Book Symposium on Responsibility and Control

Everyone should check out the latest issue of Philosophical Explorations -- it contains a book symposium on Fischer and Ravizza's book Responsibility and Control.  Symposium contributors include Ish Haji, Dan Speak, Seth Shabo, Neal Judisch, Michael McKenna, and of course, John Fischer.  This is without doubt a valuable group of essays, so go read them!  And feel free to post any thoughts here in the Garden.

Comments

[Kip Werking]

By coincidence, I just read Resp. and Control for the first time. I realize now that some of my comments here, which associated F&R's view with other hard compatibilist views, hasn't quite done justice to their ownership requirement.

Ultimately, I thought the book was absolutely fascinating and, like Robert Kane's Significance of Free Will, provided fertile ground for future work, even if I disagree with its final conclusions.

I've recommended Todd Long's critique of F&R's view here at the Garden. What's interesting about that critique is that it, I think, attacks this semi-compatibilist position from the manipulation-of-environment perspective. But F&R's view can be attacked from the opposite pole as well: manipulation-of-character. It is this last vulnerability that I believe Pereboom focuses upon (in defending his four-step argument), and which F&R only address at the very end of their book, and not (in my estimation) with much success.

The problem is that people are, in a sense, just programmed or mechanical, and as such are *just* a combination of their environment and heredity, or nature and nurture. Attributions of moral responsibility seems to require that, if environment or heredity determine how a person behaves, then that persons needs to *own* their environment or heredity (such as by having chosen to have that environment or heredity). This is a problem which the book discusses at its very end, with respect to the emotions, in a tantalizing last chapter. But as Todd Long shows, it's not entirely fair to blame people for how their environment influences their behavior (Nagel calls this "moral luck"). And as Pereboom and others show, it’s not entirely fair to blame people for their having the character that they do (this observation is especially striking when their character is predetermined).

Another way to approach this problem, I think, is to focus upon the Transfer of Non-Responsibility. F&R want to say that TNR is false. But they are not quite clear on when (NR(X) & NR(X->Y))->NR(Y) does hold, if ever. Instead they seem content to show that TRN cannot establish incompatibilism or that it begs the question against the compatibilist. But when exactly does (NR(X) & NR(X->Y))->NR(Y) hold, considering how plausible it seems? In other words, how does F&R’s account of TNR (or partial TNR) integrate with their historical account, treatment of consequences, and tracing method? TNR involves history, consequences, and tracing, but F&R ultimately reject it. I think this failure to integrate these aspects of their view is a weakness of their view.

I suspect that the road to historical compatibilism leads to TNR, and that is why some hard compatibilists (Dennett, and I think to a lesser extent, Watson) maintain less historical, and more time-slice (although not perfectly time-slice), views. The compatibilist shouldn’t have it both ways, and so time-slice compatibilism expresses hard compatibilism in its purest form. If the compatibilist tries to do justice to historical considerations, or considerations about ownership, then this view will ultimately seem dissatisfying. Because as these considerations grow more historical, they lead to the ultimate historical view: the Nagel/Spinoza strategy of reflecting upon the causes of our actions and realizing that we are, in Smilansky’s phrase, “the unfolding of the given.” At this point freedom and responsibility disappear, and this is what F&R cannot allow. Compatibilists are wise to avoid focusing upon this historical “given”, and focus instead on the immediate present (time slice), and ask whether the person has a healthy, reason-responsive mind. They seem to be *selectively* concerned about history, consequences, and tracing. Any historical considerations strike me as an awkward compromise.

This leads to my second point of departure from F&R: their view is externalist. According to them, it can matter, for considerations of moral responsibility, whether some fact obtained which was not known by the agent. So for example X cannot be morally responsible for not saving a drowning person if such rescue efforts were nevertheless futile (perhaps because sharks were around). But while I can sympathize with this view, it seems to me that whatever moral responsibility is, agents cannot be judged with respect to it according to facts that they could not know. The person who chooses not to rescue, in the world where the efforts are futile, is just as culpable and blameworthy as the person who chooses not to rescue in a world where it would have mattered. This is an internalist view, and fits better, I suspect, with the non-historical compatibilism I prefer to F&R’s historical account.

Finally, F&R endorse the younger Strawson’s subjectivism. But I find this claim to be just as bizarre as I did when I read (a while ago) Freedom and Belief, even if I think the Basic Argument is the best argument against free will’s existence. The only explanation I can think of for why people can disagree so strongly about an intuition fundamental to this issue is that we just ultimately have different intuitions. Strawson and F&R’s view has the amazing implication that I am not morally responsible for what I do, simply because I do not believe in free will or moral responsibility (and am not even willing to put my philosophical doubts aside and entertain the existence of fw and mr).

How can my own belief about whether I am free and responsible possibly matter? To be more precise: if being-cause-sui is the condition for having free will (which I think Strawson and I agree about, but F&R disagree), and fw is the freedom relevant condition for MR, what does belief-that-one-has-fw-and-mr have to do with being-causa-sui? It seems to me that the answer must be: nothing! If one could be cause-sui (in a paradoxical sense that one might unreflectively entertain), would that person therefore also have to believe-that-they-are-causa-sui? No. And if belief-that-one-is-causa-sui is a separate question from whether one is causa sui, why should it be relevant to the question of whether one is morally responsible?

These are criticisms, but there is much to praise about F&R’s book. It puts the focus upon the actual sequence, where it belongs, and it raises important questions about TNR, history, externalism, and subjectivism. It was a fascinating read and I would recommend to any friend or foe of semi-compatibilism.

Unfortunately, my college doesn’t give me access to Philosophical Explorations, and so I can’t read any of these other criticisms (which I may share), and Fischer’s response to them…

[Kip Werking]

Note, I can't seem to get the link in the post to work.

This one works better I think:

http://journalsonline.tandf.co.uk/app/home/issue.asp?wasp=ce051daada354ca481418be6e4c1f229&referrer=parent&backto=journal,1,5;searcharticlesresults,2,1000;

[Kip Werking]

The formatting seems to have ruined that link too... sorry.