Congratulations to Dan Speak

Dan Speak has been awarded a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame for 2005-06! Congratulations, Dan! (He will be on leave from Azusa Pacific University for the year.)

John Fischer on Philosophy Talk

I'm sure you will all be excited to hear that John Martin Fischer will be the guest this week on John Perry and Ken Taylor's radio show, Philosophy Talk. The subject is Free Will (what else?!), and it airs live from the KALW San Francisco website at noon tomorrow, March 29th. It is also carried by Oregon Public Radio on Thursday evenings and KUCR on Tuesday evenings (KUCR is a week behind, though, so John's show won't air there until next Tuesday). You can find out more about Philosophy Talk at their website.

You also will want to check out the recent Philosophy Talk blog. Perry just made a post about Free Will yesterday, and John will be guest-blogging this week around the show on Free Will. Enjoy!

Contextualist Response to Frankfurt-Style Cases

A possible response to Frankfurt-style cases has just occurred to me. In a Frankfurt-style case, an agent is felt to be blameworthy for an action they were unable to avoid performing, because a counterfactual intervener waits in the wings to ensure they perform it. Such cases conflict with a widely held intuition that agents are responsible only for actions which they could have avoided performing. Now recall Watson’s ‘Two Faces of Responsibility’. There Watson distinguishes two kinds of responsibility, which he calls aretaic responsibility and accountability. Watson argues that both are genuinely kinds of responsibility, and attributing either (in its negative mode) is a way of blaming. But different conditions must be fulfilled for each rightly to be attributed. I am aretaically responsible for something if it expresses where I stand on matters of importance. But I am accountable for it only if I had a fair opportunity either to avoid performing the action, or to avoid getting myself into the situation in which (as I knew) I could be called upon to perform it.

Part of Watson’s aim in ‘Two Faces’ is to dispel the apparent paradox sketched by Susan Wolf, when she argues that there is an asymmetry in our judgments of praise and blame. Wolf argues that if an agent is so constituted that she cannot help but perform a morally good action, she deserves praise, but if she is so constituted that she cannot help but perform a bad action she deserves no blame. Watson argues that the asymmetry is the product of switching between the two faces of responsibility. Aretaically the good agent is praiseworthy, but she may not be accountable for her action. The bad agent is not accountable for her action, though she is aretaically blameworthy. If we stick to one standard of responsibility, we dispel the paradox (just as we can block certain sceptical arguments by maintaining a consistent standard for the application of ‘knows’).

It will be obvious where I am going with this. Is it possible that alternative possibilities is a precondition of responsibility as accountability, and that agents in Frankfurt-style cases are not accountable? On this view, they are (merely) aretaically responsible for their actions, because they express where they stand on questions of value.

Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?

A paper by Eddy Nahmias, Stephen Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer, and Jason Turner, "Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?" should appear soon in the Recent Papers Posted section of this site.  The paper has been accepted to PPR, but comments are still welcomed.  We hope it generates discussion not only about whether incompatibilism is intuitive to ordinary people but also about whether the answer to that question should matter to the philosophical debate (and if not, why not), about how to determine whether it is intuitive, and more generally, about what intuitions are and what their role should be in philosophy.  Here's the abstract:

Incompatibilists believe free will is impossible if determinism is true, and they often claim that this view is supported by ordinary intuitions. We challenge the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive to most laypersons and discuss the significance of this challenge to the free will debate. After explaining why incompatibilists should want their view to accord with pretheoretical intuitions, we suggest that determining whether incompatibilism is in fact intuitive calls for empirical testing. We then present the results of our studies, which put significant pressure on the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive. Finally, we consider and respond to several potential objections to our approach.

Repentance and the Will

The notion of repentance is a key notion in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic ethics, and in other views that have been inspired by these traditions. The central idea is that someone who has done wrong should go through a progression of stages -- the second stage should result from the first, the third from the second, and the fourth from the third. The first stage is the recognition of one’s wrongdoing – it is to understand that one has done wrong, what is wrong about it, and how it harms others and oneself. It includes accepting that one was the agent of wrongdoing, by contrast, for example, with believing that the act was merely a reflexive response to what someone else did. The second stage - remorse, regret, or guilt -- is a kind of emotional response that should result from recognition of one’s wrongdoing. It involves at least pain or sadness that one has done wrong. The third stage, by contrast with the first two, is forward-looking, and it involves an effort of the will. It is, at root, a commitment to refrain from the sort of wrongdoing in question, for the reason that one wants instead to do what is right. The fourth stage is restoration -- motivated by this commitment to change, one aims to restore what one has damaged. For example, to restore damaged relationships, one might be moved to confession, and sometimes also to restitution.

My question is about the third stage, which involves the will. A problem here is that often morally deficient personality characteristics (such as those we associate with Eddy’s title) seem to be resistant to the effort of will, as does the expression of these personality characteristics in action. In fact, it seems that often, given these personality characteristics, no effort of will can significantly alter these characteristics, nor can it  prevent, at some time or other, their expression in action. According to Stoic ethics, every rational, mature, non-intoxicated human being can always, by effort of will, prevent such personality characteristics from being expressed in action. Whether this is so is clearly an empirical issue, but from my observations, I would say that most such human beings are on occasion unable to do so. 

At the same time, it seems to me that our practice of reprimand (by, for example, the use of the term in Eddy’s title), presupposes that effort of will can have the effects at issue. But our evidence for the truth of this presupposition is slim -- and this is independent of the sorts of considerations that support hard determinism or hard incompatibilism. One might reply that even if it is false, we might justify expressing this presupposition in our practice because there is always a significant epistemic possibility that an effort of the will on the part of the agent could alter the personality characteristics, or could prevent the bad behavior. Still, it seems that the possibility of alteration or prevention of this sort is often not a good bet (especially after character is well-formed). So should our practice of reprimand be altered to reflect the dubiousness of the presupposition?

Frankfurt on Bullshit

Following up on Eddy's post -- for those of you who missed the Daily Show tonight, and won't get a chance to watch the rerun -- here is a transcript of the interview with Harry Frankfurt. Good stuff. I'll post the first few lines here, and the rest will be below the fold.

Jon Stewart: My guest tonight – a professor of philosophy, emeritus at Princeton University, his new book is called On Bullshit. Please welcome to the program, Professor Harry Frankfurt. Professor, thanks for coming! Thank you so much for being here. I have to say – I got your book, and let me say – it was delicious. I ate ten of them. It’s tiny! This is really an essay that you wrote.

Harry Frankfurt: That’s exactly right – unchanged.

J: When did you write it?

H: 1980…5.

J: Don’t bullshit me.

H: No…well…’85 and a half?

Bullshit on Daily Show

If you missed the Daily Show on Comedy Central tonight, make sure to catch the repeat tonight (Tuesday 3/15) at 7 PM.  John Stewart's guest is Harry Frankfurt talking about his book "On Bullshit."  A convergence of two of my favorite (though very different) minds.

Meanwhile, I've decided I will title my next (i.e. first) book "On Assholes."

Garden Hires

If you've been keeping up with the running list of tenure-track hires at the Leiter Reports, you probably already know this, but I'd just like to extend a warm congratulations to two of our own Gardeners who have managed to land tenure-track positions.

So, congrats to Tamler Sommers (Duke), who was hired by University of Minnesota, Morris.

And also to Eddy Nahmias (Duke; currently at Florida State), who was hired by Georgia State University.

May we aspiring professors all be so lucky!  Keep up the good work!

PVI's comments

I'll admit (but only because it's Lent):  I'm lazy.  Rather than tracking down a citation the old-fashioned way, I'll appeal to the collective wisdom of GFP.

Does anybody know the citation, I believe it's from PVI, where the conversation about the majority of analytic philosophers in general being compatibilists is recorded?

Thanks in advance.