 One of my friends offered to give me this book and I was like of course I love Shakespeare already and you know I'm into free will. The Netflix series 13 Reasons Why based on the book of the same name tells the story of a teenage girl Hannah who is recorded a series of cassette tapes blaming various individuals in her life for her eventual suicide and releasing the tapes after her death as a form of punishment. The show has been in the news for prompting a few troubled teens to end their own lives. It's currently preceded by a content warning asking viewers who might be at risk to seek counseling if they experience suicidal ideation or need support. However the way that the story is told doesn't always paint Hannah or her reasons in a very positive light. One might even get the impression that there's a fair amount of contextual criticism of her character. There are numerous points in the narrative where her account of events is revealed to be exaggerated or even outright fabrication. The grievances she cites are sometimes made against a backdrop of other characters who are enduring similar difficulties and dealing with them in healthier ways. At points the viewer is reminded of the fact that despite her setbacks Hannah has a number of advantages that many her age do not like invested parents and peers who care about her. A viewer might accept Hannah's reasons at face value, but one might also get the impression that she's blowing these events vastly out of proportion and that her unhealthy outlook is far more to blame than the circumstances she's citing. What sticks out the most to me about either way of viewing the story is a theme of unavoidability. Hannah's tapes lay the blame for her suicide at the feet of others, essentially saying these individuals and their actions have caused me to take my own life. Any other person in my situation would make the same choice. Alternately, the show itself might be seen to suggest that Hannah, her seemingly pathological interpretation of events and her inability to cope are really to blame. That it really wouldn't have mattered if her classmates had been a little bit nicer to her. She'd still find her reasons regardless. I feel that both views are incomplete in an important way. A long ways back I gave the most bare bones of descriptions of compatibilism, the predominant philosophical theory regarding the question of whether humans have free will. That is, whether we exercise some sort of meaningful control over our choices and actions, or if they are primarily determined by external factors. In short, there seems to be a conflict between our subjective experience of our choices, the feeling like we're calling the shots, and various facts we observe about the world, things like cause and effect, or the decidedly predictable ways that manipulating a person's environment can affect their decisions. We feel in charge, but there are good reasons to suspect that that's not the case. Compatibilism asserts that we actually don't have to choose either a deterministic view of human psychology or free will. That the most coherent explanation of what we observe includes both positions. Yes, there are important differences between a person who's acting according to their own agency and a person who's being controlled or coerced. Yes, human decisions are the result of a chain of causation and can't be siloed off from that causal chain or the rules by which it operates. We can, usually, choose our own actions freely, as constrained by the laws of psychology and physics. Viewed this way, trying to draw a box around Hannah's mental state or the cumulative effect of the individuals she blames for her suicide and saying, here, here is the reason for Hannah's death is a misguided enterprise. Hannah's action is the result of a long series of causes and effects, both internal and external to her person. It's true that if she had been bullied less, she might have made a different decision. It's true that if she had learned better coping skills, she might have made a different decision. It's true that if she'd worked harder to find a healthy outlet for her frustration, or if she'd read something helpful at the right time, or if she'd been unable to find a blade, or if she'd been lightly mauled by a koala bear and hospitalized, or if any number of other links in the chain of events leading to her death had changed in some way, the outcome might also have changed. And it's true that, ultimately, the final choice was hers. It's not just impossible to attribute the event to a single step in that process. It's dangerously myopic. The National Association of School Psychologists has issued a statement about 13 reasons why, suggesting that it's not simply a risky piece of media to show to high school students who might be especially vulnerable, but that it totally avoids discussing the prominent role of treatable mental illness in suicide, and thus reinforces the most harmful message imaginable, that suicide is the only response to a sufficiently bad situation, that the causal chain of bullying and abuse can only end one way. Therapy or medication might well have been the things that ended up putting her on a different path. The integrative way of looking at Hannah's decision through the lens of compatibilism paints a much more nuanced and practically useful picture, both for policymakers who are trying to prevent suicide and for individuals who may find themselves at risk, as many of us are. Rather than narrowly focusing on stamping out bullying or toughening people up as the sole mechanisms of prevention, it highlights every step in the process as a potential turning point, a place where the right input can cause a much different result, and grants a sort of recursive agency, a chance to make decisions that can affect our future decisions in reliable ways. For example, choosing to exercise at a particular day doesn't feel that important in the grand scheme of things, but physical fitness plays an important part in maintaining mental health, and people who exercise regularly are significantly less likely to commit suicide. This makes the choice to exercise a potential breaking point in the chain of causality that leads to suicide, a fork in the road that may well lead somewhere better. Keeping a firearm in the house seems fairly innocuous, but there's a reason insurance companies raise your premiums if you're a gun owner. Even the seemingly trivial effort necessary to find another way to kill yourself can be enough of an obstacle to affect the ultimate outcome. Now, to be fair, I can imagine someone agreeing with his overall sentiment, and then simply focusing on whatever part of the equation they find most compelling. Because, hey, every part of the causal chain matters, right? It's important to recognize that there are variables that have lesser and greater effects, which can and should be evaluated using statistical methods, informing what we focus on most. Some individuals will appeal to a naive, holistic view of human behavior knowing this, either to prioritize or minimize some factor that's important for their agenda. Yes, yes, we have to teach better coping skills, but every part of the process is important, so let's talk about something else. Still, viewing human decisions and behaviors in a compatibilist framework as choices made freely under deterministic rules can liberate us from a narrow-minded focus on singular aspects of that process. Hannah comes up with 13 fairly uninspired reasons motivating her decision, but there are literally thousands, everything from her diet to the fundamental physical consonants of the universe. If she had been thinking of her future decisions as deterministic consequences of her present ones, maybe she could have made better choices. Can you think of a decision that you've made that has had significant consequences for a later one? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share, and don't stop thunking. Good boy.