The Age of Innocence?

By ROBERT WRIGHT

Perhaps the most vivid image left over from the murder of Kayla Rolland is a basically benign one: a six-year-old boy sitting at a table, drawing pictures. That he did this only hours after killing Kayla has been taken to mean that he didn't grasp the gravity of his act and so is not criminally culpable.

Fast-forward 10 years. Suppose the same boy, now 16, kills a member of a rival gang. On his way home, he picks up a pizza and rents a video--a comedy. He enjoys a few yuks and then turns in early. This segue from mayhem to amusement would be taken as proof of his brutality. A jury would find it easier to give him a stiff sentence than if he had gone home and paced the floor, racked by remorse.

Such paradoxes pervade the way we think about blame, and few cases have displayed them more clearly than this one. There has been much pondering of whether this child knew what he did was wrong. Well, probably not. But that's often the problem, isn't it--that criminals disagree with society over what is wrong? Shootings often arise out of grievance, a sense of just retribution. And more than a few robbers weave elaborate theories--not always implausible--about why their victims didn't deserve their money in the first place. Should we let these reflective thieves walk?

As for the question of whether six-year-olds have a sense of right and wrong: absolutely. Kids whine about unfairness almost as soon as they can whine. They instinctively justify their social retaliations--physical or not--as just deserts. Kayla probably died because her killer felt he was wronged.

To stress the continuity of moral development between young and old is not necessarily to favor jailing the six-year-old killer. In fact, from the same premise you could favor leniency for old as well as young.

Consider this child's famously miserable environment. How can we blame a six-year-old who has criminals as role models for his faulty moral compass? Good question. But will it be so much easier to blame him for being morally defective at 16, after another 10 years in that environment? As the twig is bent, the tree is inclined. ("A young child is even more open to cultural and family influence than an older kid," a psychologist told the New York Times. True. But older kids were once young--that is, when they got the firm dispositions, for good or ill, that later resisted social influence.)

Many people dichotomize between the six-year-old and his father. The boy is a victim of a corrupting environment; the man is the culprit, the one who shaped the environment. But of course the man was himself shaped--perhaps corrupted--by an early environment. I don't know the details of his life, but I'll bet he didn't prep at Choate.

This is not the place for a discourse on free will. It's a murky issue, and our everyday notions of blame, even if incoherent, do a passable job of punishing the people who, as a practical matter, must be punished for society to stay livable. But I do dissent from the common belief that this murder was unusual in being a "double tragedy." The more you know about what makes bad people bad--whether it is environment, genes or both--the more you realize that all murders are double tragedies.

Robert Wright is the author of Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny