David Brooks on the Morality Line

David Brooks has an article at the NYT (behind a pay wall) on moral responsibility in the Virginia Tech shootings. A version of the article has also been posted here (free).

Comments

[Tamler Sommers]

I like David Brooks, he's a sensible guy most of the time. (And I love the whole 'Bobo's' thing.) But every time he writes on free will, his critical thinking abilities go out the window. Like all of his columns on this topic, the misunderstandings pile on top of one another and unraveling the whole confused mess would take a lot of time. The worst though is the closing:

"After all, according to research by David Buss, 91 percent of men and 84 percent of women have had a vivid homicidal fantasy. But they didn’t act upon it. They don’t turn other people into objects for their own fulfillment.

There still seems to be such things as selves, which are capable of making decisions and controlling destiny..."

Apparently, the fact that one dubious at best causal influence doesn't determine a particular behavior is evidence that we have a morally responsible self ('soul' in other columns) that can control our destiny.

This is why we need a philosopher who can write for the laypeople. So that this kind of column doesn't appear anymore.

[Paul Torek]

Wow, Brooks's incompatibilism runs deep, too deep for him to see it. Never once does an "and" thought make so much as a ripple on his "either-or" mentality. Either our brains explain our behavior, or we have selves. "Both" is apparently not an option. One wonders: has Brooks simply never encountered compatibilism - None of the scientists he interviews have considered, out loud, compatibilist hypotheses or interpretations? Or do they simply bounce off?

If the former, then Eddy must be getting it wrong when he surmises that half or more laypeople have at least occasional compatibilist intutions. Or if they do, then somehow none of these intuitive compatibilists manage to become neuroscientists.

[Eddy Nahmias]

Paul, hold on a minute. I think many people have compatibilist intuitions because I think they do *not* recognize (the metaphysical thesis of) determinism as a threat to free will and moral responsibility. But I think most people *do* have the intuition that a reductive explanation of all of human behavior in terms of "brain chemistry or evolutionary psychology [genes]" is threatening to free will and moral responsibility. And, though Brooks mentions determinism, I think his discussion (and the sciences he is discussing) is better understood in terms of the latter threat, the one that suggests our behavior can be explained by causal forces that bypass our rational capacities (that bypass the self that Brooks is talking about at the end).

Notice that right before he brings up free will, Brooks writes that "Human consciousness is merely an epiphenomena of the deep and controlling mental processes that lie within," suggesting that these sciences of the mind are showing that our conscious thoughts and deliberations are not playing a causal role in what we do. (It's this threat that I think most scientists, such as Libet and Wegner, have in mind when they say they are "proving" that free will is an illusion--see my powerpoint in previous post).

Brooks says it is madness to think that Cho "could have been saved from his demons with better sermons." Perhaps. But, if so, it's not (I claim) because *determinism* is true. Rather, if he lacked the capacities to understand such "sermons" that explained why it is madness to kill innocent people, then perhaps his responsibility (and freedom) is diminished. But it'd be because he lacks the proper capacities to distinguish good and bad reasons (or something like that).

It is true that most scientists and science media folk do not recognize the compatibilist option. I diagnose this mistake as their thinking that determinism, *by definition*, entails the lack of free will (in which case compatibilism would not be worth recognizing!). But then they fill in the meaning of "determinism" with whatever they want, and usually it's some sort of reductionistic picture or the falsity of dualism or something. So, if Brooks is expressing folksy intuitions (and I think he is), I think he is not expressing incompatibilist intuitions but rather other intuitions about the incompatibility of FW/MR with certain pictures of human nature (pictures that are not entailed by determinism nor require its truth).

Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it (for now).

[Paul Torek]

Touche, Eddie. If Brooks has been talking primarily to Libet and Wegner, that might explain it all. Still, I find it shocking that no one proposes the "moral equivalent of compatibilism", if you will, for reductionism. Perhaps I understand "reductionism" more broadly than you do. Certainly if someone proposes a narrow reductionism according to which the simple balance of neurotransmitters is everything and all that electrical detail is a mere distraction, then I might find the view threatening (if I didn't find it so laughable). But, if all a scientist asserts is that somewhere in this vast complex of neural activity are all my thoughts and feelings, I'm at a loss to see why I should find that any more or less threatening than attributing my mental activities to a soul. And I'm also at a loss to see why precious few scientists are willing to voice the thought I just voiced in the last sentence.

A personal note may shed light on my concern. My wife is a psychologist, with strong cognitive therapy skills, while I'm an engineer turned philosopher turned engineer (don't ask). We often discuss a narrow sort of reductionism, which my wife calls "the Medical Model," which seems to be exactly what you also have in mind. The Medical Model pooh-poohs talk therapy, never mind its empirical success record and relative dearth of harmful side-effects, in favor of drug therapy. This fact would bother me severely even if I were not married to a therapist. Further, every bit of research showing a mind-body connection is interpreted as further proof of the Medical Model. One example that sticks in my mind is the discovery, on autopsy, that long-term schizophrenics tend to have a certain area of the brain be smaller than usual. In the many interviews on the news, I think there may have been one scientist who mentioned the possibility that schizophrenic thoughts and behavior patterns cause shrinkage of the brain area, rather than (or in addition to) the other way around. I could have kissed that scientist!

Why - oh why oh why - is it so hard, for many people who seem prepared to believe that mental events are physical events, to believe that mental events cause physical events? But perhaps I just answered my own question, when I wrote "seem prepared to believe ...".

[Proteus]

"This is why we need a philosopher who can write for the laypeople. So that this kind of column doesn't appear anymore." - Tamler Sommers

Amen to that.

[Eddy Nahmias]

Another relevant article at PLoS, "Law, Responsibility, and the Brain": http://biology.plosjournals.org/archive/1545-7885/5/4/pdf/10.1371_journal.pbio.0050103-L.pdf

It has a box with the title "Should we rethink free will?" In the introduction, the authors write of neuroscience:

"Intuitively, this view opposes Cartesian dualism (i.e., the brain and mind are separate, but interacting, entities) and assumes that violence and antisocial behaviour emanate from a
mechanistically determined brain (see Box 1).

From this standpoint, the exciting discoveries of neuroscience resonate far beyond mere philosophical
banter and may have important implications for the way government institutions, including education and
legal systems, operate."

I'll try not to "banter" too much. I'll just point out that I agree that the discoveries of neuroscience will have important implications for very important social and legal issues. I just hope that the discussion doesn't begin with the presumptions that (a) philosophers are too busy staring at their navels to be relevant to the discussion and (b) that neuroscience has proven free will is an illusion.

(Paul, I agree with most of what you said. Our lingering dualism infects our conception of mental illness in problematic ways. I certainly think compatibilism about FW/MR and naturalism about the mind-body relation is a view that needs to be developed and that would help people understand how we can have selves and free will even if we don't have immaterial souls. Many people seem to assume that the only alternatve to dualism is what you call narrow reductionism.)

[Tom Clark]

Eddy,

You say "But I think most people *do* have the intuition that a reductive explanation of all of human behavior in terms of "brain chemistry or evolutionary psychology [genes]" is threatening to free will and moral responsibility."

Seems like one threat of reductive, materialist explanations – or at least a physicalist ontology – is to reveal clearly the deterministic workings of our rational capacities, in which case might not the real bogey still be determinism?

Put another way, people might be wondering, inchoately: what's so special about our rational capacities in terms of conferring desert-entailing MR if it's all just the brain doing its deterministic thing, bereft of a categorically immaterial controller independent of Brook’s “background forces”?

You’d say: well, the fact that it’s all physical and deterministic doesn’t mean we aren’t *rational* and *conscious* and therefore blameworthy. But people have the intuition that it’s senseless to retributively punish machines instead of fixing them (the absurdity of Basil Fawlty beating up his old jalopy), and that’s what physicalist determinism makes us out to be: very fancy biological albeit rational, conscious mechanisms.

So I agree that neuroscience, by clinching the case for mechanism, has significant implications for very important social and legal issues.

[Eddy Nahmias]

Tom, just a quick response. A lot here depends on how we understand "machine" and "mechanism." If it is accurate to say that we are machines (and neuroscience is showing this), then we are indeed conscious, rational machines (or at least neuroscience has *not* shown we aren't). And if you portray to people conscious, rational machines, it's not clear that they think it's "senseless to retributively punish" them.

I'm not sure what data we could examine here, but people's reactions to artificial intelligence (robots that pass a Turing-type test) as portrayed in sci- fi movies might be relevant (I suspect many people are OK with holding retributive and reactive attitudes towards some of these machines--Blade Runner, AI, Matrix, etc.). The surveys I'm currently running might also provide some relevant data. Anyway, I think it's too quick to assume that when people lose their dualistic theories, they thereby will lose (or should lose) the most significant aspects of their beliefs about free will and moral responsibility (much less about the existence of selves or morality, etc.).

[Tom Clark]

Eddy: If as you suspect people end up attributing desert-entailing MR to machines, then it seems to me that reductionism isn't a threat to such attributions. What might still be a threat is if the machine is insane or operating with less than its normal complement of rational capacities, or coerced in some sense - the usual excusing conditions. But as our current practices of punishing the mentally ill in prisons show, even those conditions often don't deflect acting on the retributive impulse (see the New York Times today, "New Rules for the Mentally Ill in Prison"). This suggests there's more passion than principle behind retribution.

[Eddy Nahmias]

Tom, I agree with everything you say, except the last sentence. The mistakes people make regarding the responsibility of the mentally ill do not necessarily show that all retributive impulses or judgments are mistaken. Also, as Peter Strawson might say, when it comes to our retributive and reactive attitudes, you can't take the passions out of the principles.

[Tom Clark]

Ok, then your worries about threats to FW and MR don't have to do with reductionism, but with whether the proper reasons-responsive behavior-guiding capacities are present. Regarding the principle behind retribution, why punish people apart from how we can guide behavior? That, after all, is what retribution is: to punish without regard for future consequences, but only because people *deserve* it. What's the principled connection between such desert and having reasons-responsive capacities?

[Mark]

Tom,

Do you think that retributivism entails that desert is a sufficient condition to create a moral impetus to punish? I've always had it in mind that, as far as retributivism goes, desert is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition.

Afterall, these two statements seem perfectly coherent: 1) Bob deserves punishment and 2) no one exists who ought to punish Bob.

[Kip Werking]

Eddy's suggestion to look at creatures with human level AI, as portrayed in sci-fi, is *fascinating*.

1. But, as someone who is very sympathetic to the "medicalized" view that Tom describes, I have to say: arguing "well, people today might look at the robots in these movies and still want to punish them, in a retributivist way, instead of just fix them" sounds to me like a someone saying "well, people in 19th century America might looks at these black slaves and still want to hold them as slaves." In other words, my ethical (as opposed to descriptive) position in this debate, is consistent with people wanting to retributively punish humans, as well as AIs---because, as Tom notes, I think much of our ethical thinking and practices is flawed.

2. If something like Greene's dual process theory is right, then (i) we have mental machinery for dealing with "things" and "agents" and (ii) the "agents" machinery is, in some sense, faster and dumber and more ethically problematic. But, in this case, an android might be sufficiently human-ish to trigger the agent mechanism. Of course, someone like Eddy will probably take issue with (ii) above.

3. The more relevant factor, and one I have tried to emphasize before (and I don't really know of anyone else who focuses on this) is not the mechanical-ness of the human/AI. Rather, the relevant factor is the available of alternatives to punishment. Just emphasizing the mechanicalness of something, by itself, probably wouldn't be enough to change your attitude toward it, if it still poses a danger you couldn't stop.

This is what happens in Blade Runner. The "bad" replicants are loose in the city. But it is not as if Deckard can say "hey, renegade replicant, would you please come here so I can perform some sophisticated surgery on your brain/computer, turning you back into a docile robot?" No, the only alternative he has is to shoot them, and he does.

But what if Deckard *did* have that option? Suppose he had a tranquilizer gun, and could shoot the replicant, and then perform sophisticated brain/computer surgery to "fix" the replicant (putting aside, for the moment, the question of whether there's actually anything wrong here; just assume there is for now). Suppose he could just give the replicant a "moral pill". Shouldn't he do that? It seems obvious to me that he should. Furthermore, it also seems to me that farther we go down this path towards "medicalization", the farther we go from belief in a soul, free will, and retribution. We start to see people/AIs, including replicants, as sick machines needing treatment, instead of soul-endowed demons who freely choose to commit evil and therefore deserve retributivist punishment.

The relevance of "alternatives to punishment" here, is analogous to the relevance of "alternatives to slavery". I guess virtually every historian agrees that the economic benefits of slavery helps explain its longevity. It was only after a certain point of economic growth that society was ready to abandon slavery and suffer the economic cost. And after slavery ended, a host of superstitious beliefs died with it: beliefs about the moral equality of blacks, beliefs about the mental and moral capacities of blacks, and so on. All of these were enabling beliefs, that helped keep the widespread injustice alive.

By analogy, beliefs in souls, and free will, and retribution, are superstitious beliefs, that help enable and keep alive punishment practices that make more sense today, because conditions have not yet riped to the point where we can embrace a "medicalized society." But once conditions have so ripened, once we can treat people as sick instead of evil, I expect those beliefs to die with the injustices they enable.

You could say the same thing about chemotherapy: as soon as equally effective, but painless, treatments for cancer arrive, nobody will use chemotherapy anymore.

[Mark]

Kip,

Are you familiar with the book "Blink"?

When you say that faster mental processes are "dumber", I assume that you are implying that they generate poorer results, yet "Blink" demonstrates that faster, subconscious mental processes typically yield better results than the slower, conscious mental processes.

AFAIK, this book is inline with the bulk of research in that area...