If you will it, 2007 will come.

1. If you weren't at the Eastern, be glad. It was the year they brought back the smoker for a blazing good time. In other words, the hotel was on fire. Apologies for the bad and overused puns.

2. Good luck to the various Gardeners doing job hunting at the Eastern. May you receive at least as many call-backs as you had interviews!

3. Although this isn't my blog and thus perhaps not my place to say so, many thanks to all the recently-participating folks who've made the blog rebound in a big way over the past month or so! Sadly, I missed much of the discussion because of travelling and other committments, but many thanks to you and everyone over the past year for all the good conversations. I keep learning from you all.

4. Happy New Year!

Cognitive Biases and Free Will Part I: The Dual-Process Challenge

I’ve presented challenges to free willism in other posts. For example, I still find the prospect of a “Medicalized Society”, according to which wrongdoers are treated almost like sickly or diseased people, to pose a fascinating challenge.

More recently, I’ve become interested in cognitive biases that seem to affect humans in general. These biases suggest another possibility: the dual process hypothesis. The dual process hypothesis paints a picture of the mind like the following:

1. the mind has both (i) slower, smarter, more generalized (SlowSMG) circuits and (ii) faster, dumber, more domain specific (FastDDS) circuits
2. amongst the FastDDS circuits are circuits relating to identifying other agents,      understanding the causal relationship between events, assigning blame and praise, and the emotions such as anger, thirst-for-revenge, and so on
3. the FastDDS circuits compensate in speed for what they lack in accuracy, and so represent a “knee jerk” response that, upon cooler and more thoughtful reflection, is sometimes mistaken
4. so our prephilosophical or instinctive attitudes and beliefs about other agents,      responsibility and blame, and anger and retribution, etc. are sometimes mistaken or imprudent.

Now, we are all fairly familiar with the dual process challenge because Nichols & Knobe did fascinating studies showing that affect, or the moral salience of an event, seems to increase compatibilist responses at the expense of incompatibilist responses. For example, Nichols & Knobe suggest that “[p]erhaps the most obvious way of explaining the data reported here would be to suggest that strong affective reactions can bias and distort people’s judgments.” This would fit with the dual process challenge: the affective or morally salient situations *trigger* the faster, dumber, more domain specific circuits in our brain (such as those dealing with anger and retribution), which produce less accurate or more imprudent responses.

NOTE: I know some, such as Eddy Nahmias, take issue with this research. I would love to hear any possible explanations for the differences between their data and the Nichols & Knobe data.

Joshua Greene and Jonathan Haidt have done similar research on issues such as consequentialism/deontology, moral realism, and the relationship between the emotions and moral reasoning. For example, I think Greene has found that people who give consequentialist answers give them *slower*, consistent with the hypothesis that the SlowSMG circuitry is trumping the FastDDS circuitry. I think he has also put subjects in MRI scanners and actually mapped how different parts of the brain “light up” with respect to consequentialists and deontologists. And Haidt has done fascinating research on “moral dumbfounding” which suggests that people have FastDDS circuits for moral reasoning and, furthermore, that the more cerebral or cognitive parts of their brain *rationalize* the response, which has already been determined by the FastDDS circuits.

These lines of research suggest future directions for studies on the free will problem. Do those who give incompatibilist or non-realist/eliminativist answers give them slower (like the consequentialists)? When subjects give compatibilist or incompatibilists answers while in an MRI scanner, which parts of their brains “light up”, and can one argue that these parts of the brain are more like SlowSMG circuits or FastDDS circuits?

NOTE: This dual process picture of the mind is a hypothesis. It is an empirical question and cannot be settled by thought experiment (or whatever else philosophers do). But, as a live hypothesis, I think it is worth contemplating the ramifications, should the hypothesis turn out to be true or largely true.

Here are some questions for other Gardeners:

1. Do you tend to think that this dual process theory will turn out to be true or largely true? If not, where do you think it goes wrong and why?
2. Regardless of whether you that this dual process hypothesis is right, what ramifications do you think it would have for the free will debate (libertarianism, compatibilism, non-realism/eliminativism)? Is the existence and relevance of such FastDDS circuits likely to undermine one group more than others?

Best papers?

Over at Thoughts, Arguments and Rants, Brian Weatherson suggests that some blog take up the slack left by the (apparent) death of the Philosopher's Annual. I don't think this is the right place to take up the task in its entirety. But I'm a big fan of distributed cognition: we can take on the part where we have expertise. So I hereby call for nominations: what are the best papers in philosophy of action, moral responsibility and free will, published since 2003 (the last year for which PA produced a volume)?

Intuitions

This is the first time (I think) that I've ever used my posting privileges here, and since I don't know whether my preferences and name from my other blog will carry over here, I should say at the outset: this is Hilary Bok. I'm writing in response to a comment made by Kip Werking in an earlier thread; I'm writing a post about it since it seemed like the sort of topic that might justify it.

In the earlier thread, I wrote:

"consider an analogy. People have all sorts of conflicting intuitions about justice, and I assume this was as true in the late 60s as it is today, if not more so. What should John Rawls have taken this fact to entail? Probably: that just appealing to people's intuitions wasn't likely to get him anywhere. But it would not entail that there were no interesting, constructive arguments out there that might lead people to change their minds.

What bugs me about the current emphasis on intuitions etc. is that it seems to make the very possibility of these arguments vanish. If people's intuitions are all in accord, there's no problem to solve; if they differ, then it's unsolvable. In this way the entire constructive task of philosophy is made to disappear."

Kip asked whether I was talking about concepts or inferences, and said:

"If Hilary is saying that inferences are not a popularity content, then I completely agree with her. After all, the folk believe all sorts of ridiculous things. But it seems to me that they come to believe each of these ridiculous things through some fallacy: they have the right premises but reach the wrong conclusion. In that case, it is not a popularity contest. The folk are just wrong.

But if Hilary (and others) are saying that concepts are not a popularity content, then I beg to differ. I'm no philosopher of language (yet?), but it seems to be a bedrock principle of that subject, that terms means whatever their common usage is. And what is common usage but a popularity contest? You ask "which of these things is red" and point to some blood and some sky, if most of the folk say the blood, then that is the color "red", if most of them point to the sky, then "red" here actually means what we call "blue". This seems to be a fundamental truth about how language works. And it would be a most dangerous precedent to do violence to this principle just to (as it appears) inoculate some view from empirical investigation.

Given this distinction, the question is: is the compatibility question one of concepts or one of inferences? And it seems to me that it is much more one of concepts than of inferences. We are all bright, college educated people who know the simple rules of logic. And we know that, if "free will" means what G. Strawson says it means, then it doesn't exist, and if "free will" means what Daniel Dennett says it means, then it does exist (and is compatible with determinism). I don't know of a single fallacy that either side can point to the other, and accuse them of making. On the contrary, the only mistake either side could say is: "Sure, free will does/does-not exist if you use that concept of free will! but of course that is the wrong concept! You haven't committed any glaring fallacy, rather your argument never even got off the ground because you started with the wrong premise, the wrong concept of free will." And if this is true, and I believe it is, how can we settle this dispute, if not through empirical investigation, and determining what the common usage of "free will" is, and even confronting the possibility that it may have no common usage (as Richard Double seems to have concluded)! And if you appreciate how free will dispute is about concepts, and not inferenes, then you can understand why I tend to think that decisive answers about folk intuitions can be the "nails in the coffin" to compatibilism/incompatibilism."

Personally, I tend to the following views:

(a) I can, if I want, construct any concept I want. If I want to pick out that class of objects that consists solely of my house, Tom DeLay, and the number two, that's my business. It is of course true that I do not get to determine: whether my new concept actually applies to anything, and if so, what; what follows from the fact that it applies to something; etc. I also do not get to decide whether my concept is what most people mean by freedom (or by any other term.)

(b) What 'being wrong about a concept' means, I assume, is 'being wrong to think that I use the term 'X' to pick out the same concept as most other people', or something like that. To detect such an error, one would of course have to check and see what most other people do in fact mean.

(c) Personally, I am less interested in the question whether freedom, as most people use that term, is compatible with determinism, than in the questions: what is it that I want an account of freedom of the will to (allow me to) do? ('Do', here, isn't limited to actions; it includes things like: hold people morally responsible for their conduct, in some satisfactory sense. The parentheses are meant to indicate that you can construe this as a question about what the account can do -- e.g., can it underwrite an adequate account of responsibility? And yes, this means that I hold the same basic view on the problem of responsibility as on freedom: I need to ask what I want an account of moral responsibility to allow me to do, as well.) Why does freedom of the will seem to me, and to others, to matter? What turns on it? And is there some account of freedom that will allow me to get what I think turns on getting an adequate account of freedom?

(d) This means that I think of the problem of freedom of the will as the question whether it is possible to construct a concept that is both close enough to what we normally mean to count as a concept of freedom, and also able to do the various things we want an account of freedom to do. I take interesting versions of incompatibilism to assert that it is impossible to construct an account of freedom that is compatible with determinism/mechanism/naturalism/whatever, and that does what we want an account of freedom to do. (Since if they were only asserting that a given account of freedom is inconsistent with d/m/n/whatever, but allowing that there was some other account that gave us everything we wanted in an account of freedom, and which was compatible with d/m/n/w, their claim would not interest me.)

(e) It's hard to demonstrate this sort of impossibility -- to rule out the possibility that some new and unforeseen approach might actually succeed in letting us construct such an account. It's easy to gesture at the claim that such an account is possible, but it's pretty boring. What would be interesting would be to actually do the hard constructive work involved in coming up with one, which would of course demonstrate the possibility of doing so by, well, doing it.

***

Now: Kip asks whether I take my opponents to be wrong about concepts or inferences. There are, of course, people on both sides who I think have made mistakes of both kinds (I name no names ;) ) But the interesting mistake, I think, is the one I just discussed: thinking that it is impossible that any future argument will succeed where (assuming this for the sake of argument) all the existing ones have failed. This is not a mistake about concepts, but it's not obviously a mistake about inferences either -- at any rate, the 'mistake' would involve a mistake using a form of inference (induction) that no one takes to remove the possibility of error in any case.

Omitting the possibility of this sort of mistake is, I think, where Kip and I differ. And it's why I brought in Rawls to begin with. The topic of justice had been gone over pretty thoroughly when Rawls came along. Intuitions seemed to differ, and those differences seemed pretty intractable. I honestly think that had Rawls accepted, say, Richard Double's philosophical views, he would have concluded: darn, I guess people's views about justice are internally inconsistent, so there's no such thing as justice anyways. Time to move on to the next problem.

Luckily for all of us, he thought instead that there was room for constructive work: coming up with a different approach, working it out in detail, and arguing that it allowed us to reconcile things that had previously seemed irreconcilable, and to make tractable problems that had previously resisted any sort of solution. (You can play this game with lots of philosophers. Kant: "There are antinomies. So much for reason." Aristotle: "Let us consider the opinions of the many and the wise. They disagree. Darn.") And, as I said, what bothers me about the idea (Double's; I have no idea if it's Kip's) that when intuitions about some concept differ or are inconsistent with one another, we should just conclude that that concept fails to apply, is that it makes the entire possibility of doing interesting constructive work vanish. Because interesting, constructive work is what you try to do when you think that all the obvious paths have been tried and some entirely new approach is called for. This doesn't require thinking that your opponents have made mistakes either about concepts or about inferences. It only requires thinking that not all the interesting approaches have yet been tried.

Zygotes, God, and Santa Claus

I find Al Mele's Zygote Argument compelling.  (See the next to last chapter in his new book and also the paper we read in the GFP reading group not too long ago.)  That argument comprises the following story about a goddess named Diana and the subsequent numbered steps.

Diana creates a zygote Z in Mary. She combines Z’s atoms as she does because she wants a certain event E to occur thirty years later. From her knowledge of the state of the universe just prior to her creating Z and the laws of nature of her deterministic universe, she deduces that a zygote with precisely Z’s constitution located in Mary will develop into an ideally self-controlled agent who, in thirty years, will judge, on the basis of rational deliberation, that it is best to A and will A on the basis of that judgment, thereby bringing about E. If this agent, Ernie, has any unsheddable values at the time, they play no role in motivating his A-ing. Thirty years later, Ernie is a mentally healthy, ideally self-controlled person who regularly exercises his powers of self-control and has no relevant compelled or coercively produced attitudes. Furthermore, his beliefs are conducive to informed deliberation about all matters that concern him, and he is a reliable deliberator.

1. Because of the way his zygote was produced in his deterministic universe, Ernie is not a free agent and is not morally responsible for anything.

2. Concerning free action and moral responsibility of the beings into whom the zygotes develop, there is no significant difference between the way Ernie’s zygote comes to exist and the way any normal human zygote comes to exist in a deterministic universe.

3. So determinism precludes free action and moral responsibility.

I want to discuss premise (1).  I think the best way to explain the intution behind (1) is in terms of heaven-and-hell responsibility.  That is, suppose that Ernie dies and finds himself about to be judged by Diana (the goddess who created him).  Diana is deciding whether to send Ernie to hell, and decides that since E (the event Diana created Ernie to bring about) was so morally bad, Ernie should go to hell.  She's about to toss him into the fire when he pipes up -- "But wait!  Surely I don't deserve to go to hell.  After all, you created me *in order that* I would do E.  How can you possibly blame me for it?"  Ernie seems to have a point here.

But what I'm wondering, and I'm hoping you can help me out with, is whether the idea of heaven-and-hell responsibility is doing too much of the work here.  So what if we moved to another case, and this time consider another timely and supposedly omniscient person who hands out rewards and punishments based on merit: Santa Claus.  Now, in this case, Diana still created Ernie in order that he would perform E.  But forget the stuff about dying and facing judgment day.  Now let us suppose that Ernie gets a big fat chunk of coal in his stocking this Christmas because Santa wasn't too happy with the fact that Ernie did E.  If Ernie catches Santa putting coal into his stocking, does Ernie have a legitimate complaint?  Can he say, "But wait!  Surely I don't deserve this piece of coal in my stocking.  After all, Diana created me in order that I would do E.  How can you possibly blame me for it?"

So what I'm wondering is (a) whether people agree that the heaven-and-hell case is a good case to elicit intutions in favor of premise (1), (b) whether people think that the Santa case is just as good, and (c) if the answer to (b) is no, does this show that the intuitions elicited by the heaven-and-hell case are unjustified?

(And, just out of curiosity, what about another timely alteration of the case -- plug in God for Diana, Jesus for Ernie, and some significant event in Jesus' life for E.  (The woman's name is 'Mary', after all.)  What happens then?)

And by the way, happy holidays!

What's an Incompatibilist to Do?

Assume the following for the sake of argument:

1. It’s the year 2016 and the experimental philosophers have taken over.  It’s now almost impossible to get a job in an American philosophy department without doing at least some kind of experimental work.  Harry Frankfurt’s most recent bestseller is called ‘On Surveys.’
2. Empirical investigation has confirmed that people have fundamentally different intuitions about the necessary conditions for desert-entailing moral responsibility (DEMR).   This is just a psychological fact about human beings.  To some people it is intuitively obvious that DEMR requires some variety of libertarian free will.   To others, sophisticated compatibilist freedom is sufficient for DEMR. 
3. Further discourse is extremely unlikely to change anyone’s mind.  The issue is not lack of reflection or understanding, or a failure to appreciate this or that argument.  The issue is simply that intuitions fundamentally differ on the question of the necessary conditions for DEMR.

Although (1) is not all that likely to come to pass, (2) and (3) seem to have some non-vanishingly small likelihood of being true.  So here’s my question.  If (2) and (3) obtain, what metaphysical commitments must incompatibilists hold in order to claim that incompatibilism is true nevertheless?  Would they (we) have to believe that there is a ‘Form’ of DEMR that some people don’t have access to?  Could we maintain that incompatibilism about DEMR is demonstrably true a priori?  (I realize that the Basic Argument is in some sense an a priori argument, but to evaluate its soundness, we have to find certain key premises intuitively plausible.  And in this scenario those are the very premises about which people have fundamentally different intuitions.  So it would have to be a different kind of a priori argument, one that doesn't rely on controversial TNR or AP related premises. Even van Inwagen relies on ‘intuition’ in his defense of beta (pp. 97-99).)  How metaphysically exotic does one have to get in order to continue to defend a universal incompatibilist theory of DEMR under these circumstances?

(Note: I don’t have an answer to this myself.  I’m hoping that those better schooled in metaphysics and Philosophy of Language can shed light on this question, one that grew out of an email exchange I’ve been having recently with Shaun Nichols about Manuel’s Revisionism.  I do recognize that the very same question could be asked about compatibilists, but not being one myself, I’m more concerned about the available options for incompatibilists.)

Online Drafts and Blind-review

Over at Certain Doubts,there is a discussion on how online drafts of papers do, or could, undermine the blind-review process and perhaps harm one's chance of getting published.  The thread can be found here.  It seems to me that many of the folks involved in the free will and moral responsibility literatures post such drafts.  So I'm wondering what Gardeners think about this question.  I think it would be better to comment at CD to keep all the comments together, but I'm not going to close comments here.

Action Theory Movies

Well, you've heard of "action films," how about "action theory films"?

First, I would recommend "Stranger Than Fiction."  Remember, I told you that the value of acting freely is the value of writing a sentence in the narrative of one's life.  Here Will Ferrell is a character in someone's novel...

Also, I'd recommend "Deja Vu," for interesting metaphysical reflections on changing the past, and so forth.  But to understand it, I think I'll have to see it again...

Have fun!