Attributionism

A quick follow up to the discussion of the question "What is moral responsibility?" My paper on the preferability of a volitionist account of MR to an attributionist account has just been published in The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, which (for those of you who don't know) is a web-based, peer-reviewed journal attempting to establish itself as a leader in the field.

The paper is here. Hope some of you find it interesting.

GFP honored by V. Alan White

I can't think of any higher honor for our blog than the one it has just received from V. Alan White.  He has graciously dedicated his most recent philosophy song to our excellent site!  The lyrics are here, and the mp3 is here -- it is called "How can I Mend the Beta Part?" (sung to the tune of the BeeGee's song, "How can You Mend a Broken Heart") and is appropriately co-dedicated to Peter van Inwagen. (See his composition notes for an explanation of the motivation behind writing the song.)  Very entertaining indeed.

And, while you're there, check out some of the other cool songs he has written.  I especially recommend, "We Didn't Start Inquiry" (lyrics here).

Another Philosophy of Religion Conference

However, this one has a better location! (No offense to Columbia, but you can't really top San Diego in February)

The University of San Diego will be hosting the 2006 Pacific Region Society of Christian Philosophers conference 16-18 February, 2006.  Peter van Inwagen, Lynne Baker and Paul Churchland will give the plenary addresses.  The official Call for Papers can be found here:  http://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/SCP2006/call.html.  Though an SCP conference, please note that "papers on any topic of philosophical interest will be considered."  We are also looking for commentators and sessions chairs.  Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Phil of Religion Conference at U of Missouri

We've gotten word that Jonathan Kvanvig is organizing what will become an annual Philosophy of Religion Conference at the University of Missouri.  It is to be held on January 27-28, 2006.  You can find a call for papers here.  The featured speaker is Eleonore Stump, and as the call for papers says, "Papers are welcome on any topic in the philosophy of religion, with some small preference given to work on topics that Professor Stump has worked on throughout her career." It sounds like this conference will be in more of a workshop format, which always helps encourage lots of interesting discussion.  Help get the word out.

"Freedom and Determinism" Review

A review of Freedom and Determinism (ed. Campbell, O'Rourke and Shier) by the GFP's very own Eddy Nahmias has appeared in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews and can be found here:  http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=2841

What Is Moral Responsibility?

In the comments  on my previous post, David asks the following question:

can you recommend any readings I might look at that attempt to explicate or defend a definition of moral repsonsibility? As I said above, I'm most interested in definitions and not - as seems to me more usual in the literature - conditions that need to be satisfied in order for one to be held morally responsible.

That seems to me to a bloody good question. The standard answer, if there is one, is the one which I had previously given David: aptness for the reactive attitudes. But it has always seemed unsatisfactory to me. I think part of the problem is this: though the definition might 'fix the reference', it actually doesn't tell us what moral responsibility consists in (so far as I can see). Moral responsibility must be some kind of relationship between an agent and her acts; it doesn't require any observers, or even the persistence of the agent after the act (for what it's worth, I have the same problem with definitions of knowledge: the problem with JTB is not that it open to counterexamples, but it leaves me in the dark as to what knowledge actually is).

So I want to echo David's question, and ask, further, for clarification. Am I missing the point? Is there nothing to say about what MR consists in, beyond giving necessary and sufficient conditions for it? Does anyone - in the literature or here - have anything illuminating to say that will answer David's and my question?

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.

Todd Long on Moderate Reasons-Responsiveness.

I’m reviewing the Campbell, O’Rourke and Shier volume. The review will be short, so I won’t be able to say much about it (it’s always hard to review collections in any case). But of course I’ll have lots to say about many of the papers. Rather than waste my brilliant insights, I’ll post them here, if I think they might interest anyone. I begin with Todd Long’s interesting discussion of Fischer and Ravizza’s (F & R’s) account of moral responsibility.

Sommers on Responsibility and Evolution

Tamler Sommers, in “The Illusion of Freedom Evolves” (posted here on April 11th), aims to describe the evolutionary origins of the belief in moral responsibility. Sommers argues that understanding the origins of our beliefs, moreover, will support the idea that moral responsibility is an illusion; Sommers believes that evolution “explains away” responsibility.

I am not convinced, however, that evolutionary considerations provide any independent support for scepticism about moral responsibility. I will try and say why.

Sommers’ argument seems to go something as follows.

(1) Ceteris paribus, it is irrational to cooperate in prisoner’s dilemmas.
(2) Cooperation enhances survival, so some organisms evolved certain (reactive) emotions that “force” them, irrationally, to cooperate in prisoner’s dilemmas.
(3) Rational organisms, however, are liable to notice the irrationality of the reactive emotions, and repress them. As a result, such organisms are likely to evolve certain entrenched irrational beliefs (such as the belief in free will) that rationalise the reactive emotions.

I will comment on each step of the argument in turn:

(1) It isn’t obvious that cooperating in one-off prisoner’s dilemmas is irrational. (See the work of people such as David Gauthier here, for instance). Moreover, most people seem to acknowledge that adopting certain cooperative strategies (such as the tit-for-tat strategy) in iterated dilemmas is rational.

(2) If it is rational to adopt the tit-for-tat strategy in iterated games, then the reactive emotions (which incline us to use the strategy) shouldn’t be deemed irrational.

(3) In claiming that the reactive emotions may require the support of certain (false) beliefs, Sommers presupposes that these emotions have cognitive content – that they purport to represent certain features of the world. However, Sommers doesn’t consider the possibility that the reactive emotions are fundamentally non-cognitive – that the question of rationality or irrationality doesn’t apply to them at all. (On this view, it is rational to cooperate, given the reactive emotions, but it is neither rational nor irrational to have them in the first place.)
     Even if the reactive attitudes do have cognitive content, Sommers doesn’t say why the beliefs that we evolved to rationalise them are false. There appears to be an equivocation between the question of the rationality of the reactive attitudes, and the rationality of the beliefs that putatively justify them.

Free Will and Capital Punishment

As an intern for the Public Defender, I have spent the last two weeks observing a capital murder trial.  It has been one of the most fascinating experiences of my life.  I sat just a few feet from the defendant.  The trial touched upon the human condition, free will, metaethics, religion, and the dark side of human nature. 

At the beginning of the trial, when I saw photos of the victim senselessly stabbed and lying in a pool of blood, I—who am otherwise quite progressive on issues of punishment—started to feel sympathetic towards the death penalty.  I almost felt glad that the defendant done this evil deed in the state of Virginia.  Free will skeptics, it seems, tend to also have progressive views on capital punishment.  As a consequentialist, however, I don’t recognize a deontological constraint upon executing criminals (nor do I recognize any deontological principle of retribution), although I doubt that such executions maximize the good.  But the Public Defender challenged my new sympathy when he raised the issue of free will during closing arguments and began to trace the history of the defendant’s life.  The Public Defender began a project, not unlike what Gary Watson accomplishes in Responsibility and the Limits of Evil, whereby a character we once regarded as evil becomes tragic.  As Spinoza wrote “I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.”  My sympathies realigned themselves towards their previous and more natural state.

The Public Defender urged that the defendant was “on a trajectory” since childhood to commit crime.  The murder, so the argument went, was fated and inevitable.  The prosecutor argued back, just as vigorously, that the defendant hadn’t been “on a trajectory.”  On the contrary, he made “choice after choice after choice.”  Clearly, the prosecutor regarded a “choice” and a “trajectory” as incompatible—and expected the jury to share these incompatibilist intuitions.  But, of course, if the amount of indeterminism in human nature and our local environment is negligible—and the prosecutor had no way of verifying that it isn’t nor did he feel the need to raise the issue—then the defendant had been “on a trajectory.”

Garden Party

To celebrate the one year birthday of the Garden of Forking Paths (which was May 31st), UCR is appropriately hosting a Garden Party.  All are hereby invited to come join us on June 9th from 4-8pm at the UCR Botanical Gardens.  There will be food, drinks, and good conversation.  If you would like to come, please RSVP to Janet Mauren at Janet.Mauren@ucr.edu as soon as possible.

Thanks again for the great year!

Compatibilism and Modality

In a recent article (“Free Will and the Problem of Evil,” Religious Studies 40 (2004): 437-456), James Cain makes what seems to me to be a rather bold claim regarding free will and the truth of causal determinism.  Cain first distinguishes between three kinds of compatibility: metaphysical, conceptual and epistemic.  He caches these out in terms of statements.  Statements S1 and S2 are metaphysically compatible if and only if there is a possible world where both S1 and S2 are true.  Statements S1 and S2 are conceptually compatible if and only if it is conceptually possible that both S1 and S2 are true; that is, the negation of the conjunction of S1 and S2 is not an analytic truth.  Finally, statements S1 and S2 are epistemically compatible for a person p at time t only if nothing in p’s epistemic body of evidence at t rules out its being the case that both S1 and S2 are true (for more on these, see pages 438f).

Now, for the claim.  “The standard arguments for compatibilism, at most, support a conceptual or epistemic compatibilism” (443) and that the “typical arguments for compatibilism generally do not provide support for metaphysical compatibilism” (444).  By ‘typical arguments’, Cain has in mind three general strategies for arguing for compatibilism:  paradigm case arguments, conceptual analysis arguments, and arguments employing Frankfurt cases (he specifically mentions Fischer and Ravizza’s arguments in this regard).  It is this third sort of argument for compatibilism that I’m most concerned with.

Now, admittedly semi-compatibilism, versus traditional full-blown compatibilism, makes things a little dicey here (In footnote 24, Cain writes that “I do not claim that Fischer and Ravizza argue for metaphysical compatibilism”).  So let’s just stick with compatibilism. 

Cain thinks that FSCs give “little reason” (448) that there is a possible world where an action is both determined and free.  To make things a little easier, he assumes that there is some correlation between brain states and volitions/choices, as Stump and others do (though he doesn’t think this assumption is crucial for his more general point).  According to a typical understanding of an FSC, the agent in question actually makes some choice even though she couldn’t have done otherwise; that is, had the agent not made the choice ‘on her own’ as it were, the implanted device (or whatever) would have brought about that very same choice via directly stimulating the brain.  This is where Cain takes issue with FSCs.  He writes:  “The answer to the question of whether a Frankfurt device would cause there to be a choice if it caused the atoms in the brain to move just as they might move if a choice was made is as follows: it depends on what sort of causal powers (if any) are essentially active in choosing, and on whether the device brings it about that those powers are properly exercised” (449).  He considers three possibilities:  (1)  choosing does not essentially involve the exercise of any particular causal powers, (2) choosing essentially involves the exercise of certain causal powers, and those causal powers can be exercised by the manipulation device, and (3) the causal powers involved in choosing may be such that they “issued in any one of two or more mutually exclusive alternatives, and which of those alternatives comes about is not fully determined by factors outside the exercise of that power” (449).  Now, if either (1) or (2) were true, then FSCs will have shown free will and causal determinism to be metaphysically compatible.  However, “under the assumptions of case 3, the story told by the Frankfurt example may not be metaphysically possible” (450).  And until it can be shown that FSCs aren't examples of (3), "there is no reason to accept Frankfurt examples as providing a way to show that one's making a given choice is metaphysically compatible with its being impossible for one not to make that choice" (450).

In general, I'm not usually one to support compatibilism.  But I'm struck both by Cain's argument against metaphysical compatibilism, as well as the dialectic at work throughout the article.  Has anyone else read it?  Thoughts?