>-- The Garden of Forking Paths --<

The Secret Politics of the Compatibilist Criminal Law

I am curious to hear what Gardeners think about a recent paper by Anders Kaye entitled, "The Secret Politics of the Compatibilist Criminal Law."  Here is the abstract:

Many criminal theorists say that we have a 'compatibilist' criminal law, by which they mean that in our criminal law a person can deserve punishment for her acts even if she does not have 'genuinely' free will. This conception of the criminal law harbors and is driven by a secret politics, one that resists social change and idealizes the existing social order. In this Article, I map this secret politics. In so doing, I call into question the descriptive accuracy of the compatibilist account of the criminal law, and set the stage for a franker discussion of criminal punishment - one that recognizes that the perpetual struggle to say just who 'deserves' punishment is driven as much by brute politics and the competition to allocate power and resources in society as by any independent moral logic.

I am particularly keen to hear what the compatibilists who frequent the Garden have to say about Kaye's provocative line of argumentation.

Consciousness, control and responsibility

I thought Gardeners might have fun grappling with a recent paper by Christopher Suhler and Patricia Churchland, "Control: conscious and otherwise," published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(8), 341-347, available here (by permission). They argue against what they call the "Frail Control" hypothesis advanced by philosophers such as John Doris, which has it that people are far less in control than they suppose, given the influence of unconscious situational factors (lots of experimental data on this). Instead, Suhler and Churchland say that we should expand our notion of responsibility-conferring control to include unconscious and automatic processes, which they point out are robust, ubiquitous, "smart," and essential for effective behavior. Conscious control is all well and good, but not the sine qua non of responsible agency. In which case, they say, people can't appeal to unconscious influences as a new class of excuses, as the Frail Control hypothesis might suggest they could.

They say "most of the patterns of behavior described in the social psychology literature [on the effects of unconscious influences] do not fall outside the realm of control." (p. 346) Might this demotion of consciousness as the criterion of control open the door to a sort of strict liability policy, in which agents can be held responsible for behavior which had significant unconscious precursors, behavior that perhaps they wouldn't consciously endorse? Eddy Nahmias has often suggested here and in his papers that it's "bypassing" of conscious processes and the threat of mechanistic reductionism, not determinism, which pose the real threats to control and responsibility. But such bypassing seems not to worry S&C, who suggest that there are neurobiological criteria for being in control that cut across the conscious/unconscious distinction. So long as the neural mechanisms are in good working order, they say, the agent is presumptively in control, so reductionism is no worry for them either. Are they going too far in demoting consciousness, and elevating the role of unconscious mechanisms, in their conception of responsible agency, and what considerations would count against their proposal? Or for it? Enjoy!

New Experimental Philosophy Page

Just wanted to let you all know about the new Experimental Philosophy Page. It has more than 100 papers in a wide variety of areas of experimental philosophy, including a substantial section on free will and moral responsibility. I hope that it will be a useful resource for Gardeners who want to take a look at the latest experimental work on the free will problem. 

The page is designed in such a way that users can easily make changes and additions (kind of like Wikipedia). So if you have done work on this topic yourself, it would be wonderful if you could add in some of your papers, correct the listings for the ones we've already got, and put in a link to your personal website in the place where you're listed as an author. 

Thanks in advance for all your help with this!

Neil Levy is even more awesome than you realized

Details here. 

h/t: Leiter Reports. 

Free Will in Antiquity

Back in June, Kevin Timpe asked Gardeners for ancient references to Free Will Skepticism. 

I have just completed a study of Free Will in Antiquity as an expansion of my History of the Free Will Problem.

It tries to answer questions like who was the first determinist?, the first libertarian?, the first compatibilist?, and the first agent-causalist? And who first discovered the traditional "free will problem?" 

Candidates for the first thinkers to form these views include Democritus (460-370), Aristotle (384-322), Epicurus (341-270), the Stoic Chrysippus (280-207), and the skeptic Carneades (214-129).

Besides an overview of the development of the free will problem, I have surveyed and commented on the work of more than a dozen classicists and historians of philosophy, including  Carlo Giussani, Cyril Bailey, David Furley, Pamela Huby, Richard Sorabji, R. W. Sharples, A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley, Don Fowler, Julia Annas, Jeffrey S. Purinton, Susanne Bobzien, Tim O'Keefe, and Ricardo Salles.

I hope these resources will prove useful to Gardeners in your own teaching and research on free will..

Brittle People and the Varieties of Compatibilist Free Will not Worth Wanting

I want to use two compatibilist tenets against each other: (1) that we should understand free will in a way resulting in free will being valuable and (2) that in determining whether an agent has free will, we should focus on what the agent would have done in counter-factual worlds.

Neither of these tenets is necessary to compatibilism, although I believe both are popular.  In particular, I think Dennett has popularized both.

Of course, anti-realists about free will have challenged (1).  In an underappreciated passage from the introduction to Living Without Free Will, Pereboom directly questioned Dennett’s insistence that free will is valuable.  That is one way to attack the compatibilist position.

But there is another way to attack the compatibilist view.  What if we humor the compatibilist?  What if free will must be valuable?  Does the compatibilist version of “free will” even satisfy that standard?  In other words, are the varieties of free will that Dennett (and others) asserts are worth wanting really worth wanting?

Does Determinism have any Consequences?

Over the summer I came across an interesting exchange between Ted Honderich and Richard Double in the Dec 1996 issue of PPR.   Double leads off with a critique of Honderich’s attempt to develop an objective synthesis of compatibilism and incompatibilism.  Honderich in his books has argued that neither of these positions is true because a belief in determinism leads to a different set of mutually consistent attitudes that encompass elements of both.  We feel “dismay” when we understand that we cannot rise above the influences of our heredity and environment.  Yet we also have another set of “life-hopes” that require only that our actions be voluntary in the compatibilistic sense.  Thus, according to Honderich, determinism does have consequences even if those consequences are different from what both the compatibilist and incompatibilist imagine. 

Richard Double makes two important points about Honderich’s view.  First, Double notes that the view might best be classified as a kind of incompatibilism.   Incompatibilists don’t deny that voluntariness is possible if determinism is true and are not committed to the view that determinism would remove all important types of freedom.  But I want to focus on Double’s second criticism.  Double faults Honderich for concluding that determinism has objective consequences of any kind.  He writes:

If our responses to determinism are simply attitudes, and if attitudes are neither nor false, then determinism has no logical, moral or psychological consequences in the sense of correct conclusions that have to be accept by all rational persons.  There are only reactions to determinism, none of which is objectively better than all the rest .(848)

The idea is that since attitudes have no truth values, Honderich’s objective synthesis of compatibilism and incompatibilism is doomed from the start.   To drive home the point, he imagines a “smart aleck” who denies that incompatibilist intuitions would count as evidence for incompatibilist conclusions about moral responsibility and demands a reason for thinking that they do.  Since attitudes aren’t reasons, according to Double, there is no response to give to the smart aleck.

A Question About Agency Over Attitudes

Folks doing experimental philosophy -- and also folks doing agency theory in general and moral psychology -- might find this interesting. And perhaps they might help me out with pointers to further my inquiry. Suppose an agent's range of attitudes regarding interpersonal comparisons of well-being is reduced to, say, indifference, envy, and admiration. My guess is this agent will find it hard to conceive of (and *probably* to experience) a state in which she may desire an X that her neighbor has (where X is a possession, a character trait, a particular aspect of her life, etc.) without the dissatisfaction that envy entails. However, if one's range of attitudes went beyond indifference, envy, and admiration, one could be in a state that shares many features with envy, but that is different from envy in that it doesn't pick out any of its "negative" aspects. But our poor fellow won't have access to this state, unless she expands her lexical, conceptual, and emotional repertoire. There's a lot going on here. Let me unpack it below the fold.

Can We Separate Free Will and Moral Responsibility?

In recent years, "free will" has become what John Fischer calls an "umbrella-term" for a large range of phenomena. He says (in his recent 4-volume Routledge anthology "Free Will," vol.I, p.xxiii)

The term is used differently by different philosophers, and I think that it is most helpful to think of it as an "umbrella-term" used to describe some sort of freedom that connects in important ways with moral responsibility, and, ultimately, person-hood. More specifically, the domain of free will includes various sorts of freedom (freedom of choice, of action, choosing and acting freely, and so forth), and the practices constitutive of moral responsibility (moral praise and blame, punishment and moral reward, and a set of distinctively moral attitudes, such as indignation, resentment, gratitude, respect, and so forth).

Some philosophers do not distinguish between freedom and moral responsibility. Put a bit more carefully, they tend to begin with the notion of moral responsibility, and "work back" to a notion of freedom; this notion of freedom is not given independent content (separate from the analysis of moral responsibility). For such philosophers, "freedom" refers to whatever conditions are involved in choosing or acting in such a way as to be morally responsible.

In the spirit of a careful conceptual (and linguistic) analysis, I think there are benefits to separating free will from moral responsibility and wonder what other gardeners think.

Moreover, I think our discussions (the dialectic) could benefit from three additional separations:

1) The separation of "free" from "will."
2) The separation of "moral" from "responsibility"
3) The separation of "moral responsibility" from "retributive punishment" (revenge).

SSPP 2010 in Atlanta: Call for Papers

I hope Gardeners will consider submitting a paper to the 102nd Meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SSPP), which is being held here in Atlanta, GA, April 15-17, 2010 (and the philosophy program is being run by Georgia State's new addition, Dan Weiskopf).  Here's the info:

SSPP Webpage: http://southernsociety.org/
Information on 2010 meeting: http://southernsociety.org/annualmeeting.htm
Call for papers: http://southernsociety.org/Call%20For%20Papers.doc

Submission of papers having interdisciplinary interest is strongly encouraged. Papers should be no longer than 3000 words and be accompanied by an abstract of no more than 150 words. Submissions for the philosophy side of the program, accompanied by the abstract submission form from the website, should be sent to:

Daniel Weiskopf
Department of Philosophy
Georgia State University
sspp.submission@gmail.com

Submission deadline: November 16, 2009 (postmarked midnight for electronic submissions)

Please look below the fold to see the impressive invited side of the program.