Evil and Libertarianism

I want to follow up on one of Eddy’s older posts.  On July 10, 2006, in a post titled “Free Will in the World Cup”, Eddy asked:

“For that matter, why is it that in the case of other foolish and seemingly irrational acts, like suicide terrorism, people are so much less interested in applying their theory of mind modules to figure out what drives the behavior and so much more likely to just say it's evil (is there a boundary past which we give up trying to explain or simply cannot explain certain actions)?”

    Those words really resonated with me.  Surely, I thought, Eddy was picking up on a real phenomenon: people were less able or willing to understand the behavior of wrongdoers and more willing to attribute their behavior to evil simpliciter.  Indeed, Eddy was making a point I tried to make on September 11th 2004, in a post titled “Who Was Morally Responsible For September 11?”: “The world's response to the events of September 11, 2001 suggests that our intuitions about freedom and responsibility are, in some ways, mistaken…”

    When I wrote my post on September 11th 2004, I had not yet read about cognitive biases.  But last summer I did research on many such biases that might be relevant to the free will problem.  Fortunately, I discovered research documenting exactly the phenomenon that Eddy and I were talking about.  I quote my findings below:

ANNOUNCING: The New and Improved GFP Reading Group of Excellence!

I’m stepping down from running the GFP reading group (I'll still be hanging out here otherwise, so don't get too excited). It has been a lot of fun but over the next few months my commitments are going to outstrip my time, so this is one of the things that had to go. Moreover, it seemed to me the right time for new blood to run the reading group. So, I’ve found someone who has graciously agreed to make things better than they have been.  Your new reading group coordinator is Neil Levy, the guy who puts the cosmopolitan back in compatibilism, the multi-hemispheric Man from Melbourne and homme d’Oxford.

Neil will be organizing things from here on out. So if you promised me you would be willing to do a commentary at some point, I hereby transfer that promise to Neil (can I do that? Someone should post this question over at PEA Soup). More generally, please say yes if he comes a knockin’. I’ve been told by a number of people that they’ve enjoyed the reading group discussions. A crucial part of the success, such as it is, of the reading group seems to be the willingness of folks to take the role of lead commentator. So, please help Neil out if you can. It doesn’t take much time but it is one of the things that may make the Garden a fruitful place to hang out.

I also want to take a moment to thank everyone who has participated in the reading group over the past year, and I especially want to thank our lead commentators, without whom not. So, my thanks and appreciation to the efforts of Al Mele, Tim O’Connor, John Doris, John Fischer, Randy Clarke, and Saul Smilansky, all of whom delivered terrific commentaries on a range of interesting papers. And, of course, thanks to all the authors who permitted us to have public discussions of their papers, including: John Doris, Joshua Knobe, and Robert Woolfolk, Al Mele, Shaun Nichols, Peter van Inwagen, Kadri Vihvelin.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

The Gangster of Thought

Not free will-related, specifically, but notable in a Tony Soprano sort of way:

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/article2663731.ece

More Reasons to Celebrate: Gardeners Rockin’!

To join in the celebration of the Garden's third anniversary, let me announce two big pub coups by Gardeners:

Neal Tognazzini has a new paper, "The Hybrid Nature of Promissory Obligation", forthcoming in Philosophy and Public Affairs. Congrats to Neal!

John M. Fischer, whose name shines in the firmament of Moral Responsibility (yes, the booze makes my writing corny, but aren't we all still toasting?), and -- again! -- Neal Tognazzini, penned "Exploring Evil and Philosophical Failure: A Critical Notice of Peter van Inwagen’s The Problem of Evil", forthcoming in Faith and Philosophy.

What do We Mean by "Deserve"?

A recent exchange between Tom and Kip reminded me that I’m getting increasingly confused about desert, about what the concept means to most people. Narrowing down this question a little, it seems like there are a number of possible ways to interpret a claim like ‘Joe deserves punishment.’ Here are my contenders.

(1) Joe is a fair and appropriate target of punishment.
(2) Independent of any consequentialist considerations, Joe ought to be punished.
(3) All things being equal, it would be wrong for Joe not to be punished.
(4) Joe is an appropriate object of resentment or moral anger.
(5) Joe has done something that warrants punishment.
(6) Joe has done something that makes him a fair and appropriate target of punishment.
(7) Joe has done something wrong, and it is his fault; so (independent of consequentialist considerations) he ought to be punished [or it would be wrong for him not to be punished]
(8) Joe has done something wrong out of his own free will, and so he ought to be punished.
(9) Joe has done something wrong, and he is causa sui [or is the true source of what he has done] and so, independent of consequentialist considerations, he ought to be punished.

Do any of these (overlapping) interpretations capture the concept of desert, at least with regards to punishment? Is there a better way to describe it? One thing I’m interested in is whether the conceptual space allows for people to deserve punishment without having done anything—or done anything of their own free will. Another is whether anyone (incompatibilists most likely) thinks the concept has incompatibilist notions built into it. Finally, I wonder if ‘desert’ when applied to blame rather than punishment might mean something slightly different. To be clear, I’m not asking under what conditions our assignments of desert are justified. I just want to figure out what the word means to most people. Any ideas?

Why the Garden is Great, Why is the Garden Great?

This was a post I started to write before the announcement that the blog is 3 years old and the comments that followed, so apologies for some of the redundancy. I guess some of these thoughts are in the air right now.

This past week (now, almost two weeks ago) I was struck by the vitality and energy of the free will-focused part of the online philosophy world. First, there was the OPC2. I didn’t monitor the comments with anything like mathematical precision, but my sense is that comments on the free will papers outpaced all the other comments, and maybe even all the other comments combined. Then, there is the fact of the GFP itself. Blog activity seems to outpace many comparable blogs in fields that are ostensibly bigger (ethics, epistemology) and in some cases where there isn’t any comparative group, topical blog out there (political philosophy anyone?).

To be sure, we’ve had dry spells. But, overall we seem to have successfully made the transition to a middle-aged philosophy blog (relative to the lifespan of blogs, anyway).

I take it that it won’t be particularly tough to sell this crowd on the thought that we are mighty bloggers. What I’m really interested in is why we seem to be so active in the blogophere.

Several possible answers occurred to me: