New Dennett on Free Will

Online Papers in Philosophy alterted me to a new article on free will, by Daniel Dennett, which is forthcoming in Psychology and Free Will.  The article is called "Some observations on the psychology of thinking about free will" and you can find it here.

The article include some provocative quotes:

"More recently, the World Question Center on edge.org mounted its 2006 question: What is your dangerous idea? and my friend Richard Dawkins dashed off–and later regretted sending and tried unsuccessfully to retract–a piece inspired by his friend John Cleese’s hilarious scene in Fawlty Towers where he beats his automobile, “punishing” it for its poor performance. The image is unforgettable, but the conclusion Dawkins was tempted to draw was a non sequitur indeed…"

"What if the parallel, in free will, to keeping your head down (in golf), is believing in an afterlife? Or believing in the Old Testament God? Is that too steep a price to pay for free will? What if you’re simply unable to muster the conviction? Have we lost our virginity for free will?"

"A world without punishment is not a world any of us would want to live in."

Comments

[Cihan Baran]

Interesting article. I just want to comment on the analogy that Dennett quotes from one of his earlier books about the cupid myth:

Recall the myth of Cupid, who flutters about on his cherubic wings making people fall in love by shooting them with his little bow and arrow...And suppose some killjoy scientist then came along and showed them that this was simply not true: no such flying gods exist. “He’s shown that nobody ever falls in love, not really. The idea of falling in love is just a nice--maybe even a necessary–fiction. It never happens.” That is what some might say. Others, one hopes, would want to deny it: “No. Love is quite real, and so is falling in love. It just isn’t what people used to think it is. It’s just as good–maybe even better. True love doesn’t involve any flying gods.”

I think that Dennett chooses a convenient example. One could also cite other folk non-sense such as ghosts and bizarre superstitions and these wouldn't really support Dennett's argument.

Suppose that I claimed to see ghosts . A doctor upon examining me decides that what I really see are illusions. This case is in a stark contrast to that involving love and Cupid's arrows. The rational thing would be not to still accept the existence of ghosts but only believe in a different underlying mechanism than I had previously believed in - it would be rational for me to give up the belief in ghosts.

When it comes to moral responsibility, things could go either way. We might be able to hold onto the essential features of it and yet just explain it differently or it may just be an illusion such as ghosts and other primitive beliefs.

However, one question that I thought was very interesting was that what or how could be a different, scientific explanation/justification for moral responsibility besides our folk-theoretic conception of it?

I think Dennett also raises a good point when he says that although most incompatibilists are eager to press the point that the common-sensical, traditional, absolutist moral responsibility is not feasible, there may be other kinds of responsibility (perhaps not as strong) that can withstand philosophical scrutiny. Why should we be so stuck about what the common man thinks about moral responsibility? Maybe there is a better, more philosophically sound sort of responsibility that only those who study philosophy can appreciate.

[Anibal]

What price we pay for believing in free will? Is science in a worst position because believing in free will is the last frontier in the aim towards unified science á la Snow? the last ghost to exercise, or,in conterpart our conception of personal relations and society would be disastrous without the idea of free will?
I prefer to degrade science a little bit and sustain free will á la Kant when he said that he prefers to limit science to let more space to faith. In this case, the faith in free will.

[Charles Edwards]

How can Dennet express disbelief in a self, yet fill his article with mysterious personal pronouns? Maybe he really can’t help it. But I wonder what are those things, “you”, “I”, “we” that he refers to so often? How come he believes those things can own things - “your body”, “his brain”? Or, is he admitting that a self can exist, but he’s so subdued with his conception of space that he thinks “inner self” means something that is not himself but exists spatially inside of a human body? What is that idea of possession that is implicit in his philosophy, but which he also attacks as mysterious and non-existent? How come there exists some thing that controls something else, and yet this act of control is controlled and so isn’t control at all? In what way does the word “evolution” have meaning if the reality obtained could be no other way, and one state of being is evaluated as as good as any state of being? Does evolution take time? Is time eternal? What is this implicit faith he expresses that ideas come from life, instead of the other way around – life comes from ideas? Why does he think that? He must believe the only thing that exists is this mysterious thing he calls the “material world” (whatever that is, amen). He implies that this only thing is just what he thinks it is – and yet he denies there is such a thing as “he is thinking”. Is all that not one mysterious belief system? His philosophy is so filled with naive mysticism that he continually misses the most obvious fundamentals – one of them being that if he really stops participating, no one else will know he’s there. Yet, speaking of mysterious events, Dennet has made himself known. I wonder if this is something he evolved into (a few million years? could he have been around that long?), or does he believe it just happened and then just keeps happening with or without his participation?

[David Clark]

Huh. Watching Dennett do his thing is like watching a car wreck; I can't look away. Alright, if he's really insistent on defining 'free will' as something everyone else regards as 'the lack of free will', then I suppose he can justify his incompatibilism. Reading Freedom Evolves, I kept getting the impression that he was doing just that - playing with the definition until he found something that satisfied him emotionally.

It won't help him - the Folk will continue to define free will the way they always have - as cartesian, and dualistic (and 'magic', I suppose). He can rail against the folk definition all he wishes - he'll lose in the end - they outnumber him.

[David Clark]

Apologies; obviously I meant 'justify his compatibilism' above.

[Paul Torek]

Well, of course the Cupid myth is a conveniently chosen example. Dennett is trying to explain his view to people who are, in the main, familiar only with the two other views whose shared assumption Dennett rejects. And he could hardly explain his view by reference to an incoveniently chosen example.

Dennett's right to call for attention to the psychological consequences of our self-descriptions. It matters what we say. Carpe dictum!

[Tom Clark]

Dennett is resolutely conservative in his compatibilism, not exploring (here at any rate) the possibility that exploding the folk conception of contra-causal free will might change our responsibility practices to become less gratuitously punitive. He says:

“We ought to admit, up front, that one of our strongest unspoken motivations for upholding something close to the traditional [contra-causal] concept of free will is our desire to see the world’s villains 'get what they deserve.' And surely they *do* deserve our condemnation, our criticism, and – when we have a sound system of laws in place – punishment. A world without punishment is not a world any of us would want to live in.”

He acknowledges that the retributive impulse drives belief in contra-causal free will, and then goes on to imply that people “surely” deserve punishment in the way that this now exploded concept supports. But it isn't clear that they do, since the very conception of free will he defends (and thus the moral responsibility it establishes) says that it extends *outside* the individual, to "the 'surrounding' cultural storehouse–the memes, plus a little help from our (human) friends." A naturalized notion of desert should take the contribution of culture and peers into account, instead of concentrating blame solely on the person (the function of contra-causal free will and the cognate concept of ultimate or deep moral responsibility). This in turn might help curb the expression of our retributive impulses and help reform our punishment/responsibility practices.

When Dennett says that no one would want to live in a world without punishment, does he mean only that punishment is a (currently) necessary infliction of suffering to deter wrong-doing, or that it's a positive, dignity-enhancing good, as retributivists generally see it? It would be helpful if he clarified his position on the retributivism/consequentialism question.

He seems mostly concerned about the dangers of determinism to the moral landscape, but doesn't consider the moral progress that questioning contra-causal free will makes possible, once the misconceptions about the "universal excuse" of determinism are dealt with. Too bad.

[Kip Werking]

Dennett's compatibilism, and his enthusiasm for punishment, always strike me as something like Luddism. What do I mean by that? Well, we've been endowed, by God or nature, with certain technologies for regulating behavior: we have specialized brain mechanisms for dealing with agents and things (e.g. folk psychology and folk physics), and we have instinctive and almost automatic responses and emotions like anger and gratitude, rage and compassion. Indeed, this natural technology seems to work quite well: studies show that people will engage in altruistic punishment, which might otherwise seem irrational, to the benefit of all.

Dennett seems like a Luddite, it seems to me, to the extent that he is so committed to using this natural technology, and blind to the possibility of using another. I can imagine, in a distant future, how the natural technology we have for dealing with wrongdoers becomes obsolete: we design agents from scratch, their whole lives planned out in advance, such that they never do any wrong. Or we can predict the future wrongdoing of any agent well in advance, and prevent it from ever happening, in a painless way (not unlike the movie Minority Report). Or, once someone has done something wrong, we can treat that person like a patient, and give them a moral pill, or perform minimal and sophisticated brain surgery, to restore them to never-doing-wrong status.

This is a world without punishment, but it is also a world that I would want to live in. It would certainly involve less suffering and less wrongdoing. But Dennett doesn't seem to agree ("A world without punishment is not one in which we would to live.")

He's not unaware of this possibility. He explicitly addresses the possibility of a "medicalized society" in Freedom Evolves. But he dismisses the possibility in a paragraph or two (and not very convincingly, in my opinion). Indeed, he says something which is very strange, which is not that a medicalized society would be normatively wrong, but that it would never happen, because people would keep wanting to take responsibility for their actions. As a descriptive claim, society would just never gradually absolve itself of responsibility in that way.

Perhaps, if I am right, Dennett just had a failure of imagination. He sees the vague outlines of what a medicalized society would be, but can't see how it should work or persist.

But I doubt this. Instead, Dennett seems to see the prospect of a medicalized society, in full detail, but he finds the prospect of this *disturbing*. When he says, "society wouldn't do this, because they want to take responsibility", one can safely infer that he means, alternatively or in addition, "I wouldn't do that, because I find it disturbing, and I want to take responsibility."

One sees this best when you consider Dennett's use of the word "nihilism." At times Dennett seems to just say: "ha, the incompatibilist boogy man would make you think that determinism would lead to nihilism, but once we see past the smoke and mirrors, we realize that this threat doesn't exist." This is consistent with the claim that, even if free will and moral responsibility don't exist, nihilism doesn't necessarily follow. But, in this new paper, he confirms what I suspected:

"One might think that this would be enough, that since this naturalistic variety of free will preserves and explains what really matters--our belief in our own moral responsibility, and thus the denial of nihilism–it deserves to be called real free will." [My emphasis]

That last clause makes me do a double take. "What!?!?" Would the denial of moral responsibility really entail "nihilism"? First, what is nihilism? Dictionary.com defines it this way:

1. total rejection of established laws and institutions.
2. anarchy, terrorism, or other revolutionary activity.
3. total and absolute destructiveness, esp. toward the world at large and including oneself: the power-mad nihilism that marked Hitler's last years.
4. Philosophy.
a. an extreme form of skepticism: the denial of all real existence or the possibility of an objective basis for truth.
b. nothingness or nonexistence.

One might presume that Dennett, as a philosopher speaking in a philosophical context, is referring to the philosophical definition (4). But then his claim is patently and obviously false; indeed, the conclusion (about real existence or objective truth) seems to be far too strong, and quite unrelated, to the premise (about the denial of just moral responsibility).

A more charitable reader would regard Dennett as referring to the first definition: the "total rejection of established laws and institutions." But this isn't quite right, either. What would a medicalized society be like? It would reject the laws and institutions associated with criminal law, and those that depend upon certain beliefs about moral responsibility. But not all of our beliefs depend in this way. Consider such precious beliefs as: democracy, aesthetics, science and medicine, and the harm-avoidance principle.

In a medicalized society, people might still vote, the majority might still win, people might still try to cure cancer (as well as murder), and do research towards that end, and people might judge works of art (as well as people) as more and less beautiful (in terms of physical appearance as well as personality), and people might still try to avoid bad things, like suffering, and feel sadness and regret, when their efforts fail or would be futile. There would still be governments, and hospitals, and scientific research centers, to name just a few institutions so important to our species.

So, here, Dennett (who I regard as quite a thoughtful, if not terribly precise and thorough, thinker on these issues), seems to make the grossest of errors. A medicalized society does not entail nihilism, and it does not entail anything like nihilism, on any definition of nihilism. It is the most unjust of accusations, like guilt by association, to attach nihilism to the free will non-realist's view.

I say this as one who, like Smilanksy, thinks that both free willists, but especially free will non-realists, too often emphasize the good news in the free will debate. Like Smilansky, I feel there is an important sense in which lacking free will is "bad news"; at the very least, I often wonder whether non-realists often go too far in trying to salvage precious beliefs from the no-free-will aftermath. But, saying all that, I still feel that a medicalized society might be committed to democracy, science, and the avoidance of harm, amongst so many other wonderful things.

It's important to point out this gross mistake, if it is one, because then one can certainly understand why Dennett fights so hard to say that free will exists (even going so far as to admit that he uses the word in an idiosyncratic way). Indeed, given his strong commitment to evolutionary psychology, with its emphasis on the modularity of the mind, one would expect him to be motivated by something the dual process theories and cognitive biases I have talked about, towards something like free will non-realism. For example, the only other thinkers in this area, to my knowledge, who emphasize evolution so much (myself and Tamler Sommers), both hold no-free-will views; and an informal study published in Lancet Neurology shows evolutionary psychologists to be especially skeptical about free will.

But if I felt, as Dennett (and other compatibilists too, I suspect) seems to feel, that free will non-realism would lead to nihilism, I would think twice about arguments like the Basic Argument, and I would certainly be inclined, like Smilansky, to say "well, even if it's true that free will doesn't exist, let's not shout this from the rooftops" (esp. in light of intriguing new research, which Dennett cites in his paper). And I tend to be adamant in insisting that wishful thinking is an evil, and that whether something would be good or bad has no bearing upon whether it would be true. But if the denial of moral responsibility really entailed nihilism, one can better understand why Dennett fights so hard to be a compatibilist. Yet, if I am right, it doesn't entail anything like nihilism. This leaves Dennett as something like a Luddite: opposed to the use of new technologies, like moral pills, for selfish or misguided reasons.

[Mark Smeltzer]

By nihilism, Dennett is referring to value non-realism, the same position Nietzsche used the term to refer to, which has the net effect that nothing ultimately means anything, since ultimate meaning is contingent upon objective value.

The dictionary is oft a poor reference for philosophical jargon...

By linking the falsity of moral responsibility to a nihilistic outlook, Dennett is asserting that it wouldn't matter what we do if moral responsibility turns out to be false. Moreover, Dennett is asserting that in that case there wouldn't be any real reason to appreciate one "solution" over another. In other words, he is claiming there would not be any real reason to prefer a medicalized society over a barbaric society over a society that endorses a punitive legal framework. Dennett says, why even bother arguing about those things since it wouldn't matter anyway?

If at the end of the day we do not have much control, it would seem like an instance of wishful thinking to presume that we can do anything to significantly better our situation. Wouldn't you agree? If so, how to you distinguish this kind of wishful thinking from the kind of thinking you engage in whilst constructing a vision of a medicalized society?

[Cihan Baran]

I don't think that nihilism follows from free-will nihilism but I am curious about how you could do substantial ethical theory without free will.

Would you be able to theorize ethically just as good as before? Would it only affect the punitive parts of an ethical theory? Or could you have values without moral responsibility?

I think in a sense, persons are still persons. Even if we don't think they have moral responsibility, they are still not just machines and that allows a leeway for substantial, albeit affected, ethical theory. I think in a way you could still have values, even though they would have to change somewhat.

[Cihan Baran]

*free-will nihilism

I mean free-will denialism...

Sorry... Should read my posts better.

[Kip Werking]

Mark,

I agree that Dennett was probably referring to value nihilism. Perhaps it would have been better if I had referred to a philosophical encyclopedia instead of the dictionary.

But, even so, my argument would remain largely the same. As Cihan agrees, the denial of fw or mr would not entail the denail of all values. One can value democracy, beautiful works of art, scientific research, and the promotion of happiness/flourishing, at the expense of suffering/pain. None of these beliefs seem to rely upon further beliefs about free will and moral responsibility: we can imagine how, in a medicalized society, we might abandon talk of free will and moral responsibility, and treat wrongdoers more like we treat patients in a hospital, without abandoning our support for these other values and institutions.

You ask:

"If at the end of the day we do not have much control, it would seem like an instance of wishful thinking to presume that we can do anything to significantly better our situation. Wouldn't you agree? If so, how to you distinguish this kind of wishful thinking from the kind of thinking you engage in whilst constructing a vision of a medicalized society?"

First of all, I plead innocent to the charge of wishful thinking. Like Tamler did in another thread, I would here distinguish between fatalism and free will non-realism.

Free will non-realism: My entire life story is fixed by the initial conditions of the universe, and nothing I will actually do will change this life story or the history/future of the universe. My natural conception of self and others as something like self-creators or unmoved movers, is false in a way that undermines fw and mr. Nevertheless, my actions are causally related to the future, as part of that causal chain.

Fatalism: Even if I took other actions during my life, these would still lead back to the same result and the same future. For example, even if I had refused to wake up this morning, and refused to eat breakfast, the result would still have been that I woke up, and ate breakfast, because none of my actions make any difference, not even in a conditional sense.

If the free will non-realist were further committed to fatalism, so construed, then I would agree that it would seem to be wishful thinking to suppose we could avoid harm, etc., in a medicalized society. But the non-realist need not defend such a strong, and obviously false, claim.

[launa lazariuk]

I don't think that he was trying to say that the denial of free will or moral responsability would mean a denial of all values. but raather to denye that we do have free will or that we can be morally responsible is to denye a very real and significant part of ourselves.
It would be nihilistic in the sense of having a false sense of self. If one has a false sense of self, and negates one's being, it can and necessarily can lead to destructiveness. In fact, it is a sort of destructiveness in itself.

To denye freedom is to be irresponsible. To denye freedom is to, contrary to wht reason would have you do, to do otherwise.

AS far as I am concerned and for the most part I suppose I am in agreement with dennett.. but I will sum up my view as follows.

Humans absolutely have free will as long as they learn and progress in life. We have the ability to choose so long as we are mentally aware enough and alive. So those actions which may negate our ability to choose or that bring upon our death prematurely are counter-productive to us truly having free will, if we should not ecer learn from them or if we keep repeating the same mistakes seemingly without end.

In other words, freedom implies responsibility in so far as if we do not progress, be responsible, then we will extinct our species or mentally dull it so much that we will literally remove our ability to choose. we will no longer be able to choose because we will be dead or mentally deficient.

[Kip Werking]

This is an effort to keep this thread alive, because it raises some of the issues in this area of philosophy that are dearest to my heart.

In particular, I want to ask:

1. Am I right to characterize Dennett as claiming that the denial of moral responsibility would entail nihilism?
2. If I am right to characterize him this way, is this claim about moral responsibility and nihilism correct?
3. In particular, how could this claim be true if we might preserve other values, such as the values of science, art, democracy, and avoiding suffering, even if we shed our belief in moral responsibility? In other words, does Dennett regard our holding these others values as contingent upon our belief in moral responsibility, and if so, how?
4. Regardless of whether this claim is correct, what does Dennett mean by nihilism mean here?
5. Is Dennett's empirical claim that, although it is conceptually possible to stop "taking responsible" for our actions, we will never do so, even in a distant future, because people *want* to take responsibility... is this empirical claim true?

One reason I think this issue is so important is that it suggests a gross error which might, rightly or wrongly, motivate Dennett's compatibilism. In other words, we might imagine how, if Dennett didn't find the denial of moral responsibility to be such a nihilistic and horrible thing, then he might not fight so hard to say "free will exists, even if it means something different than most people think it does."

I'd love to hear what other Gardeners have to say about these questions.

[harry nac]

My question relates to how political freedom and philosophical freedom are intertwined.
Is one a prerequisite for another, or are they entirely disentangled?
For example : is it worth fighting for freedom, if freedom in the philosophical sense cannot exist anyway?
Or is political freedom more related to the compatibilist view of freedom, namely that freedom to do whatever you want yourself is the important issue?
Anyway interested to hear your input.
Thanks!

another issue that might be worthwile considering, is how free will relates to stuff as quantum mechanics?

ooh and how it relates to consciousness?

Aah, and last post in this regard : why does this debate not stir a lot of emotions among the general audience. Too abstract perhaps?
Sorry for the multitude of my replies, i just think this is a topic worthwile considering and i look forward to your replies!