Why I Admire Anthony Weiner
By SALLY L. SATELSEPT. 25, 2017
On Monday, former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner was sentenced to 21 months in prison for having lewd exchanges with a 15-year-old girl on Skype and Snapchat. The sentencing was just the latest act in Mr. Weiner’s nightmarish downfall fueled by his compulsive sexting habit.
Mr. Weiner cried as he pleaded guilty to one count of transferring obscene material to a minor, a crime that carried up to 10 years in prison. “I acted not only unlawfully but immorally, and if I had done the right thing, I would not be standing before you today,” he told Judge Denise L. Cote in Manhattan.
“I was a very sick man for a very long time,” he said. Indeed, his behavior fits a commonly understood definition of addiction, which is persistent engagement in a behavior despite negative consequences. And those consequences were epic — loss of his congressional office in 2011, the implosion of his mayoral bid in 2013, public humiliation, the dissolution of his marriage and accusations of jeopardizing Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid.
“I’ve had a disease but I have no excuse,” he continued. “I accept complete and total responsibility for my crime. I was the adult.”
In admitting this, Mr. Weiner captured an important distinction that has been lost in our culture, which tends to over-pathologize problematic behavior. He didn’t blame his “disease.” He knows that there is a difference between having a compulsion and acting on it. But there is an idea bigger than just controlling one’s impulses. It’s what legal scholars and philosophers call “diachronous responsibility.”
Consider the drunken driver. Once he is tanked up on whisky and heading to his car to drive home, it is unrealistic to expect that he will instead amble to the closest Starbucks to sober up or call someone to drive him home. A cycle has been tripped and the odds are that he’ll drive home intoxicated. If he kills someone, it’s no excuse. That’s because he had ample opportunity to be responsible: When he was sober and walked into the bar. That was his first mistake, and a totally avoidable one.
According to Stephen Morse, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, a person can be responsible for the ultimate harm, even if that person is somehow not responsible at the moment of committing an act, as long as three conditions are met: He must a) be responsible at other times, b) know or should know that he is at risk of causing those harms in a non-responsible state, and c) fail to take reasonable steps to prevent the harm from arising.
Mr. Weiner is three for three on the diachronous-responsibility test.
First, he is responsible at other times. Clearly, Mr. Weiner knew enough not to sext in front of his wife. Second, he knew or should have known that he was at risk of causing those harms in a non-responsible state. Mr. Weiner is an intelligent man who had watched his life crumble years before the offense. And third, he failed to take reasonable steps to prevent the harm from arising.
Addicts, pedophiles and others are in the same situation when they are not “overwhelmed” by their desires, Mr. Morse told me. “They need to be held accountable if they don’t take steps to tie themselves to the mast to avoid being overwhelmed.”
The mast reference here is to Ulysses, literature’s most famous subject of temptation, who tied himself to the mast of his ship to keep from submitting to the sirens’ call. Ulysses’s self-regulation led the political philosopher Jon Elster to coin the idea of Ulysses contracts. For example, a gambler might tell his local casino to bar him from entering in the first place. In Mr. Weiner’s case, that contract might mean putting parental controls on his own laptop, or even not owning a smartphone.
This may sound odd, but I admire Anthony Weiner for what he did on Monday. He stood tearfully before the judge and acknowledged several compatible truths: that he was responsible for his action, that he is accepting the consequences, and that he needs help so that he can liberate himself from those compulsions, or, at the very least, stop acting on them.
By SALLY L. SATELSEPT. 25, 2017
On Monday, former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner was sentenced to 21 months in prison for having lewd exchanges with a 15-year-old girl on Skype and Snapchat. The sentencing was just the latest act in Mr. Weiner’s nightmarish downfall fueled by his compulsive sexting habit.
Mr. Weiner cried as he pleaded guilty to one count of transferring obscene material to a minor, a crime that carried up to 10 years in prison. “I acted not only unlawfully but immorally, and if I had done the right thing, I would not be standing before you today,” he told Judge Denise L. Cote in Manhattan.
“I was a very sick man for a very long time,” he said. Indeed, his behavior fits a commonly understood definition of addiction, which is persistent engagement in a behavior despite negative consequences. And those consequences were epic — loss of his congressional office in 2011, the implosion of his mayoral bid in 2013, public humiliation, the dissolution of his marriage and accusations of jeopardizing Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid.
“I’ve had a disease but I have no excuse,” he continued. “I accept complete and total responsibility for my crime. I was the adult.”
In admitting this, Mr. Weiner captured an important distinction that has been lost in our culture, which tends to over-pathologize problematic behavior. He didn’t blame his “disease.” He knows that there is a difference between having a compulsion and acting on it. But there is an idea bigger than just controlling one’s impulses. It’s what legal scholars and philosophers call “diachronous responsibility.”
Consider the drunken driver. Once he is tanked up on whisky and heading to his car to drive home, it is unrealistic to expect that he will instead amble to the closest Starbucks to sober up or call someone to drive him home. A cycle has been tripped and the odds are that he’ll drive home intoxicated. If he kills someone, it’s no excuse. That’s because he had ample opportunity to be responsible: When he was sober and walked into the bar. That was his first mistake, and a totally avoidable one.
According to Stephen Morse, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, a person can be responsible for the ultimate harm, even if that person is somehow not responsible at the moment of committing an act, as long as three conditions are met: He must a) be responsible at other times, b) know or should know that he is at risk of causing those harms in a non-responsible state, and c) fail to take reasonable steps to prevent the harm from arising.
Mr. Weiner is three for three on the diachronous-responsibility test.
First, he is responsible at other times. Clearly, Mr. Weiner knew enough not to sext in front of his wife. Second, he knew or should have known that he was at risk of causing those harms in a non-responsible state. Mr. Weiner is an intelligent man who had watched his life crumble years before the offense. And third, he failed to take reasonable steps to prevent the harm from arising.
Addicts, pedophiles and others are in the same situation when they are not “overwhelmed” by their desires, Mr. Morse told me. “They need to be held accountable if they don’t take steps to tie themselves to the mast to avoid being overwhelmed.”
The mast reference here is to Ulysses, literature’s most famous subject of temptation, who tied himself to the mast of his ship to keep from submitting to the sirens’ call. Ulysses’s self-regulation led the political philosopher Jon Elster to coin the idea of Ulysses contracts. For example, a gambler might tell his local casino to bar him from entering in the first place. In Mr. Weiner’s case, that contract might mean putting parental controls on his own laptop, or even not owning a smartphone.
This may sound odd, but I admire Anthony Weiner for what he did on Monday. He stood tearfully before the judge and acknowledged several compatible truths: that he was responsible for his action, that he is accepting the consequences, and that he needs help so that he can liberate himself from those compulsions, or, at the very least, stop acting on them.
