Subverting Free Will

Following John Fischer’s lead of pointing out a reference to responsibility from a “real world” source (reality TV!), here’s a reference to free will. A recent article in Newsweek (July 5) about “Mindreading” offers a summary of some interesting research on cooperative (and selfish) decision-making and the effect of the reactive attitudes on such decisions (the upshot: indignation at an unfair offer from another person will make us reject that offer even if it means we get nothing). The article also mentions some neuroscientists who are working for advertisers to try to figure out how consumers make decisions. One of these researchers, who is “well aware of the Orwellian implications of this work,” hastens to add that “there’s no ‘buy button’ out there to be found. We’re not going to subvert free will. This isn’t about screwing the customer.” Yeah right.

But there are some more serious points I’d like to raise about this quotation and others like it that I’ve been collecting over the years (mostly from scientists or science writers discussing research in psychology, neuroscience, other cognitive sciences, genetics and evolutionary psychology but also from legal discussions or just ordinary folk). First, there is the point that people out in the real world do in fact use the term ‘free will’—contra van Inwagen who claims that “the term ‘free will’ is a philosophical term of art…. If someone uses the words ‘free will’ and does not use them within [the phrase ‘of his own free will’], he is almost certainly a participant in a philosophical discussion” (“When is the Will Free?”). Indeed, we philosophers embroiled in our debates sometimes seem to treat ‘free will’ as a technical philosophical concept without paying close enough attention to its ordinary uses (don’t worry, I’m not about to launch into an argument in the tradition of the ordinary language philosophers here). For instance, people often talk about free will in contexts that do not involve questions of moral responsibility and often treat it as a set of capacities people (or other creatures) either possess or don’t.

Furthermore, when people talk about threats to free will, especially in the context of discussions about new research in the mind sciences, they are generally referring to our capacities to know what we are doing, to act on our reasons, to have conscious control of our actions, etc., and the research is usually presented as threats to these abilities. All I want to suggest for now is that these sorts of threats are quite distinct from the alleged threat from determinism (at least without an argument explaining why they are not). The scientific research discussed neither requires the truth of determinism nor entails determinism. More generally, the reductionistic picture of human nature they sometimes present is a distinct threat from determinism, since determinism neither entails nor is entailed by reductionism.

Sometimes I worry that while we philosophers concentrate our efforts on endless (which is not to say fruitless) debates about whether determinism precludes free will, we may neglect attacks from the flank to conditions we all agree are necessary for free will and moral responsibility—threats that certainly seem more pressing to ordinary people and conditions that certainly seem fundamental to their conceptions or freedom and responsibility.

Comments

[Fritz]

Hi Eddy,
I can't speak for others, but I know why I focus pretty obsessively (when working on free will) on the question of the compatibility of determinism and free will and usually ignore the "flank" attacks from those arguing that certain facts (usually from some science) undercut necessary conditions for free will.

I do this because I am (perhaps overly narrowly) focused on the *modal* question of whether determinism (or anything else) precludes freedom. Determinism is the best candidate to play this role. The possible flank attacks you mention involve at least one and likely two elements of relevant contingency:
(1) the empirical facts that "challenge" this-world-freedom challenge at most that: this-world-freedom. That's relevant to an argument about whether we actually have free will, but some of us take that to be a big separate question from the compatibility questions we work on most of the time.
(2) the "necessary conditions" that allegedly get undercut by the scientific facts may not be *metaphysically necessary* conditions. Anything weaker and the result isn't modally strong enough to effect the compatibility debate in any relevant way. [It may well be that many people think that, for example, some consciousness/action connection is "fundamental to their conception of freedom" but unless this implies that this consciousness/action connection is metaphysically necessary for freedom, even a modally loaded conclusion undercutting this condition won't imply the the undercutting condition is fully incompatible with freedom.

You of course might wonder why on earth one would pay more attention to the modal issues than to the question of real world freedom. But of course those of us who do this simply go where our interests take us. Let a million flowers bloom in this little freedom garden (John said this was a pluralistic garden after all --- I had thought this was his way of tell me to at least try to behave myself for a change, but perhaps he meant more centrally that lots of different questions about freedom / agency /etc could be featured here.

So in the end I guess I'm offering a rather minimalist answer to the question I'm reading into your post -- Question "why aren't more of you free will people focusing on the empirical challenges"; answer "we're doing other things"

[Neil]

I agree with Fritz that the determinism question is a different question from the flanking questions, and that it is worth pursuing - especially now that various incompatibilisms are on the march once more. However, I'm more interested in the flanking questions. Compatibilism holds, inter alia, that we are free so long as we can act for reasons of our owns, but the flanking arguments seem to threaten the notion that we act for reasons (rather than, say, confabulated reasons - think of Nisbett and Wilson or Wegner). If you're a convinced that free will can survive the attack from determinism, you're not finished yet: you still have to show that it can survive various empirical challenges from cognitive science.

[Eddy Nahmias]

Thanks for the responses. I certainly was not suggesting that the question of determinism is not interesting and important, and part of my point is precisely that it is a different question from the flank attacks (though, let's be honest, many incompatibilists--especially in the past--have presented determinism as an extension of threats from specific scientific theories, such as Freud's or Skinner's, and presented scientific theories as specific manifestations of determinism; and I think such presentations have played some role in getting untutored folk to feel the bite of incompatibilist arguments).

Like Neil, I am more interested in the flank attacks (and I've been working on a paper presenting the threat of social psychology--Nisbett and Wilson etc.--to free will and have papers on Wegner). And I agree that compatibilists have more work to do to defend free will once they allegedly dispose of the threat of determinism. So do libertarians, at least those who (a) mean to assert that *we* have free will and (b) take the relevant (threatened) compatibilist conditions to be necessary--though, of course, not sufficient--for free will.

This, by the way, raises a terminological point. There's lots of logical space for compatibilists who do not believe we have free will (because of contingent facts about human agents), but such an unnamed position is not even considered part of the philosophical debate (at least to the extent that no one names it or talks about it).

While I agree with Fritz that we should let the multifarious flowers of the standard debate bloom, I just hope to plant the seeds for a section of the Garden that deals with what we're now calling the flank attacks. I don't think these threats--which I emphasize again are the ones more relevant to non-philosophers--should be considered outside the mainstream philosophical discussion about free will and moral responsibility. Unless I'm missing something about the modal questions raised in Fritz's post. Am I? In any case, I'm curious to hear more from Fritz or others about why they find the modal questions so interesting (and important). For me it's always been about whether we human beings are free and responsible (in the ways we take ourselves to be).

[Neil]

Is that paper you mentioned in a state in which it could be presented to the Garden, Eddy? I, for one, would like to read it.

[Fritz]

For now I only have time for 2 quick comments about Eddy's followup.

On the terminological point about compatibilism's relationship to the thesis that we have free will. --- It's *very* unfortunate that so many people mess this up, taking compatibilism to imply that freedom exists. Of course it doesn't. I guess it fell out of the fact that most compatibilists do believe that we are free. This slip does effect some serious arguments in the literature unfortunately.

And yes, point taken - many people do take the determinism worry to be some sort of extension of real world worries about this-world freedom. And no doubt there are possible connections one could maintain here. But the links in question will be contentious so it strikes me as best to keep the two issues distinct.

[Manuel]

I agree with several of the comments that there are distinct issues here.

And at times, I feel pulled by the something suggested by (though maybe not intended by) Eddy's remarks: it is weird that so little philosophical work has paid attention to non-deterministic threats to free will. So while we should rightly let lots o' flowers bloom, it can seem puzzling that so much of the fertilizer has been poured on the determinism issue, and that the "flank" issues are flank at all. When in these moods, I think it is mainly the inertia of philosophical tradition working its way through our projects.

Though there may be something to this sort of view, I'm also inclined to think that there are several other issues going on: (1) the dependency of these issues on a largely distinct and fast-moving field (i.e., philosophy of mind) (2) the relationship between (1) and the fast-growing sciences of the mind. Unless one was willing to pursue these issues, and to keep abreast of those fields while also keeping up with the generally independent but fast-moving literature on free will, these "flank" issues will seem an unnattractive use of time to many of us.

That said, I'd wager that the flank issues will become more prominent over the next few years for several reasons:
(1) the increasingly institutionalized interest (at least in some places) in naturalism and the relevance of experimental results for philosophy will make work in these areas seem more important
(2) as the body of interesting results from neuroscience and social psych builds up, and as that work is forced to get more philosophically astute because of complaints by philosophers and philosophically-minded scientists of the mind, we're likely to get more data that is more philosophically useful for flank problems
(3) Finally, perhaps, exhaustion at another round of debates about the compatibility of free will and determinism may drive people into focusing on flank issues (sorry Fritz!- I actually think that this sort of work will always be necessary, I'm just making a guess about future popularity).

But really, more fertilizer all around is a good thing.

[Fritz]

I have no objection to serious work on the flank issues. And I won't even have a serious complaint if the flank issues gain in popularity over the good old modal compatibility debate that some people think is a bit tired. In my own mind the flank issues are largely someone else's problem (Eddy and Manuel can have them).

If people are going to work (and write Newsweek articles)about the flank issues, I *for sure* want some philosophers in on the discussions. Because flank threats to freedom undermine freedom only if they eliminate some necessary condition(s) on freedom: it's not enough if they, for example, do something like, uh, force us to rethink our self-conception or modify our understanding of agency or, well, anything other than rule out some genuine necessary condition on agency. I hope the philosophers in discussion with the flank gang will not all the construction and destruction of a straw man built by wildly inflating the necessary conditions on free agency.

[Neil]

There is interesting conceptual, as well as empirical, work to be done on the flank, and here the traditional work on compatibilism is directly relevant. Lots of the Newsweek kind of articles on these questions seem to reason as follows: (1) We think we're free, but (2) in fact it is possible to demonstrate that our supposedly free actions have neural correlates which are pretty regular. Therefore, (3) freedom is an illusion (suppressed premises suppressed deliberately - I'm reconstructing a common argument, not putting the best possible case). Also very common are similar arguments to the effect that, eg, love, is not real because in fact love is caused by neurochemical changes. So the empirical work needs conceptual clarification. Let lots o flowers bloom, but don't think their roots aren't entangled.

[edi]

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