Tempered Enthusiasm for Four Views on Free Will

A review at NDPR by fellow Gardener, Dan Speak (LMU).

Can a libertarian account deal with worries about manipulation?

I have just become a contributor to GFP at the invitation of Neal Tognazzini.  My homepage (not the most elegant I’m afraid) is here.

I want to take up the libertarian cause by responding to two points made by Joe Campbell in his comments on Haji’s “The Manipulation Argument”.  First, he says “no libertarian account has successfully illustrated the key to free human action,” and suggests that a libertarian response to worries about manipulation can be no better than a compatibilist response; and he criticises agent causation as being a “primitive unanalyzable concept”.

I’ve been trying to develop a libertarian account that does focus on how and why human action is free and that can deal with manipulation worries, as well as with Galen Strawson’s responsibility argument.  One article, an edited version of which was published in Times Literary Supplement last year, was the subject of some discussion on this website, but this discussion tended to skate over the main arguments.  (The article was written in part as an answer to Galen Strawson’s argument, and since he as philosophy editor for TLS okayed it for publication, I was encouraged to hope he saw it as having some merit.)   I also published an article (“Making our own luck”) to similar effect in Ratio in September last (which I can’t put on the internet until next September), and another on the role of consciousness in Philosophy Now in Jan/Feb this year.

The (bare) gist of my position is that, given our circumstances and laws of nature, the way we are provides available alternatives, inconclusive reasons (and how they appeal), and unconscious tendencies, and also the capacity to decide between the alternatives on the basis of the reasons; and what we do is what we decide in exercise of that capacity.  The constraining effect of the way we are is limited to determining alternatives, reasons and unconscious tendencies, and our decisions are not otherwise constrained by any distinguishing features of the way we are (we are all alike in respect of our capacity to decide):  to this extent, we are truly responsible for our decisions.  That applies whether the way we are is due to manipulation and/or natural causes and/or prior decisions.

I support this by arguing (1) that conscious experiences can make a positive contribution to decision-making; (2) that this contribution is not one wholly determined by rule-based processes; (3) that we can respond to whole feature-rich gestalt experiences that cannot engage as wholes with rules or laws of any kind; and (4) that the role of consciousness (and its advantage) is to enable us to contribute this response to decision-making.

This may be seen as a kind of agent causation, but I would suggest it is far from being primitive and unanalysable.

The focus in the free will debate at present is so much on compatibilism and incompatibilism that there seems to be little concern about what I see as of central importance, namely the role of consciousness in decision-making, and especially in plausible reasoning.  So I would really appreciate comments that squarely address the arguments of these articles, particularly the four points listed above.  And if anyone would like to investigate my arguments further, they could look also at an article in Philosophy in 2001 which first introduced my gestalt argument, and another in Journal of Consciousness Studies in 2002 which has the fullest exposition of it.

Study of the Human Self Conference

Al Mele has kindly sent along this PDF brochure for a conference being hosted by Paul Davies at the College of William and Mary this fall called "The Study of the Human Self". Here are the "objectives of the conference":

Although we are learning from psychology and neuroscience that we are not the kinds of agents described in our traditional humanistic theories of the self, we do not yet know what kind of agent we are. We do not yet know how to think of ourselves as deliberators, choosers, and actors. At the conclusion of this interdisciplinary conference, panelists and participants will have addressed the following questions:

What kind of agent are we?
What are we actually like as deliberators, choosers, and actors?
And what are the methods of inquiry most likely to help us discover the truth about our capacities as agents?

Both the conference format and the conference itself look very interesting.

SPP 2008

Announcing the 34th annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SPP), June 25-29, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.
Registration is now open; deadline Thursday, June 5, 12:00pm EST.
Note that early registration is suggested, as the reserved hotel block is likely to fill quickly.
http://www.ircs.upenn.edu/spp/

The 2008 conference will feature presentations by:

George Ainslie, Michael L. Anderson, Louise Antony Peter Carruthers, Louis Charland, Anjan Chatterjee, David Danks, Felipe De Brigard, Michael Devitt Marthah Farah, Evelina Fedorenko, Owen Flanagan, Jerry Fodor, Kenneth R. Foster, Lila R. Gleitman (President of SPP), George Graham, Bryce Huebner, Bertram F. Malle, Barbara Malt, Christopher Meacham, Dominic P. Murphy, Thomas Nadelhoffer, Kenneth Norman, Mike Oaksford, Erik Parens, Nancy Petry, Jeffrey Poland, Zenon Pylyshyn, Sarah Robins, Paul Rozin, Laurie R. Santos (the 2008 Stanton Prize winner), Michael Strevens, Justin Sytsma, Kelly Trogdon, Charles Wallis, Deena Weisberg, Daniel Weiskopf, Fei Xu, Carlos Zednik. . . among many others

On topics including:

-Addiction and Responsibility
-Concepts and Categorization
-Consciousness
-Bayesian Inference and Rationality
-Foundational Issues in the Philosophy of Cognitive Science
-Language & Mental Representation
-Moral Psychology
-Neuroethics
-Theory of Mind

Note that this year the conference will be preceded June
25-26 by a workshop on experimental philosophy
http://www.socphilpsych.org/workshop.html

More information on both the 2008 SPP conference and the
Experimental Philosophy Workshop can be found on the
website http://www.ircs.upenn.edu/spp/

Moral Responsibility and Mental Illness

Suppose you discovered that someone has committed a horribly violent crime. And now suppose I tell you one additional fact about the person who performed this act: he or she is mentally ill. In fact, suppose I tell you that the reason he performed this act he is suffering from damage to a particular area of his brain. Would you still conclude that he could be morally responsible for what he had done?

At this point, you might be guessing that no one would hold an agent morally responsible in such a circumstance. After all, how could we hold someone morally responsible for behavior that was clearly the result of neurological illness? Surely, anyone would agree in such a case that the agent is not to blame for what he has done!

Guess again.  A new paper from the philosophers Eric Mandelbaum, David Ripley and Felipe De Brigard shows that people actually are willing to ascribe moral responsibility in cases like that one. In their study, subjects were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. Subjects in the 'abstract' condition received the following story:

Dennis has recently found out from his doctor that he has a neurological condition that has caused him to behave in certain ways. Were someone else to have this neurological condition then that person would have had to behave in the same ways as Dennis.

Just as you might expect, most subjects who received this story said that Dennis was not morally responsible for the behaviors he performs. But don't be too swift to assume that people with neurological conditions will get off the hook. Mandelbaum and colleagues also included a 'concrete' condition, in which subjects were told:

Dennis has recently found out from his doctor that he has a neurological condition that has, in the past, caused him to rape women. Were someone else to have this neurological condition then that person would have had to behave in the same ways as Dennis.

When the story is made more concrete in this way, people's intuitions change radically. They end up concluding that Dennis actually is morally responsible for what he'd done. 

It seems that, no matter how much we tell people about damage to an agent's brain, the impulse to blame will get the last word. It is as though people are thinking: 'Well, he does have a neurological condition... but then again, someone ended up getting raped.  We just can't let this go by without declaring at least one person to be morally responsible!'