Hamartiology for Technocrats

06 Apr, 2025

What follows, friends, is a true example of an essay: an exploratory working out of an idea or situation that risks, and assuredly commits, error, misunderstanding, and baseless or unfair accusations, all in the attempt to get to the bottom of what’s bothering me. Were I to avoid this process of exposing my faulty assumptions and reasoning for correction and etc., I’d never really get any nearer to figuring anything out. With apologies in advance, then, to Ludwig Wittgenstein and economist Elias L. Khalil, here goes what I hope is something better than an adolescent assertion of I’m right–you’re wrong.

In an article aimed at establishing the difference between self-deception and delusion, Khalil uses the mythical world parents Adam and Eve to try and get at why “rational agents [would] undertake self-deception.”¹ Their eating the forbidden fruit, his theory goes, should have provided the pair with the understanding that God would have known what they’d done; hence, they wouldn’t have tried to hide that fact from him. If you’re familiar with the tale, though, when God asks what’s happened, Adam begins the regressive game of blame-casting (“the woman told me to do it”) that eventually gets back to the serpent, who’s got no one else to throw under the bus, so the confessions stop there. But the thing is, there’s not much narrative elaboration involved in the account of this detective work; God asks, “‘Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?’ The man said, ‘The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.’ Then the Lord God said to the woman, ‘What is this that you have done?’ The woman said, ‘The serpent tricked me, and I ate.’”² If any of the wrongdoers were squirming, it’s not shown in the text; each person’s account is pretty straightforward, and even if each is pointing to some other source of blame, they’re not lying or attempting to distract God from the facts, nor are they trying to hide the truth from themselves. (The woman’s saying the reptile tricked her seems, even if it really does reflect what happened, like the only possibility of justifying one’s choices here, but she doesn’t play any role in Khalil’s case study.)

Be that as it may, what’s nagging me isn’t necessarily the degree to which Khalil sticks to the text (or to his assertion that he’s giving us the tale “in its simplest rendering”—i.e., without speculating on what the protagonists are thinking or what they “truly believed” or how they’re delivering up their justifications). Rather, it’s the way he describes what the pair has done: they’ve committed a “sinful (suboptimal) act” as opposed to a “justified (optimal)” one.³

Wait—what? Some grand and complicated concept, both here and throughout the rest of the article, has been sucked dry, or at least used in a type of argument where it just doesn’t fit. Because “sin” isn’t really a concept that can function in a social sciencey discussion, which often either ignores or works hard to remove any fuzziness or nuance from the ideas and situations it’s dealing with.⁴ Even if you’re willing to buy a minimal, even atheological, notion of sin as the imperfect, inherent or causative structure that shapes our being in the world, that idea is massive, encompassing collective agencies, systems of governance, individual will and degrees of freedom and sensibility and feeling (and yes, reasoning), resource distribution, and on and on, along with the fact that these manifestations and arrangements will all look different depending on where and when you are. Something, in other words, that can’t be placed into a neat category. So when I read the equation of a sinful act with a suboptimal one, I choke-laughed at the absurd reduction this author apparently “truly believed” was valid.⁵

Khalil does specify that there are situations where it does or doesn’t make sense to refer to sub/optimal possibilities. (He says that delusion, for example, differs from self-deception in that the desires and dreams you have for yourself, whether or not you’re really capable of fulfilling them, can’t be judged in this way.⁶) And his choice of qualifier does for the most part fit in with the common-sense assertion that you can make better or worse choices, in terms of what those choices will mean for your interactions and relationships with others. But with its use of bone-dry technical language, Khalil’s approach is akin to a less fine-grained version of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s description of “the world” in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “the totality of facts” which “determines what is the case”—and where “What is the case—a fact—is the existence of states of affairs” in which “objects fit into one another like the links of a chain.”⁷ Sin according to Khalil’s assumption might be understood as a way of grasping what the state of affairs is—able to be depicted on a chart that came along with the piece of fruit plucked from the tree of knowledge—and where the best and less-great options present themselves clearly. Admittedly, if you adhere to a super-legalistic form of religion that does reduce sinful/not sinful to a list of rules from which you can’t deviate one little bit, and you live in a community that functions according to this understanding, this notion of sin might make more sense.⁸

But life and the options it provides, not to mention the mythologies we construct to explain them, are rarely that clear cut, and that’s only part of the problem. Khalil seems here to be making some leap from a routine description of human interaction to the ostensibly more-than-human concept of sin. Again, Wittgenstein is helpful, even if I can’t do justice at the moment to his very intricate argument about what we can and can’t (logically) say about the world. The philosopher says that both “[t]he sense of the world” and any “value” we find within that world “must lie outside the world.” Sin, which affects how one is to approach and value the world and the things in it, is something that depends on divine judgment, an inscrutable ethical decree that comes from outside the world. “Optimal” and “suboptimal” options are at best weak grasps at describing behaviors acted out within a system of such finally inconceivable ethics—especially since “ethics,” as Wittgenstein says, “cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental.” When dealing with ethics, “our question about the consequences of an action [how our behavior will be met by God or the community] must be unimportant…. There must indeed be some kind of ethical reward and ethical punishment, but they must reside in the action itself.”⁹

That assertion seems at first glance to fit with the legalistic or technocratic version of sin, in which an action itself, not what it intends to do or winds up resulting in, is either sinful or not, case closed. But in this account, there’s either a sinful or nonsinful action—no in-between that could be described as suboptimal. There’s also the problem, even within strict traditions that are pretty clear about laying out what’s acceptable and not, when justified action might as well be called sin. Job knows, for example, and won’t be silent about saying so, that’s he’s done everything right—optimally—and still, everything’s taken from him. His case is airtight—but that’s not good enough. Because, as God spends a slew of verses reminding him, his puny human brain doesn’t know shit about how the universe really works or what the point of this whole ordeal is, or whether he really should think everything’s A-OK once he accepts that fact and gets a new wife and kids and fields full of animals in return. Although Job does seem like the only rational agent in this story, none of the concepts the tale wants to illuminate, such as the nature of divine justice, could be said to operate according to anything we’d have an easy time calling rational or logical; Job could have carried out any action he wanted along the sin-justice (sub/optimality) continuum, and it would’ve made no difference.¹⁰

The case of Job is related to the fact that when we’re dealing with something more nuanced than a system of box-checking (and when the actors Khalil’s describing are behaving out of concern for themselves, not for the action itself), trying to situate human conduct on some point along a graduated scale of rational decision-making seems out of place.

For one thing, there’s often no optimal decision to be made: no right answer or choice whatever you do. The understanding of that unfortunate reality might point to the concept of sin as its cause—but it could also point, as it did in ancient Greek drama, to the tragedy of existence. Bury your brother and go against the king’s explicit prohibition, getting yourself killed; or obey the law and offend the gods, getting yourself killed? In Antigone’s situation, there actually was a right answer on the level of divine justice—bury your brother—but none where her own fate was concerned; she was doomed either way. The ethical (justified) reward and punishment here, as Wittgenstein pointed out, were contained within the action of burial itself, an action carried out in line with that ethics that came from beyond “the world,” and which would ultimately have no bearing on the individual punishment that in this case would be Antigone’s whatever she did.

But I feel like I’m twisting myself into ever more indignantly grasping knots, and have lost contact with an aim I might never have clearly defined. This essay, then, seems to be disintegrating into failure, and I think I’m going to need to step away and come back to this wrangling after a mental reset. So in temporarily closing this thing down before I have an aneurism, what exactly is my problem? It’s not a sense of offended religious faith; not an adherent of any tradition, theological discussions often just annoy me. Even so, I appreciate the grandness of certain religious concepts; concepts that accept on some level that certain realities are just too big to explain if human reasoning is all we have at our disposal to make sense of them. What’s getting me, then, isn’t a matter of sacrilege, but instead seems more of an offense against language and the unpredictable, other-than-rational, even finally inexplicable motivations and workings of human nature; the attempt to contain that messiness and mystery within some sort of grading matrix or chart.

Admittedly, part of what it means to belong to our species is dealing with uncertainty. But in figuring out how to do that, we often try, not to live with that uncertainty, but to believe—dare I say delude ourselves into thinking?—that we can control it or do away with it altogether. While I don’t of course think Khalil’s trying to do this, the language he and other social scientists use, and the strangely rigid and category-confusing definitions it allows,¹¹ do seem intent on domesticating human existence’s erratic, nonrational outliers, along with the unpredictable or puzzling outcomes they entail.

So does it just come down to letting the holders of irreconcilable views agree to go their own ways, the romantics with their gaudy metaphors and the hyperrationalists with their legalese or computer code? Knowing that solution is both impossible and undesirable, I’ll have to leave the question unanswered, and hope that some better—more optimal?—suggestion eventually comes along.

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