Empirical evidence for more than one concept of freedom (and responsibility)?

The following was sent in by Garden reader Zac Cogley.  Comments encouraged.

"In this article from the New York Times Magazine, three psychologists suggest that Americans have differing concepts of freedom.

From the article: 'As behavioral scientists, we have found that the people who frame freedom in terms of choice are usually the ones who get to make a lot of choices — that is, middle- and upper-class white Americans (most of our study participants are white; we can't make any claims about other racial and ethnic groups). The education, income and upbringing of these Americans grant them choices about how to live their lives and also encourage them to express their preferences and personalities through the choices they make. Most Americans, however, are not from the college-educated middle and upper classes. Working- class Americans often have fewer resources and experience greater uncertainty and insecurity. For them, being free is less about making choices that reflect their uniqueness and mastery and more about being left alone, with their personality, integrity and well-being intact.'

Connecting freedom with choice is very close to connecting freedom with the availability of alternative possibilities (since one has to choose between them). On the other hand, equating freedom with being left alone resonates with a classical compatibilist conception of freedom as absence of constraint.

If this research is correct, maybe we won’t be able to settle what the *real* concept of responsibility is by doing empirical studies. I’m interested to know what other Gardeners think about this possibility, especially those who do experimental philosophy."

Evil and Psychopathy Symposium at USF

Maybe of interest to a few Gardeners:

At the University of San Francisco we'll be hosting a one day symposium entitled "Evil and Psychopathy" on Saturday, April 8th, in Lone Mtn 100. Papers will be given by Agnieszka Jaworska (Stanford, philosophy), Dominic Murphy (Caltech, philosophy), Dana Nelkin (UCSD, philosophy) and James Waller (Whitworth, psychology). Attendance is free and open to the public. So, if you happen to be in the Bay Area or were looking for an excuse to come up to the Bay Area, come to the symposium!

For questions, email me at mrvargas at usfca dot edu.

Annual UCR Conference

Since everything we can quantify over relates to free will in some way or another, and since conferences are included among those things we can quantify over, it's only right that I make this announcement.

This weekend UCR is hosting its annual conference.  The theme for this year's conference is "Normativity & Universality from a Kantian Perspective".  Speakers include Allen Wood, Barbara Herman, Hannah Ginsborg, Tyler Burge, and Charles Parsons.  The conference begins on Friday at 1pm and ends on Saturday at 5:30pm.  More information is available here. 

Come check it out!

P. F. Strawson

Peter Strawson died 13 February 2006.  An obituary can be found here:  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-2040505,00.html

UPDATE (from Neal): Brian Weatherson is keeping track of obituaries for Strawson here.  There's no doubt about the importance Strawson's work has had for the literature on free will and moral responsibility.  Gratitude is surely an appropriate reactive attitude.

Taking libertarianism back from those pretenders . . .

Do you ever get tired of explaining that 'libertarian' also refers to a view about free will, in addition to referring to a view in political theory? Now you can add some sneering to your explanation. Try saying "I mean libertarian in its truest and original sense" or "I mean libertarian in the sense it had before it was debased" or "I don't mean libertarian in the vulgar way."

Here's why you should feel entitled to say those sorts of things (on the assumption that your highest degree came with the usual serving of haughtiness):

The Oxford English Dictionary lists the first use of the term "Libertarian" for philosophy as 1789 BELSHAM Ess. I. i. 11 "Where is the difference between the Libertarian..and the Necessarian?"

And, the first usage of libertarianism was about 40 years later: 1830 W. TAYLOR Hist. Surv. Germ. Poetry III. 10 note, "The general drift of his [Kant's] system..is not libertarianism."

In contrast, it took those political theory thieves almost a century to steal the good word from us. The first political use of the term comes in: 1878 SEELEY Stein III. 355.

Take that, libertarians-in-the-johnny-come-lately-POLITICAL sense!

(Thanks to Katharine Denson and Annie Barrows for the info.)

Cognitive Science Cafe

Exhausted after all this cogitation over why we should believe we're morally responsible? Why not take a relaxing break at the Cognitive Science Cafe?

John's Way

You'll all be delighted to know that John Martin Fischer's collection of essays My Way: Essays on Moral Responsibility is now in print.  It will be nice to have all of these essays in one place.  And for those of you going, be sure to pick up a copy before this year's INPC, where there will be a symposium on the book.  Enjoy!

Why Should We Believe We're Morally Responsible?

In a 1990 Analysis paper, Saul Smilansky claims that Peter Van Inwagen’s argument (in An Essay on Free Will) for the existence of libertarian moral responsibility is weak   I would agree.  The argument focuses largely on his claim that he can’t take anyone seriously who denies moral responsibility, because in the next breath they’ll assert that stealing books is “shoddy.”   People who deny moral responsibility, according to PVI, contradict themselves with monotonous regularity.  I won’t go into the problems with this view here (but see Smilansky’s paper, available on his webpage, for one good response.)   Rather, just assume Smilansky is right.  What are the implications of this?  According to Smilansky, the whole structure of An Essay on Free Will collapses.  I believe that’s correct too.  Because here in a nutshell is PVI’s argument for the existence of libertarian free will.

(1)   We must have libertarian free will in order to have libertarian moral responsibility.

(2)   The claim that we lack libertarian moral responsibility is absurd.

(3)   Therefore we must have libertarian free will.

Without good arguments for claim (2), PVI has no right conclude (3).   At best, he can claim that either hard determinism or libertarianism is true.  But that is certainly not his goal in EOFW.  On the contrary, he claims that if he learned determinism was true, he would abandon incompatibilism.   I had noticed this gap in reasoning as well, and I asked PVI about it when he came to Duke a couple of years ago.  His response was roughly: “I simply think that the  probability that we lack moral responsibility is lower than the probability that incompatibilism is false.”   That seemed fairly reasonable to me at the time.  Lately though I’ve begun to wonder: what is that probability assessment based on? 

This is not a rhetorical question.  I’m really interested to know.   What grounds do we have to assign a high probability to the truth of ‘people can be morally responsible’ (in the strong desert-entailing sense)?   I think that this question can be asked not just of PVI and other libertarians but of anyone who asserts the existence of desert-entailing moral responsibility.  What are you basing this belief on?  Does the belief have strong support?   And to what extent does your theory of moral responsibility depend on a good independent justification for its existence?