APA Symposium on Freedom Evolves

At the 2004 Pacific APA meetings, one of the "Author Meets Critics" sessions was on Daniel Dennett's recent book, Freedom Evolves, the critics being John Fischer, Al Mele, Tim O'Connor, and Manuel Vargas. Luckily for us, we have received permission from Blackwell Publishing to post this material on the Papers on Agency blog.

Go check out the informative and entertaining exchange between these philosophers here.

Comments

[Fritz]

For many years now I have had the following love/hate relationship with Dennett's work. Though I rarely agree with him, I find his work in philosophy of mind (and related areas excluding free will) challenging, rewarding, interesting and helpful. His work in phil of mind is usually in contact with other serious work while also being highly original. His less frequent work on freedom, however, has always struck me as disappointing, poorly researched and generally out of contact with serious work on the topic.

Is anyone surprised that the best parts of *Freedom Evolves* are the speculative story telling parts and the worst parts are where the professional literature is (modestly) engaged?
In reading over the APA symposium, it's clear that Dennett thinks that it's ok for him to ignore details and even broadly *central* issues in the literature because, well, why? I guess it's because he thinks he sees something wrong with the main literature. What? Well, apparently he can't say, or can't say without doing many years work that he doesn't want to do. Fair enough -- if one doesn't want to do professional level work on the topic one certainly doesn't have to do so (his work in other areas is *much* better and interesting after all). But I'm disappointed by the posturing: the pretense that somehow the professionals have been engaged by this work (as if the joint work with Taylor is breakthrough work on causation and determinism and has deep implications for discussions of the Consequence Argument and other incompatibilist arguments). I myself doubt that that particular paper could have survived even a modest refereeing process. Why Kane included it in the Handbook is beyond me.

[John Fischer]

I must say that I agree with Fritz. Despite Dennett's considerable ingenuity and philosophical brilliance, it is very frustrating to me that he thinks he can ignore much of the current literature on free will. At the APA session he was very upfront about this, to his credit, but it is still distressing. I did my best to explain the motivation for the Consequence Argument (or "Basic Argument"), but it completely left Dennett cold. I was struck by the fact that here is an area in philosophy where people really divide: some think the Consequence Argument OBVIOUSLY correct, and others are completley baffled as to why anyone would take it seriously.

In my work, especially The Metaphysics of Free Will, I have sought to explain and motivate the elements of the Consequence (or Basic) argument, including the Fixity of the Past and Fixity of the Laws constraints. I am reminded of what Peter van Inwagen attributes to A. J. Ayer, having heard Alvin Plantinga's lectures on necessity at Oxford: "I have lived in vain!"

Really, even extremely careful and very smart philosophers tend to brush the Consequence Argument aside. I would rather see us compatibilists take it seriously: hence Semicompatibilism.

[Fritz]

I'm glad that John agrees and doesn't mind saying so.

My next move (it's a longshot in the current environment) is to convince people to agree with me that (1) the Consequence as formulated by most people is invalid and (2) there are better arguments for incompatibilism out there.

I made an initial case for these two claims in my contribution to the Phil Perspectives Freedom and Action issue several years ago, but obviously I need to do more. The problems with the Consequence argument aren't the "semi-technical" problems with beta that many of us have written about (yes, Peter's original beta was invalid but several seemingly adequate fix ups have been provided...). The problem is the deeper modal fallacy objection I pressed in the first half of the Phil Perspectives paper. Sorry about the shameless self-promotion of that paper, but, well, what else am I going to self-promote until my book is finished and the real sales push begins. :),

Fritz

[Matthew]

Tim O'Connor's paper "Pastoral Counsel for the Anxious Naturalist" is a real gem! I snickered through most of it while reading it at work. I wish I could have been at the session to see it presented.

[Fritz]

Tim's paper is, as usual from him, really good. And by engaging on the very general meta-level issues he explored, Tim unsurprisingly got a more significant engagement with Dan D out of it. Helpful material from both Tim and Dan in that exchange. If the responses to Fischer and Mele were half as interesting as the exchange with Tim this overall packet would be first rate stuff.

[Tamler Sommers]

Speaking of not engaging the contemporary literature, I find it puzzling that almost no one feels it necessary to address the Basic Argument as presented by Galen Strawson in Freedom and Belief and "The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility." This is not the same basic argument that John Fischer refers to in his reply to Dennett. Galen's Basic Argument attempts to show that moral responsibility as we ordinarily conceive it is impossible. As he himself notes, it's not an original argument--it has its roots in the Greeks, Hobbes, the Enlightenment Philosophers, and Nietzsche. But Galen does lay it out nicely in the works mentioned above, and he gives a number of different formulations in "The Bounds of Freedom"--an essay in Robert Kane's new anthology. If the argument is sound, then strong moral responsibility, the kind of moral repsonsibility that could ground any form of retributive justice, is completely untenable. If the argument is not sound--and I assume most people think it's not--then I'm curious as to where everyone thinks it goes astray.

Dennett never tackles the Basic Argument head on, but he's not the only one.

(Not surprisingly, other moral responsibility skeptics refer to the argument. And S.L. Hurley, who is no skeptic, addresses it in her new book. But does anyone else?)

[Al Mele]

Tamler,

Re your closing question: Yes, I do in *Autonomous Agents* (Oxford, 1995), pp. 221-30.

Al Mele

[Fritz]

There have been other critical discussions of the Strawson argument in the literature, but I think most would agree that Al Mele's is one convincing criticism. Importantly, as I recall (correct me if I'm wrong Al) Al's response to Strawson doesn't contain any "backhanded" criticism of the libertarian. It's genuinely a libertarian friendly rejection of the argument.

Al, as many of us know, can be sneaky sometimes --offering the libertarian "help" that really contains a hidden poison. But I don't that happened in his discussion of Strawson.

[Al Mele]

I think of those poisons as antidotes, Fritz. I'm concocting a new one now as part of *Free Will and Luck* (in progress). Here's a very nice thing about it: any libertarian can use it, and once it is used the user should see that there is no need for such things as agent causation, dual competing efforts to decide, or anything fancy.

Thanks for the kind words.

[Tamler Sommers]

Al, Thanks. Eddy hoarded your book when he was still at Duke--I'll take a look at it.

Fritz--you said there were other critical discussions of the argument. Are there any compatibilist criticisms you can lead me to?

[Fritz]

Tamler -- I don't know of any specifically compatibilist replies to Strawson's argument.

Al -- hey, those weren't meant as kind words! You are an evil man trying to poison the waters that we libertarians drink from.... looking forward of course to your book.

[John Fischer]

I am planning on writing about Strawson's argument soon. It may be in a separate paper, or perhaps in the introduction to my collected papers on moral responsibility for OUP. I hope that will come out in 2005, but I'll be happy to post something before that.

I know this is a horribly crude and no doubt unfair metaphor, but I think moral responsibility is a matter of playing the cards that are dealt one, given that the dealer has dealt the cards in a fair way. I do not think it requires that one have actually made the cards or constructed the rules of the game, etc.

[Rob]

To somewhat echo Tamler, it would be nice to see some of the folks participating in this blog address what -- surely, not only to me -- increasingly seems like the elephant in the room here: the a priori case against both the possibility and coherence of "free will" as Galen Strawson has so lucidily articulated it in his Routlege Encyclopedia entry (http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/V014SECT3) and in "The Bounds of Freedom."

Here, by the way, is Strawson's succinct deflation of Dennett's "Freedom Evolves": http://query.nytimes.com/search/article-printpage.html?res=9D01E5DC153DF931A35750C0A9659C8B63

~Rob

[Tamler Sommers]

John,

That's true, but I see Strawson as arguing that our mental nature determines not only the hand we're dealt--our character--but also the way we play our hand: our actions, choices, the thoughts that run through our head.

So if we aren't responsible for our mental nature, how can we be responsible for our choices and actions (i.e. the way we play our hand)?

Tamler

PS It would be great to see a preview of your Strawson discussion in the Garden.

[Randolph Clarke]

I have a reply to Strawson's Basic Argument in my book on libertarian accounts. I've since drafted a somewhat different response, arguing that Strawson's argument takes for granted a crucial premise, one very much like a premise of what is called the Mind Argument. I'd be happy to forward a copy to anyone interested.