Bled Conference

Speaking of conferences (see the post below about the OPC), here's another conference announcement:

The Bled Philosophical Conference on Freedom, Determinism, and Responsibility will be May 29th-June 3rd of this year. It looks like it will be a good conference. Participants include Mark Balaguer, Bernard Berofsky, Joe Campbell, John Carroll, Ish Haji, Stewart Goetz, Mark Heller, Terry Horgan, David Hunt, Tomis Kapitan, Neil Levy, Ned Markosian, Michael McKenna, Tim O'Connor, Paul Russell, Saul Smilansky, and a lot of other people too!

The website for the conference is here.

OPC is On

The first On-line Philosophy Conference (OPC) is here now.  There are seven papers with commentary posted for this week, to be followed by 8-9 papers per week the next three weeks.  I hope the philosophical blogging community will help make this event a success by participating a spreading the word, especially to grad students and undergrads who may learn a lot by reading some of these papers and comments.  Thanks!

A Question About Ability

Consider this uncontroversial principle about ability.  Call it 'PEA' for 'Performance Entails Ability':

(PEA) If an agent performed an action, then she was able to perform that action.

On first glance, PEA seems so obviously true that it would be absurd to question it.  But I have my doubts about it.  My doubts might be due to some confusion about what it is to be able to perform an action, though, so if you think I'm way off, please point me in a better direction.

I have my doubts about PEA mainly for two reasons: 1) I incline toward Source Incompatibilism, and I tend to think that talk about 'abilities' carries with it some sort of implications about sourcehood which wouldn't be satisfied in a deterministic world even if agents still perform actions in a deterministic world, and 2) Manipulation cases in which arguably, an agent performs an action (because his brain was directly manipulated), but there still seems to be some sense in which the agent himself wasn't able to perform the action, due to the sourcehood connotations of 'ability'.  Come to think of it, maybe those are the same reason.

So I'm wondering -- do you think talk about abilities carries with it any connotations of sourcehood, and if so, would it be at all plausible to deny PEA?

Source Incompatibilism and the Direct Argument

I know I've touched on this topic before, so I'll make this quick.  I just had another thought about it.

Many people seem to think that source incompatibilists need to be committed to the soundness of some version of the direct argument.  But I don't think that's right.  The source incompatibilist, in fact, can argue for the incompatibility of determinism and responsibility in a way that exactly parallels the strategy of the leeway incompatibilist, as follows:

1) Determinism is incompatible with sourcehood.

2) Sourcehood is required for moral responsibility.

3) Therefore, determinism is incompatible with moral responsibility.

This argument, it seems to me, is an "indirect" argument for the incompatibility of determinism and responsibility, but it's not one that goes via PAP.  Of course the source incompatibilist will have to give some reason to accept the premises, but the leeway incompatibilist has to do that too.  There needs to be an argument for why determinism rules out the ability to do otherwise and an argument for why we should accept PAP. 

Two reasons why I think source incompatibilists should argue in this indirect fashion rather than via the direct argument.  One -- objections to the direct argument will not ipso facto be objections to source incompatibilism.  Two -- it doesn't define 'sourcehood' in terms of moral responsibility (as, for instance, 'whatever control or origination or whatever is required for moral responsibility), and so keeps separate issues separate.

FSU a Free-Will Powerhouse

There really must be some connection between sunny weather and quality work on free will.  Al Mele points us to this announcement over at Brian Leiter's blog.  Congrats to Clarke and McKenna.

"This is turning into a big year for the Department of Philosophy at Florida State University, which cracked the top 50 for the first time in the 2004 PGR. In addition to appointing Michael McKenna, as Jason Stanley reported, FSU has also hired to the tenured ranks: Michael Bishop (epistemology, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of science) from Northern Illinois University; Randolph Clarke (philosophy of action, free will) from the University of Georgia; and Justin Leiber (philosophy of mind and language) from the University of Houston. With Clarke, McKenna, and Alfred Mele, FSU seems certain to emerge as one of the top choices in the country for students interested in free will/philosophy of action and cognate topics. I would also not be surprised if FSU breaks the overall top 40 in the fall 2006 PGR surveys."

INPC Pics

Here are some rough comments on my experience at the INPC.  I am also posting plenty of pictures.

The rest is below the fold...

On-line Philosophy Conference (OPC)

The program is now tentatively set for the first annual Online Philosophy Conference (OPC).  I hope you will find that it offers an impressive line-up of excellent philosophers presenting cutting-edge work in many different areas of contemporary philosophy.  (Thomas Nadelhoffer has done an outstanding job putting this together.)  We offer this conference as a way for you to engage these philosophers and this work from the comfort of your own home, office, coffee shop, park ... anywhere but the cold confines of a hotel conference room. 

We need you to spread the word, especially among your undergraduate and graduate students who may not have the opportunity to attend such a conference in person and see philosophers presenting their work and responding to the comments and questions of their audience.  Please consider sending an email to your students (or relevant listserv) and your colleagues to publicize this event.  Given that the OPC is open to anyone in the world with access to the internet, it could be the largest philosophy conference in history. It's success will depend entirely upon how many people participate.  So, anything you can do to help promote the conference would be greatly appreciated.

The plan is to post a set of papers (usually 8), along with commentary, each week in May, linked from the conference website:  http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/online_philosophy_confere/
We've tried to offer a diverse line-up each week.  "Attend" whichever "talks" look interesting to you and post comments or questions as you please (comments will be moderated for relevance, appropriateness, and length).  The authors, including several GFP regulars, will be encouraged to respond to the commentator's remarks and to the thread of questions and comments at several points during the week, though they cannot be expected to address every question and comment. 

So, OPC will fill the month of May with exciting (and free) philosophical action.  We hope you will be part of it.

The tentative schedule is as follows:

Week One:
Sunday April 30th:

1. Mary Coleman (Bard College), “Holistic Directions of Fit and Smith’s Teleological Argument,” with commentary by Michael Smith (Princeton).
2. Julia Driver (Dartmouth), “Luck,” with commentary by Hans Maes (The University of Kent).
3. Noa Latham (University of Calgary), “Fundamental Laws,” with commentary by Cei Maslen (Victoria University).
4. Alfred Mele (Florida State University), “Practical Mistakes and Intentional Actions,” with commentary by Jing Zhu (Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of the Sciences) & Andrei Buckareff (Franklin and Marshall).
5. Steve Stich (Rutgers) and Daniel Kelley (Rutgers), “Two Theories about the Cognitive Architecture Underlying Morality,” with commentary by Michael Cholbi & Peter Ross (Cal State Polytechnic).
6. Kit Wellman (Washington-St. Louis), “Immigration and Freedom of Association,” with commentary by Fernando Teson (Florida State University—Law).
7. Jessica Wilson (University of Toronto), “Non-reductive Physicalism and Degrees of Freedom,” with commentary by Michael Strevens (New York University).
8. Outstanding Undergraduate Paper: Andrew Bailey (Biola University), “Some Unsound Arguments for Incompatibilism,” with commentary by John Martin Fischer (University of California-Riverside).

Week Two:
Sunday May 7th:

1. David Chalmers (Australian National University), “Probability and Propositions,” with commentary by David Braun (University of Rochester).
2. John Fischer (University of California-Riverside) “Freedom, Foreknowledge, and Frankfurt: A Reply to Vihvelin,” with commentary by Kadri Vihvelin  (University of Southern California).
3. Brie Gertler (University of Virginia), “A Fregean Argument against Externalism,” with commentary by Sanford Goldberg (University of Kentucky).
4. Benj Hellie (University of Toronto) “That Which Makes the Sensation of Blue a Mental Fact,” with commentary by Adam Pautz (University of Texas—Austin).
5. Thomas Hurka (University of Toronto), “Value and Friendship: A More Subtle View,” with commentary by David McNaughton (Florida State University).
6. Uriah Kriegel (University of Arizona), “Another Look at the Manifest Image,” with commentary by Owen Flanagan (Duke University).
7. Stacey Swain, Joshua Alexander, and Jonathan Weinberg (Univ. of Indiana) “The Instability of Philosophical Intuitions,” with commentary by Adam Feltz (Florida State University).
8. Amie Thomasson (University of Miami), “Answerable and Unanswerable Questions,” with commentary by Jason Turner (Rutgers University).

Week Three:
Sunday May 14th:

1. Justin Fischer (University of Arizona), "Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis,” with commentary by Frank Jackson (Australian National University).
2. Joshua Gert (Florida State University), “Irrationality and Harm,” with commentary by Jussi Suikkanen (University of Reading).
3. Joshua Knobe (UNC-Chapel Hill) and Erica Roedder (New York University), “The Concept of Valuing: Experimental Studies,” with commentary by Antti Kauppinen (University of Helsinki).
4. Jonathan Kvanvig (University of Missouri-Columbia), “Coherentism and Justified Inconsistent Beliefs,” with commentary by Michael Bishop (Northern Illinois University).
5. Neil Levy (University of Melbourne), “Why Frankfurt Style Cases Don’t Help (Much),” with commentary by Kevin Timpe (University of San Diego).
6. Adam Pautz (University of Texas—Austin),  “Externalist Intentionalism and Optimal Conditions: A Comment on Byrne and Tye,” commentator to be announced.
7. Graham Priest &  Neil Thomason (both from University of Melbourne), “Lakatos, Paradox, and Paraconsistency,” with commentary by Stuart Shapiro (Ohio State University).
8. Manuel Vargas (University of San Francisco), “Building a Better Beast,” with commentary by Eddy Nahmias (Georgia State University).

Week Four:
Sunday May 21st:

1. Thom Brooks (Newcastle University), “On Retributivism,” with commentator to be announced.
2. Tyler Doggett (University of Vermont) & Andy Egan (University of Michigan & ANU), "Imagination, Desire, Affect and Action,” with commentary by Tamar Gendler (Yale University).
3. R.A. Duff (University of Stirling), “Virtue Jurisprudence,” with commentary by Lawrence Solum (University of Illinois—Law).
4. Elizabeth Harman (Princeton University), "The Mistake in "I'll Be Glad I Did It" Reasoning:  The Significance of Future Desires,” with commentary by Brook Sadler (University of South Florida).
5. Terence Horgan (University of Arizona), “Materialism: Matters of Definition, Defense, and Deconstruction,” with commentary by Thomas Polger (University of Cincinnati).
6. Susanna Siegel (Harvard University), “The Perception of Causation,” with commentary by Sarah McGrath (Holy Cross).
7. Sharon Street (New York University), “Evolution and the Schizophrenia of Quasi-Realism About Normativity,” with commentary by David Enoch (Hebrew University).
8. Jason Turner (Rutgers University), “On How Things Are,” with commentary by David Manley (University of Southern California).
9. Brian Weatherson (Cornell University), “Conditionals and Relativism,” with commentary by Gillian Russell (Washington—St. Louis).

The program is now tentatively set for the first annual Online Philosophy Conference (OPC).  I hope you will find that it offers an impressive line-up of excellent philosophers presenting cutting-edge work in many different areas of contemporary philosophy.  (Thomas Nadelhoffer has done an outstanding job putting this together.)  We offer this conference as a way for you to engage these philosophers and this work from the comfort of your own home, office, coffee shop, park ... anywhere but the cold confines of a hotel conference room. 

We need you to spread the word, especially among your undergraduate and graduate students who may not have the opportunity to attend such a conference in person and see philosophers presenting their work and responding to the comments and questions of their audience.  Please consider sending an email to your students (or relevant listserv) and your colleagues to publicize this event.  Given that the OPC is open to anyone in the world with access to the internet, it could be the largest philosophy conference in history. It's success will depend entirely upon how many people participate.  So, anything you can do to help promote the conference would be greatly appreciated.

The plan is to post a set of papers (usually 8), along with commentary, each week in May, linked from the conference website:  http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/online_philosophy_confere/
We've tried to offer a diverse line-up each week.  "Attend" whichever "talks" look interesting to you and post comments or questions as you please (comments will be moderated for relevance, appropriateness, and length).  The authors, including several GFP regulars, will be encouraged to respond to the commentator's remarks and to the thread of questions and comments at several points during the week, though they cannot be expected to address every question and comment. 

So, OPC will fill the month of May with exciting (and free) philosophical action.  We hope you will be part of it.

The tentative schedule is as follows:

Week One:
Sunday April 30th:

1. Mary Coleman (Bard College), “Holistic Directions of Fit and Smith’s Teleological Argument,” with commentary by Michael Smith (Princeton).
2. Julia Driver (Dartmouth), “Luck,” with commentary by Hans Maes (The University of Kent).
3. Noa Latham (University of Calgary), “Fundamental Laws,” with commentary by Cei Maslen (Victoria University).
4. Alfred Mele (Florida State University), “Practical Mistakes and Intentional Actions,” with commentary by Jing Zhu (Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of the Sciences) & Andrei Buckareff (Franklin and Marshall).
5. Steve Stich (Rutgers) and Daniel Kelley (Rutgers), “Two Theories about the Cognitive Architecture Underlying Morality,” with commentary by Michael Cholbi & Peter Ross (Cal State Polytechnic).
6. Kit Wellman (Washington-St. Louis), “Immigration and Freedom of Association,” with commentary by Fernando Teson (Florida State University—Law).
7. Jessica Wilson (University of Toronto), “Non-reductive Physicalism and Degrees of Freedom,” with commentary by Michael Strevens (New York University).
8. Outstanding Undergraduate Paper: Andrew Bailey (Biola University), “Some Unsound Arguments for Incompatibilism,” with commentary by John Martin Fischer (University of California-Riverside).

Week Two:
Sunday May 7th:

1. David Chalmers (Australian National University), “Probability and Propositions,” with commentary by David Braun (University of Rochester).
2. John Fischer (University of California-Riverside) “Freedom, Foreknowledge, and Frankfurt: A Reply to Vihvelin,” with commentary by Kadri Vihvelin  (University of Southern California).
3. Brie Gertler (University of Virginia), “A Fregean Argument against Externalism,” with commentary by Sanford Goldberg (University of Kentucky).
4. Benj Hellie (University of Toronto) “That Which Makes the Sensation of Blue a Mental Fact,” with commentary by Adam Pautz (University of Texas—Austin).
5. Thomas Hurka (University of Toronto), “Value and Friendship: A More Subtle View,” with commentary by David McNaughton (Florida State University).
6. Uriah Kriegel (University of Arizona), “Another Look at the Manifest Image,” with commentary by Owen Flanagan (Duke University).
7. Stacey Swain, Joshua Alexander, and Jonathan Weinberg (Univ. of Indiana) “The Instability of Philosophical Intuitions,” with commentary by Adam Feltz (Florida State University).
8. Amie Thomasson (University of Miami), “Answerable and Unanswerable Questions,” with commentary by Jason Turner (Rutgers University).

Week Three:
Sunday May 14th:

1. Justin Fischer (University of Arizona), "Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis,” with commentary by Frank Jackson (Australian National University).
2. Joshua Gert (Florida State University), “Irrationality and Harm,” with commentary by Jussi Suikkanen (University of Reading).
3. Joshua Knobe (UNC-Chapel Hill) and Erica Roedder (New York University), “The Concept of Valuing: Experimental Studies,” with commentary by Antti Kauppinen (University of Helsinki).
4. Jonathan Kvanvig (University of Missouri-Columbia), “Coherentism and Justified Inconsistent Beliefs,” with commentary by Michael Bishop (Northern Illinois University).
5. Neil Levy (University of Melbourne), “Why Frankfurt Style Cases Don’t Help (Much),” with commentary by Kevin Timpe (University of San Diego).
6. Adam Pautz (University of Texas—Austin),  “Externalist Intentionalism and Optimal Conditions: A Comment on Byrne and Tye,” commentator to be announced.
7. Graham Priest &  Neil Thomason (both from University of Melbourne), “Lakatos, Paradox, and Paraconsistency,” with commentary by Stuart Shapiro (Ohio State University).
8. Manuel Vargas (University of San Francisco), “Building a Better Beast,” with commentary by Eddy Nahmias (Georgia State University).

Week Four:
Sunday May 21st:

1. Thom Brooks (Newcastle University), “On Retributivism,” with commentator to be announced.
2. Tyler Doggett (University of Vermont) & Andy Egan (University of Michigan & ANU), "Imagination, Desire, Affect and Action,” with commentary by Tamar Gendler (Yale University).
3. R.A. Duff (University of Stirling), “Virtue Jurisprudence,” with commentary by Lawrence Solum (University of Illinois—Law).
4. Elizabeth Harman (Princeton University), "The Mistake in "I'll Be Glad I Did It" Reasoning:  The Significance of Future Desires,” with commentary by Brook Sadler (University of South Florida).
5. Terence Horgan (University of Arizona), “Materialism: Matters of Definition, Defense, and Deconstruction,” with commentary by Thomas Polger (University of Cincinnati).
6. Susanna Siegel (Harvard University), “The Perception of Causation,” with commentary by Sarah McGrath (Holy Cross).
7. Sharon Street (New York University), “Evolution and the Schizophrenia of Quasi-Realism About Normativity,” with commentary by David Enoch (Hebrew University).
8. Jason Turner (Rutgers University), “On How Things Are,” with commentary by David Manley (University of Southern California).
9. Brian Weatherson (Cornell University), “Conditionals and Relativism,” with commentary by Gillian Russell (Washington—St. Louis).

Psychopaths and Moral Responsibility

Can psychopaths be morally responsible for their behaviors?  The question is a difficult one -- with different theories of moral responsibility yielding different answers -- and I'm sure there will be some interesting discussion of it at the exciting conference this weekend organized by Manuel Vargas.

Shaun Nichols, Daniel Batson and I were curious about how ordinary people would approach this issue, and we recently ran an experiment to see if we could figure it out.  All subjects were given a description of a disorder loosely based on psychopathy.  Subjects were then asked whether people who had such a disorder could be morally responsible for the immoral actions they performed.

But different subjects were asked this question in different ways.  Half of the subjects were simply asked in the abstract whether anyone who had this disorder could ever be morally responsible for the immoral actions they performed.  The other half were given a concrete story about a person who had the disorder and who therefore decided to kill his own wife and children.  They were then asked whether this particular person was morally responsible for what he had done.

By now, you have probably guessed the results.  Subjects who were asked the abstract question tended to say that people with the disorder could not be morally responsible for their immoral actions, but subjects who were given the concrete story tended to say that this particular person actually was morally responsible for killing his wife and children.

These results certainly don't leave us with a clear picture of people's ordinary understanding of moral responsibility and psychopathy, but they do provide some puzzling data that cry out for explanation...

What is Source Incompatibilism?

Here are some thoughts about so-called 'Source Incompatibilism' occasioned by conversations and papers at the INPC.

It seems to me that often, the term 'source incompatiblism' is used to denote any view that holds the following two claims:

1) The thesis of determinism is incompatible with the thesis that we are sometimes morally responsible for our actions, and

2) The main reason determinism and moral responsibility are incompatible is NOT because determinism rules out the ability to do otherwise.

But I don't think all views that hold those two claims deserve to be called 'Source Incompatibilism'.  For instance, if the above is our definition of 'source incompatibilism', then proponents of the Direct Argument are source incompatibilists.  And Galen Strawson is a source incompatibilist.  But both of those results seem wrong to me.  Proponents of the Direct Argument don't usually talk about sourcehood -- they talk about the Transfer of Non-Responsibility.  And  Strawson doesn't think the reason determinism rules out responsibility is because it rules out sourcehood -- he thinks that responsibility rules out itself, regardless of determinism.  So, I think that Source Incompatibilism should instead be characterized as the conjunction of the following two theses (this is close to how Kevin Timpe characterizes it in his paper, "Source Incompatibilism and its Alternatives"):

1) The thesis of determinism is incompatible with the thesis that we are sometimes morally responsible for our actions, and

2) The reason that determinism is incompatible with responsibility is because determinism is incompatible with our being the source of our actions.

This characterization does not count Strawson or the proponents of the Direct Argument as source incompatibilists, and that seems right to me.  Moreover, anyone who thinks that both determinism and indeterminism are incompatible with responsibility won't count as a source incompatibilist either.  Their reason for the incompatibility isn't anything having to do with sourcehood -- it has to do with the coherence of responsibility itself.  So, for instance, Pereboom counts as a source incompatibilist, but only because he thinks that we could have responsibility if agent-causation existed.

Do people share my intuitions about what source incompatibilism is and who should (or shouldn't) count as a source incompatibilist?  If I'm right, then significantly, objections to the Direct Argument won't count as objections against Source Incompatibilism, as many have taken them to be.

Post-INPC

Once again, the folks at WSU and UI pulled off a fabulous conference.  Not only was the content of the sessions great, but they make the conference come off in a very seamless way.  I'm amazed by how they do it.

I was also really pleased to finally meet some of you that I only knew through the GFP and the Experimental blog.  I look forward to continuing to interact with you and your work in the future.