Buras on Yaffe

Just a quick FYI.

Todd Buras (Baylor) has a review of Gideon Yaffe's recent book, Manifest Acitivity, on his website.  Have a look!

Does Improbability render an Alternative Irrelevant?

In a recent article ("Frankfurt-Style Cases and Improbable Alternative Possibilities," Philosophical Studies 130 (2006): 399-406), Gerald Harrison argues that a Frankfurt-case need not eliminate all alternative possibilities in order to show PAP to be false.  This, by itself, isn't too surprising--many others have made the same general point (among my favorites here are Fischer-scenarios).  According to Harrison,

an agent may have the opportunity to do othwerise in an indeterministic world yet lack the ability to do otherwise in the sense relevant to PAP (401).

But what I do find puzzling is Harrison's argument for this claim.  He thinks that an alternative can be irrelevant even if it contains a free action/decision.  The kind of case Harrison uses is a Hunt-inspired blockage case.  But in order to avoid the objections to full blockage cases, Harrison gives a case in which all alternative possibilities but one are blocked.  The remaining alterntative is possible, just highly improbable. 

So here's my version of his kind of case.  We're at the next  APA, and I see Dan Speak at the smoker.  In general, I like Dan.  Who woudn't?  But in this case, Dan has recently snubbed me and my moral character is such that I am strongly inclined to kick people that have snubbed me.  Given this, I am strongly inclinded to kick Dan in the shins.  But my moral character isn't such that I must kick Dan in the shins--there is an accessible possible world in which I freely refrain from kicking him.  It's just very, very improbable that I won't.  All other possible worlds are blocked.  As it happens, what is probable becomes actual and I kick Dan.

According to Harrison, not only am I morally responsible for kicking Dan in the shins, but I also lack the ability--in the sense relevant to PAP--to not kick Dan despite my access to such a world.  I lack the ability to not kick Dan simply because my doing so is highly improbable. 

It is not enought that the agent have access to some alternative in which they [sic.] act freely, there must in addition be a sufficiently high probability of actually accessing the alternative in question (405).

I wonder why the mere improbability of an alternative that includes a free action/decision would mean that that alternative was irrelevant to my moral responsibility.  Furthermore, if it is, just how improbable would it need to be to be irrelevant?  Any thoughts?

It's on! (Mele on Doris, Knobe, and Woolfolk)

Here's our first ever GFP Online Reading Group Event. Make it awesome.

Initial comments (below) by Al Mele on Doris, Knobe, and Woolfolk's paper "Variantism about Responsibility."

For this to work, you need to start commenting. Al's given us some great reflections below. Now you join in. Thanks in advance.
-------------------

From Al Mele:

DKW’s paper was a pleasure to read. I’ll get the discussion started with some scattered comments.

1. Frankfurt-style and Woolfolk-style stories

Many readers will have noticed a difference between the Woolfolk et al. stories about Bill and Frankfurt-style stories. In F-style stories, the potential controller doesn’t cause the agent to decide to A and doesn’t cause the agent to A. He is prepared to do this if necessary; but the agent does it all “on his own” and the potential controller stays on the sidelines. In Woolfolk’s story, the “drug makes [Bill] unable to resist the demands of powerful authorities,” and they order Bill to shoot Frank in the head. So it certainly seems that they cause Bill to shoot Frank. Even so, “subjects judged the high identification actor more responsible . . . than the low identification actor” (p. 13).

Why might that be? (I’m assuming that “more responsible” here is short for “more responsible for killing Frank” and that the kind of responsibility at issue is moral responsibility.) Consider the following suggestions about part of what the subjects might be thinking about Bill in the high-identification condition:

A. (1) the bad guys caused Bill to kill Frank, and (2) Bill’s desire to kill Frank (or Bill himself, as in agent causation) also caused his killing Frank. (This is consistent with causal overdetermination and with joint causation.)

B. A1 is true, A2 is false, and Bill has some responsibility for killing Frank because he would have killed him even if the bad guys hadn’t made him do that.

(These suggestions aren’t meant to be exhaustive, of course.)

Possibly, suggestion B has led some of you to wonder whether some subjects would say that Bill has some responsibility for killing Frank in a strange story in which it is clear that Bill does not kill Frank. Wait! Am I nuts? Well, consider a story along the following lines. Bill makes his discovery about Frank and is extremely upset. Bad guys paralyze his arms and hands, put a gun in his right hand, raise his right arm (by electronically stimulating his arm muscles) so that the gun is pointed at Frank’s head, and (by further electronic stimulation) cause Bill’s paralyzed right index finger to depress the trigger. “Bill was certain about his feelings. He wanted to kill Frank.” What’s more, Bill thought that he was acting: he did not realize that his arm and hand were paralyzed. And he felt no reluctance about blowing “his friend’s brains out.”

Suppose that “subjects judged” this Bill “more responsible [for killing Frank] . . . than the low identification” Bill. What should we make of that? Well, given that these rational subjects know that Bill did not kill Frank (even though Frank was killed), they cannot be expressing the belief that he has some moral responsibility *for killing* him. They are doing something else with their words. This certainly is possible, and it makes one wonder whether some of the respondents to Woolfolk’s own high-identification story are doing something similar with their words. Running the story I sketched would produce some evidence about this. (Suppose it turned out that the responsibility rating is not significantly higher in Woolfolk’s high identification case than in my high identification case.)

Lots more below the fold.

Conference: Freedom, Will, and Nature

Gardeners looking for yet another conference at which to present their work (or to object to the work of others) might find the 2007 meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Assocation to be of interest.

Conference

The following conference will be of interest to many Gardeners.

Call for papers
SELFHOOD, NORMATIVITY, AND CONTROL
Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
May 10-11, 2007
Keynote speakers: David Velleman and Susan Hurley
It is a basic folk intuition that genuine agency can be distinguished from mere bodily movement in virtue of an agent's capacity to be in control of their behaviour. This intuition is also central to many traditional philosophical accounts of human agency, no matter how diverse they may be in other respects. Central features such as agential authority, or selfhood, and acting for a reason, or normativity, are often thought to imply some important kind of control. An agent's actions are considered to be hers in virtue of the agent's being in control of her actions. And an action is done for a reason in virtue of the agent's capacity to bring her behaviour under normative constraints.
Recent developments in experimental psychology, however, raise questions about this intuition. Experimental work suggests that for at least some types of behaviour, our trusted notion of conscious control does not do any explanatory work. These new results force philosophers and psychologists alike to rethink the traditional picture of human agency with its key notions of selfhood, normativity, and (indeed) control. In particular, do we need the concept of control to make sense of selfhood and normativity, or can we do without? If we can't do without it, which revisions of the traditional idea of control do we need?
We invite those who would wish to contribute to the conference to send us an abstract of their paper before October 1, 2006. Decisions about the conference programme will be made by November 1, 2006. We will be able to offer those invited to present a paper accommodation in Nijmegen for three nights and we are trying to get additional funds for covering travel reimbursement.

Abstracts to Jan Bransen:

Professor of Philosophy
Behavioural Science Institute
Radboud University Nijmegen
P.O. Box 9104
6500 HE Nijmegen
Netherlands
Phone: + 31 24 - 361 18 17
Fax: + 31 24 - 361 62 11

Email: j.bransen@pwo.ru.nl
Website: http://www.ru.nl/pwo/bransen/

(Hat tip: David Hunter).

Should we Care About The Individuation of Action?

I rarely post anything or even reply to the many interesting posts here at the GFP. So I reckoned it was time for me to post something. But this is not a gratuitous post. I'm wondering what folks think about current attitudes among philosophers of action regarding the value of work on action-individuation. These days folks seem inclined to either ignore the debate over action-individuation altogether (offering blank stares when you raise the topic in a discussion over some topic in action theory) or while they find the topic interesting, they claim that the issue, to quote Ginet, "though sufficiently interesting in its own right, is not one on which much else depends" (On Action, p. 70).

What I am most concerned about is whether anything else in the philosophy of action (including the free will debate) and related areas hangs on the conclusions we reach with respect to the debate over action individuation. I think it might make a difference both for what we count as an action-type as well as for what the proper objects of our reactive attitudes should be when we hold agents responsible for their actions and their outcomes (in fact, it might make a difference for whether or not we count an event as the proper part of actions or as the mere intentional outcome of an action). For example, some folks treat "thought" as an action-type. But as Al Mele and others have noted, it's not obvious that thinking is a type of action. However, if you accept a componential theory of action-individuation, couldn't thinking be an action-type all of the tokens of which are composed of more simple events (including actions and non-actional events)? So if you'd like, perhaps thinking is a "broad" type of action, all of the tokens of which are constituted by tokens of simple action-types. An interesting parallel is "driving". That is a fairly uncontroversial action-type. But when you drive to the store, you perform a fairly complex action that is constituted by a plethora of different events, including non-actional events. Driving like thought, again, assuming a componential theory of action individuation, is an action-type that is broad--i.e., such that all of its tokens are complex actions.

Why does any of the foregoing make a difference? Think about responsibility. You express disapproval of S's thinking about p or S's driving too fast. If we focus on driving, if you accept a fine-grained view, we have to ask when your driving occured among the myriad actions you performed (because there are numerous action-properties exemplified when you are "driving"); and if you accept a coarse-grained view then either your driving is one action that admits of a host of different descriptions or there are various actions you perform, but fewer than on the coarse-grained view because a number of them are really just the same action under different descriptions. Of course, if you accept a componential theory, then we can hold you responsible for performing the intentional action of driving fast, where your driving fast is composed of a bunch of more simple actions. I realize this is all quick. But I think that once we start thinking about it, the conclusions we reach about action-individuation might make more of a difference for some debates than some prominent action theorists have admitted. Does anyone have any thoughts about this? (Again, I'm acknowledging that this was all very quick and very sloppy.)

Talbert on Carlos Moya (no, not that Carlos Moya)

More free will related goodness here. Matt Talbert reviews Carlos Moya's Moral Responsibility: The Ways of Scepticism.

Free Will, Cross-Cultural Style

I started writing this post before Joe’s and Neil’s recent comments because I could no longer stand the deafening silence each day when I clicked on my gfp bookmark. Anyway, here’s a thought experiment that I hope will get a few comments going to warm us up for our discussion of the Doris, Knobe, and Woolfolk piece.

Imagine we discover a culture (of humans somehow previously hidden here on Earth or of intelligent aliens on a distant planet, I don’t think it matters) that resembles modern, Western cultures in many ways. Most notably, after hanging out with the people in this culture for a while, we recognize that they have basically the same practices regarding moral responsibility (i.e., praise and blame, punishment and reward) as ours, they express and seem to experience the same reactive attitudes (pride and shame, indignation and gratitude, etc.) as we do, and they talk about choice, freedom,  responsibility, and so on in basically the same ways we do (e.g., we have no problem translating the relevant aspects of their language).

However, perhaps in part because of their advanced science, these people also believe causal determinism is true. They believe that there is only one possible future given the actual past and laws of nature. They believe that every event has a set of sufficient prior causes. They believe that this is true of all of their choices and actions as well as everything else in the universe. [You may substitute here whatever conception of determinism incompatibilists take to preclude free will and moral responsibility.]

Now, it’s not just the scientists and philosophers who believe determinism is true. It’s everyone. It’s a belief that’s become understandable to the folk and seeped into the culture as fully as the belief that the earth is round and moves around the sun has seeped into ours (I wish I could say “as fully as the belief in evolution has seeped into ours”!). Hence, the ordinary folk in this culture appear to believe in free will and moral responsibility as much as the ordinary folk in our culture do but also to believe explicitly that determinism is true. [I’m not sure whether to say that the philosophers just don’t recognize the compatibility question to be a philosophical problem or that they take themselves to have “solved” it a long time ago by adopting some compatibilist strategy, such as rejecting transfer of non-responsibility principles.]

My question is what we should say about this thought experiment and this culture. Here are some of my thoughts, but I’d really like to hear from others (especially incompatibilists):

1) Compatibilists should presumably say this culture has discovered what is true.

2) Incompatibilists might say that, despite the surface similarities, these people mean different things than we do when they use the language of responsibility and freedom (especially, desert and retribution).  How might we show that they really mean different things than us?  Do they also feel something different when they feel and express the reactive attitudes?

3) Incompatibilists might say that these people (especially their philosophers!) are simply missing an important truth (e.g., some principle, such as transfer of non-responsibility, or some conceptual connection, such as the necessity of ultimate sourcehood for desert). If they thought about it enough, they’d recognize it (or maybe they wouldn’t, but either way, it’s still true). Skeptics about free will might say that, in this way, these people are just like most ordinary folk here.  Is so, what sort of truths are these (a priori, conceptual, necessary, what?)?

4) Incompatibilists might say that these people just think determinism is true but they are wrong. They have libertarian freedom and that’s what allows them to develop the practices and beliefs and attitudes about freedom and responsibility that they do.

5) Incompatibilists might say that the thought experiment is incoherent.

I can’t see why 5 would be right. Regarding 4, I can’t imagine an incompatibilist (certainly not a skeptic!) would want to argue that we can know we have libertarian freedom based on our practices and beliefs about freedom. I’d like to hear more about 3 or 2 (both of which I find problematic for reasons I can explain more fully later) or any other response anyone has.

[The post's title is a reference to Machery, Mallon, Stich and Nichols' "Semantics, Cross-Cultural Style" which suggests that Kripkean intuitions about reference vary across cultures.]