Gardeners in Analysis

I'm always glad to see work on free will published in Analysis, partly because it means I'll be able to read the articles fairly soon after they come out, since they are usually bite-sized (though of course even a bite-sized morsel can pack quite a punch!).  So I'm glad to see that the October 2007 issue has a piece by Saul Smilansky entitled, "Determinism and prepunishment: the radical nature of compatibilism".  I haven't received my copy of the journal yet, but I look forward to reading this piece.

You may also be interested to know that Lynne Rudder Baker has an article forthcoming in the January 2008 issue (you can find the preprint here) on the Consequence Argument, in which she references Joe Campbell's excellent Analysis piece we discussed a bit earlier.

And finally, congrats to fellow Gardener Alan White on his forthcoming piece on time (co-authored with Nathan Oaklander), which also appears in the October 2007 issue.

Responsibility, Agency, and Persons Conference at USF

The lineup and schedule is now set for the upcoming Responsibility, Agency, and Persons Conference at the University of San Francisco on October 26th and 27th.

Gardeners are more than welcome to attend (indeed, lots of Gardeners are on the program!). Attendance is free, and the website lists some hotel options near the conference site, as well as directions for getting to and from the conference. For more information, go here.

More nonsense on free will from scientists

Here. An anecdote. A prominent neuroscientist gave a talk I attended about moral responsibility. In question time, I pointed out that compatibilism exists as a view. The prominent neuroscientist said "Oh, I know that philosophers say something like that. But they don't really believe it, do they?"

Nelkin on Experimental Philosophy

I was happy to see the recent post about the superb article by Nahmias, Coates, and Kvaran in Midwest Studies.  I hope this doesn't end up stealing any attention from that earlier post, but I thought it might be helpful to draw your attention to another article in the same special issue. 

The article I have in mind is Dana Nelkin's 'Do We Have a Coherent Set of Intuitions about Moral Responsibility?' There, Nelkin goes through almost all of the recent work on moral responsibility within experimental philosophy and argues that it is actually possible to capture all of the intuitions uncovered by this work in a single coherent theory. 

One thing I found especially striking in her paper was the explanation she offers for cases in which people seem to think that moral responsibility is not compatible with determinism.  Her suggestion is that, when people hear that an agent's behavior is entirely determined, they conclude that the agent is not truly making decisions at all.  In arguing for this claim, she writes:

Additional anecdotal support for the idea... is provided by my experience presenting some of the relevant experimental results to an interdisciplinary academic audience that contained a number of psychologists.  Several objected to the set-up of the experiments in which subjects are supposed to respond to agents performing deliberate actions in a deterministic scenario. In particular, they worried that the scenarios might already beg a key question in describing actions in such terms at all in a deterministic world, and that the scenarios were actually incoherent because determinism precludes deliberate actions done for reasons [!].

I feel certain that Nelkin is getting at something important here -- that people ordinarily do show a tendency to think that determinism precludes even the possibility of taking into account certain reasons and then making a decision.  Yet this phenomenon strikes me as a highly puzzling one.  Just on the face of it, the concept of determinism doesn't seem to have much to do with the question as to whether people can genuinely make decisions.  Why then would people be drawn to the idea that determinism and decision are incompatible?

 

Schwitzgebel on Control and Situationism

Over at The Splintered Mind, Eric Schwitzgebel has an interesting post about the situationist critique of virtue ethics.  Gardeners may find his response interesting, as it appeals to control and moral responsibility. 

I find the post especially interesting because I have recently been thinking a lot about the relationship between skepticism about moral responsibility and the problem of moral luck.  Of the four sorts of moral luck Nagel identifies in his article on the topic, all but circumstantial luck play a large role in the literature on freedom and responsibility, as far as I can tell.  (The worry about deterministic causation is a worry about antecedent luck, Strawson's worry about self-creation is a worry about constitutive luck, and the worry about indeterministic causation -- which is the only one to explicitly use the word 'luck' -- is, I think, a worry akin to worries about resultant luck.)  This suggests that there is another skeptical argument to be had from the idea of circumstantial luck, but I've never seen such an argument.  How might it go?  Well, maybe something like this (with an obvious nod to Strawson):

1) You do what you do because of the situations in which you find yourself.

2) If (1), then in order to be responsible for what you do, you must be responsible for finding yourself in those particular situations.

3) But you cannot, ultimately, be responsible for finding yourself in the particular situations in which you find yourself.

4) Therefore, you cannot be responsible for what you do.

If anyone is moved by something like this argument, I suspect that they will think Schwitzgebel's response to the situationist critique of virtue ethics is unconvincing.  But...is anyone moved by something like this argument?  I wonder why it gets so much less attention than the other three worries about luck mentioned above.

New Categories

One cool feature of our blog that we don't really take advantage of very much is the Category feature, which is a way of sorting blog posts by topic.  When we first created the blog way back in 2004, Gustavo and I just came up with some categories to put there and haven't really touched them since then.  Well, you may have noticed that the categories we came up with were hopelessly broad (like 'free will') and as such quite unhelpful for sorting posts.  Some contributors did place their posts in categories, but most didn't.  The time has come to make the Category feature more useful, so here's what we've done.

Tamler had the brilliant idea that we should take a leaf out of PEA Soup's book, and have categories for each contributor's posts, so that someone could, for instance, find all of Manuel's posts with just one click.  You can now do that.  If you scroll down, you'll see the categories on the left-hand sidebar -- one for each contributor (who has actually posted something on the main page).  I spent the last couple of hours sorting all of our archived posts, but the sorting of new posts will be up to you all.  Whenever you post something, please remember to file it under the correct instance of the category schema "Posts by [your name]".

While I was at it, I deleted the other useless categories we had up there.  If there are any other categories people think would be useful to have, let me know and we can start filing posts in them from now on.

Thanks for the suggestion, Tamler -- it's a great improvement to the usefulness of the Garden, I think.

Garden-type Research and the Public Life

Al Mele has a nice piece on drinking, taking responsibility, and self-deception. It was written in the context of a campaign against drunk driving and is therefore very accessible to non-philosophers. The campaign was launched by Pernod Ricard USA. This fact may strike some as odd, but I think that every decent attempt of philosophers to get involved in the public life is commendable, and I applaud the fact that a first-rate philosopher (and Gardener :)) has taken this step.

I don't mean to imply that philosophers in general or Garden-type philosophers in particular have never been involved in public issues -- off the top of my head, I can remember Joel Feinberg's piece on equal punishment for both failed and successful attempts to commit a crime (which, I'm told, is being discussed by Canadian legislators), Bonnie Steinbock's piece in which she argues that deaths caused by drunk drivers should constitute 2nd degree murder and not merely manslaughter, and a couple of pieces by Gary Watson on responsibility and addiction -- but still, the (more or less direct) involvement of philosophers in public issues is less widespread than what I believe would be desirable. It might be interesting to discuss, then, a set of interrelated questions, which I put forth below. (I'm afraid these questions reveal my ignorance rather than setting up the issues in an interesting way, but at least they might trigger some discussion).

1) What are the implications of philosophy in general, and Garden-type philosophy in particular, for public life? (I know, this is a monstrously broad question, but still... Also, I know there's a post, with a long thread of comments, about whether there are any straight implications of Garden-type philosophy for the public life -- or at any rate, for the notion of legal responsibility, if I remember correctly -- but I can't seem to find it now. Pointers?)

2) Are there any institutions that attempt to bridge the gap between academic philosophy and the public life? 

3) Related to the last point, In what ways could philosophers get more involved in the public life?

4) What Garden-type philosophers are (more or less directly) involved in the public life?

Some caveats: I'm aware that the expression "Garden-type philosophy" is too broad. One may argue that, for instance, research on the Consequence Argument has no practical implications, whereas research on self-deception and control does. Also, the kind and degree of "involvement in the public life" are left unspecified above. I mentioned Steinbock's paper on drunk driving. But that was a paper published (I think) in Philosophy and Public Affairs. Is that to count as an intervention in "the public life," or should this expression refer to something a bit more tangible (e.g., working with legislators)? One last thing: perhaps this post sounds a bit more skeptical than it should be. I have to acknowledge that, among other things, with the increasing acceptance of experimental philosophy -- alongside increasing Garden-related news in the mainstream media -- perhaps the situation is not as bad as I assume. However, I think that the questions above are still worth discussing.

New Midwest Studies in Philosophy

Hi Gardeners,
Check out the new Midwest Studies in Philosophy volume on "Philosophy and the Empirical."  You may be able to access the articles here or here.  There are a lot of interesting articles, and several articles on free will and moral responsibility, including ones by Shaun Nichols, Dana Nelkin, Thomas Nadelhoffer & Adam Feltz, and yours truly (with co-authors Justin Coates and Trevor Kvaran).  Our article (which I link below in case you don't have access) includes the largest survey yet of intuitions about FW and MR (over 1000 subjects, 8 scenarios, 20 experimental questions), the results of which seem to support my claim that determinism per se is not intuitively threatening to FW and MR unless it is presented in a way that suggests reductive mechanism (but there are some other intruiguing results summarized in the Table and briefly canvassed in the appendix).  At some point we hope to set up a webpage with more info on the studies and a link to the surveys so we can collect data from philosophers. 
All the best, Eddy

Download nahmias_coates_kvaran_final.pdf

Manuel Vargas: The Interview

The Florida Student Philosophy Blog has the scoop.

Modern Day Hobartians?

I've been re-reading Hobart's classic "Free Will as Involving Determinism and Inconceivable Without It."  This got me thinking--what contemporary compatibilists think that free will is compatible with determinism, but incompatible with indeterminism?  I know that Fishcer, for example, intends his view to be neutral with respect to the truth of determinism.  This issue comes up, for example, in discussions of the Luck Objection and the Mind Argument and that many compatibilists think that indeterminism wouldn't help secure free will.  But are there recent papers explicitly defending this kind of Hobartian view where the falsity of indeterminism would, by itself, render all agents unfree?

Agency at the Intersection

From September 13-15, 2007, Indiana University, Bloomington will be hosting the Conference on Agency and Responsibility: Perspectives from Metaphysics, Ethics, and the Emerging Sciences of Brain and Behavior.

This conference will bring together philosophers from the diverse areas of ethics, metaphysics, and the cognitive sciences at their intersection point of human agency.  Invited speakers include Richard Holton (MIT), Jennifer Hornsby (Birkbeck College), Al Mele (Florida State U), Shaun Nichols (U Arizona), Adina Roskies (Dartmouth), Angela Smith (U Washington), and R. Jay Wallace (UC Berkeley).

A complete list of commentators and invited participants can be found at the conference web site.  Registration is $40.  Further information regarding registration and accommodations can be found online.

Further comments and inquiries can be directed to agenresp@indiana.edu.

Conference address: http://www.indiana.edu/~agenresp