess the transformation can be and sometimes is total. This is not, however, why assholes are properly blamed: assholes aren’t to blame because they can potentially recover. They are to blame simply because they think like an asshole, whether or not they will, or even can, ever change.
    ----
    1 . “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,”
Wall Street Journal
, January 8, 2001, http://​online.​wsj.​com/​article/​SB100​014240​52748​70411​15045​76059​71352​8698754.​html , and Amy Chua,
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
(New York: Penguin Press, 2011).
    2 . And in any case she quite rightly takes objection to recent, approval-obsessed Western styles of parenting, which have made kids tend toward either self-destructive anxiety or narcissism and the desperate need to experience something real (e.g., through college binge-drinking experiences).
    3 . As Simone de Beauvoir puts the point, “Social discriminations … produce in women moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to spring from her original nature.”
The Second Sex
(1949; repr., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 18.
    4 . On the diversity of cultural influences, see Elizabeth V. Spelman,
Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), and Patricia Hill Collins,
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment
(New York: Routledge, 2000).
    5 . For a Marxist take, see Maria Mies,
Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour
(London: Zed Books, 1998).
    6 . According to Judith Butler, in
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(London: Routledge, 1999), however, even biological sex categories are socially constructed. As a component of socially constructed gender, “maleness” isn’t off the causal hook, but rather not a distinct causal variable. Instead of coming to the aid of maleness, this view denies its existence as natural.
    7 . The whole story is nicely documented in
Bustin’ Down the Door
, www.​imdb.​com/​title/​tt11​29921/ .
    8 . This is according to a University of Michigan study, described in “Empathy: College Students Don’t Have as Much as They Used To,” May 26, 2010, www.​news​wise.​com/​articles/​view/​565005/?​sc=​lwtr;​xy=5017391 .
    9 . The foregoing is roughly a version of the skepticism defended by Galen Strawson in “The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility,”
Philosophical Studies
75 (1994): 5–24, if we substitute “full control” for a kind of conscious choosing (which he specifies).
    10 . This view is defended by Roderick M. Chisholm, “Human Freedom and the Self,” in
Free Will
, 2nd ed., ed. Gary Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 26.
    11 . Gary Watson, “The Trouble with Psychopaths,” in
Reasons and Recognition: Essays on the Philosophy of T. M. Scanlon
, ed. R. Jay Wallace, Rahul Kumar, and Samuel Freeman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). See also Watson’s “Responsibility and the Limits of Evil: Variations on a Strawsonian Theme,” in
Perspective on Moral Responsibility
, ed. John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 119.
    12 . Watson, “Responsibility and the Limits of Evil.”
    13 . Watson, “The