I suspect Manuel, Eddy, and other like-minded revisionists and compatibilists will be comfortable with this folk "degrees of freedom" description of the contemporary problem of free will (especially as it relates to science) despite some of the confusions contained therein . For instance, even if we didn't have free will and hence weren't morally responsible in the robust sense, it wouldn't follow that criminals shouldn't be accountable at all. How and why we treat criminals would of course change, but that we do something rather than nothing would not change. Setting that aside, I nevertheless find the post illustrative. I am curious to see what the Gardeners think...
Here are two BBC articles that lend support to the "circumscribed yet free in the face of science" line of reasoning. The first is about child abuse and suicide, the second is about child abuse and alcoholism. In both cases, the evitability of the outcome is stressed in the end despite the genetic and neuro-cognitive changes that are said to occur as the result of abuse. I take it the skeptics in the crowd will focus on the stark changes that abuse can cause whereas the free willers (and likely the folk--such as the author of the aforementioned post) will focus on the openness of the end result. But that is a story for another day...
Yet another piece on free will by a psychologist can be found here. This time, the author is Joachim Krueger--a social psychologist from Brown University. In light of the gathering number of popular science pieces on free will, I thought this might be a good opportunity to get everyone to list the ones they know of in this thread. I actually had someone contact me the other day when I posted the the link to the "free choice" study asking me if there was a rough and ready list for getting one's feet wet with respect to what psychologists are saying about free will (or lack thereof). Since this is something that comes up here at the Garden, I figured this would be a perfect place to get the ball rolling. Once the comment thread is flowering, I will compile it into a bibliography and post it here for others to use. It might aslo be helpful if you state in your comments whether the psychologists take a pro, anti, or neutral stance on the existence of free will--which would make it easier for me to clasify the bibliography. Since I know at least two Gardeners are already working on a paper about the contemporary interest amongst psychologists in free will, I assume they will take the lead here! :)
UPDATE:
The piece by Krueger is a response to an earlier post by Baumeister which can be found here. Another response to Baumeister can be found here.
Non-historicists about responsibility (eg. Frankfurt, McKenna) argue that how an agent came to be the way they are is not relevant to whether they are responsible for how they now behave: even manipulated agents (not to mention instant agents) can be responsible, so long as they satisfy some current time-slice conditions (CTS conditions). So, for instance, Mele’s manipulated Beth, who is a dedicated philosopher only because her dean hired neuroscientists to rewire her preferences to make her a psychological duplicate of Ann, can be responsible for the very first act she performs upon waking from the manipulation, even if that is an act she performs only because she has been rewired (perhaps she agrees to referee a paper).
But are they entitled to this view? No one doubts that recent history matters to moral responsibility; even non-historicists concede tracing cases (that is, cases like the drink-driver case, in which someone is morally responsible for hitting a pedestrian while DUI, even though they didn’t control hitting the pedestrian, because they are apparently responsible for their inability to exercise control). But they can apparently point to a relevant difference between these cases and the case of Beth. The principle they uphold, which explains both cases like Beth and the drink-driver, is that all responsibility traces back to free choices by agents who satisfy some set of CTS conditions, regardless of how the agent came to satisfy these conditions.
But recent history matters to moral responsibility in ways beside those seen in tracing cases. Actions are extended processes. Even the shortest take time: it takes time to perceive the stimulus, to begin the reaction and to translate it into overt bodily movements. Now, surely on any view how this history goes matters to whether the agent is responsible for the action. Consider Mog who robs a bank. Mog is responsible in virtue of a complex and extended series of actions: planning the robbery, stealing the getaway car, planting the dynamite... To see this, suppose that some deity creates Mog as an instant agent with lit fuse in hand. I don't think we would hold Mog responsible, even if Mog were to place the dynamite against the wall, in accord with his plan (which he falsely believes himself to have formulated). If you don't buy that, then consider Mog’s twin Meg. Meg is created by the same deity and comes into existence at the very moment she launches a punch aimed at George’s head. She has just time to deflect the trajectory of the punch, were she to desire to do so, but she has no such desire.
Why are agents like Mog and Meg responsible in the real world? In virtue of an extended serious of actions, including actions which are analogues of those like the ownership conditions set down by Fischer, Mele and other historicists. Actions begin as urges or desires; they go on to become overt bodily movements because we fail to inhibit them. That seems at least analogous to the endorsement condition we can find in historicists. So it turns out that history does matter, after all.
Consider the following principle:
(HR) It is fair to hold an agent S morally responsible for φ only if you know that S is morally responsible for φ.
Although (HR) seems true to me (at the very least it's related to the very plausible principle which holds that you should assert p only if you know that p), I won't be able to offer a defense of it here. But tentatively accepting it, here are some questions.
Most compatibilists and libertarians believe that it is sometimes appropriate for us to hold individual agents morally responsible for their actions. If you're one of these compatibilists (as I am) or one of these libertarians who thinks that it's sometimes fair for us to hold individual agents responsible, then given the putative truth of (HR), it seems like we're committed to the claim that we sometimes know that individual agents are morally responsible. But this seems like a problem because how could we know that any particular agent satisfied the conditions of moral responsibility at a particular time?
I suppose that if Frankfurt's requirement on freedom of the will is correct, then we could just ask the wrongdoer about whether or not her second-order desire issued in the first-order volition that produced her action. But what if Fischer and Ravizza's account of moral responsibility is correct? How could we ever know that S acted from her own moderately reasons responsive mechanism? And it wouldn't help to study those neurological or psychological mechanisms that actually issue in our actions because it's unclear what that could tell us about the modal properties of such mechanisms that are relevant to moderate reasons responsiveness. Worse still, what if moral responsibility requires that we posses agent causal powers? How could we ever know that we possess such powers? Do we simply know it through introspection? Or as a result of divine revelation? Are those of us who think that it is sometimes appropriate to hold individual agents responsible committed to one of these answers? Or should we simply abandon (HR)? Of course, if we give up on (HR), we'll need another principle to replace it because surely there is some connection between what we believe of another agent and whether or not it is appropriate for us to hold that agent responsible.
I suppose a final option is that we radically alter our practices, not because we're not morally responsible (as the hard incompatibilist supposes), but because none of us is in the right sort of epistemic position to hold others morally responsible. This seems to me (at least initially) to be a bad result, but maybe it wouldn't be so bad; I don't know, but I'd appreciate any help in sorting out the flurry of questions that seem to have emerged from this way of thinking about these issues.
There is a recent article in Cerebral Cortex that explores the neural mechanisms of what the researchers take to be "free choice" (see here). It's certainly the kind of thing Gardeners ought to find of interest. The abstract is as follows:
Let the grumbling begin!
Given the interest generated by Tamler's recent post on free will skepticism, I thought I would try to keep the discussion going by posting something about a related issue that I have often found puzzling. On the surface, it is obvious enough what distinguishes libertarians, on the one hand, from compatibilists, semi-compatibilists, and revisionists, on the other hand. The later, unlike the former, believe that we could be free and/or morally responsible even if determinism were true. Similarly, it is obvious enough what distinguishes libertarians from free will skeptics. The former, unlike the later, believe that we are both free and desert-based responsible.
However, it is not always as clear to me what distinguishes compatibilists, semi-compatibilists, and revisionists from free will skeptics. As far as I can tell, proponents of each of these views generally believe the following:
So, wherein lies the disagreement? It appears the two main disagreements are as follows:
The first of these two disagreements is entirely terminological. Settling this dispute requires the parties to the debate to spell out why they believe using the term "free will" is beneficial or harmful. For instance, Manuel thinks we should keep the term even if we have to (radically?) change the meaning, whereas I think we should jetison it entirely if we now realize we don't have the kind of causal powers we once thought we did.
The second disagreement does not appear to be merely terminological. But it is nevertheless important for compatibilists, semi-compatibilists, and revisions to spell out very carefully how and why the kind of circumscribed free will we purportedly have is enough to ground desert-based responsibility. Keep in mind that the issue is not whether humans ought to be held responsible for their actions. As 4 above makes clear, this is something about which all parties to the debate agree. The issue is whether the kind of free will compatibilists allege we have is enough for moral desert.
Here’s the latest in my series of increasingly dangerous concessions to Strawson-style compatibilism.
Assume (plausibly) that theories of moral responsibility hinge on our all-things-considered intuitions or judgments about the proper conditions for deserving blame, praise, punishment and reward.Now imagine a person, call him Jack, who finds hard incompatibilist arguments intuitively compelling all things considered, and therefore accepts that no one can be morally responsible for their behavior. (He even publishes a couple of articles defending that view.) But then Jack thinks of a scenario in which someone deliberately, willfully harms his daughter.The offender in the imagined scenario meets all normal compatibilist conditions, but not the incompatibilist conditions that Jack believes are necessary for desert.
Were this scenario to occur, Jack would feel that the offender deserved to suffer for the act— he would feel this more strongly than just about anything else. In fact, he thinks it would be obscene of him to apply incompatibilist principles to this case, to worry about whether the guy was causa sui, or whether the factors that trace back beyond his control led him to harm his daughter. If someone said "but what about the TNR principle?" he would say “F*ck the TNR Principle!” More importantly, even now, just imagining the scenario, Jack believes that this is the right or appropriate response—that it would be wrong not to feel this way. Lastly, Jack realizes that he wouldn’t feel that response to be appropriate if the offender didn't meet certain basic compatibilist conditions.If the man was completely crazy, or manipulated into performing the act, he doesn’t think that it's wrong not to feel retributive towards that person. (He might feel retributive anyway, but now, upon reflection, he sees that as more irrational.)
Now Jack is fully aware of his incompatibilist commitments.He finds the four-case argument and the basic argument no less compelling.He is also aware that his retributive attitude in this case has deep psychological roots that trace back to his evolutionary history, kin selection etc. But he doesn’t care. He still thinks it would be deeply inappropriate to favor his incompatibilist intuitions over the intuition that the guy who harmed his daughter deserves to suffer for that crime. And he cannot see why the same reasoning shouldn’t apply to other people’s daughters (and relatives, friends etc.) as well.Since intuitions are the ultimate arbiters for theories of responsibility, and the force of this latter intuition is greater that the intuitions that favors incompatibilist principles, does Jack has reason to rethink his all-things-considered rejection of compatibilism?
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