Responding to Terrorism and Other Bad Behaviour

Cognitive empathy, justice, and evil

The 2003 documentary Death in Gaza presents a special opportunity for us to show compassion for bigots, or at the very least to use our cognitive empathy to understand the source of their beliefs. In the film, innocent and vulnerable Gazan children recite their hatred of pigs (Israelis and often Jews writ large), their wish to kill them all, and their desire to die trying. While such views are vile and unjustifiable, no one in their right mind condemns these children in the same way they would condemn an adult who espoused the same views.

These kids live under an inhumane and illegal Israeli occupation; they are subject to violence and squalor by their occupiers; their family members are maimed and killed by their occupiers; there is no hope for a future of peace. (With hindsight twenty-two years later, these abysmal views of the future proved true.) And, most of all, they are children. They don’t know about the world. We excuse children for holding mistaken, and immoral, views. Because they are children, we naturally find it easier to empathize with them and what they believe. In this essay, “to empathize with a belief” means “to employ cognitive empathy to understand the causes of that belief,” not “to endorse or justify the belief;” that’s what I would call sympathizing with a belief.

But the amount of empathy we lend these children (because they don’t know any better, they are the victims of circumstance) ought to be lent to all humans, no matter the views they espouse.

The case of Gaza is useful for illustrating this point because it is a closed society, cut off from the rest of the world. Why should we expect hateful children in Gaza to somehow become enlightened as they age? What new information will they encounter that will change their perception of Israelis, a people they know only to shoot guns, drive tanks, and bomb refugee camps (because those are the only Israelis they’ve ever seen). Most Gazans don’t receive some world-class liberal education that emphasizes the value of all human life. Not even Americans receive that. Most Gazans are not reading books written by Jews or with Jewish characters or watching TV shows that demonstrate that Jews are normal people, just as inclined to benevolence as others. Yes, they have the internet. But the internet is not smorgasbord of the narratives of the world; it is not a neutral platform that presents the various ethnicities, ways of life, and ideas found throughout humanity for the user in a pleasant way. Internet users are guided by their predispositions, biases, and the profit-motivated algorithms of YouTube, Instagram, and the like. The internet caters to your prejudices; it doesn’t challenge them.

Despite the unchanging material and information environment in Gaza—where bombs keep falling and poverty lingers—innocent and pardonable antisemitic children turn into supposedly incorrigibly evil antisemitic adults, or so many people believe. But it is not incorrigible evil that underlies their bigotry. Cognitive biases that afflict even the most enlightened, educated, open-minded person¹ (such as in-group bias and attribution error) mould the beliefs of many Gazans²: an understandable yet false narrative is created in which there is one enemy to which all of life’s ills can be attributed.³

In-group bias leads us to favour and trust people we perceive as being part of our own group, and attribution error makes us attribute bad behaviour on the part of our out-group to their nature rather than their circumstance (and good behaviour to circumstance rather than nature). In other words, when we see someone we don’t like doing something bad, it confirms our belief that they are fundamentally bad; it’s in their nature. And when we see them doing something good, we basically view it as part of a plan whose ultimate aim is bad.⁴

Harmful Beliefs

Think of the false narratives that dominate American politics. If we can empathize with the silly things Americans believe, then we must be able to empathize with the admittedly worse things many Gazans believe, considering their far worse circumstances. Here are some examples:

Some liberals attribute all of society’s vices to the white man. “White men colonized the world. White men control politics. White men control the extractive, capitalist economy,” or so the narrative often goes (this is not a real quote). This understandable, false narrative is adopted by young people with an innate sense of social justice who begin to fully grasp the inequalities of the world, and they look to the demographics of the people with the most power. Never mind that many white men are also victims of one of society’s greatest injustices (the unequal distribution of resources, IMHO); never mind that it was a tiny minority of white men who colonized the Americas while the rest lived in feudal subjugation; never mind the fact that races and genders lack immutable social characteristics and beliefs (i.e., there is no “white” way of seeing the world). This is not enough to dissuade many young, well-educated people of their false belief. The people portrayed in newspapers, books, and Instagram stories as doing the plundering and oppression are white men. And this is enough for the mind with its cognitive biases to subconsciously create a false narrative of the world.

A similar phenomenon afflicts some conservatives, who view immigrants and BLM protestors as the enemy. I hope my enlightened reader will be able to reconstruct the story of why these people hold these beliefs. They are not incorrigibly bigoted. They have been fed a stream of propaganda and lies by news organizations like Fox and politicians like Trump. Their beliefs, like yours, mine, those of social-justice-warrior liberals, and those of Gazans, are shaped (and fully determined, in my view) by circumstance and cognitive bias. At the very least, circumstance plays a huge role in determining beliefs, and to the extent that it does so, we ought to empathize with those beliefs. Determinism suggests that all human actions are influenced by prior causes, such as genetics, environment, and social conditions, rather than by free will. For a longer explanation of why I believe in psychological determinism see footnote.⁵

However, it’s clear that such beliefs as “Jews are the sons of dogs,” which was voiced by a young girl in Rafah whose house would soon be demolished by the IDF in Death in Gaza, are detrimental to the fabric of society: they cause serious harm to people, and that harm is magnified when they impel people to take further harmful, often violent action. As a society, we ought to decide on what a just and good response is to people who say such hateful things. Such a response should (a) grant a sense of justice or satisfaction to the victims of the bigot’s remarks, (b) allow the bigot room to learn and change their beliefs, and crucially (c) lay the foundation for a future in which such bigotry is less likely to ever come about, let alone be expressed.

By resisting our natural urge for retributive justice, we can address concern B. By very slightly entertaining our instinct for retributive justice and punishing people for bigotry that they can’t fully be blamed for, we can address concern A. And by soberly examining the social and material causes of human action and addressing those broader issues, we can ameliorate concern C and build a better society.

Clearly concern C, preventing future harm, is the most important, and it’s the one we usually fixate on. People often attempt to address concern C by silencing or destroying or exiling the person who has done harm. I think this sort of extreme action is often wrong, but it’s necessary when the aggressor’s bad behaviour would continue even in a better context (i.e., when the aggressor’s behaviour is only explicable in terms of some kind of innate, irrational belligerence).⁶ The problem is that our cognitive biases systematically make us overestimate how likely it is that our opponents are motivated by innate, irrational belligerence. And such miscalculations can have disastrous consequences.

Resisting retributive justice

I won’t rehash my screed about false narratives and cognitive biases again. But perhaps the greatest false narrative of all is that people’s harmful behaviour is motivated by pure, Manichaean evil, an evil so intense that it is inexplicable in terms of normal human psychology. I think this false narrative obtains because people refuse to understand the causes of others’ beliefs. Of course, it is very difficult to understand via cognitive empathy the causes of people’s beliefs when those beliefs are harmful and bigoted. We don’t want to put ourselves in the shoes of others, but we ought to. Once we realize that people’s beliefs are formed by material and social factors in the world, we realize that those factors can be changed: people are generally not incorrigibly evil.

If you believe me that most people are not incorrigibly evil, then you must also believe that most people are capable of changing and learning: they are corrigible. The instinctual response to harmful action (a broad category including bigotry and crime but also mundane things like being mean) is retributive punishment: make them pay for what they’ve done; euthanize the murderer; castrate the pedophile; torture the terrorist; scream at the person who stole your spot at the check-out aisle: make them suffer for suffering’s sake.

An inclination toward retributive justice would have certainly helped our ancestors in the Pleistocene era defend themselves and pass on their genes to the next generation. This is because they lived in tight-knit hunter-gatherer communities. In such small communities, it is instrumentally useful for you to follow your retributive instincts by, for example, lashing out violently at someone who stole what you hunted and gathered—this would establish your reputation as someone not to be messed with. Overestimating the extent to which others pose a threat to you (and assuming their actions are motivated by innate and irrational badness) would have kept you on your guard, preserving your life and allowing you to pass on your genes. But it doesn’t allow for a very happy or fruitful existence.

Modern society is not like this.

Homo sapiens mostly evolved before agriculture, in hunter-gatherer times. Natural selection turned retributive justice into a human instinct, one that is on display when you get cut off in traffic and scream “stupid asshole!” at the offender, despite the fact that you’ll likely never encounter them again (and thus your scream probably serves no useful purpose). Your demonstration of ferocity, which would have helped a Pleistocene make a name for himself as someone not to be messed with, is in vain and risks starting a dangerous confrontation.⁷

The issue with retributive justice ever since the neolithic revolution is that it neither advances the goal of natural selection nor is conducive to a moral, happy society.⁸ (And in the modern world, the geopolitical mistakes that come about due to our instinctively cynical disposition can lock us in constant war and prevent us from cooperating globally to solve the greatest threats to society, such as the risk from pandemics, AI, nuclear weapons, and climate change—though that’s the topic for another essay.)

This instinct is particularly inimical to improving the views of those who do harmful actions, which was concern B. By harshly punishing those who do harmful actions, we often reinforce the false narrative that impelled the harmful action. For example, punching someone (in an act of retributive justice) who called you an asshole will do nothing to dissuade them of their conception of you; it will make it worse.

Embrace retributive justice just a little

After you’ve thoroughly cleansed yourself of the will for revenge (the instinct for retributive justice), I ask you to indulge it just a little bit. Because humans are instinctively vengeful and punitive, we naturally yearn to see our enemies suffer. A system of practical justice, in which punishment is purely instrumentally, would make people suffer insofar as that suffering signals to others that they should refrain from harmful actions (otherwise they’ll be punished). This kind of suffering certainly seems useful for society, and in my view that makes it just (even though, due to determinism, I don’t really think anyone deserves to suffer).

There’s probably an extra amount of suffering that should also be inflicted on criminals and the like insofar as it gratifies the vengeful desires of their victims. We don’t want victims who feel ignored by the justice system to be frustrated or turn to vigilantism. This specific form of punishment that I’m advocating isn’t technically retributive justice because it isn’t suffering for suffering’s sake; it’s another signalling effect.⁹ But the semantics don’t matter. What I’m trying to convey is that we still can and should get quite upset at the little girl who thinks “Jews are sons of dogs,” and condemn or punish her somehow for espousing that view, even though it isn’t really her fault.

Why do people do bad things?

As any Israel-bashing peacenik can tell you, when you begin to dissect the material conditions in Gaza that make hatred and terrorism more likely to arise, you are immediately accused of (a) antisemitism and (b) “explaining away,” “rationalizing,” or “justifying” Hamas’s actions. The funny thing is that in a sense I am precisely attempting to “explain away” Hamas’s actions—or rather “explain” Hamas’s actions.¹⁰ I don’t believe most human actions arise from a nebulous, incomprehensible, and fundamentally morally responsible thought process, devoid of exogenous input. I think human psychology and behaviour is largely legible, theoretically predictable, and explainable in regard to evolutionary psychology and material conditions. I also think it’s in Israel’s interest to understand what causes Hamas to do awful things, to “explain away” Hamas’s actions. This would be helpful in preventing another 10/7. For if we have no idea why Hamas does what it does, how can we even attempt to avert future horrific attacks?¹¹

Robert Wright succinctly expressed this view in a 2006 essay in the New York Times:

This immersion in the perspective of the other is sometimes called “moral imagination,” and it is hard. Understanding why some people hate America, and why terrorists kill, is challenging not just intellectually but emotionally. Yet it is crucial and has been lacking in President Bush, who saves time by ascribing behaviour that threatens America to the hatred of freedom or (and this is a real time saver) to evil. As Morgenthau saw, exploring the root causes of bad behaviour, far from being a sentimentalist weakness, informs the deft use of power. Realpolitik is reality-based.

The “why are you justifying Hamas?!” (WAYJH?!) impulse reveals a belief in retributive justice over utilitarian justice. It rests on the belief that free will, and what we do with it, makes us morally responsible. Those who espouse the WAYJH?! impulse fear that if we can explain away Hamas’s actions sufficiently, we will be unable to morally condemn them. But as I addressed in the last paragraph, there are versions of instrumental and even retributive-ish justice that are available—and these kinds of justice make way more sense. Compatibilism can’t even save the WAYJH?! view because it regards human actions as determined, and thus subject to the exogenous variables (like material conditions and cognitive bias) that a instrumental view of justice advocates we deal with.¹²

We must separate the tasks of (a) understanding the underlying causes of actions and (b) deciding what to do about them in terms of punishment and moral condemnation. Too often we let our emotions decide B and then we neglect A entirely. Don’t let the WAYJH?! make you ignore these historical developments, which I consider to be the underlying causes of Gazan terrorism:

Israel ethnically cleansed two-thirds of Mandatory Palestine in 1948, pushing many Palestinian refugees into Gaza. Israel never let those refugees return to their homes after the ’48 war (in violation of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the 1948 Fourth Geneva Convention). After the Six-Day War in 1967 in which Israel captured Gaza, it illegally occupied and settled the territory until 2005. Israel heavily restricted Gazan trade immediately following the 2005 withdrawal, devastating the Gazan economy. Preceding¹³ Hamas’s 2007 takeover of the strip, Israel implemented an economic blockade. Israel has repeatedly “mowed the grass”—its term for indiscriminately bombing (to borrow a phrase from staunch Zionist Joe Biden) the dense strip—ever since the withdrawal of settlers (this bombing is done with 2000-pound bombs, which are widely viewed as inappropriate for urban warfare due to their catastrophic civilian impacts). The IDF explicitly operates under the Dahiya Doctrine, originally outlined by IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Ezienkot, which explicitly endorses disproportionate force and the destruction of civilian infrastructure (both of which are war crimes, as far as I can tell).¹⁴¹⁵

And I’m aware that Israel did these things for reasons, not out of the blue! My scepticism of attributing Hamas’s actions to “pure evil” applies to Israel’s attacks too. The above list is what I consider to the “the underlying causes of Gazan terrorism,” not a definitive and fair history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

If you want to get a primer on my view of the 2023-’24 Gaza War, check out a letter of mine published in the New York Times immediately following the Oct. 7 attack. I think it holds up pretty well with hindsight. I also wholeheartedly endorse what

Bentham's Bulldog

wrote on the subject immediately following the attack:

Moral Blindness On Gaza

The issue of incorrigibly evil humans

Yes, they likely exist. My basic, not-terribly-thought-through theory is that there’s a normal distribution for the propensity of humans to be evil.

Join me in donating to the Shrimp Welfare Project.

In all societies, there will be a small group of particularly malicious, vile people with no empathy. These people are the most susceptible to false narratives that easily explain society’s ills, and they are most likely to do harmful actions. (There’s probably also a group of angelically compassionate, understanding humans on the other end of the spectrum.) If these incorrigibly evil people exist, then how can we build a better society by addressing the root causes of harmful actions and beliefs, like hate and terrorism? Won’t hate and terrorism remain, as constants? I think not. A small amount of hate will probably exist. While a small minority may be incorrigibly evil, addressing systemic issues can reduce their influence and prevent them from gaining power. We have the capacity to deprive those few incorrigibly evil humans of the resources they need to enact their most awful goals.

Take Hamas: I think a small portion of Gazans are probably so indoctrinated with hatred of Israelis that no change in Israel or America’s behaviour would reform them; these people are probably overrepresented in Hamas’s leadership. But currently they have access to a vast army of sad, enraged people: the victims of Israel’s crimes, men who grew up without a mother or with a paralyzed sister because of Israel’s bombs.¹⁶ If Israel were to turn away from retributive justice toward a strategy that ameliorates the violence and poverty facing Gazans, this supply of potential soldiers and supporters for Hamas would be extinguished, leaving those few incorrigibly evil people without the means to pull-off attacks like 10/7.

So we should acquiesce to terrorists?

No, I’m not saying that. We should just approach justice, and other important things such as foreign policy, with a dispassionate outlook that focuses on achieving good outcomes, rather than meting out retributive justice. We should try to minimize the ways cognitive biases warp our thinking, by ignoring the Pleistocene instinct that tells us our enemies are only motivated by pure evil. They’re not. They’re usually motivated by reasons, just like us. And when we begin to understand the reasons that bad things happen we can try to address those reasons, rather than reacting to every affront in the most belligerent way possible (what I call whac-a-mole foreign policy), which promises further violence.

1. In fact, well-educated people might be especially afflicted by such biases.

Smart People Are Especially Prone to Tribalism, Dogmatism and Virtue Signaling

2. Obviously, not all Gazans hold the same beliefs.

3. For Gazans in 2003, there really was one main villain to which most of life’s ills could be attributed: the illegally occupying Israeli army.

4. Attribution error also affects the way we perceive our friends and allies: when they do something bad, we attribute to circumstance (“oh, they’re just having a bad day” or “they were forced to do that”), and when they do something good, it confirms our belief that they’re fundamentally good-natured.

5. Consider the following: all the physical particles in the universe follow strict deterministic laws—at the very least, we can reasonably induce this based on current knowledge of science, which explains the behaviour of the world in terms of deterministic laws. (Sometimes physical particles are subject to stochastic* behaviour at the microscopic, quantum level, though that doesn’t seem to have an effect on their macroscopic behaviour; i.e. the deterministic laws of physics at the atomic and molecular level still hold.)

In principle, with knowledge of the velocity and position of every atom in the brain, we could predict exactly where each atom will go in the future by applying the laws of physics. Neurology is in principle explicable in terms of biology, biology in terms of chemistry, and chemistry in terms of physics. Neurological, biological, and chemical patterns are emergent from physical patterns: they explain the same underlying dynamics but at a higher, more abstract level of analysis. Unless you believe in some kind of supernatural force (commandeered by the “soul” perhaps) that intervenes on the physical world, upsetting its laws, then you ought to accept that human behaviour and thought is determined. This means we should empathize with others’ beliefs and reject retributive justice.

*Stochastic phenomena have a random probability distribution or pattern that can be analyzed statistically but cannot precisely predicted.

6. Sometimes such solutions are effective.

7. Credit goes to

Robert Wright

for this argument. Read his book Why Buddhism Is True for more along these lines.

8. Though, regarding this second point, I’m not sure it was before the agricultural revolution either.

9. In other words, this form of punishment or justice still wouldn’t advocate that we punish a criminal who lives alone on an island, where they could never harm anyone again (where signalling effects would have no use).

10. It seems adding the word “away” to “explaining” somehow implies that by explaining actions in reference to exogenous causes we render them morally justified. But that doesn’t make sense.

11. Perhaps some people would take issue with the way I’m framing this, as if only Israel has the capacity to act and change the course of history,* as if Hamas holds no moral responsibility. This is not what I’m saying. Here’s what I’m doing in this essay: I’m proposing some ways we can respond to harmful actions (be they gruesome attacks or merely insults) in a constructive way.

If you wish to preserve the concept of “moral responsibility,” you can do this and still buy my entire argument. I just take issue with some of the common actions people think are justified by their designation of who’s morally responsible and who isn’t. I do think that moral responsibility is effectively a meaningless concept thanks to physical determinism, but if you want to cling on to it (just as many philosophers cling on to compatibilism vis-à-vis free will), go ahead.

Another thing I don’t love about the concept of moral responsibility: it’s almost always the case that, in a conflict, either side could have abstained from some unreasonable action in the past which would have prevented violence. For example, Israel could have not settled and occupied Gaza and Hamas could have not done the Oct. 7 attacks. These are two very reasonable asks since both of these actions were deeply illegal and immoral, and Israel and Hamas weren’t really coerced into taking them (i.e. they probably would have gone on existing just fine without taking them). If either of those conditions had been met, the ensuing 2023-2024 Gaza War probably would not have occurred. Many people latch on to one of these two insights to try to blame one side wholly for the conflict, and in a sense both sides can be blamed wholly for the conflict. (One could even blame the British Empire wholly for the conflict.) I think either moral responsibility is a meaningless concept or the totality of moral responsibility adds up to far more than 100% because there are always many actions that many different parties could have reasonably refrained from taking which would have prevented the given moral wrongdoing.

* Also, I’m writing from a Western perspective to other Westerners. Regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict, all my suggestions will be for what the West (Israel and the United States) can do to improve things. This doesn’t mean I don’t think Hamas ought to do things differently too; I do. But I’m fed up with the idea that just because Hamas ought to change its ways, Israel doesn’t have to implement any reforms in the meanwhile. If a country (Israel) can do something (like stopping ethnically cleansing the West Bank) that will improve the world, it is always preferable that the country do so—especially if those reforms would still be morally the right thing to do absent any wrongdoing on the part of that country’s opponent!

12. Also compatibilism makes no earthly sense, so no need to fret about this too much. (It seems like semantic sorcery to me.) Shockingly, one of the smartest philosophers out there

Ben Burgis

, (who I interviewed) thinks compatibilism is correct.

13. I feel that the issue of whether Israel’s blockade preceded or succeeded Hamas’s 2007 takeover is quite important, and it has never been honestly covered by the media. In January 2024, I attempted to alert the New York Times of this issue; they were not to be dissuaded of their ahistorical view:

Hello,

Mr. Friedman wrote that Hamas's takeover of Gaza in 2007 "led to the first Israeli economic blockade of Gaza". In fact, an economic blockade had already been imposed when Hamas took power. The very election that Hamas won was conducted under an Israeli economic blockade in Gaza. Here's a UN report from Jan 2006 that shows that Israel had blockaded the only crossing by which exports left and imports entered Gaza.

Friedman's defense of the Gaza blockade relies on the made-up notion that it succeeded Hamas's takeover, when in reality it preceded it.

Best,

Theodore Shouse

Dear Theodore Shouse,

Thank you for your message.

Mr. Friedman writes:

“In the end, Hamas violently ousted Fatah from Gaza in 2007, killing some of its officials and making clear that it would not abide by the Oslo Accords or the Paris protocol. That led to the first Israeli economic blockade of Gaza ....”

According to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs:

“In June 2007, following the takeover of Gaza by Hamas, the Israeli authorities implemented a blockade/movement restrictions citing security concerns, virtually isolating the 2.2 million residents in Gaza from the rest of the OPT and the world more broadly. This land, sea and air blockade on the Gaza Strip intensified previous restrictions, imposing strict limits on the number and specified categories of people and goods allowed through the Israeli-controlled crossings.”

https://www.ochaopt.org/content/humanitarian-needs-overview-2023

According to Britannica:

“After Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, Israel declared the Gaza Strip under Hamas a hostile entity and approved a series of sanctions that included power cuts, heavily restricted imports, and border closures.”

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hamas/Conflict-with-Israel

The Times stands by the essay as written.

Jose Fidelino
copy chief, Opinion

Hello Mr. Fidelino,

Thanks for your response. I don't believe, however, that the sources you sent contradict my objection, which is that an economic blockade had already been in place in 2006 and therefore Mr. Friedman's use of the word "first" to describe the Israeli blockade that began in 2007 is untruthful. Many other media sources, including the Los Angeles Times and AP, published articles in 2006 referring to Israel's sanctions on Gaza as a "blockade".

Here's an article from Agence France-Presse from June 2006 that referred to a "full naval and ground blockade on Gaza". Here's one from the Los Angeles Times from July of 2006 that also refers to Israel's blockade of Gaza. The Associated Press in July of 2006 reported that the International Red Cross was "working to get the military blockade of Gaza lifted". Here's an AP article from February of 2006 that said Israel was planning to implement a blockade of Gaza following Hamas's election in January of 2006.

The UNCHR source you sent hints at this when it says, "the blockade intensified previous restrictions". Those previous restrictions were costing the Gazan economy half a million dollars a day and blocked all humanitarian aid, according to UNCHR. Perhaps the NYT does not consider this a full economic blockade, but many others do.

I did some research: The Times reported on this issue in 2006. In the linked article, it says that the Karni crossing (the only crossing by which exports and imports could leave and enter Gaza) was closed for over 325 days of the year in 2006. Here's another Times article from 2006 detailing how repeated Israeli closures of the crossing harmed the Gazan economy.

Perhaps the wording in Mr. Friedman's piece can be altered to say that the Hamas takeover "encouraged Israel to continue its economic blockade of Gaza" or "led to intensified Israeli sanctions of Gaza". Or perhaps you should reach out to Mr. Friedman to see why he disagrees with AP, the LA Times, The International Red Cross, and AFP.

Best,

Theo

The Times did not respond.

14. Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Convention of 1977, article 48 and Customary International Humanitarian Law Rules 11, 12, 13, and 54.

15.

Glenn

wrote a good piece about how continued US destruction of Gaza (via an occuption) would provoke terror attacks:

If You Want Another 9/11, Take Over Gaza

16. “By almost every metric, the harm to civilians from the first month of the [2023-2024] Israeli campaign in Gaza is incomparable with any 21st century air campaign. It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented.”