Talk Announcement

On November 17th at 3pm, Ted A. Warfield will give the Marshall Weinberg
Professor lecture at the Universitiy of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The title of the
lecture is:

"Ecumenical Necessary Conditions on Free Action (and other problems for
compatibilists)"

As you know, Ted, aka, "Fritz," is a regular contributor to the blog, and I'm sure he'll
uncover many problems for (traditional!) compatibilism.

Comments

[Fritz Warfield]

Thanks John,
as it happens, instead of displaying "many" problems for compatibilism about freedom and causal determinism, the plan is display one or two really big ones...

[Fritz]

Just got a flyer for my talk -- apparently the time was changed: the flyer says 4:30pm at the Michigan League, Hussey Room.

Fortunately I still get to talk about a couple of big problems for traditional compatbilists about determinism and freedom....

[Robert Allen]

Prof. Warfield gave a great talk, accomplishing his goals of making us take Incompatibilism more seriously and the so-called experimentalists (much) less seriously. His lampooning of the latter's methodology was worth the price of admission. (Alright the lecture was free, but it did cost $2.50 to park, $8.00 for pizza because I was too hungry to wait until I got home, and, with the way the capitalists are gouging us these days, probably $5.00 for gas. But still worth it.) "Young ambitious types" indeed.

[jon kvanvig]

Now, what a truly responsible researcher would do at this point is to share a written version of the talk with the inquiring minds that frequent this blog! :-)

[Fritz]

Robert - thanks for your kind remarks and for attending the talk. It was an emnjoyable session and discussion. And it was good to meet you.

About posting the draft I worked from... sorry Jon, not going to happen... Eventually the material from the talk will appear in real papers. For the talk I focused on accessibility rather than precision. If you want to know how bad I was, here's a brief summary of what I did.

1. I showed that clear common sense judgments about cases in which people are not free can be philosophically systematized either with a principle that entails incompatibilism or with a principle that is "compatibilist friendly" (though it does not entail compatibilism). I suggested that in light of this fact we must attend to the philosophical *arguments* about this issue. Among other positions, "Moorean Compatibilism" is not intellectually respectable. Incompatibilism must be taken more seriously than it is by general philosophers (non-freedom-specialists).

2. I made some critical remarks about recent "experimental philosophical" work on the question of whether compatibilism or incompatilism (or neither) is intuitive and on the question of whether children have/use a robust concept of "agent causation". I don't think the "experimental philosophers" have been at their best when working on free will. I think they are too quick to label a student's response to a survey question as "compatibilist" or "incompatibilist": when a student ascribes freedom to someone in a described situation that is neutral between determinism and indeterminism I see no reason to count that response as, for example, "compatibilist".
And I think some experimentalists have conflated the minimal, non-metaphyiscally loaded notion of Agent Causation (as discussed by, eg, Velleman) with the Big Bold libertarian agent causation of Reid, Chisholm, etc...: the work "showing" that children of a certain age have the concept of agent causation doesn't reveal them to have the metaphysicall Loaded notion. Experimenters who say it does likely don't understand the difference between the weak notion of agent causation and the strong.

I'll take up these issues in a responsible way in future articles.

[jon kvanvig]

Fritz--rats! I wondered which X-philosophy you talked about. John Doris was here last week, reporting some experimental results, and I wondered if you had talked about those studies.

[Fritz]

I haven't seen free action experimental work from Doris and so didn't say anything about that. Eddy N's group was one and S. Nichols was another.

[Eddy Nahmias]

Fritz, not surprisingly I agree with you about the critique of Nichols' findings on children (Jason Turner and I have a response coming out in M&L), though I think what he's found doesn't even suggest they have a *weak* conception of agent causation or of indeterminist agency. Of course, I suspect you disagree with me in that I think Nichols' experimental work is generally quite interesting, as are his uses of it.

I get the feeling you don't want to go too much further into this here, but I hope you will clarify your criticism of my group's work. You say that "when a student ascribes freedom to someone in a described situation that is neutral between determinism and indeterminism I see no reason to count that response as, for example, "compatibilist"." Of course, we agree with that claim. But we thought we had described situations that were not neutral between determinism and indeterminism (except perhaps the "Fred and Barney" case). Can you explain why you think our situations mischaracterized determinism? (Or have I misunderstood your criticism?)

Also, is Lycan your "Moorean compatibilist" target?

[tnadelhoffer]

Fritz,
I look forward to seeing some of your ideas concerning the shortcomings of experimental philosophy in future publications. In the meantime, I think it is worth pointing out that I, for one, agree that the experimental work done on free will is more problematic than similar work being done in action theory and moral psychology--but that is perhaps an inevitable side effect of the nuanced complexities of the folk intuitions involved. This is precisely why we readily admit in each of our papers that both our data and our interpretation of them are preliminary and programmatic. Either way, I look forward to hearing more about your own interpretation in the not so distant future.

Robert,
Since I suspect that the "young ambitious types indeed" comment was presumably aimed at people like me, I thought you would be kind enough to explain the relevance of this observation to the merits of the arguments we have put forward. At first blush, your comment looks like the first step in an ad hominem--but perhaps I am simply being uncharitable. I, for one, usually embrace criticism of the kind of work being done in experimental philosophy--especially from first-rate philosophers such as Fritz and especially when these criticisms help us further flesh out some of the meta-philosophical issues that interest us. But I am unsure that name calling does much to foster dialogue--which is not to deny that I am either young or ambitious. It is only to question the relevance of either of these personal characteristics to the arguments we have put forward in motivating our approach to the free will debate.

[Fritz]

The "young and ambitious" phrase came from me during the talk (Robert was using it as a way of emphasizing that he enjoyed my commentary on the experimental work -sorry for the confusion). I used the phrase to identify most of my critical targets and gave their status as "Y&A" as a reason for doing two things in the talk:

1. spending more time than would be normal explaining that I did *not* mean for my aggressive criticisms of experimental work on "free action" to be interpreted as a challenge to "experimental philosophy" generally. As I emphasized in the talk, it is an approach that may well have value on other topics, or even this one if certain barriers can be overcome. I think that the work is prima facie well-suited for some purposes and topics, but not well-suited for other purposes and topics. I went into this some in my talk, and will go into it in real work as promised.

2. though I did use explicit examples from several of the recent/forthcoming papers that I had access to, I didn't name the authors even when quoting. [I instead said things like "I quote from one recent study" and "I quote from a different group's work".] I didn't "name names" because I didn't want people in what was a very general audience to hear those names for the first time in conjunction with aggressive criticism, given that, as pointed about by others above, the work I was criticizing, though published, really is of a first-pass/preliminary nature.

And partly I used the phrase for laughs (again, it was a very general audience and part of my job was to make them happy...). Some of the humor of *my* calling people "young and ambitious types" is that I'm still, by most standards, viewed as a "young and ambitious type" myself even though I've been around awhile. I'm younger, as it happens, than some of the people I was identifying with that label for instance.

Eddy: my good friend Bill Lycan is indeed one Moorean Compatibilist, but Bill's Moorean compatibilism is theoretically well-informed (Bill is well aware of the major moves in the compatibilism/incompatibilism debate). So Bill isn't really who I had in mind -- I had in mind general philosophers who don't really know much at all about the compatibilism debate but still insist on a Moorean compatibilist position. My main point: compatibilism is too far down stream (in terms of philosophical sophistication and complexity) in order for a Moorean position to be appropriate. Compare: it's one thing to maintain a Moorean commitment to the thesis that we have free will; quite a different thing to (try to) maintain a Moorean commitment to the further thesis that freedom is consistent with some further philosophically complex thesis. The latter issue seems to be too far in to the real debates and arguments to be the proper subject of a Moorean move. Or so it seems to me.

Just briefly about your groups cases and your remarks about Nichols (again, expect professionally responsible discussion of them by me in the future -- hey, that's good for you guys I hope!) ----
on Nichols -- what I (and many others) call the weak notion of agent causation / agency does not even imply indeterminism. So I'd certainly agree with your criticism of him if you put it this way: nothing in the work shows, or even suggests, that the children have an indterministic notion of agency. On "weak agency" (so understood - as neutral on the issue of indeterminism), my official line from the talk was that "at most the cases who the possession deployment of a concept of weak agency..." so that's not as critical as it appears as you want to be, but our critical positions are consistent with one another.

About your cases -- as you well know, you face the following difficult task given the approach you're taking [I prefer a different experimental approach that I'll save for my published work]. You need to try to manage all of the following:

(1) avoid explicit reference to determinism in your cases, because many will, for whatever reason, equate that with "not freedom" rather than with the philosophical notion of determinism in play in the compatibilism debate

(2) sketch cases that the students can understand sufficiently without philosophical tutoring.

(3) sketch cases where the story sketched really does imply determinism (so that "freedom" judgments can plausibly be interpreted as compatibilist judgments).

My worry, in outline, is about both #2 and #3. About #3, neither the Laplacean substitute case, nor the one about (something like) "universal causation" are cases where the case described implies the relevant notion of determinism: they are implied by it, but don't imply it. How to tighten up? well, good luck doing so without introducing terminology even more confusing to freshman that what already has to be used to introduce these not-quite-determinism-implying-cases.

About #2, *my* freshman (hey, my seniors and typical first year grad students even) would be crying out for clarification of phrases like "laws of nature" "conjunction of laws of nature" "entails" "completely caused by". Certain kind of checking for understanding are easy to do (you did some of this as I recall) but, well, let's just say for now that I don't see a reason for thinking that general responders have sufficient understanding of the terminology in the case for us to care about their reactions. [no doubt we'd want to have a serious discussion of what "sufficient understanding" really requires here: I think that for "philosophically downstream" issues like [in]compatibilism, the level is pretty high. This, by the way, is why I applaud the criticism of those philosophers on both sides of the debate who claim that the folk intuitively are committed one way or the other on this issue. I sure don't think that, and I applaud you guys calling these people out on those claims.]

I hope this gives you guys an idea about what I'm up to. I certainly don't intend these sketchy remarks to sufficiently engage your detailed work. I'd rather save the nitty gritty engagement for print because I'm sort of caught up in 999 other things right now and because I think the work deserves the additional attention it will get if critically engaged in significant publications rather than just in our little fun house here.

Fritz

[jon kvanvig]

Fritz--I think the Doris studies will be relevant to the first part of your talk, as described above. He claims the studies show that there is no "invariantist" way to systematize responsibility ascriptions. So, the talk defended "variantism." Variantism is a denial that there is any way to systematize responsibility ascriptions in terms of any of the usual philosophical principles about responsibility. You're talking about freedom instead of responsibility, but it would be a bit surprising, I would think, if variantism were true about responsibility ascriptions but not freedom ascriptions.

[Robert Allen]

"Since I suspect that the "young ambitious types indeed" comment was presumably aimed at people like me, I thought you would be kind enough to explain the relevance of this observation to the merits of the arguments we have put forward. At first blush, your comment looks like the first step in an ad hominem--but perhaps I am simply being uncharitable." Thomas Nadelhoffer

Me thinks thou doth protest too much. I'm not trying to argue with you- how could I, as a pollster you give me nothing to argue against. You simply don’t have any arguments worth considering unless you have put forth either a compatibilist or incompatibilist thesis on the basis of a priori reasoning. I was just seconding Prof. Warfield’s point: that, in thinking that there is anything philosophically valuable to be gained from querying intro students re. free will, you’ve allowed your ambition to cloud your judgment.

[Fritz]

Now now Robert -- *I* didn't put the point that way! [in terms of judgement clouded by ambition]. So that's not seconding my point.
What I did was make the *joke* about "young ambitious types" and then offer real criticisms. So I take blame for the phrase, but not every possible use of it. Surely we all agree that the joke has not outlived whatever useful purpose it might have served in a general audience talk...

Jon: the differences between freedom and responsibility in this neck of the woods can be quite important. My focus in the talk was on two possible and fairly natural routes for systematizing a range of *clear* intuitive "no freedom" judgments. I did not claim that the principles in play for this purpose would systematize all judgements, though I'd be surprised to learn that we can't do that too. I'll look forward to catching up on John D's work on this though. Thanks for calling it to my attention.

[Robert Allen]

Fritz,

I had a feeling you would distance yourself from that reading of THE JOKE. I just wanted to make sure. Henceforth, then, I'm flying solo here, pushing a point made by one of my teachers at dear old Wayne State: some philosophers will adopt strange views just to make a name for themselves, a la David Lewis.

[Fritz]

Whichever Wayne State teacher (and there are many fine ones at WSU) said that *about Lewis* likely didn't know him. Lewis did indeed adopt strange views on several topics... but this was surely as genuine a case of following the arguments where (he thinks) they lead as you'll ever find. Fritz

[tnadelhoffer]

Fritz,
Thanks for filling in some details. As I said earlier, I look forward to reading more about your views concerning the experimental stuff on free will in the future. It's also worth pointing out that it was clear from Robert's earlier comment that the Y&A part came from your talk—which did not bother me at all. Indeed, had I been fortunate enough to attend the talk, I, too, would have gotten a laugh for the reasons you already mentioned. It was Robert’s use of the phrase that rubbed me the wrong way. Rather than discussing and agreeing with some of the substantive criticisms you presented during your talk--he borrowed your phrase to make what I perceived to be an unnecessarily flippant (and unmotivated) comment about those of us working in experimental philosophy. Obviously neither I nor anyone else doing experimental work minds when people criticize our work, but it gets tiresome when people do so either without having read the arguments we have given in our attempts to motivate the approach or without bothering to address them.

Robert,
Your subsequent comments have reinforced my earlier suspicion that an ad hominem is lurking in our midst. It has become clear that you are dismissing the experimental approach because many of the people working in the field happen to be young and ambitious--aren’t all junior philosophers? Since you appear to be intent on being very uncharitable when it comes to impugning motives to the experimental crowd and evasive when it comes to addressing the arguments they have put forward, I will politely bow out of this particular discussion.

[Tamler Sommers]

I'm not very familiar with the debate between X-phi-philes and the X-phi opponents, but one thing has always struck me as odd about the latter position. X-phi opponents often (1) develop arguments that ultimately appeal to the reader's intutions about moral responsibility, and (2) maintain that it doesn't matter what people's intuitions are regarding moral responsibility.

How can (1) and (2) be reconciled? Or I have mischaracterized the X-Phi opponent's position?

[Fritz]

Tamler -- at least in the free action discussion that I am a part of, one disagreement between the experimentalists and their opponents is over the role and relevance of "untutored" intuitive judgments. So, for example, are the intuitive reactions of freshmen on the first day of philosophy 101 class relevant to, eg, the debate between those who think determinism rules out free action and those who don't?

I take it that your point is that at *some* point in a compatibilist or incompatibilist argument, an appeal will be made to intuition. Let's grant that claim. Still, there's plenty of room for a dispute here. Some think that it takes some philosophical work and training to understand the concepts in play "entailment" "determinism" etc... before "intuitive" judgments mean much of anything. Others, I take it, disagree.

So the fact, if it is a fact, that ultimately all philosophical arguments will appeal to "intution" doesn't show that the intuitions of freshmen intro students are important data for all philosophical debates. Likely they are for some but not for others.

[Fritz]

oh, so in case it isn't obvious -- you ask how to reconcile your (1) and (2) -- the answer I suggest is this: deny (2) if it is intended as a universal claim. (2) needs to be suitably qualified.

[Tamler Sommers]

Fritz,

I think we agree on this topic more than we disagree. I have a similar problem with some of the experimental work (although I agree with Thomas, Eddy, Shaun et al that it is quite suggestive and a sign of even more interesting things to come). But my reaction to the results, especially the compatibilist results, is generally along the lines of: "but those kids are just not thinking about this hard enough! Give me ten minutes with them and they'll change their answer." (And to be fair they can have ten minutes with a compatibilist too.)

My post was aimed more at the type of position that states: "it doesn't matter what the folk think, this is a debate that can only be settled by philosophical argument." That seems strange to me because the only way I can see to really settle the incompatibilist/compatibilist debate is to accurately guage the intuitions of the (tutored) folk. (And I don't think this tutoring requires a graduate seminar in action theory.) There's no way to demonstrate by a priori reasoning that people don't deserve blame if their actions were determined, or that it's not 'fair' to punish or reward people to if they are not ultimately responsible for any aspect of their character. The opponent can always consistently say "yes they do" and "yes it is" and the dispute will in the end become a clash of intuitions. The only way to move past this clash is to show that when most reflective people understand all of the relevant information, their intuitions tend to lean towards, say, incompatibilism. And that, at bottom, is an empirical question, right?

[James Gibson]

"The only way to move past this clash is to show that when most reflective people understand all of the relevant information, their intuitions tend to lean towards, say, incompatibilism. And that, at bottom, is an empirical question, right?"

I agree it's an empirical question when we want to know what most of these reflective people think. What I don't understand, Tamler, is how this moves us past the clash. Suppose I hold some belief that p, which after doing x-phil find that most reflective people find p to be counterintuitive. And suppose I think I have plenty of good undefeated reasons to support p. What should I do after finding out that most people have different intuitions about p than me? Or the reasons that I believe support p, while intuitive to me, nevertheless have no pull with others? It looks to me like the options are: either I give up my belief because most reflective people think otherwise; I maintain my belief that p but make no claims about p's truth; or I maintain that the majority are still wrong. With this last option, I might try to find reasons for why their intuitions go in a particular direction; but I may still offer all the same reasons for the truth of p (after all, I think they *are* good reasons that do justify p). I don't think the first option is likely to happen, nor that it should happen. So, aren't we still in the clash even after finding out what most reflective people believe? Maybe you have something else in mind.

[John Fischer]

CBS TV has "The Young and the Restless," with Victor and his clan. This thread suggests to me that maybe PBS should try, "The Young and the Ambitious," starring xxx. It could be about youngish (that includes me of course) and ambitious (in the good sense, of course) philosophers striving to solve the problems of free will and moral responsibility...

[Robert Allen]

"Since you appear to be intent on being very uncharitable when it comes to impugning motives to the experimental crowd and evasive when it comes to addressing the arguments they have put forward, I will politely bow out of this particular discussion."

Didn't you read what I said? You have NO ARGUMENTS worth considering. Why would I waste my time with your so called experiments when there is Prof. Fischer's splendid new anthology Free Will and Moral Responsibility to devour- without an empirical claim in sight (which I should finish just about the time Prof. Mele's eagerly anticipated new monograph hits the stores)?

[Tamler Sommers]

James,

I guess this is what I had in mind. If I learn that my intuitions are not in accord with the intuitions of a vast majority of reflective people who understand the problem then I might assume that my theoretical commitments are distorting my intuitions. Surely this happens quite a bit in philosophical inquiry. It would be valuable to have some sense of when it does.

Here's an example--one I may have used before in another context. I'm a free will skeptic (yes, I recognize the concerns of the M and E purists, but I embrace the term anyway. I am against the DH rule though). My free will skepticism relies on the truth of what S.L. Hurley calls the "regression requirement" for moral responsibility, roughly the claim that in order to be morally responsible for an action, we must be morally responsible for at least some of the determining causes of that action. Since I don't think we can be morally responsible for any of the determining factors of our actions, I believe that we cannot be morally responsible for the actions themselves.

To me it seems obvious that the regression requirement must hold in order for someone to be responsible in the robust desert-entailing sense of the term. But can I demonstrate philosophically that the regression requirment is true, or that it is an essential feature of genuine moral responsibility? I don't think so. I can't see how. The best I can do is appeal to the intuitions of the (tutored) folk.

My hunch is that intuitions don't conflict about the regression requirement; theories do. I think most people accept the regression requirement but (mistakenly) believe it to be satisfied--which is why they believe they can be morally responsible. But if I'm wrong about this, if it's shown to me that many of the tutored reflective folk do reject the regression requirement, and do in fact find something like reason-responsiveness or the capacity to form second order volitions to be sufficient for robust moral responsibility...well, then, what can I do? I'd have to at least admit the possibility that my intuitions on this front were corrupted by the seductive theories of the hard determinists. On the other hand, if I'm right about my hunch...then the opponents of free will skepticism have some further explaining to do. If you assume that neither Hurley nor I are being insincere about our ground level intuitions, it seems the only way to get past our disagreement is to discover which position strikes a chord with the most people.

[Robert Allen]

"The only way to move past this clash is to show that when most reflective people understand all of the relevant information, their intuitions tend to lean towards, say, incompatibilism. And that, at bottom, is an empirical question, right?" Tamler

The settling of which is of no philosophical importance. For no matter how it turns out, there remains the real philosophical task of showing that that the folk are right. Libertarians such as Prof. Kane already concede that there is a common sense notion of FW/MR (something akin to the guidance control of Prof. Fischer). Thus, as a compatibilist, I do not need to waste my time proving it exists. (And were I curious about folk's leanings, I'd query my own students or hire a real polling firm.) My task is to show that the understanding of FW/MR employed by, say, judges and attorneys- for whom Determinism is not a consideration- captures the truth re. FW/MR.