A Perceived Gridlock regarding Torn Decisions

My concern here is with a specific type of “torn decision,” in which an agent’s decision cannot follow directly from the endorsed contents of their self (such as moral convictions, rational deliberations, self-governing policies, volition structures, and so forth). In statistical terms, the probability of this agent deciding in favor of any one of the options before her is .5. It is important to note that the agent is not indecisive because she is confronted with prospects she takes to be abhorrent/unthinkable options, nor is she torn because her decision is, to her, trivial/insignificant. She is “torn” because the constituents of her agential self either do not specify what she should do or they conflict with one another, resulting in a .5 probability of her deciding one way or the other.

 

Perhaps an example would help: Agent Z has, for some time, endorsed only Republican candidates. Simultaneously, he has come to care deeply about the reduction of pollutants released into the atmosphere. These commitments, surprisingly, do not conflict until the election of 2010, wherein the Republican candidate openly opposes pollution controls, and the Democratic candidate supports them. For sake of simplicity, suppose that, to Z, all other factors regarding the election and the two candidates cancel out. He is in the voting booth, and must vote one way or the other, having previously decided that not voting is an unthinkably unpatriotic thing for him to do.

 

Libertarians, such as Kane and Balauger, seem to view such torn decisions as the paramount opportunity for freedom (or L-freedom). Here, alternative possibilities are generated and the agent indeterminately “just decides,” perhaps “in light of” prior deliberation and desires, and perhaps as a self-forming decision, but always by selecting from 2 or more genuinely available courses of action. Compatibilists, on the other hand, would seemingly tend to view such moments as examples of diminished autonomy, wherein such notions as identification, ownership, and self-governance are inapplicable. The decision is not adequately controlled by the agent’s reasons-responsive mechanism and/or volitional structures (given that, should the decision-moment occur 1000 times, one result will happen 500 times, and the other result will happen 500 times), and so is not one that is made fully autonomously.

 

What is irksome to me is that I am not comfortable with either of these horns, so to speak. The so-termed “libertarian” view seems to ride on the presumption that, when the agent “just decides,” it is she who is making the decision and so it is she who makes the leap beyond indeterminacy. But exactly who or what is this “she” that/who is deciding? If her present beliefs, commitments, and desires cannot guide her one way or the other, it seems as though there is no “she” that makes a decision. A volitional spasm, perhaps, but not the personality of an agent. At the same time, at least some of our torn decisions do seem to constitute important moments in our agential history, defining, in a way, who we become as persons and agents. And so for compatibilists to poo-poo such decisions as paradigm examples of non-autonomous (or at least, less-than-fully autonomous) decision-making seems mistaken, as well.

 

How might we move beyond this gridlock? That is, what is the sort of agency proper to non-randomly made torn decisions (of the kind discussed here)?

Free Will and Fiction

In a few weeks I'll be teaching a course at UCR that is aimed at introducing students to the free will/moral responsibility debate by investigating contemporary fiction.  Since it's a summer course, I'm  planning on using two novels to supplement our discussion: The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut and A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.  The former deals mainly with free will, manipulation, and the meaning of life, while the latter focuses more on responsibility, blame, and how we should treat wrong-doers.

It's almost certainly too late to incorporate any new novels into my syllabus, but I'd be really interested to hear if other Gardeners know of any other good novels that deal with free will, responsibility, or other aspects of agency.  I'm also curious if anyone has tried something like this and has good ideas about integrating fiction and philosophical literature.

Are Humans Glorified Thermostats?

Consider the following dialogue:

 

Thermostat: It’s not up to me what the temperature is.

Human: Sure it is!  You’re the thermostat.  The buck stops with you.  If the room gets too cold, you warm it up.  Too hot, you cool it down.

Thermostat: Yes, I always keep the temperature at 73 degrees.  But who decided on 73 degrees?  Not me.

Human: But you love 73 degrees.  If it gets to 74, you sweat.  If it gets to 72, you shiver. 

Roy Baumeister vs. John Bargh on Free Will

B & B duked it out on free will at the recent Society for Personality and Social Psychology convention in Tampa and the debate continues on their respective Psychology Today blogs here and here. To my way of thinking Baumeister has some rather inchoate libertarian leanings and fears demoralization by determinism, while Bargh bites the deterministic bullet, saying everything’s going to be all right.

Madoff, Manipulation, and Libertarianism

Consider the following manipulation scenario. 

I implant in your brain a radio-controlled neurological device that allows me to manipulate all of the psychological forces (PFs for short) that guide you in your choices—that is, all of the feelings, emotions, sensitivities, motivations, dispositions, desires, aversions, beliefs, and so on that hold sway in your mind.  Using the device, I can make you feel pleasure, pain, guilt, pride, calm, anxiousness, anger, compassion, and so on, each in response to whatever stimuli I specify.  I can make you love a certain kind of food, I can make you hate members of a certain race, I can make you romantically attracted to a certain person, I can do all of that.  More importantly, I can control the degree and intensity of each of your states of mind. 

History of FW Skepticism

First, a stipulated definition (with apologies in advance to PvI for not following his terminological guidelines):  let free will be the control condition on moral responsibility.

Now, the historical question.  What, if any, philosophers denied the existence of free will prior to, say, 1900?  (This is an arbitrary time; I'm actually most interested in whether any ancient, medieval, or modern philosophers denied the existense of free will.)

Bonus question for those who answer the historical question: What reasons were given to support FW skepticism?

A Flaw in the Standard Argument Against Free Will?

The simple and logical argument against free will is that either determinism or indeterminism is true.

If determinism is true, we are not free.

If indeterminism is true, our actions are random, so we did not will them.

We are not responsible either way. Ergo, no free will. Q.E.D.

The flaw in the argument concerns indeterminacy. Because logic is time and space independent, many philosophers assume that if indeterminism if true, randomness is significant and relevant at all times and all places, independent of scale or size.

But indeterminacy is normally important only for microscopic structures. Macroscopic structures, including our brains and bodies, are adequately determined - except when some useful indeterminacy helps us to generate alternative possibilities, or (and this is very important) allows us to be creative and bring genuinely new information into the universe.

So could you accept some chance in your own causal chain that would not make your decisions random?

Free Will, Computers, and Forbes Magazine

Here. 

Luck Again

I have long been convinced of the soundness of the luck argument against standard accounts of libertarianism (the qualification ‘standard’ is necessary; I believe that libertarianisms that are no more subject to luck than the best compatibilisms are possible, but I don’t want to get into that argument right now). The luck argument, as I understand it, targets moral responsibility: if an agent Xs, where X-ing is bad, and they are lucky to X, inasmuch as had luck played out differently, they would have performed some action incompatible with X (or not action at all), then they are not responsible for X-ing.

The question I am currently grappling with is why are standard libertarianisms subject to an unacceptable degree or kind of luck: that is, what condition or conditions on moral responsibility are not satisfied by an agent who is subject to responsibility-undermining luck? The way in which I set out the luck argument above is influenced by (or perhaps influences) the condition on moral responsibility I am tempted by. Call it the contrastive principle. It is intended as a necessary condition:

An agent is morally responsible for X-ing only if the event of his X-ing is the (non-deviant) upshot of his decision to X rather than Y, where X-ing and Y-ing have conflicting moral valences. An agent can satisfy the contrastive principle either directly – by deciding to X rather than Y – or indirectly; by being strongly disposed on the current occasion to X because of past occasions on which he directly satisfied the contrastive principle.

The above is probably a little obscure, so let me say just a little bit more. Moral valences are polarities; the moral valence of an act is its goodness or badness. Thus, an agent satisfies the contrastive principle directly by choosing a bad action rather than a good one, or vice-versa (actually, I think moral responsibility unlike moral goodness tracks subjective judgments; so really it is by choosing an action that he takes to be bad rather than good that an agent satisfies the principle). I want the contrastive principle to be satisfiable by agents in Frankfurt-style cases (despite my doubts about such cases). The intuitive idea is that we blame agents for choosing the bad rather than the good, and vice-versa for praise.

I have a feeling that the contrastive principle has problems. At the moment, its only a vague feeling. Want to help turn it into a conviction?

Mele in the NYT

The good stuff is here.