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.)

Comments

[Kevin]

Tamler,

Interesting post. Rather than answer your question, I'd like to make a comment about something that struck me as humorous in our post, ask a question, and then make an additional comment.

First, I'm wondering if you mean to suggest anything by the title parallelism in (1)? [I.e., something along the lines, 'first he wrote on bullshit, and now he's writing on surveys!] Given what I know about your interests, I doubt it. But the first time I read it, it make me laugh.

Is there any reason to think that the truth of (2) and (3) as described in your posting would mean that incompatibilists can't claim that incompatibilism is true nevertheless? If so, what would it be?

As an incompatibilist, I'd like to hear what people think about the parallel question that you don't seem interested in: 'what metaphysical commitments must compatibilists hold in order to claim that compatibilism is true nevertheless?'

[Alan]

Frankfurt's 2016 BS meter I assume is set to "on"; the stated conditions of that year must constitute a sufficient minumum threshold of his meter's activation. :-)

Kevin's response to Tamler's intriguing post sets the stage for making a simple but I think accurate distinction between incompatibilists and compatibilists generally: incompatibilists have intrinsically metaphysical interests in expounding their views, but compatibilists do not. Because Libertarians and Hard determinists alike agree on the principle that the metaphysics of mind--D and I--constitutes the difference between respectively not-having and having FWinc (incompatibilist FW), they are equally committed to the centrality of such a metaphysical issue. But compatibilists (*usually* so-called soft determinists), maintain that the issue is more of a purely conceptual one about what the proper description of FWc (compatibilist FW) is--that is, the descriptive properties of how FWc works in relation to action and the processes of responsibility-ascription that trump any underlying metaphysical basis of how such FWc actually works. So Tamler may well ask about how the metaphysics of FWinc may be supported among the vague intuitions supplied by studies in 2016, but supporters of FWc then will be more interested in showing how we may more accurately describe FWc actions and responsibility-attributions than any underlying reality of how they work. (I appreciate the fact that both camps are completely dismissive of the metaphysical/conceptual significance of simple indeterminism--no control or responsibility can be attributed to complete randomness and chance.)

[Kip Werking]

I'm confused. If 2 and 3 hold, that would be a nail in the coffin of incompatibilism (and compatibilism) right?

I only have two lingering concerns:

1. I think the concept "desert-entailing moral responsibility (DEMR)" may be too vague, just like deep moral responsibility or "robust moral responsibility." It may instead be better to ask "do people think they, and others, have more control over their lives than they actually have?" "Do people think they, and others, are more unpredictable and fundamentally unexplainable, at least in certain contexts, than they actually are?"

2. The stimulus seems to distinguish between those who are categorically compatibilist and those who are categorically incompatibilist. It seems to me unlikely that many people are like this (although perhaps you acknowledge this when you write "(2) and (3) seem to have some non-vanishingly small likelihood of being true"). Instead, Knobe/Nichols' affect-compatibilism finding suggests that most people have both intuitions inside them, and different things can elicit their response. The population isn't divided into compatibilists and incompatibilists, each person is divided into a compatibilist and incompatibilist part, with the two warring against each other. In some people (perhaps, as Watson suggests, people like Einstein who seem less engaged with the reactive attitudes), the incompatibilist side seems to win. In others the compatibilist side seems to win. But in each, there should be a battle (some battles larger than others).

[Tamler Sommers]

Kevin,

It's true that first he wrote "on bullshit." But next he wrote "On Truth."

In response to your question, I guess I can't figure out what the truthmakers would be for incompabitilism if (2) and (3) hold. What do you think they would/could be? An eternal form of DEMR is one example that doesn't depend on our intuitions. But we don't believe in eternal forms, do we?

Alan,

Right, and so the question is: what happens if x% of the population genuinely think that some sort of libertarian metaphysical condition has to obtain for an agent to have DEMR, and Y% do not. How could we possibly determine who has the 'correct' view? (Or are we forced to abandon the notion that there is a 'correct' view?)
Kip,

I agree that there may be some intrapersonal conflict, as indicated by the Nichols and Knobe studies (and discussed by Doris and Knobe). But I still think it's possible that certain scenarios don't erase an individual's incompatibilist intuitions, they just make them harder to access. In any case, in my world, described above, this has all been sorted out. Reflective equilibrium has led some to cling strongly to a notion of ultimacy or AP as necessary for the existence of moral desert. While others find desert to be possible without any sort of LFW.

[Patricia Greenspan]

Tamler -- If 2 held, wouldn't you suspect that people had fundamentally different notions of "desert"? That possibility doesn't seem to be ruled out under 3. There may be no reason to jump to metaphysics.

[Tamler Sommers]

Patricia,

Right, that's certainly possible. So it is fair to add '(4)And everyone is working with roughly the same notion of desert'?

(I hesitate to try to spell out that notion here, but it's something along the lines of fair, non-consequentialist attributions of blame, praise, punishment, and reward...)

[Tom Clark]

Tamler,

I take it (as you suggested in your reply to Patricia) that DEMR carries a deontological implication, such that the agent should, for instance, be punished because she acted in a certain way, whether or not it produces any good consequences. Why do we punish her? Because she *deserves* it.

In this instance the question you’re raising is (I think): what can decide between incompatibilist and compatibilist intuitions about the basis for deontological (retributive) punishment? Incompatibilists think that the agent must have some originative capacity that transcends or intervenes in the causal chain, taking advantage of AP, in order to deserve punishment. Compatibilists think that punishment is deserved in virtue of certain sophisticated control capacities of the agent (e.g., being rational in some sense) that are in principle fully explicable on a deterministic (no LFW) view of things.

The incompatibilist picture clearly has more force in motivating DEMR because it assigns the agent a buck-stopping originative power – a “first cause” type of power that intuitively carries with it deontological desert (“he didn’t have to do it, he *just chose* to do it”). The compatibilist picture of a fully determined (no LFW) agent with sophisticated control capacities doesn’t as strongly motivate the intuition regarding desert because there’s no implication of being a first cause.

Now, this “argument” (as some would scarequote it) in favor of the incompatibilist claim about DEMR, which uses the entailment from first cause to retributive punishment, may just be my incompatibilist intuition speaking. But I always wonder: what *is* the entailment from being rational, etc. to retributive punishment, and more generally, to DEMR? If there’s no entailment that can be spelled out, but just the unanalyzable claim that being a rational agent without LFW justifies non-consequentialist desert, then it seems to me the compatibilist’s case isn’t as strong.

Your original question was: “If (2) and (3) obtain, what metaphysical commitments must incompatibilists hold in order to claim that incompatibilism is true?” There’s no further metaphysical commitment I can see that secures the truth of incompatibilism. It’s just that the incompatibilist claim about what sort of agent *deserves* punishment has more intuitive force than the compatibilist claim.

[Alan]

Suppose that LFW (and, for simplification of discussion, random/chance SI indeterminism of human nature as well) were shown to be false. Certainly we would stop punishing people for retributive reasons because retribution requires that an ultimacy criterion be met (else retribution has a purely emotional/irrational basis or has some consequentialist analysis compatible with determinism). But I doubt that our emotional/psychological/rational need for punishing immoral acts would be thereby extinguished by knowledge of this fact alone. (Perhaps extended education about the lack of LFW over generations would eventually expunge this need; after all, our emotions are not detached from our social psychology, and perhaps our emotional reactions could eventually be acculturated to accord with our knowledge. Einstein's credo (Google that term) suggests that possibility.) If we could not separate our need for punishment from such a demonstration of the falsity of LFW, then compatibilist descriptions of responsibility ascription would be the only alternative to rejection of all responsibility ascriptions (and so aside hard determinist alternatives, such as, e.g., consigning all criminals to some remote continent without regard to punishment, though even here there is a practical assessment of responsibility as the x who committed the horrible act y).

In short, compatibilism can survive the possibility that minds can be shown to work by specifiable mechanisms; LFW cannot. Can incompatibilist philosophical principle trump the empirical possibility that LFW is wrong? Only if incompatbilists can countenance the hard determinist paths left to them should LFW be illusory--or if illusionism can be rationally embraced.

And I suspect that if all the foregoing could be presented to most people in an orderly manner, they would say: better punish for compatibilist reasons than none at all (or rationally adopt illusionism, if that can be rationally defended).

Bottom line: practical matters supercede theoretical ones for most people. So I suspect.

Deeper issue: are free will issues at bottom axiological ones?

[Patricia Greenspan]

I did mean (as Alan just suggested) that there might be something like an axiological issue in play, at least as the basis of the fundamental disagreement in intuitions that Tammler was considering.

Compatibly with everyone's accepting the same definition of "desert" in terms of fairness or other normative notions, intuitive incompatibilists might impose stronger conditions on desert, perhaps as a matter of basic temperament -- finding it unfair to hold someone responsible for an act whose causes he ultimately had no control over -- whereas intuitive compatibilists might be satisfied with weaker, "time-slice" conditions, extending the notion to any acts that resulted from the agent's character as currently constituted.

Even if such differences couldn't be resolved by moral argument, there presumably would be moral, rather than metaphysical, assumptions according to which an incompatibilist could say that compatibilists are viewing things inappropriately. For instance, on a simple-minded level, the "time-slice" view might be said to be morally myopic.

[Alan]

Patricia (if I may) I completely agree. Too often value questions are only involved in FW argument as relevant to matters of how moral views fit or fail to fit with FW positions as those positions are already assumed for defense or refutation. But over the years I've thought more and more that FW positions as they are formed reflectively or pre-philosophically invoke values as part of the justification of the positions themselves, and usually as part of wider world-views. Values are a kind of articulation-point between, say, a certain FW view and a belief in theism or committment to utilitarianism. Nothing new in that, I know--but the role of values has been a bit too submerged in these discussions, or consigned to talk about intuitions.

Thanks everyone for a great thread.

[Tamler Sommers]

Thanks Patricia, Alan, and Tom. As I suspected (and hoped for), this thread has gone a little over my head. But let me try to make sure I understand Alan and Patricia's comments. My question didn't presume that the conflicting intuitions were over metaphysical issues. After all, hard incompatibilists and compatibilists have roughly the same beliefs about what is really going on when people act; and in any case, that's a descriptive question. My question was how the conflict between (perhaps moral) intuitions could be resolved--and it's here that I thought metaphysics might have to kick in. Just as Plato appealed to metaphysics to resolve moral disagreements, and Locke relied on metaphysical assumptions to ground a moral notion of natural rights, I thought incompatibilists might be forced to appeal to some kind of metaphysical theory in order to defend the view that fair blame, praise, punishment, and reward require LFW (assuming 2,3, and 4). So, for example, if 2,3, and 4 are true, how can we justify the claim that the compatibilist 'time slice view is morally myopic' without appealing to metaphysical, or metaethical, considerations? The naturalist route seems to be ruled out (given the variation in intuitions and practices) and I can't see how that claim can be true a priori. So, again, what would be the (metaphysical or non-metaphysical) truthmaker for a claim like that?

[Eddy Nahmias]

I hope Frankfurt is alive and writing in 2016, though I bet he wouldn't be writing about surveys! I'm sure experimental philosophy will not take over philosophy, nor should it. But I hope it expands a bit and people find results that are interesting enough to be considered relevant to the philosophical debates. I must say that the results of the online surveys my students, Trevor Kvaran, Justin Coates, and I ran last week on nearly 700 subjects certainly look interesting to us; I'll share some results once we've analyzed them, but we did ask a new question that is relevant to Tamler's post and the debate about the question. We asked:
When Ertans [the people on the world described as deterministic] commit a crime, the Ertan judicial system imprisons them. Two of the goals are to prevent the criminals from committing further crimes and to make other Ertans less likely to commit crimes. In addition to these goals, do you think that the goal should also be to make the Ertan criminals suffer because they deserve it for what they have done? (Then we said two goals of judicial systems on Earth are [deterrence] and asked the same question about whether criminals should suffer.)
Surprisingly (to me), for the question about criminals on Earth, only 50% said they deserve to be punished (in addition to deterrence), 32% said they didn't, and 18% responded "I don't know." I would have thought the folk were more retributive. (Suggestions on how to get at the issue more clearly are welcome since we will be running another big set of subjects in January.)

Regarding Tamler's question, I don't have much to add here right now. In response to Alan, I think it is question-begging to assert "retribution requires that an ultimacy criterion be met." What is the argument for this claim (and can that argument be presented without premises that are supported only by questionably intuitive principles or claims)?

In response to Kevin, as my coauthors and I argue in our forthcoming PPR piece, the compatibilist does not seem to have to carry the burden of advancing an argument for the compatibility of free will (or MR) and determinism, only to respond to incompatibilist arguments. Like any other two concepts that are not *definable* in contrast to each other, assuming FW/MR and determinism are not *obviously* incompatible, they should not be assumed to be without a positive argument for their incompatibility. We draw on Lycan's recent "Free Will and the Burden of Proof'; also see McKenna's forthcoming PPR piece on the Manipulation Argument where he puts it in terms of playground rules: "The incompatibilist started it!"

Of course, if incompatibilism (or the premises and principles that entail it) *is* just obvious, intuitive, and commonsensical to almost everyone, then it would be more accurate not to say they started it but that they highlighed it and it's the compatibilist who started it by trying to push some crazy, counterintuitive view down our throats.

But Tamler's presupposition (well-supported by the exp phil results so far, in my view) is that incompatibilism is not obvious, intuitive, or commonsensical. As such, (like Tamler) I'd like to hear more about how it should be motivated in the face of conflicting intuitions (or even more prevalent compatibilist-friendly intuitions should that be shown).

[Patricia Greenspan]

Tamler,

I'm confused by your last post. You say that your initial "question was how the conflict between (perhaps moral) intuitions could be resolved." But your condition 3 suggested that you didn't think it was resolvable, or at any rate at all likely to be resolved: "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."

Do you mean something other than changing people's minds by "resolving" the conflict? I had thought you were looking for an assumption that supported a particular side in the debate -- though presumably people on the other side wouldn't accept it.

Am I missing something? If you managed to locate an assumption that did have a clear truth-maker, and one that could be shown to be satisfied, wouldn't that falsify 3? Presumably all you'd be doing is adding another entry under "this or that argument." But if the truth-maker couldn't be verified, what would be the gain over leaving things on the level of conflicting values?

[hilzoy]

Suppose people's intuitions are divided: that nonetheless leaves room for all sorts of arguments of the form: conclusion C, which you badly want to defend, cannot be defended using a conception of free will that has feature X. So if we're interested in C, only some conception of free will that does not have X will be useful to us.

If your third assumption involves just the claim that people are clear on their intuitions, then there's lots of room for this sort of argument. If, on the other hand, it involves the implications of various different conceptions of free will having been completely explored, I don't see that it's plausible that it will hold by 2016.

I mean, 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.

[Kevin]

Eddy,

Perhaps I shouldn't, but I agree that the compatibility claim should be the default--and for just the reasons you (and Lycan) say. So now I think that (3) is doing a lot of the work. Two brief further comments on it. First, perhaps I'm finding it hard to accept this stipulation. I have vastly different intuitions about these issues than does, for example, John Fischer. But I always find a lot in his writings that pushes my thinking, including making me think that some of my intuitions are (or may be) false. I don't see intuitions as inviable. Second, even if the intuitions of all parties involved became fixed, wouldn't that just mean that one side of the argument has false (and no longer flexible) intuitions, and that as a result, they aren't seeing the soundness of certain arguments that they should? I guess my thinking here is starting to go in the direction of PvI's paper that the blog is discussing next month.

[Mark Smeltzer]

Kevin,

I think Tamler's concern has more to do with the truth-makers for these intuitions than with the intuitions themselves. In other words, if one group's intuitions are false and the other's are true, what is it that makes the false intuitions false and the true intuitions true?

[Mark Smeltzer]

Kevin,

I think Tamler's concern has more to do with the truth-makers for these intuitions than with the intuitions themselves. In other words, if one group's intuitions are false and the other's are true, what is it that makes the false intuitions false and the true intuitions true?

[Tamler Sommers]

Patricia,

You're right, I shouldn't have phrased the question that way—if my conditions hold, the conflict can't be ‘resolved' in the sense that everyone is in agreement. So let me try to rephrase my question. If 2,3,4 hold, it is still possible for incompatibilism to be TRUE, right? For example (sorry to lean so hard on the Form analogy), Plato in the Republic did not think that everyone had the ability to discover true form of Justice. So, at least as I interpret the Republic, Plato believed that disagreement and conflict about justice might be unavoidable, but there is still a fact of the matter about what justice REALLY is. And some people, but not all, are able to discover this fact.

Similarly, it might be that intuitions fundamentally differ about the necessary conditions for DEMR, and so only some people are able to discover what TRULY justifies non-consequentialist assignments of blame, praise etc. This is just a said fact about human psychology: some people have irrevocably false intuitions on this question. An argument, at this point, is not going to convince those people because the argument would have to appeal to true intuitions that they do not have. (And incidentally, I agree with hilzoy and Kevin that we are nowhere near this point yet. I am certainly not suggesting that arguments about free will have no value right now!) My question is: what metaphysical assumptions would an incompatibilist have to make in order to claim genuine moral desert requires libertarian free will, even when a significant proportion of the population lacks the necessary intuitions to support that claim and will therefore never be convinced?

To respond to your final question, Patricia, I’m not sure what the gain would be to hold an unverifiable view on this matter. But there is some gain, perhaps, in understanding what our positions on moral responsibility might commit us to metaphysically (or metaethically). Does that make more sense?

(Just finished composing this, and I see that Mark just made a similar point far more concisely..)

[hilzoy]

Tamler: there are, I think, two questions wrapped up in your last one ("what metaphysical assumptions would an incompatibilist have to make in order to claim genuine moral desert requires libertarian free will, even when a significant proportion of the population lacks the necessary intuitions to support that claim and will therefore never be convinced?") First, what would it take to make a convincing argument in favor of an incompatibilist account of free will? And second, supposing that the basis of this argument were not intuitions about the sort of free will required by genuine moral desert, what exactly might it be based on?

I don't think the answer necessarily has to be anything metaphysically odd. It might be: intuitions about something else, and an argument that that something else taking the form we think it does requires incompatibilist free will (plus, maybe, an argument about why, given the choice between ditching those other intuitions and embracing an incompatibilist account of free will, we should choose the latter.) One could try making a constructivist argument based on something like facts about human agency, and what they entail. One could do any number of things; Platonic forms are only one option.

(By the way, sorry I'm coming out as hilzoy, which is my name on my other blog. This is Hilary Bok.)

[Eddy Nahmias]

A quick agreement with the spirit of Hilary's earlier point: I certainly agree that we should not put too much weight on intuitions or think that if they conflict then we can't resolve the debate. I'm inclined to use something like the reflective equilibrium (RE) model, which I take to support compatibilism about determinism and FW/MR since (a) it preserves the "input" to RE from our best scientific theories better than libertarian theories do, and (b) it preserves the "input" to RE from our intuitions better than skepticism about FW/MR (since it is highly counterintuitive to think we are not free and responsible in any sense that preserves the reactive attitudes and our deserving moral praise and blame, etc.)--and in my estimation, without too much need for revision of our intuitions by giving up the causa sui model of libertarian agency.

But on the reflective equilibrium model, again, it is hard to see what would motivate libertarian theories of agency (much less skeptical views) without significant folk intuitive support for incompatibilism, no?

[Dan Speak]

Hello All,

Thanks for this post, Tamler. I'm really enjoying the discussion. But I have to admit to being a bit confused. Why should the truth of 2, 3, and 4 generate any further demand for incompatiblist metaphysics? Contra Kip-- who suspects that 2 and 3 would be the "nail in the coffin" of incompatibilism-- I just fail to see (at this point) how these facts even so much as bear on the incompatibilist's metaphysics. I mean, if one is an incompatibilist in virtue of finding the consequence argument forceful, would the truth of 2,3, and 4 give the incompatibilist any reason to reject one the premises? I can't see how... but I'm open to being persuaded. And if the incompatibilist isn't forced to reject a premise, then where is the demand for additional metaphysics coming from?

[Neal]

I'll echo Dan's confusion here. (I don't want him to feel like he's the only one confused.) What exactly is the problem for incompatibilists?

The one thing I've heard that does sound like an objection to incompatibilistic metaphysics is some sort of worry about truthmakers. The worry is that if Tamler's (2) and (3) are true, then there is nothing in virtue of which incompatibilism (or compatibilism, for that matter) is true.

But I guess I am confused about this objection too. How would the *falsity* of (2) or (3) amount to a truthmaker for incompatibilism? In fact, insofar as I can even get my head around asking for a truthmaker for something like incompatibilism, it seems to me that incompatibilism is in the same boat as any other abstract metaphysical thesis -- what's the truthmaker for, say, unrestricted composition, or actualism, or presentism? Does it even make sense to ask these questions? What would even count as an acceptable answer to them?

[Tamler Sommers]

Ok, thanks for all the questions. Let me try to clear few things up.

First, Neal, I don't see my post as an "objection" to incompatibilism. It was an honest question about what aside from 'people have fundamentally incompatibilist intuitions' could make incompatibilism true. Nor was I implying that the falsity of 2,3, and 4 would serve as a truthmaker for incompatibilism, as (I think) you saw me as claiming. Regarding your second point, I think incompatibilism is a far more straightforward metaphysical thesis than the abstract positions that you mention. I could certainly come up with examples of metaphysical questions that do have truthmakers. "There is a God," for example, has a truthmaker that has nothing to do with people's intuitions about God. And although I have a lot of sympathy with the Vienna Circle crew, I do think it makes sense to ask questions about at least some metaphysical questions.

Dan, you wrote: "if one is an incompatibilist in virtue of finding the consequence argument forceful, would the truth of 2,3, and 4 give the incompatibilist any reason to reject one the premises?"

Well, no, if you want to be a subjectivist about the question. I personally would remain an incompatibilist even if 2,3, and 4 are true because my intuitions, at least for now, lean in that direction. But I might have to concede that incompatibilism is only true for me and not for everyone--i.e. it doesn't apply universally. Especially, if I couldn't even conceive of a way to justify, say, beta, without appealing to intuitions that many equally reasonable people simply don't have.

I also want to echo Eddy's support of Hilary's earlier claim. I hope people don't see this post as an attack on the power of philosophical arguments to shape our beliefs and intuitions. I had to assume that the philosphical well had run dry for the purposes of my question. (Maybe I should have made the year 3016 but then I couldn't have made my Harry Frankfurt joke.) But I don't think that's the case now, and maybe it will never be the case.

Finally, thanks Hilary for your interpretation of my question, which makes a lot sense to me. What I'm really interested is in the answer to what you call my second question: "...supposing that the basis of this [incompatibilist] argument were not intuitions about the sort of free will required by genuine moral desert, what exactly might it be based on?" As you may have guessed, I'm hoping that there is an answer that doesn't appeal to metaphysically odd theories. (I could envision a Mackie-style argument from queerness against incompatibilism if 2,3, and 4 held, and I'd like to have a satisfactory response. I guess the tough philosophical task would be developing the (say, constructivist) accounts you're suggesting might work.

By the way, I think Shaun's paper is very relevant here. Shaun, rejecting objectivism about what could justify genuine moral desert, aims to come up with an 'all things considered' defense of compatibilism. I would want, I think, to develop an 'all things considered' defense of incompatibilism (in particular, skepticism about moral desert). This post originally was meant as an attempt to see what the alternatives were to this kind of approach.

[Kevin]

One more follow-up point about the truth-maker bit. If incompatibilism is true, then isn't its truth a necessary one? So wouldn't the truthmaker for it not be something about intuitions, but more along the lines of the truthmaker for 2+2=4 or there are objective moral facts?

[Neal]

Thanks for the clarification, Tamler. I guess I was reading Kip's "nail-in-the-coffin" remark back into your original post. Now that I look at it again, you are just asking a question -- not raising an objection.

Are you looking for something along the following lines? In order for an incompatibilist to maintain incompatibilism in the face of (2) and (3), she must accept the following theses:

1) There are laws of nature.
2) There is such a thing as the state of the world at an instant.
3) There is such a notion as logical entailment.
4) It makes sense to talk about capacities of human beings such as reasons-responsiveness, identification, etc.
5) We can make sense of modal discourse, one way or another.

The incompatibilist believes that it's impossible for both of the following theses to be true together:
(a) The laws of nature plus the state of the world at one instant entail the state of the world at every other instant.
(b) Human beings have the capacities that ground moral responsibility.

Now, if we want to talk about truthmakers, we'll have to move our discussion to potential truthmakers for the theses 1-5 I mentioned above. But then we're no longer doing free will and moral responsibility -- we're doing modal metaphysics, or philosophy of logic, or something.

(I'm inclined to think this is what the incompatibilist must maintain even if Tamler's (2) and (3) *aren't* true.)

[Patricia Greenspan]

Thanks for your clarifications, Tamler. Another thing I wasn't getting may have seemed too obvious to spell out when you posed the question (I got it from Hilary's post in this 'round) was your assumption that the only current support for incompatibilism is its apparent fit with our intuitions. So something else would be needed, presumably a metaphysical assumption, to back up the view if intuitions turned out to be divided.

There still might be alternatives outside metaphysics, though. I'm now rereading (in connection with "weighting reasons") the initial bits of Nozick's treatment of free will in *Philosophical Explanations*, which suggests that determinism would undermine human dignity. I think that comes close to my own (semi-choate) reasons for thinking I'm a libertarian semi-compatibilist -- i.e. compatibilist, or largely so, on the issue of moral responsibility, but incompatibilist nonetheless -- on something like what Scanlon in his Tanner Lectures calls the "personal" problem of free will.

Whether and where metaphysics might bolster incompatibilism under the circumstances you sketch would seem to me to depend on what drives the intuitive divide in moral terms. If, e.g., it's a matter of historical vs. time-slice assessments of responsibility, as I was suggesting earlier, perhaps something about the nature of the self that we judge responsible, as something continuing over time and thus properly judged in light of how it got to be what it is, might help. (Note, though, that a normative claim also comes in here, about the "proper" basis for a judgment of responsibility.) But your metaphysical imagination is no doubt more developed than mine...

[Tamler Sommers]

Patricia,

One last clarification: I don't exactly "assume that the only current support for incompatibilism is its apparent fit with our intuitions." (Although again I can see how what I thought was an innocent post could have been interpreted in that way.) On the contrary, I'm hoping that there are other ways to support incompatibilism, especially if it turns out that there is no such universal fit. Moreover, I would love it if these forms of support for incompabilism did not appeal to unverifiable (or even worse, 'obscure and panicky') metaphysical beliefs. The alternative suggested by you and Hilary that appeals to non-metaphysical intuitions on other matters might help to resolve the issue is in many ways a best case scenario for me. I may very well have been too quick to assume that any metaphysical assumptions would be necessary at all.

So I hope you're right that there are alternatives outside metaphysics. That would be the first place I'd want to look as well. (I actually have an extremely underdeveloped metaphysical imagination.) I'm a little wary of Nozick's strategy, however (at least as I understand it): claiming that determinism undermines human dignity and then using this claim to undermine a belief in the truth of determinism and any position that denies DEMR. (Is that a fair way of describing his view?) That argument requires solid independent (perhaps metaphysical?) reasons to believe that human beings have the type ofdignity that is incompatible with our lacking DEMR. And I'm not aware of good reasons to believe this is the case--which is certainly not to say that they don't exist...

Thanks again to everyone for bearing with me on this issue. I would like to note for the record that I did not mention the Red Sox and the insane signing of JD Drew for 70 million dollars even once in the entire thread..

[john m. doris]

When Woolfolk, Darley and I were working on some experiments designed to see if there are Frankfurtian strains in "folk" habits of responsibility attribution, I talked to Harry a bit. Although I of course can't speak for him with authority, my recollection is that Harry seemed to think it would be interesting to know more about how "intuitive" his views were, as I expect it would be for many folks proceeding in a Rawlsian RE frame. As gardeners have already heard, the answer seems to be "pretty intuitive" (Woolfolk et al., Cognition 2006).

Happy Holidays, Doris

[Kip Werking]

I just want to comment on something that Hilary wrote:

"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."

I remember discussing this issue with her at Inland 2006. And what she's written comes close to expressing my own view. Just because something "bugs" one, or would be unfortunate, doesn't mean it isn't true. It could be, for example, the vanishing of these sorts of arguments (i) would be a bad thing and yet (ii) is also actual.

That said, let me say what bugs me about putting less emphasis on the folk or intuitions: it has the appearance of inoculating one's view from empirical investigation. To be melodramatic, it seems not unlike geocentricists saying "well, who cares what the stars say, I know the sun moves around the earth, and I know free will is compatible with determinism!"

Now, Hilary and others can say "but the folk make mistakes! The compatibility question isn't a popularity content! You criticize me for not investigating astronomy, but we can't just ask people whether the sun moves around the earth!" And here is where one must note what I would call the Fundamental Dichotomy, in the context of experimental philosophy, and it is something I have talked about before:

concepts versus inferences

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.

I'll repeat an analogy that I think goes a good way to illustrating this distinction: even, as Tamler notes, many philosophers who deny the existence of God cannot bring themselves to deny the existence of free will (and whenever we are discussing this subject, it is important to keep that analogy in mind). So, even if Peter van Inwagen and Kevin Timpe and Robert Kane (I think) cannot agree with us, Fischer and Dennett and most compatibilists can. And if we can all agree that the folk's religious beliefs are mistaken, then we can ask ourselves why? Are these mistakes involving concepts or mistakes involving inferences? And it seems to me that these are obviously mistakes involving inferences and not concepts. In fact, I bet if you asked the folk what the concept of God is, they would nail the answer to that question, and give virtually the dictionary definition. Rather, it is when they combine this concept with other facts about the world (e.g. evil, or the internal inconsistent between God's attributes), that they make mistaken inferences.

But this semantics aspect of the dispute is not the only possible way of framing this debate. Recently, I've also learned about a huge number of cognitive biases that affect even ordinary people's thinking. A subset of these biases would be relevant to the free will problem and virtually all of them favor belief in free will. I think one could actually try to explain the dispute in at least three different ways:

1. There is not much consensus about what "free will" means and so people disagree about its existence, because they are using stronger or weaker concepts of that term. And to determine what "free will" actually means, we would have to investigate its common usage.
2. There is some consensus about what "free will" means, and this would have led rational people to eventually reach a conclusion about whether it exists, but some cognitive biases prevent people from reaching the right conclusion. They let their emotions infect their decision making, or they suffer from the illusion of control, etc. Note that, in theory, such cognitive biases might argue against libertarian, compatibilist, or eliminativist views.
3. The final characterization, which I would call the Mystery Characterization, is that even though there is sufficient consensus about what "free will" means, and even though there is sufficient consensus about the rules of logic and facts about human nature (what powers we do and do not have; putting aside the libertarian hypothesis for a moment), and even though no cognitive biases explain why one group has reached its view, philosophers have extreme difficulty reaching a consensus about whether free will exists. So why haven't philosophers reached a consensus? It's a mystery. And the way to solve this mystery is not to investigate intuitions, and not to investigate the common usage of terms, and not to investigate the relevance of cognitive biases that infect human thinking, but rather to do some mysterious "philosophical work" (thought experiments?), which such empirical studies threaten to eliminate, and it is through this magical and mysterious philosophical work that we will finally reach a conclusion.

My own characterization of the problem is a combination of 1 and 2. And although I detect hints of 3 in the comments of those philosophers, like Hilary and Neil, who have expressed skepticism about the authority of intuitions, that characterization strikes me as a complete non-starter. There may be other good explanations, in addition to 1 and 2, but 3 is not amongst them. 3 shrouds the free will problem in a cloak of mystery, it gives vague answers to vague questions, it claims to aspire to solving the free will problem while actually ensuring that it will forever remain unsolved. That, at least, is my own suspicion.

[Kevin]

"So, even if Peter van Inwagen and Kevin Timpe and Robert Kane (I think) cannot agree with us..."

Thanks, Kip, for putting me in such good company! :)

[Mike R. from MI]

What an incompatibilist should do in this case: appeal to a theory of self-deception to explain why the compatibilist chooses not to accept the truth of incompatibilism. Was it Twain who said, "It is very hard to get a man to see the truth of a proposition when his salary depends on it being false", or something to that effect? (Al Gore used this quote in his film.) One runs the risk of committing the genetic fallacy when one starts down that road, but the fun thing about informal fallacies is that sometimes they aren't fallacies at all--sometimes the evidence people offer in defense their view has nothing to do with their real reasons for holding a belief (as experience shows). And incompatibilists are certainly entitled to believe that some people simply WILL not give up their position regardless of what evidence is presented (experience shows this, too).

Likewise, the compatibilists could claim that some people are simply determined to make certain errors of inference--but it's a short step from the proposition that our views are determined in this way to a radical skepticism (unless externalism is true).

I don't see how experimental philosophy could distinguish between (a) a conflict between sincerely differing intuitions, and (b) a conflict between a sincere intuition one the one hand and an entrenched ideological commitment on the other--at least, not by 2016.

[Manuel]

Well, this is too late to be of much use, and lots of discussion has erupted on other threads about the issues here, but I'm inclined to think that the right question to ask is akin to some of the questions Hilary was advancing elsewhere: libertarianism is required for DEMR in what sense of required? If it is a brute conceptual entailment, that seems pretty unremarkable. People have all sorts of screwy connotative content to their beliefs. If the worry is instead something a bit more complicated, like required to justify various practices, explain various distinctions we make, and so on, then we have grounds for argument that take us beyond intuition reports.

And, of course, when we go beyond the intuition reports we'll all end up revisionists. :-)