>-- The Garden of Forking Paths --<

Morality without responsibility

I have posted a draft of a piece on morality without responsibility on the SSRN site (--the abstract-and-download site recently described by Brian Leiter).   Comments and suggestions would be deeply appreciated.

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:

“Asymmetrical attributions of blame may reach their zenith in the process of demonization (Ellard et al. 2002). Demonization is an unwillingness to empathize with another such that the person regards this other as evil.  Despite correcting for any potential differences in personality, by having the same person write both a story as a perpetrator and a story as a victim, Baumeister, Stillwell, and Wotman found significant differences between the two kinds of stories: perpetrators recalled much shorter time spans, victims regarded the actions of perpetrators as more inexplicable, and victims regarded the perpetrator’s actions as more harmful (1990).  One might worry that these findings are only relevant to attributions of evil but Baumeister and Vohs are quick to suggest that demonization admits of degrees and so may be a common feature of our responsibility practices:

‘To be sure, our research sample consisted of many everyday conflicts and misdeeds, few of which were sufficiently important to qualify for the grandiose term evil.  Our assumption, however, is that similar processes operate in everyday transgressions as in large-scale misdeeds, and that if anything, the gap between victim and perpetrator would probably be even larger in horrendously evil events than in petty, everyday conflicts.’
(2005: 87)

    In the context of the free will debate, the most important feature of demonization may be the failure of victims to understand the actions and motivations of perpetrators.  Baumeister et al. reported that although “[b]oth victims and perpetrators distorted their stories—and to almost identical degrees,” “the weight of the evidence tends to be closer to the perpetrators’ accounts” (2005: 89-90).  This is so because “[p]eople rarely attack for no reason” even though the “perpetrator’s motives are often opaque to the victim” and “victims cannot or will not see this perspective” (2005: 88-89).”   

    This research fits well with Nichols & Knobe’s data suggesting that affect tends to make people more free willist.  But I don’t think it is quite right to suggest that these persons become more compatibilist because such actions do not “come out of nowhere.”  The observer of wrongdoing in a deterministic world can always explain, in principle, where the behavior came from: just trace the states of the universe back in time, according to the laws of physics.

    Instead, I take the data from Baumeister and his colleages to suggest that angry or affected persons simply lose their grip on determinism.  Bully soccer players, or suicide terrorists, tend to make us more libertarian, not more compatibilist.  Indeed, it is most interesting that, according to the Luck Objection, the actions of libertarian agents “come out of nowhere” and cannot be attributed to the agent, just as victims see transgressors as “attacking for no reason.”

    I’m optimistic about the prospects of cognitive science to help us solve the free will problem.  Baumeister et al.’s research helps explain third person attributions of evil and may be relevant to understanding third person attributions of freedom and responsibility.  It suggests that such attributions may vary in degree, according to context.  But further research would need to explore first person attributions of freedom and responsibility and the ways in which different contexts inspire different attributions.  Other biases (such as the illusion of control), and other contexts, may also be important.  Such research has not yet solved the free will problem.  But it suggests to me how we might go about trying to solve it.

Smilansky, Van Inwagen, and You

Once again, the Indomitable GFP Reading Group of Destiny returns with another action-packed episode, with enough chills, thrills, and spills to keep you bathed in the glow of your monitor just a bit longer. In this episode, the Hero of Haifa - a mild mannered professor usually known as Saul Smilansky-  swings into action to test the the Sultan of South Bend, his excellency Peter van Inwagen. The target? The Sultan's forthcoming edict: "How to Think About the Problem of Free Will."

Will the edict stand? Will the Hero prevail? Who will the people favor? Dear reader, only YOU can decide.

Saul's comments begin below . . . .

(Thanks to Saul and Peter)
---------------
Peter van Inwagen’s paper “How to Think about the Problem of Free Will” is written with his usual admirable clarity, force, and scope. Anyone working or thinking seriously about the free will problem, whatever his or her position, will benefit from reading this challenging paper. It can help us to open up a meta-free will debate, about what it is valuable to discuss at all, and how. And the stakes are high: Peter calls for no less than a radical change in the whole direction of the contemporary free will debate. The fact that this proposed transformation is traditionalist, wishing to take us back to the golden past, should not hide from us the truly revolutionary nature of this paper. If Peter is right, many (and perhaps most) of us have been wasting our time, while if he were to be widely followed and is mistaken about the debate, as I believe that he is, this would set back the philosophical investigation of the free will issue enormously.

Peter does a number of things in his paper, and I will not be able to address them all. After briefly presenting some of his main contentions, I shall make a preliminary point, and then sketch a very different construal of what the free will problem is about.

Van Inwagen’s points (that I will discuss)

Broadly, Peter sees the debate in the following way (and I urge you to read his paper and not settle for my brief outline). There are (a) seemingly unanswerable arguments for the incompatibility of free will with determinism, and (b) seemingly unanswerable arguments for the incompatibility of free will with indeterminism. If all those arguments are indeed unanswerable, there is no free will. But (c) there are also seemingly unanswerable arguments for the dependency of moral responsibility on free will. It is, however, evident that moral responsibility does exist. But all this cannot be true together: it cannot be the case that there is moral responsibility, which is dependent upon free will, while there is no free will. So, at least one of the claims made above must be false. Given that moral responsibility is evident, either (a), (b), or (c) must be denied. The free will problem is about deciding which one.  (pp.1-2)

Free will, according to PVI, is the “power or ability to do otherwise than one in fact does”. And “compatibilists and incompatibilists mean the same thing by ‘able’”. Therefore, “’free will’, ‘incomatibilist free will’, ‘compatibilist free will’ and ‘libertarian free will’ are four names for one and the same thing”. (p.8)

Much of what goes on in the free will debate is, therefore, a mere pernicious confusion, “led astray by bad terminology and confused ideas” (p.14). For example, “It’s simply not true that there are two distinct things, libertarian free will and compatibilist free will, and that libertarians want the one and don’t regard the other as worth having” (p.12). It is therefore not true that libertarians want something else than compatibilists or soft-determinists. “We present-day incompatibilists see the free will that compatibilists believe in as the genuine article; their only mistake, in our view, is to suppose that it, the genuine article, is compatible with determinism” (p.12). In sum, “There is only one variety of free will worth wanting, because there is only one variety of free will: the ability to do otherwise” (p.13). The way to be a compatibilist is to follow David Lewis and discuss the "Consequence Argument" (p.19).

A preliminary point

How should we understand the issue of free will? It seems to me that we should try to formulate the issue so that what are widely accepted as major contributions in the contemporary debate are not excluded outright. Peter’s suggestion clearly doesn’t meet this guidance. Perhaps the two figures that have been most influential in the contemporary debate are Harry Frankfurt and P.F. Strawson. A major insight of Frankfurt was that it seems that people can have free will and be morally responsible, even in situations where they did not have the power or ability to do anything except the very thing that they did do. That is the intuitive force of “Frankfurt-type” examples, namely, that “ability to do otherwise” is NOT required for free will and moral responsibility. This position is of course (and reasonably) contentious. But it is excluded by definition in Peter’s very formulation of free will (see the previous two paragraphs). P.F. Strawson’s contribution to the free will debate was made in terms of the reactive attitudes and of the justificatory force that they have. It seems that for Strawson's "scepticism-proof" neo-Humeanism there is even less room under the constraining guidelines for the debate that we are being offered. It might be countered that it IS after all possible that even such central positions will be completely mistaken, and perhaps Frankfurt, Strawson and the many philosophers who they have influenced are talking about the free will equivalent of the “ether”, and not about reality. But a very strong case has to be made in defence of such a claim, and I don’t see it. In sum, it is not clear why we should construe the issues in such very narrow and exclusionary ways. On the other hand, we immediately see how much that is interesting and fruitful would be lost to the debate, if we adopted Peter’s Draconian constraints. When I shortly set out in outline my own alternative understanding, we will (I think) see further reasons for not accepting these constraints.

A very different way to see the free will problem (and hence what the debate should be like)

The quickest way in which I can sketch an alternative to Peter’s way of seeing things, and show the attractions of this alternative, is to take up the challenge at its critical points. I will sketch the way I see compatibilism, and then show that the notion of “compatibilist free will” is relatively clear, that it is clearly something very different from "libertarian free will", and that what separates the different positions on the free will debate follows from these differences.

COMPATIBILISM is the view that even if everything is determined people can have the sort of control over their actions that suffices for moral responsibility (and concomitant notions).

The “suffices” here is ambiguous, hence it is useful to distinguish between

MODERATE COMPATIBILISTS, who believe that compatibilist control or free will suffices for SOME measure of moral responsibility (but perhaps not for all significant forms or levels of moral responsibility), and EXTREME COMPATIBILISTS, who think that compatibilist control or free will suffices for ALL the worthwhile forms or levels of moral responsibility. Such a moderate compatibilist might hence also be at the same time (gasp!) partly a hard determinist, and think that there are also important forms or levels of moral responsibility (and desert, and moral worth, etc.) that are impossible under determinism, and hence that determinism does matter greatly. I am in fact such a moderate compatibilist and a partial (or moderate) hard determinist, which adds up into making me a “dualist” on the compatibility question. I think that there are at least two and very distinct varieties of free will in some sense worth wanting, the compatibilist and the libertarian. In my book I sought to combine the partial but valid insights both of compatibilism and of the type of hard determinism which morns the absence of libertarian free will. 

Clearly all this is grossly muddled, and disallowed, according to van Inwagen’s way of understanding the problem. But while I may well be mistaken, I don’t see that my way of speaking lies outside of the free will debate, nor that is it trivially mistaken. And (if I may say so), it also seems fruitful for those who have other views on free will to think about such an alternative position. If this is so, Peter’s advice about how to understand the issues should not be followed.

COMPATIBILIST FREE WILL is the capacity and ability people have (even under determinism)   to recognize options, to understand and evaluate reasons, to reflect critically upon their desires, to form their choices in accordance with their reasons and desires, and to act effectively upon their choices.
[or something like that.]

In another way, compatibilist free will is the sort of control that compatibilists investigate. But why do compatibilists think that we can have moral responsibility even under determinism? Clearly, because they are less demanding: they settle for such lowly forms of local control that exist even under determinism. They think compatibilist free will suffices.

Arguably, most people most of the time have compatibilist free will. When people perceive new options, reason better, reflect upon their desires, enhance their self-control, increase their power to pursue their choices, and so on, they (I claim) are increasing their free will (and capacity for behaving responsibly). People who do not have such pedestrian, compatibilist, free will – because they are under the power of overwhelming compulsions and fears, say – ARE MUCH LESS FREE. The kleptomaniac or alcoholic, just as the person who is afraid to leave her house, or must constantly wash her hands, or has hallucinations she cannot distinguish from reality, are not free in the sense that most people are. And – this is very important – these people would typically wish to be released from the grasp of the forces harming their free will.

But notice that the difference between the free and unfree here has NOTHING to do with determinism. The difference between such examples of lack of freedom and normal, more or less free human beings is not that the one group is determined and the other not (if we assume here that determinism rules all human actions). What make the crucial difference are the type of deterministic processes that are going on, and their impact upon compatibilist control, rather than the mere fact of determinism. I think that if Peter himself were to become convinced of determinism he would, on reflection, still see that some unfortunate people have much less free will (reflective control over their actions) than others, on account of such compulsions (and the other factors discussed by compatibilists). He might admit that they have good reason to wish to become more free, in compatibilist terms. And he might even think that some (those who have compatibilist free will) might take part in a Community of Responsibility while others (whose level of compatibilist control is very low) cannot. That being as it may, such considerations show that compatibilist free will is both a clear and an important notion, and (more controversially) that most people most of the time have quite a large measure of it.

What, then, is in contention? Some determinists (the extreme hard determinists) and libertarians put the bar of freedom and moral responsibility much higher: such pedestrian forms of control as we have considered do not suffice for genuine moral responsibility, they claim. They are more demanding, THEY WANT MORE. There is some truth here, and compatibilist free will indeed does not give us everything, morally and personally, that we thought we could have, and that it matters that we don't have (recall that I am also a partial hard determinist). Yet, I also think that such extreme incompatibilists are too extreme when they completely deny the importance of commonplace compatibilist free will. Recall the kleptomaniac and alcoholic. But that is a big issue that I cannot argue here further. What I believe that everyone should recognize, pace van Inwagen, is that those who seek (or mourn the absence of) something beyond compatibilist free will, are seeking (or morning the absence of) something ELSE. This, properly called libertarian free will, is some form of transcendent ability to control one’s actions, which goes beyond anything that is possible within a deterministic world. It certainly goes beyond the models of free will offered by compatibilists. I am not the right person to try to make sense of this ambitious notion, but some such thing is what libertarians try to describe, and in doing so they go beyond the commonplace compatibilist forms of control. This other thing is also what libertarians WANT, in the precise sense that they think that moral responsibility requires it, and hence they hope that it exists – again, distinctly apart from the pedestrian compatibilist forms of control. In order to explain this very different thing libertarians utilize indeterminism (which is of no use whatsoever to compatibilists explicating compatibilist free will), or postulate a new form of (“agent”) causation. 

There is hence, as far as I can see, no problem in making sense of the notion of “compatibilist free will”, and in seeing that it is a very different and much more conventional thing than “libertarian free will”. Similarly, it makes perfectly good sense (and even happens to be true) to say that (extreme) compatibilists do not see why anyone would want libertarian free will (they are happy with mere reasons-responsiveness etc.), while libertarians do want it – otherwise they would be content to lie alongside the lion of determinism, as the compatibilists are. 

To go back to the beginning of Peter’s paper, what, then, is the free will problem about? As I have written in the Garden before, I have found it helpful to think about it as a combination of four very different BIG questions:
1. Is there libertarian free will (LFW)? (Here would go as sub-questions the issue of determinism, the question whether libertarian free will is at all coherent, and so on.)
2. If LFW does not exist, do we still have moral responsibility and the related things (e.g. desert)? This is, of course, the familiar compatibility question, best asked as the question whether we can have moral responsibility without LFW (rather than with complete determinism).
3. If we do not have moral responsibility (etc.) because of the absence of LFW, or if MR is at least seriously harmed by the absence of LFW, is this a good or a bad thing?
4. What can and should we do about the conclusions to questions 1-3?

In our daily lives as free will investigators, many specific questions will concern us: How can compatibilist free will be enhanced (irrespective of LFW)? How important are things like rationality, or identification, or second-order reflection, or tracking values, or self-expression, within compatibilist free will? If there is no LFW (so that all we can have are pedestrian compatibilist forms of control), how deep can compatibilist notions of free will, desert, justice, self-respect or moral worth be? How much do we need to revise our view of free will and moral responsibility, if there is no LFW? If there is no LFW, is there a difference between the viability of the notions of free will, ability to do otherwise, moral responsibility, blameworthiness, praiseworthiness, self-respect and desert (i.e., can we have some but not others)? To what extent ought our decisions about the degree of compatibilist free will and moral responsibility to be context-dependent? Or affected by contractual or utilitarian considerations? How can we combine moderate compatibilism and moderate hard determinism? What sort of free will do people believe in, and how much can such beliefs (and related reactions and practices) change? What would be the effects of the decline of belief in libertarian free will, and should we encourage it? These are just a few quick examples of the many fruitful questions that we have been discovering relatively recently. It makes perfectly good sense to speak in such mostly van Inwagen-forbidden ways, and I think that doing so is the key to making progress on the free will problem.

Pereboom on the Weirdness of Compatibilism

I want to write a post about an interesting point Pereboom makes about compatibilism.  It is a point I’ve tried to make, however inelegantly, several times before.  But Pereboom is an eloquent writer and does a better job than I could.  I first heard him give this argument at the symposium on Fischer’s work at Inland 2006.  Now he has published an article with largely the same arguments in Philosophical Books.  Here’s Pereboom:

“While this ‘legitimately calling to moral account’ notion may be a bona fide sense of moral responsibility, it is not the one at issue in the free will debate. For incompatibilists would not find our being morally responsible in this sense to be even prima facie incompatible with determinism. The notion that incompatibilists do claim to be incompatible with determinism is rather the one defined in terms of basic desert.”

Pereboom is writing in terms of desert and moral responsibility.  But, I think, the point also applies, and with more force, to talk about “free will.”  In short, Pereboom is pointing out the remarkable, but obvious, fact that compatibilists are committed to the following claim

WEIRD: The power or faculty of “free will” is something nobody would deny most humans have most of the time.

Now, suppose you were learning about the free will debate for the first time—as all of us must have at some point.  You learn about compatibilist conceptions of free will and you learn about incompatibilist conceptions.  Perhaps you’re sufficiently unprejudiced and trying to decide which one actually captures what “free will” means.  If you are like me—and, I imagine, most compatibilists—the weirdness of compatibilism counts against it.  Personally, I thought something like “well, the compatibilist thinks free will is something that most people have, most of the time, and that just can’t be right.”  But the question is: when I think “that just can’t be right”, am I correct?

Some points:

1. Compatibilism isn’t committed to WEIRD per se.  For example, I can imagine that a compatibilist is genuinely committed to requiring powers the existence of which is controversial.  The neurotic compatibilism of Nahmias is something like this (although, even then, the threats that concern Nahmias don’t seem so troubling, and he seems to share my optimism about this).  Similarly, a compatibilist might require “free will” to involve something that no human being has—perhaps something like an IQ of 2000.  But, in practice, most compatibilists are committed to this weird claim.  Whether we are discussing Fischer’s ownership and reasons-responsiveness, Frankfurt’s identification and hierarchy of desires, Watson’s concern with values, Dennett’s list of evolved faculties, these are all powers that nobody would deny most people have most of the time.

2. To appreciate this point, consider this analogy: people are arguing about whether ZERODOME exists (you can substitute the non-sensical word of your choice).  The existence of ZERODOME is very contentious.  People have been arguing for millennia.  People have been put to death because of the belief in ZERODOME; others have been spared the death penalty because people doubted whether ZERODOME exists.  One group says: ZERODOME is the Loch Ness monster.  This makes sense, because people have argued about whether the Loch Ness monster exists.  Sure, only one of the Loch Ness believers, or the Loch Ness doubters, can be right at the end of the day.  But at least they were arguing.  Another group, however, says ZERODOME is the city of London.  But this is strange.  It was extremely contentious that ZERODOME exists, yet it is not extremely contentious that London exists.  In fact, it’s not contentious at all.  So it would be very strange if ZERODOME and London were the same thing.  That analysis doesn’t seem to capture the controversial element of whatever ZERODOME was supposed to be.  Yet this is precisely what the London group says: ZERODOME is something that nobody would ever doubt exists.  So a newcomer, trying to decide whether ZERODOME means the Loch Ness monster or London, might feel inclined towards believing it means the Loch Ness monster.

3. It is important to note that you can’t say this about the other analyses of free will in the literature.  Consider first the libertarian conception of free will.  Unlike ownership and reasons-responsiveness, and unlike having five fingers on each hand, the question of whether we are unmoved movers (e.g agent causes) or whether spooky physics in our brains gives us free will is controversial.  Some people actually believe we have these powers and some people strongly doubt that we do.  The libertarian analysis of free will is not weird, in the same way that the compatibilist analysis is, because it is consistent with “free will” being controversial.  One can even make this point, with only slightly less force, about logically impossible conceptions of free will, because even their proponents, like Galen Strawson and Thomas Nagel, insist that—however impossible this kind of free will is—belief in it is incredibly hard to shake.  Fischer, Frankfurt, Watson, and Dennett say no such thing about their kind of free will—they never doubted, in their wildest dreams, that most humans, most of the time, have these weaker powers.  So, again, the other parties of the debate analyze free will in a way that is consistent with people doubting that free will exists.  Compatibilists do not—they make the weird claim that free will is something nobody would doubt that most people have most of the time.

I am not 100% sure that this argument, so formulated, is right.  Is it not possible, for example, that people might argue about whether something (“free will”) exists without knowing, and only later discovering, that it is identical to something that everyone agrees exists?  But I suspect that a better formulation would work.

The compatibilist can say: “Imagine that MYSTERYKEY is a key that opens the mystery door to the tomb.  People argue about whether MYSTERYKEY exists—it is unclear whether any key in existence will open that door.  But everyone agrees that KNOWNKEY exists.  KNOWNKEY is a big gold key that the mayor owns.  The mayor has never tried to open the mystery door with KNOWNKEY.  One day, he tried to open the door with KNOWNKEY and it opens.  People discover that MYSTERYKEY and KNOWNKEY are the same.  So, even though people doubted that MYSTERYKEY existed and agreed that KNOWNKEY existed, MYSTERYKEY and KNOWNKEY can still be the same.”

I suspect that a dogged incompatibilist can resist these sorts of counter-examples.  Pereboom’s point about the weirdness of compatibilism has a strong pull on my intuitions.  But much more needs to be said.  Perhaps the one who needs to say the most is the compatibilist.  Because compatibilism is weird, in a way that incompatibilism is not (as described above), it seems that compatibilists owe us an explanation for this weirdness, like the explanation the mayor can give for how MYSTERYKEY and KNOWNKEY are identical.  Although there is no shortage of compatibilist writings for me to look over, it’s not clear to me that compatibilists have provided such an explanation (and if they have, please feel free to remind me).  They seem to still owe us an explanation for how the existence of free will ended up not being contentious at all.

David Brooks on the Morality Line

David Brooks has an article at the NYT (behind a pay wall) on moral responsibility in the Virginia Tech shootings. A version of the article has also been posted here (free).

Argument from the Authority of my 2 1/2 year old Daughter

As many here know, I’m a huge fan of Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment,” but I’ve never really been convinced by the argument. Why should my proneness to experiencing an attitude connected to moral responsibility make me think that the belief in moral responsibility is immune from rational criticism? Just a few weeks ago, however, as I was watching Toy Story 2 with my daughter Eliza, I felt the force of Strawson’s argument for maybe the first time. For those who don’t know the movie, a toy store owner (henceforth “the Chicken Man”) steals Woody, the toy cowboy voiced by Tom Hanks, from a yard sale just as Woody is saving broken penguin squeaky toy from the 25 cents box. The Chicken Man intends to sell Woody to a Japanese toy museum for a large amount of money. He's about to put Woody on an airplane and make his fortune when Buzz Lightyear, Mr. Potatohead, a slinky dog, and a dinosaur voiced by the playwright Wallace Shawn rescue Woody at the last minute.

Now (bear with me) the Chicken Man’s running TV gimmick throughout the movie is to dress up like a chicken and say ‘come to Al’s Toy Barn—everything for a buck buck buck.” At the end of the movie, we see him on TV and he’s doing his schtick but now he’s crying because his diabolical plan was ruined: “Everything for a [sob] buck [sob] buck [sob] buck.

Like most toddlers, my daughter is very attuned to the emotional states of others. When we watch movies, she’ll say to me repeatedly “Nemo’s Daddy sad.” “Cindarella sad.” “Gromit’s sad.” And it really bothers her. She’ll look at me, tilt her head, and ask ‘soon happy?’ Usually I can say “yes, soon happy” because we haven’t started to watch 70s film with dark endings yet. (I’m waiting until she turns six before we watch Chinatown.)

This time, when we see the commercial and the chicken man is sobbing, my daughter says (as usual):

“He’s sad.”

But then, after a two second pause, she adds:

“I’m glad he’s sad.”

The first thing that struck me was that retributive emotions run pretty deep. Eliza, not even three, already thinks: ‘it’s good when bad people are sad.’ And I can almost guarantee she wasn’t performing a utilitarian calculation when she expressed that sentiment.

More troubling for me, I thought she was right! Yet I’m committed to the view that no one deserves blame because everything is swallowed up by moral luck. So then I tried to think: OK, this chicken man had bad constitutive luck, circumstantial luck, wasn’t ultimately responsible for... but then I realized: I don’t care! I’m glad he’s sad too. I don’t care what kind of bad moral luck he’s had. I don’t care that the chicken man wasn’t causa sui, or had bad constitutive luck, or that his act may have been determined, or that he was not ultimately responsible for any of the factors leading to his character or action. Eliza's right! The Chicken Man deserves to be sad, period. All the theories in the world haven’t made an impression like she did that evening.

I’m not exactly sure what to make of this story. I can’t say it marks the end of my skepticism about moral responsibility. But I feel like it’s philosophically important somehow. (Or maybe not.)

By the Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth!

Coming to this very blog, a display of mystery, illusion, and philosophical prestigiditation! The Haifan Illusionist (aka Saul Smilansky) will expound on the recently discovered text "How To Think about the Problem of Free Will." Ancient sources attribute the text to the Mysterionist of South Bend, Peter van Inwagen.

The prestige will be unveiled sometime during the week of April 30th. Prepare to be amazed.

Warning: The Garden of Forking Paths is not responsible for any fainting that should occur from laws of nature being defied or the revelation of other arcana best not seen by the weak of mind. Indeed, the Garden may not be responsible for anything at all.

(Thanks to Saul Smilansky and Peter van Inwagen for agreeing to comment and provide the paper, respectively).

Cokely and Feltz on the Folk Containing Both Compatibilists and Incompatibilists

I'm surprised that this has not been mentioned (to my knowledge) at the Garden yet: the Experimental Philosophy blog has a post introducing new research by Cokely and Feltz on free will and folk intuitions.  They describe their main thesis thus:

"Our main finding is that there seem to be groups of people who express compatibilist or incompatibilist intuitions--hence, the folk are not compatibilists or incompatibilists. Moreover, contrary to Nahmias et al's tentative position, our data suggest the biggest group of folk are incompatibilists. Section 3 reports these new findings (sections 1 and 2 are background)."

Their conclusions seem intuitive to me.  But I need to read it again to digest how these new results square with the earlier findings by Knobe, Nahmias, and their colleagues.  I'm also very curious to see how these results might fit with the research that Nahmias, with others, is currently conducting.

The paper is here.
The Experimental Philosophy post is here.

Enjoy.

Neurolaw Revisited

As I noted a few weeks back, there was a recent article in The New York Times by Jeffrey Rosen concerning the growing new field of neuro-law.  The central issue in Rosen's piece is the role that cognitive neuroscience (CNS) can (and should) play with respect to the criminal law (and its underlying notion of criminal culpability).  In the article, Rosen mentions an interesting paper by O. Carter Snead entitled “Neuroimaging and the ‘Complexity’ of Capital Punishment.”  And while Snead mostly limits his attention to the role that CNS could play with respect to capital sentencing (and punishment) rather than punishment more generally, for present purposes I want to use his argument as a way of jump starting a discussion concerning the general relationship between CNS and criminal law.

For starters, I want to first provide a brief overview of what I am going to call the Cognitive Neurolaw Agenda (CNLA)—an agenda that Snead associates with the following two-fold goal:  (a) the short term goal of CNLA: get CNS findings into the courtroom as mitigating evidence, (b) the long term goal of CNLA: use findings from CNS both to debunk retributivism at the institutional level and to develop a forward looking two-pronged preventative and rehabilitative regime. 

According to Snead, the proponents of CNLA envision the long term goal as a focused attempt to adopt a more humane and compassionate response to the crime problem than the present retributivist regime. Snead criticizes CNLA on two fronts.  On the one hand, he tries to show that the short term goal and long term goal of CNLA are inconsistent.  By his lights, the present goal of using data from CNS to mitigate or exculpate blame would be undermined by the long-term goal of purging the criminal law of retributivist principles.  On the other hand, Snead claims that if the long-term goal of CNLA were to come to fruition, it would make the system of criminal law more rather than less brutalizing and inhumane. 

Jonathan Cohen and Joshua Greene are two individuals who advocate for something roughly like CNLA.  In a very fascinating paper entitled “For the Law, Neuroscience Changes Nothing and Everything,” they argue that as the public becomes better informed with respect to the gathering data from CNS, it will have a transformative effect on our beliefs about agency, autonomy, free will, and moral responsibility.  Moreover, according to Cohen and Greene, this paradigm shift in our self-conception will usher in a paradigm shift with respect to criminal law as well.  On their view, a forward looking and preventative and rehabilitative regime will eventually replace the backward looking retributive model we have now.  As Snead correctly points out, “Cohen and Greene do not merely believe that the overthrow of retribution by cognitive neuroscience will yield a better functioning system of criminal justice.  They believe that it will make it more humane for criminal defendants” (Snead: 45). 

Proponents of CNLA not only believe that retributivism is undermined by the gathering evidence from CNS, they also believe that purging the criminal law of retributivistic principles will have a humanizing effect on the law.  In this respect, the CNLA fits quite nicely with the progressive and reformative theories of punishment developed earlier by Becarria, Bentham, Wooten, and others.  What is envisioned is no less than an entire paradigm shift from a regime that focuses on the suffering of the defendants to one that focuses on both the defendant’s well-being as well as the well-being of society at large.  The benefit of CNS—according to proponents of CNLA—is that it may help soften (or perhaps even eliminate) the public’s retribuvistic impulses and beliefs—thereby paving the way for the transformation of the criminal law envisioned two centuries ago by reformers such as Bentham.

Snead’s main criticism of CNLA is that:

Simply put, the project, taken as a whole, is utterly at war with itself.  The short term aim relies on a particular theory of mitigation that is firmly grounded in the notion of just deserts—a principle that is explicitly rejected by the architects of the cognitive neuroscience project as destructive and unintelligible (Snead: 54).

On his view, “it is only by virtue of the doctrine of just deserts that neuroimaging evidence of the roots of criminal violence can be understood as mitigating…the long term aspiration seeks to undermine and destroy the very distributive principle of retributivist justice upon which that of the short term depends.” (Snead: 54)  Moreover, not only does Snead think that the long term success of CNLA will undermine the use of CNS for establishing mitigating factors, he also claims that the data from CNS will still be used to establishing aggravating factors and future dangerousness.  As he says:

In a further ironic twist, once retribution is snuffed out as a distributive principles of punishment is replaced with a regime that single-mindedly concerns itself with the prediction of crime and the incapacitation of criminals, the only possible significance of the body of neuro-imaging research on the roots of criminal violence for capital sentencing (on which the short term approach is erected) is as an aggravating factor of future dangerousness (Snead: 60).

In addition to purportedly establishing that CNLA is internally inconsistent, Snead also claims that even if the long term goal of CNLA were to come to fruition, it would have a brutalizing rather than a humanizing effect on the criminal law.  In supporting this claim, he suggests that:

Many of the features of the criminal justice system that arte frequently criticized as draconian and inhumane, are in fact, motivated by the consequentialist crime-control rationale of predicting and controlling dangerous behavior.  Such measures include: laws that authorize life sentences for recidivists; laws that reduce the age at which offenders can be tried as adults; laws that punish gang membership; laws that require the registration of sex offenders; laws that increase sentences dramatically by virtue of past history; and, most paradigmatically, laws that provide for the involuntary commitment of predators who ‘show difficulty’ in controlling their behavior (Snead: 63).

Snead takes these examples as evidence that if the proponents of CNLA are successful in transforming both public opinion and the criminal law, this success will produce more rather than less draconian punishments.

I am presently working on a response to Snead’s paper—but it is still really rough around the edges.  For now, I just wanted to float two knee-jerk responses to Snead that may hopefully generate some discussion here on GFP.

Objection One:

Snead tries to show that if CNLA’s long term goal of purging the law of retributivism were successful, defense attorneys would no longer be able to use evidence from CNS as a mitigating factor.  According to Snead, the very notion of a mitigating circumstance only makes sense against the backdrop of retributivist justice.  After all, the whole point of trying to establish that there were mitigating circumstances surrounding a defendant’s actions is to show that he is less than fully blameworthy.  But if—as the proponents of CNLA suggest—no one is blameworthy, then the very idea of mitigating circumstances becomes otiose.  If all of us are equally blameless, there is no blame to mitigate!  Snead takes this to show that in some sense CNLA defeats itself.  But is this correct? 

The most obvious move for the proponent of CNLA to make is to simply deny that the underlying issues that presently arise in the courtroom when judges and juries consider mitigating and aggravating circumstances would have no roll to play in a purely forward looking regime.  Keep in mind that consequentialists such as Bentham insist that certain restrictions are to be put in place when it comes to punishment.  Minimally, in order for punishment to be justified in a given case, punishing that individual must not be groundless, inefficacious, unprofitable, or needless.  On this view, determining whether punishing an individual fails on one of these fronts requires judges and jurors to look very carefully at the specific circumstances surrounding a violation as well as the specific circumstances surrounding the mental states of the agent.  Finding out that someone had less than full control over their action does not make them less blameworthy—after all, in some sense, no one is blameworthy according to the proponents of CNLA—but it does make punishing them less sensible.

If Snead just means to claim that the long-term goal of CNLA would undermine the notion of a mitigating circumstance, then what he says is in some sense true by definition.  After all, if “mitigating” just means “blame reducing,” then clearly the long-term goals of CNLA threaten the role of mitigating circumstances in the criminal law.  But notice this would also undermine the notion of an aggravating circumstance as well.  But it does not follow than the very same issues that arise when we presently consider aggravating and mitigating factors won’t arise in a post-retributivistic world.  Just because we may no longer talk about a defendant’s blame, we may nevertheless be very interested in his upbringing, his beliefs, his mental and emotional capacities, his impulsiveness, his susceptibility to addiction, and the degree of remorse he expresses.  These are all factors that will surely continue to play a central role in our criminal proceedings—albeit for different reasons.  Rather than appealing to these factors under the banner of determining moral and legal blameworthiness, we will appeal to them under the banner of determining what needs to be done in order to rehabilitate and reintegrate criminals into society more effectively and efficiently. 

Moreover, by focusing on crime prevention and rehabilitation rather than general deterrence, the proponent of CNLA can further allay many of Snead’s worries since much of his fretting seems to be driven by the assumption that all forward-looking punishment theorists are going to focus on general deterrence more than prevention and rehabilitation (see, for instance, his discussion of the debate between Bentham and Blackstone concerning excuses and utilitarianism). 

Critics of forward-looking theories of punishment often conveniently forget that these theories almost always focus first and foremost on crime prevention rather than general deterrence.  The importance of this forgetfulness is a story for another day.  For now, I just want to point out that Snead makes a blanket assumption about forward-looking theories of punishment that cannot withstand close scrutiny.  Nearly all of the factors that retributivists think are relevant to determining how much punishment criminals deserve will be relevant to the consequentialist’s attempt to figure out how to reform and rehabilitate criminals.  Indeed, the only factor that will be irrelevant to consequentialist is how much suffering criminals deserve for their transgressions.

Objection Two:

Snead claims that forward-looking theories of punishment are ironically to blame for what he takes to be the recent dehumanizing of the criminal law (e.g., mandatory minimum sentences, trying children as adults, and the like).  My response is two-fold:  First, his claim appears to be false on the facts.  The criminology literature over the past twenty years reveals that the pernicious and counter-productive punishments Snead identifies have been driven not by consequentialism but by the rebirth of retributivism that we witnessed in this country beginning in the late 1970’s.  Moreover, not only does the criminology literature show that Snead is wrong about the source of these new forms of “hard treatment,” it also reveals that most criminologists are painfully aware of just how unsuccessful many of these programs are in the grand scheme of things when it comes to crime prevention.  Indeed, I suspect that one could show that each and every one of the punishments Snead mentioned would fail one of Bentham’s aforementioned four conditions for justified punishment.

Second, even if we grant for the sake of argument that abandoning retributivism would produce longer sentences for less serious violations, Snead’s worries seem to sneak retributivism in through the back door.  Keep in mind that one reason we are particularly keen on making sure we don’t send innocent people to jail is that prisons are brutal, dehumanizing, and depressing places that are designed to punish criminals rather than reform or rehabilitate them.  It is precisely because of the prevalence of hard treatment that makes punishment so brutal.  Minimally, the brutality of our current regime makes the worry about punishing the innocent (or punishing people more than they deserve) all the more pressing.  But if we viewed prisoners as human beings who understandably need our assistance in being part of society rather than apt targets of our retributivistic impulses, “prisons” would look less like dungeons in the dark ages and more like treatment facilities.  For now, we need not worry about what these facilities might look like.  It should suffice to point out that they would not look anything like they do now.  By my lights, Snead’s argument only appears successful because he forgets to take into account just how radically different the criminal law would look if the proponents of CNLA have their way.  His worries about dehumanization are fueled by a failure to take into consideration the myriad of ways that CNLA would change the way society views criminality. 

Once we let go of the idea that people deserve to suffer for their anti-social sins, we will quickly see that what criminals need is encouragement, a sense of self-worth and accomplishment, the ability to read and write, the fortitude and determination to stay off drugs, anger management, treatment for mental illness, job skills, and the like.  And when our best attempts to build up the criminal fail to stave off his future criminality, we may regrettably need to quarantine him.  But the place where he will be housed will not be a prison of ill-repute but a more hospitable place that is not designed to make the individual suffer any more than he already has as a result of his inability to play by the social rules.  By my lights, retributivists such as Snead can only scare us away from forward-looking theories of punishment that focus on prevention and rehabilitation by keeping a lot of the backdrop against which we are asked to judge these theories decidedly retributivistic.  This kind of shortsightedness makes retributivism appear to be part of the solution rather than the ultimate source of the bulk of the problems!

Fischer Heads South

On 26 April, GFP's very own John Fischer will depart the beauty and serenity of Riverside and head south to the dingy Tijuana suburb of San Diego to give a talk entitled "Source Incompatibilism."  Word on the street is that he's going to publically acknowledge his newfound support for SI and his repudiation of semi-compatibilism.  OK, so I just made that up—but one can hope.  (It's not too late to convert, John!)  Any Gardeners in the area wanting to come join the festivities are welcome.  The talk is scheduled for 12:30 on USD's campus.

Neurolaw in The NY Times

I originally hoped that my first post here would be more substantive than this one, but apparently that was not in the cards!  Instead, I simply want to point the Gardeners to an article in yesterday's NYT about neurolaw in the event that some of you have not already seen it.  I thought the crew here might not only find the piece interesting, but it might even open the door to yet another discussion here concerning the thorny relationship between the gathering data in the sciences of the mind and our (shrinking?) autonomy and responsibility. 

Free Will and Cognitive Biases Part 4: The Most Important Bias of All?

When I researched free will and cognitive biases last summer, I found myself in an awkward position. The plausibility of some biases having influence on the free will debate was obvious enough: the illusion of control, the fundamental attribution error, the just world phenomenon, etc. But the plausibility of other biases being relevant was often less obvious. Yet, sometimes, it was these “hard sells” that I, personally, thought would be most important to the debate.

In this shorter post, I want to describe one of the harder sells. To convey the notion, I first want to focus upon the idea of a happy coincidence: people might find certain constraints on their alleged freedom to be less disturbing if they are more confident that things turned out, nevertheless, the “right” way.

Consider this interesting data point: those who tend to be non-realists about free will also to also be non-realists about moral truths. This is true of at least myself, Tamler Sommers, Richard Double, and Joshua Greene (correct me if I have gotten this wrong). Why might this be? It may just be that these persons find themselves attracted to deflationary views in general (e.g. perhaps they enjoy shocking people with their outrageous claims). I want to suggest something deeper is going on: such non-realists feel it is less of a happy coincidence that they are who are they are and do what they do. For example, a person who both (i) believes that killing innocent people is wrong and (ii) finds himself as the sort of person who neither kills innocent people nor wants to do so probably considers this a happy coincidence. Even if he lacks the freedom to be, or have become, such a killer, this freedom does not undermine his sense of free will much, because he has nevertheless found himself on the one, true path (so to speak). A non-realist (or anti-realist) about moral truths, however, does not have this luxury.

Given this consideration about happy coincidences, I wonder: is there a cognitive bias that might be relevant here? I had not thought so until I remembered Smilansky’s lovely phrase “we are merely the unfolding of the given.” Smilanksy is right, I think, to characterize the free will problem as one about the self, and one’s relationship with the self, and this worry about given-ness. Just how disturbing is this given-ness and how disturbing should this given-ness be? There is a prominent cognitive bias that might distort our judgments about that which we are given: it is called the endowment effect. According to the endowment effect, people develop undue liking, or irrational fondness, for that which is given to them. There is similar bias called the mere exposure effect: people develop undue liking, or irrational fondness, for that with which they are familiar.

Suppose that the endowment effect and mere exposure effect are real. Then one tantalizing possibility is that compatibilists and libertarians finds Smilansky’s given-ness to be less disturbing because of a happy accident—an arguably irrational one. The idea here is that, because we are given the original traits and characters we have (the “slant” of our constitution, to use Fischer’s phrase), that alone gives us a preference for being ourselves. And as we grow more familiar with ourselves, at the expense of familiarity with others, this irrational preference grows and continues. Because we prefer being ourselves, we feel less disturbed at the given-ness which Smilansky describes. By analogy, a boy at Christmas might say “wow, I thought it was so awful that I couldn’t choose my own Christmas presents, but then I discovered that I got just the presents I wanted! With a Santa Claus like that, who needs to make their own decisions about presents?” We regard ourselves as happy accidents but, to the extent that these biases are irrational, this may be a mistake. I actually suspect that this bias may be the most relevant of all to the free will problem (which is not to say that I suspect its absolute relevance is great; further experiments may help settle that different question).

The level after next: Clarke on Vihvelin

You've heard of taking it to the next level. Now witness the spectacle, nay, the earth-shattering event of Randy Clarke taking it to the level after next! As Beyonce taught us all to say, I don't think you can handle this. So, get your mama, get your copy of Kadri Vihvelin's paper, and get ready to join in the extraordinary experience of the latest edition of the GFP Online Reading Group.

Thanks to Ed Minar and Phil Topics for letting us post a copy of Kadri's paper.

Randy's comments begin below the line:
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Compatibilists have long argued that having an ability to act is having a causal power or disposition. Incompatibilists have long disagreed. The dispute was, for a long time, side-tracked by the mistaken assumption, on both sides, that causal powers or dispositions are analyzable in terms of simple conditionals: e.g., x is water soluble iff, if x is immersed in water, x dissolves.

Incompatibilists were right that having an ability to act is not analyzable in terms of any such conditional. But the core compatibilist claim, that having an ability to act is having a causal power (or a bundle of dispositions) is nevertheless correct. Seeing where the simple conditional analysis of dispositions goes wrong allows us to see where the simple conditional analysis of ability to act goes wrong, and we can then see that the latter mistake leaves untouched the thesis that an ability to act is a disposition (or a bundle of dispositions). With this correct view of ability to act, we can see that having free will–having the ability to make choices on the basis of reasons--is compatible with determinism, and, indeed, that even in Frankfurt scenarios, agents are able to choose and act otherwise.

So, in brief, argues Kadri Vihvelin in “Free Will Demystified: A Dispositional Account” (Philosophical Topics 32, nos. 1 & 2 [2004]: 427-50).

The paper is rich and instructive. (Pointing out the parallel [pp. 444-45] between cases involving disposition finks and an objection from Lehrer meant to counter conditional analyses of ability is one of many nice observations.) There’s long been a need to bring to bear on the free will debate some very good recent work on dispositions, and Vihvelin’s paper is one of a few recent papers that begin to fill this need. There’s a lot I’d like to say about the paper; I’ll have to select only a few points for comment. (Even so, the comments are lengthy. If you aren’t at all interested in what dispositions are [though you should be!], you might skip no. 1.)

1. What was wrong with the simple conditional analysis of dispositions? For one thing, the analysis failed for cases involving finks, entities that might remove a disposition in just the circumstances that would ordinarily trigger its manifestation, or that might add a disposition in precisely such circumstances. A glass might be fragile, disposed to shatter if struck. Yet a wizard might stand ready to render the glass non-fragile should it be struck. Then, although the glass is fragile, it is false that it would shatter if struck. Conversely, a wizard might render a glass non-fragile (by somehow changing its molecular structure), but stand ready to make it fragile as soon as it is struck. Then, although the glass isn’t fragile, it would shatter if struck.

In his “Finkish Dispositions” (Philosophical Quarterly 47 [1997]: 143-58), David Lewis observed that finks work by altering intrinsic properties of objects that constitute the causal bases of their dispositions. He proposed the following template for a revised conditional analysis of dispositions:

RCAD: Something x is disposed at time t to give response r to stimulus s iff, for some intrinsic property B that x has at t, for some time t’ after t, if x were to undergo stimulus s at time t and retain property B until t’, s and x’s having of B would jointly be an x-complete cause of x’s giving response r. (Lewis, p 157)

(An x-complete cause is “a cause complete in so far as havings of properties intrinsic to x are concerned, though perhaps omitting some events extrinsic to x” [Lewis, p. 156].)

Vihvelin assumes, for the sake of her argument, that something like RCA is correct. But it is quite doubtful that anything like RCA is correct.

a) Finks remove or add dispositions. Things of another sort–masks--prevent dispositions from manifesting without removing the dispositions. A poison’s power to kill when ingested can be masked by an ingested antidote. A glass’s fragility can be masked by internal packing that prevents breakage even if the glass is struck. Masking presents a difficulty even for RCAD. For, given the possibility of masking, the causal basis for a disposition may be present and retained, the stimulus conditions may be present, and yet the manifestation not occur.

Can any conditional analysis accommodate masking? One might think that all the possible maskers of a given disposition can be considered part of the stimulus condition, or that an additional condition that none of these maskers is present can be added to the analysis. But one difficulty with either strategy is that there is no end to what might mask a given disposition; a comprehensive list of potential maskers would be infinite. And all that they need have in common is that they can prevent the manifestation of the disposition, even when (the rest of) the stimulus as well as the causal basis of the disposition are present. To cover them with any such general characterization would trivialize the analysis.

b) Even setting aside masking, the stimulus conditions for the manifestation of a disposition need not guarantee its manifestation. There need be no such guarantee. A causal power might be indeterministic. In the case of such a disposition, the stimulus might be present, the causal basis retained, and all masks absent, and still the manifestation might or might not occur. This point would not seem irrelevant when what is at issue is the proper understanding of an ability to choose otherwise, particularly if such an ability is, even in part, a causal power. Shouldn’t it, at the start, be an open question whether the ability to choose otherwise includes such a power?

c) Some dispositions are unconditional: their manifestations aren’t conditional on any stimulus. Some such dispositions might be continuously manifesting. George Molnar (Powers, Oxford University Press: 2003, p. 87) suggests that rest mass may be such a disposition, as massive objects manifest gravitational power in interaction with space-time for as long as they possess mass.

Other unconditional dispositions spontaneously manifest. Again, here’s an example from Molnar (p. 85): a muon has a capacity to decay into an electron, a neutrino, and an antineutrino. The power is manifested (when it is) without any trigger or stimulus.

Of course, the point stands if there so much as can be such unconditional dispositions. No conditional analysis can cover them.

Certainly no one wants to claim that abilities to act are continuously manifesting dispositions. And no one should hold that an ability to act is just a spontaneously manifesting disposition, for the manifestation of such a disposition, in a case like that of the muon, is just a matter of chance. But might incompatibilists not think (something along these lines) that having an ability to choose to A is having a spontaneously manifesting disposition AND its being up to you whether, on the occasion in question, that disposition is manifested?

2. Setting aside the question of whether there is any correct conditional analysis of dispositions, is there some such analysis of ability to act?

Vihvelin observes that abilities to act (like dispositions) can be finkish. A fink can remove an ability in just those circumstances in which it would, if retained, be exercised, or create an ability to act only when such circumstances obtain. The lesson, she recommends, is that “persons have abilities by having intrinsic properties that are the causal basis of the ability” (p. 438). She suggests the following Revised Conditional Analysis of Ability:

RCAA: S has the ability at time t to do X iff, for some intrinsic property or set of properties B that S has at t, for some time t’ after t, if S chose (decided, intended, or tried) at t to do X, and S were to retain B until t’, S’s choosing (deciding, intending, or trying) to do X and S’s having of B would jointly be an S-complete cause of S’s doing X (p. 438).

(To be precise, her claim is that RCAA, or something reasonably close, is correct for “basic abilities,” those that are dispositions. “Complex abilities, including the ability to make choices for reasons, are not dispositions; they are bundles of dispositions” [p. 439]. On the ability to choose, see no. 6 below.)

Vihvelin argues (pp. 441-45) that various objections that were taken to be forceful against the simple conditional analysis of ability fail when applied to RCAA. Some of her claims here are puzzling.

One objection was that an agent may be able to A, and yet may try but fail to A. (J. L. Austin’s case, in “Ifs and Cans,” of the golfer who misses a putt of a sort that he usually makes is an example.) Vihvelin says the objection has no force against RCAA, but it seems to apply as powerfully here as it does against the simple conditional analysis, for it has nothing to do with subtraction or addition of any causal basis of the ability.

Another objection was that the conditional ‘if S chose (decided, intended, or tried) to do X, then S would do X’ may be true, but still S may be unable to do X, for S may be unable to choose (decide, intend, or try) to do X. Vihvelin considers this objection as part of a regress objection (which adds that if we in turn try to analyze ‘S is able to choose to do X’ in terms of a similar conditional, then we are off on an infinite regress). But the original objection may be considered in its own right, and as such it seems to count as fully against RCAA as it does against the simple conditional analysis. It may be true that (as Vihvelin says) some agent (an animal, or a young child) may have an ability to perform an action of type A without having any ability to choose to A, but the further possibility that some agent may lack that ability to choose and, for just that reason, lack the ability to A undermines RCAA as an analysis of ability to act. For despite that lack of ability to choose to A, the agent may have some set of intrinsic properties B such that, if the agent chose to A and retained B, then the agent’s choosing to A and her having B would jointly be an agent-complete cause of her A-ing.

Vihvelin also suggests that, in such a case, if asked whether the agent can A, we should answer ‘yes’ and ‘no’. But the ‘yes’ goes against one of her remarks about her target: she is concerned with the ability that is relevant to moral responsibility. An agent who can’t A because she can’t choose to A may, because of that inability, be excused from responsibility.

3. Setting aside the question of whether there is any correct conditional analysis of either dispositions or abilities to act, is ability to act a disposition (or a bundle of dispositions)?

Vihvelin notes (p. 431) several important similarities between dispositions and agents’ abilities to act. Like dispositions, abilities to act are relatively stable features that typically continue to exist even when not being manifested. Indeed, like a disposition, an ability to perform an action of a certain type can exist even if never manifested. And as objects possessing a certain disposition can behave in certain ways, so agents possessing a certain ability to act can act in that way.

On the basis of such observations, Vihvelin advances the following:

ABD: To have an ability is to have a disposition or a bundle of dispositions (p. 431).

Is this claim correct?

Here are some things we might have in mind when we think or say that someone, S, has an ability to (is able to, can) do something, A:

i) S has a general capacity to A. (S can speak Spanish, ride a bicycle, drive a car, etc.)

ii) S has a general capacity to A, and the circumstances are friendly to S’s exercising that capacity. (S is capable of driving a car, she has a functioning car handy, she has the keys to it, the weather is mild, there are good roads between her house and her intended destination, etc.)

iii) S has a general capacity to A, and it is open to S (at some specified time) to exercise (at some specified time) that capacity.

iv) S has a general capacity to A, and it is up to S (at some specified time) whether S (at some specified time) exercises that capacity.

v) S has a general capacity to A, and S has a choice (at some specified time) about whether S (at some specified time) exercises that capacity.

Some of these characterizations are less than perfectly clear; one thing we might seek is further clarification of them. Perhaps some are equivalent to others. Note that on none of them is an ability to do otherwise explicitly incompatible with determinism. It may be, however, that some argument shows that on one or another of these characterizations, the ability to do otherwise is in fact so incompatible.

The type of ability characterized in (i) is quite plausibly just a causal power, or a bundle of such powers. ABD is apparently correct about such abilities. But the other sorts of abilities aren’t so obviously just dispositions, though having each may require having some dispositions. ABD isn’t so obviously correct about them.

Is, then, THE ability to act just a disposition (or a bundle of them)? Arguably the question carries a false presupposition. There are many different things that we might be thinking or talking about when we think or say that someone can or is able to do a certain thing.

4. Can agents act otherwise in Frankfurt scenarios? Vihvelin points out (p. 447) that the would-be intervener in common Frankfurt scenarios is a fink: he doesn’t actually remove any of the agent’s dispositions, but he would, if necessary, remove those that constitute the ability to do otherwise. But since none of these dispositions is actually removed, the agent is in fact able to do otherwise, despite the set up. Frankfurt’s claim to have shown that responsibility is compatible with the inability to do otherwise is thus mistaken.

How could there possibly have been any disagreement on this point? Consider this hypothesis: there is a type of ability, ability_V, that Vihvelin is concerned with when she maintains that, even in Frankfurt scenarios, agents are able to do otherwise. And there is a different type of ability, ability_O, that her opponents are concerned with when they deny that, in Frankfurt scenarios, agents can do otherwise. Vihvelin is right that, in Frankfurt scenarios (at least in prior-sign cases), the agents have the ability_V to do otherwise. Her opponents are right that, in those scenarios, the agents lack the ability_O to do otherwise. (So maybe we CAN all be friends.)

Vihvelin’s concern is, I think, roughly, (i) above. The would-be intervener doesn’t actually mess with such abilities. But the presence of the would-be intervener arguably undermines abilities of some of the other types.

Vihvelin says that her target is the ‘can’ that is relevant to moral responsibility. If the agent in the Frankfurt scenario is responsible for what she does, then obviously no ability that is relevant to moral responsibility is missing. Vihvelin’s opponents might be tempted to say that Frankfurt’s argument shows that NO ability to do otherwise is required for moral responsibility, but perhaps that is too strong. Surely certain powers or general capacities for deciding and acting otherwise are retained by the agents in Frankfurt scenarios (at least in the prior-sign versions). Perhaps it should be accepted that, in a sense, any agent possessing those kinds of powers to A can A.

But what about ability_O? If having that type of ability to do otherwise isn’t something required for responsibility, then do we really have any interest in it, are there really any contexts in which we are concerned with it? Those who accept Frankfurt’s argument perhaps owe an answer to these questions. Since this comment is already rather long, I’ll forego offering any suggestions here.

5. Is the ability that is relevant to moral responsibility a disposition (or a bundle of dispositions)? Sometimes, in excusing, we say that someone was unable to do something, or couldn’t do it, when it was some circumstantial factor that prevented them from doing it. I regret that I wasn’t able to get to the family reunion because the airport had closed due to inclement weather. None of my intrinsic powers to get to the reunion was removed by the airport closing. There is at least A sense of ‘can’ or ‘ability’ that is relevant to responsibility and concerns more than the agent’s dispositions.

Even setting aside circumstantial factors, here’s something that one might think: to be responsible for A-ing, one must have possessed a general capacity to A, and one must have originated one’s exercise of that capacity. Whether originating an exercise of a causal power is itself simply a matter of manifesting a disposition would seem to be a relevant question. Certainly some argument would be needed to show that such origination isn’t just disposition-manifestation, but what in Vihvelin’s paper shows that it is (or, alternatively, that no such origination is required for responsibility)?

6. What is free will? Vihvelin rightly chides earlier compatibilists for attempting to reduce or replace the question of free will with that of freedom of action. Free will, she suggests, is “the ability to make choices on the basis of reasons, an ability that can be exercised in more than one way” (p. 427).  To have this ability is to have a bundle of simpler abilities, such as an ability to form and revise beliefs in response to evidence and argument, an ability to form intentions in response to one’s desires and instrumental beliefs, and an ability to engage in practical reasoning in response to one’s intention to make up one’s mind what to do (p. 439). Each of these abilities is, in turn, a disposition or a bundle of dispositions. Hence,

FWBD: To have free will is to have the ability to make choices on the basis of reasons and to have this ability is to have a bundle of dispositions (p. 429).

As with abilities to act, the ability to make a certain choice that is of concern to Vihvelin is, she says, the sort that is relevant to moral responsibility.

But now, setting things up this way just about makes it incomprehensible that anyone should have ever thought that an agent lacking an ability to choose otherwise might be responsible for what she chooses and does. Whether or not that thought is correct, it’s comprehensible that some have thought it. That’s comprehensible because there are notions of ability to choose that aren’t at all obviously tied to responsibility. Many writers simply set things up differently from the start. Perhaps their target is a type of ability to choose characterized roughly along the lines of (iii), or (iv), or (v) above. (Again, it would help if they said more about what our interest in such an ability is.)

I admire much in Vihvelin’s paper. I’ve noted here some points on which I dissent, and I’ve raised some questions that bloggers may want to discuss.

Review: John Searle's Freedom and Neurobiology.

John Searle, Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power, New York: Columbia University Press, 2006       

                                                                                                                                           By Christopher Franklin   

                                                                                                                                       

      In this short book John R. Searle proves again why he is one of the most innovative and thoughtful philosophers of our time.  Known best for his work on consciousness, Searle has recently turned his philosophical gaze towards agency (see also his book Rationality in Action).  The book is composed of seemingly two unrelated chapters that both grew out lectures delivered in Europe. However, both chapters are attempts to move us closer to a solution to what Searle calls the single overriding question in contemporary philosophy: How do humans fit in? How do we square the fact that the world is wholly composed of “mindless, meaningless, unfree, nonrational, brute physical particles” with our ordinary conception of ourselves as “conscious, intentionalistic, rational, social, institutional, speech-act performing, ethical and free will possessing agents”? (p. 5)

      Chapter 1 concerns the problem of free will and its attendant problems of rationality, consciousness, and the self.  Chapter 2 focuses on social ontology and political power.  Given the venue of this post, I found it appropriate to focus my discussion on Chapter 1.

     Before diving into the free will problem Searle lays some ground work.  It might seem anachronistic to say that the question of how we fit it is the most pressing question in contemporary philosophy.  After all, haven’t philosophers been concerned all along with precisely this question?  So what is so special about the current day?  He answers this question as follows: it has only recently become possible to treat all these topics (e.g. consciousness, rationality, language, intentionality, free will, etc.) naturalistically; we can provide answers to these questions that are consistent with and a natural outgrowth of the basic facts.  He takes the basic facts of the world to be described in the atomic theory of matter and evolutionary biology.  Searle takes the world, as described by these theories, as a starting point. 

       Moreover, there have been recent developments in philosophy that allow us to tackle this question in a way that was previously impossible.  All of the following have contributed to our privileged position: The move away from epistemology and its skeptical arguments about knowledge of the material world, the move from philosophy of language back to philosophy of mind, the destruction of a sharp line between philosophy and empirical disciplines, and also the great benefit we have from our philosophical predecessors, who over the last sixty years, have focused on answering questions in piecemeal fashion, providing distinctions and clarifications so that we can state theories in precise terms which admit of empirical verification. 

      Chapter 1 is entitled “Free Will as a Problem in Neurobiology”.  The goal of this chapter is to take the first steps towards showing how the free will problem could achieve a scientific resolution.  The task of the philosopher, as Searle sees it, is to provide a precise formulation of the problem of free will so that it admits of empirical and scientific testing.  He thinks he has done this with the mind-body problem and he also wants to do this with the problem of free will.  He wants to transform the traditional free will problem into a problem essentially about how the brain works. Let us now consider his attempt to move us towards this goal.

      The logical form of the free will problem is that we appear equally committed to two positions which are inconsistent.  We think, on the one hand, that natural phenomena occurs in such a way as to admit of deterministic explanations (contrastive explanations).  When we explain why an earthquake occurred we do not merely explain why it just so happened to occur, we explain why, given the antecedent conditions, it must have occurred.  There are sufficient causal conditions for the earthquake.  However, there appears to be a small subset of human behavior that does not admit of deterministic explanations.  We explain “free action” by citing the reasons we acted on.  However, we ordinarily do not take ourselves to be giving deterministic explanations.  Given the antecedent reasons, beliefs, and desires, we believe that we could have done otherwise.  There are not sufficient causal conditions for free action.

      The problem of free will arises from a feature of our experiences that Searle labels “volitional consciousness.”  “The feature is that I do not sense the antecedent causes of my action in the form of reasons, such as beliefs and desires, as setting causally sufficient conditions for action….” (p. 41)  This is strikingly different from perceptual consciousness; we do not experience our perceptions as being up to us in the way we experience some of our behavior as being up to us.  Searle refers to this as the experience of the gap.  This gap only occurs in a few places: (i) between reasons and the making of a decision, (ii) between decision and the onset of action, and (iii) for extended action, between the onset of action and its continuation.  But on the other hand determinism appears just as convincing.  We typically only accept explanations which cite sufficient causal conditions as true or adequate explanations for natural phenomena.  Hence the problem of free will is the problem of a certain sort of consciousness, volitional consciousness. 

      Not only do we arrive at the postulation of a gap via experience, but this gap is also reflected in the logical structure of reason explanations.  Such explanations are not deterministic in form, but instead specify a reason that an agent acted on.  Ordinary causal explanations have the logical form: A caused B.  However, rational explanations have the following logical form: “A self S performed action A, and in the performance of A, S acted on reason R” (p. 53).  But a problem arises at this point: How in the world can such explanations be adequate since they do not cite casually sufficient conditions?  They do not explain why, given A, B must have occurred and hence they do not furnish us with contrastive explanations.  So what must be the case in order for rational explanations to be adequate?  Searle believes that such explanations cannot be adequate unless we posit an irreducible, non-Humean self.  He provides the following transcendental argument for the existence of such a self (pp. 53-55):

     1) Explanations in terms of reasons do not typically cite causally sufficient conditions (assumption)

     2) Such explanations can be adequate explanations of actions (assumption)

     3) Adequate causal explanations cite conditions that, relative to the context, are causally sufficient (assumption)

     4) Construed as ordinary causal explanations, reason explanations are inadequate (conclusion)

     5) Reason explanations are not ordinary causal explanations (conclusion)

     6) Reason explanations are adequate because they explain why a self acted in a certain way.  They explain why a rational self acting in the gap acted in one way rather than another, by specifying the reason that the self acted on (conclusion)

    

      Again, it is important to note that this is not a deductive argument but a transcendental argument; one that attempts to state what necessary conditions must obtain in order for there to be adequate reason explanations. Hence, the intelligibility of reason explanations requires the postulation of an irreducible, non-Humean self.  Taking stock: the free will problem leads us to two other problems: consciousness and the self.  Consequently, a solution to the free will problem requires a solution to these problems.

      So what must the brain be like in order to realize free will?  Searle’s picture of the brain is that at the micro level there are neurons, neurotransmitters and synapses.  Consciousness is a higher-level or systemic feature entirely composed of the micro level elements.  At the higher level we have decisions leading to intentions and at the micro level we have neuron firings causing more neuron firings.  Moreover, consciousness at each instant t is completely determined by what is going on at the micro level at t.  So the free will problem now becomes this: “If we suppose there is a gap at the top level in the case of rational decision making, how might that gap be reflected at the neurobiological level?” (59).  We know there are no gaps in the brain: So what must the brain be like at the micro level in order to realize the gap at the higher-level of consciousness.  Searle thinks that if the total state of the brain at any instant t1 is causally sufficient for the state of the brain at t2, then we do not have free will.  Hence, there are two hypotheses: Hypothesis 1: for every brain state S1 at any instant t1, S1 is causally sufficient for S2 at t2.  Hence, free will is an illusion.  The experience of the gap is realized in a brain that is wholly deterministic.  Hypothesis 2: the experience of the absence of causally sufficient conditions at the psychological level is matched by the absence of causally sufficient conditions at the neurobiological level.  Hypothesis 2 envisages the brain as being such that the micro elements are sufficient to determine the conscious state at any given moment, but that the operation of the conscious self is what explains the movement from one conscious state to the next.

       However, neither Hypothesis is very satisfying.  Hypothesis 1, although consistent with what we currently know from brain science, leaves us with epiphenomenalism and this goes against everything we know about evolutionary biology.  The problem with Hypothesis 2 is its extreme demandingness.  It requires the brain to have the following three features: (1) consciousness functions causally in moving bodies, (2) the brain causes and sustains the existence of a conscious self that is able to make rational decisions and to carry them out in actions, and (3) the brain operates in such a way that the “conscious self is able to make and carry out decisions in the gap, where neither decision nor action is determined in advanced, yet both are rationally explained by reasons the agent is acting on” (p. 73).  Searle thinks that (3) is the trickiest condition.  Since quantum mechanics is the only indisputable form of indeterminism in the world, in order for Hypothesis 2 to be correct, consciousness must manifest quantum indeterminism.  But this does not necessarily mean it is random.  The whole does not necessarily have the properties of the parts.  So randomness might be a property of the parts without being a property of the whole.

     I would now like to turn to questions and comments about Searle’s intriguing project.  This first point is somewhat nitpicky, but I think it is worth mentioning for clarity sake.  I find Searle’s equating sufficient causal conditions with deterministic causal conditions objectionable.  If A nondeterministically causes B, then wouldn’t A be a sufficient cause for B?  Searle appears to simply move from sufficient causal conditions to deterministic causal conditions.  I find this usage unfortunate and at times misleading.  It would seem better to state the worry in terms of deterministic causal conditions and the experience of the gap as an experience of a lack of deterministic causal conditions. 

      Moving on to more substantive questions/comments, I worry that Searle’s program provides fertile ground for revisionism or skepticism about moral responsibility.  Searle makes it clear that he does not know whether or not we actually possess free will.  In discussing Hypothesis 2 he writes, “Notice that I do not ask, ‘How does the brain work so as to satisfy these conditions?’ because we do not know for a fact that it does satisfy these conditions…” (p. 71).  Although Searle explicitly maintains that he is not concerned with moral responsibility, his view of our current epistemological status with respect to the existence of free will raises questions about whether or not we are justified in engaging in our ordinary practices of praise and blame (which might be thought to presuppose the existence of free will). Depending on one’s temperament, one might find an argument for skepticism concerning moral responsibility or an argument for revisionism about what justifies our ordinary practices lurking in this comment.

      Lastly, although I applaud the spirit of Searle’s project, I worry to what extent the problem of free will is reducible to a problem in neurobiology.  After all, “the free will problem” hardly denotes a single problem.  So if even we were able to substantiate Hypothesis 1 or 2, would it really be correct to say that we have arrived at a solution the free will problem?  I think this question deserves a negative answer.  After all, one of the most pressing questions that is often denoted by the phrase, “the free will problem”, is whether or not free will is compatible with determinism.  Searle himself simply asserts that he is using “free will” in such a way that it is incompatible with determinism.  However, were we to discover that Hypothesis 1 is correct, could we, as fair minded philosophers, really announce that free will is illusion without first dealing with the question of whether or not it is actually compatible with determinism?  And it is far from clear to me that this latter question is reducible to any scientific discipline. 

      It seems to me that the virtue of Searle’s program is an attempt to test certain hypotheses put forward as an answer to one part the problem of free will opposed to an attempt to reduce the whole problem to a neurobiological problem.  Hence, it seems somewhat exaggerated to say that problem of free will just is whether the brain states at t1 are sufficient to cause the brain states at t2.  Instead, such testing will help us in discerning the viability of certain libertarian programs.  So again, I fine Searle’s approach quite advantageous when it comes to specific hypothesis offered as a solution to one aspect of the free will problem, but I am dubious about whether the whole problem can be reduced to science.

      However, despite some of my disagreements with Searle, I am a huge admirer of this excellent piece of philosophical work. I am confident that it will generate interesting research programs and many responses from various fields of inquiry.

                                       

      Christopher Franklin

Cognitive Biases and Free Will Part I: The Dual-Process Challenge

I’ve presented challenges to free willism in other posts. For example, I still find the prospect of a “Medicalized Society”, according to which wrongdoers are treated almost like sickly or diseased people, to pose a fascinating challenge.

More recently, I’ve become interested in cognitive biases that seem to affect humans in general. These biases suggest another possibility: the dual process hypothesis. The dual process hypothesis paints a picture of the mind like the following:

1. the mind has both (i) slower, smarter, more generalized (SlowSMG) circuits and (ii) faster, dumber, more domain specific (FastDDS) circuits
2. amongst the FastDDS circuits are circuits relating to identifying other agents,      understanding the causal relationship between events, assigning blame and praise, and the emotions such as anger, thirst-for-revenge, and so on
3. the FastDDS circuits compensate in speed for what they lack in accuracy, and so represent a “knee jerk” response that, upon cooler and more thoughtful reflection, is sometimes mistaken
4. so our prephilosophical or instinctive attitudes and beliefs about other agents,      responsibility and blame, and anger and retribution, etc. are sometimes mistaken or imprudent.

Now, we are all fairly familiar with the dual process challenge because Nichols & Knobe did fascinating studies showing that affect, or the moral salience of an event, seems to increase compatibilist responses at the expense of incompatibilist responses. For example, Nichols & Knobe suggest that “[p]erhaps the most obvious way of explaining the data reported here would be to suggest that strong affective reactions can bias and distort people’s judgments.” This would fit with the dual process challenge: the affective or morally salient situations *trigger* the faster, dumber, more domain specific circuits in our brain (such as those dealing with anger and retribution), which produce less accurate or more imprudent responses.

NOTE: I know some, such as Eddy Nahmias, take issue with this research. I would love to hear any possible explanations for the differences between their data and the Nichols & Knobe data.

Joshua Greene and Jonathan Haidt have done similar research on issues such as consequentialism/deontology, moral realism, and the relationship between the emotions and moral reasoning. For example, I think Greene has found that people who give consequentialist answers give them *slower*, consistent with the hypothesis that the SlowSMG circuitry is trumping the FastDDS circuitry. I think he has also put subjects in MRI scanners and actually mapped how different parts of the brain “light up” with respect to consequentialists and deontologists. And Haidt has done fascinating research on “moral dumbfounding” which suggests that people have FastDDS circuits for moral reasoning and, furthermore, that the more cerebral or cognitive parts of their brain *rationalize* the response, which has already been determined by the FastDDS circuits.

These lines of research suggest future directions for studies on the free will problem. Do those who give incompatibilist or non-realist/eliminativist answers give them slower (like the consequentialists)? When subjects give compatibilist or incompatibilists answers while in an MRI scanner, which parts of their brains “light up”, and can one argue that these parts of the brain are more like SlowSMG circuits or FastDDS circuits?

NOTE: This dual process picture of the mind is a hypothesis. It is an empirical question and cannot be settled by thought experiment (or whatever else philosophers do). But, as a live hypothesis, I think it is worth contemplating the ramifications, should the hypothesis turn out to be true or largely true.

Here are some questions for other Gardeners:

1. Do you tend to think that this dual process theory will turn out to be true or largely true? If not, where do you think it goes wrong and why?
2. Regardless of whether you that this dual process hypothesis is right, what ramifications do you think it would have for the free will debate (libertarianism, compatibilism, non-realism/eliminativism)? Is the existence and relevance of such FastDDS circuits likely to undermine one group more than others?

What's an Incompatibilist to Do?

Assume the following for the sake of argument:

1. It’s the year 2016 and the experimental philosophers have taken over.  It’s now almost impossible to get a job in an American philosophy department without doing at least some kind of experimental work.  Harry Frankfurt’s most recent bestseller is called ‘On Surveys.’
2. Empirical investigation has confirmed that people have fundamentally different intuitions about the necessary conditions for desert-entailing moral responsibility (DEMR).   This is just a psychological fact about human beings.  To some people it is intuitively obvious that DEMR requires some variety of libertarian free will.   To others, sophisticated compatibilist freedom is sufficient for DEMR. 
3. Further discourse is extremely unlikely to change anyone’s mind.  The issue is not lack of reflection or understanding, or a failure to appreciate this or that argument.  The issue is simply that intuitions fundamentally differ on the question of the necessary conditions for DEMR.

Although (1) is not all that likely to come to pass, (2) and (3) seem to have some non-vanishingly small likelihood of being true.  So here’s my question.  If (2) and (3) obtain, what metaphysical commitments must incompatibilists hold in order to claim that incompatibilism is true nevertheless?  Would they (we) have to believe that there is a ‘Form’ of DEMR that some people don’t have access to?  Could we maintain that incompatibilism about DEMR is demonstrably true a priori?  (I realize that the Basic Argument is in some sense an a priori argument, but to evaluate its soundness, we have to find certain key premises intuitively plausible.  And in this scenario those are the very premises about which people have fundamentally different intuitions.  So it would have to be a different kind of a priori argument, one that doesn't rely on controversial TNR or AP related premises. Even van Inwagen relies on ‘intuition’ in his defense of beta (pp. 97-99).)  How metaphysically exotic does one have to get in order to continue to defend a universal incompatibilist theory of DEMR under these circumstances?

(Note: I don’t have an answer to this myself.  I’m hoping that those better schooled in metaphysics and Philosophy of Language can shed light on this question, one that grew out of an email exchange I’ve been having recently with Shaun Nichols about Manuel’s Revisionism.  I do recognize that the very same question could be asked about compatibilists, but not being one myself, I’m more concerned about the available options for incompatibilists.)

Back with another one of those blog-rocking posts

Now that the magnificent Mele melee has subsided a bit, we can announce #3 in the ongoing Garden of Forking Paths Unstoppable Online Reading Group of Excellence!

For your reading pleasure and conversating delight, next month we will discuss a paper by Shaun Nichols that dares to ask that forbidden question:

"How Can Psychology Contribute to the Free Will Debate?"

Through the arcane power of the internets, the delight that can only be found in Nichols' paper is available here:

http://www.usfca.edu/fac-staff/mrvargas/GFP/gfprg.html

As initial commentator, John M. Doris — the world-famous sensei of psychology and philosophy— will show us The Way of The Lurking Tiger.

The opening bell will sound around November 13th.
Your comments will follow soon after.
While you are at it, go grab a psychologist and make him or her comment, too.
Just do it.

Blaming Slaveowners

I'm in the process of reading Carlos Moya's new book Moral Responsibility: The Ways of Scepticism (reviewed here by Matt Talbert).  In the last chapter, he attempts to show that moral responsibility is compatible with indeterminism, and thus give support to a libertarian position.  In the process, he talks about slaveowners and compares our intuitive judgments about the blameworthiness of slaveowners, depending on what century they lived in.  I think this is an interesting question, so I put it to you.

Grant that purchasing a slave is morally wrong.  Now consider someone living in Ancient Greece who purchases a slave.  There's some intuitive pull to saying that even though this person may have done something morally wrong, he is not blameworthy.  On the other hand, consider someone who purchases a slave in 18th century America.  There's some intutive pull to saying that this person has done something morally wrong, and is blameworthy.  How do we explain this difference?

There are a few ways we can go.  Do we want to say that the Ancient Greek slaveowner is not blameworthy because he is not morally responsible?  But then, which condition on responsibility might he fail to meet?  Or do we want to say that the Ancient Greek slaveowner is responsible, but this is one case where someone can be morally responsible for a morally wrong action without being blameworthy?  But then, what mitigates his blameworthiness?  Or do we want to say that despite the fact that purchasing a slave today is wrong, purchasing slaves in Ancient Greece was not morally wrong?

What do you think?

Responsibility vs. Blameworthiness

Let's suppose that to be morally responsible is to be an apt target for the reactive attitudes.

And let's suppose that to be blameworthy/praiseworthy is to be such that the reactive attitudes are justifiably applied to you.

Nearly everyone agrees (I think) that an agent can be morally responsible without being praiseworthy or blameworthy.  That is, in our terms above, an agent can be the sort of object to which reactive attitudes are appropriately applied without it being the case that any reactive attitude is justifiably applied to the agent in a particular circumstance.  But what people disagree about (I think) is what gets you from moral responsibility to blameworthiness/praiseworthiness.  So what is it?

Pereboom thinks (I think) that if you are morally responsible for a morally wrong action, then you are therefore blameworthy for it, and if you are morally responsible for a morally right action, then you are therefore praiseworthy for it.  On his view, the only actions that an agent can be morally responsible for without being praiseworthy/blameworthy are morally neutral actions.

But others disagree.  For instance, Fischer thinks that more is needed.  Take his resopnse to Pereboom's 4-case manipulation argument.  Fischer has responded by saying that although the agent is morally responsible in all four cases, the agent is not blameworthy in all four cases.  He stops short of actually telling us where the cut-off for blameworthiness comes, but he does say that it's clear to him that in case 1, the agent is not blameworthy, whereas in case 4 (the deterministic case), the agent is blameworthy.  I wonder what other conditions for blameworthiness Fischer has in mind here?

And in general, I wonder what people think about the relationship between these two notions -- responsibility and blameworthiness.  In some discussions of moral responsibility, you'll hear an incompatibilist say that to be morally responsible is to be truly deserving of praise or blame.  But this sounds a lot closer to what I called 'blameworthiness/praiseworthiness' above.  Could it be that when Fischer judges the agent in case 1 not to be blameworthy, he is actually agreeing with the incompatibilist, but they are just using different words (one saying 'blameworthy'; the other saying 'morally responsible')?  I'm sure it's more complicated than that, but I feel like it's important to be clear about the relationship between these two concepts.  Any thoughts?

Can Moral Responsibility Skeptics Feel Schadenfreude?

For years I’ve found the culture critic Lee Siegel to be completely insufferable—a whiney pretentious abusive humorless hack.  Read this letter to Jon Stewart (who I don’t even like that much) and you’ll see what I mean.  Last weekend Siegel was suspended from his post as senior editor of The New Republic for “sock-puppetry,” meaning that he posted comments on his own article under an assumed name.  Here are a couple of posts from 'sprezzatura' (i.e. Siegel himself.).

“How angry people get when a powerful critic says he doesn't like their favorite show! Like little babies. Such fragile egos. Siegel accuses Stewart of a "pandering puerility" and he gets an onslaught of puerile responses from the insecure herd of independent minds. I'm well within Stewart's target group, and I think he's about as funny as a wet towel in a locker room. Siegel is brave, brilliant, and wittier than Stewart will ever be.”

“I'm a huge fan of Siegel, been reading him since he started writing for TNR almost ten years ago. (Full disclosure: I'm an editor at a magazine in NYC and he's written for me too.) I watch the goings-on and have to scratch my head. The people who hate him the most are all in their twenties and early thirties. There's this awful suck-up named Ezra Klein--his "writing" is sweaty with panting obsequious ambition--who keeps distorting everything Siegel writes--the only way this no-talent can get him. And I ask myself: why is it the young guys who go after Siegel? Must be because he writes the way young guys should be writing: angry, independent, not afraid of offending powerful people. They on the other hand write like aging careerists: timid, ingratiating, careful not to offend people who are powerful. They hate him because they want to write like him but can't. Maybe if they'd let themselves go and write truthfully, they'd get Leon Wieseltier to notice them too.”

(Can you imagine doing this?  The closest I could even come is giving myself a red chili pepper on ratemyprofessor.com.  Right now I only have one student review, and it was clearly a guy, since I wasn't given a chili pepper.)  Anyway, Franklin Foer of The New Republic discovered this and fired him.   The story went public and Siegel is now a laughing stock.  When I heard about this, I was giddy with schadenfreude.   If I had thought about it for a week, I couldn’t have imagined a more appropriate fate for this guy.  Talk about getting your just deserts!  But then I remembered: I don’t believe in just-deserts.  So I asked myself: am I being inconsistent with my skepticism about moral responsibility?  After all, it’s not Siegel’s fault that he’s an pompous pr---.  He doesn’t deserve blame for that, and so why should I be so happy to hear about his disgrace? So I ask the Garden: Is there a way to reconcile schadenfreude with skepticism about moral responsibility, or is this just another area, like sports, where skeptics have to set aside philosophical beliefs and do the Hume backgammon thing?

Sosa on Moral Responsibility

Ernie Sosa has a new paper on experimental philosophy. Among other topics, he discusses some of the recent experimental work on moral responsibility.

In essence, he argues that the English word 'responsible' is ambiguous -- with one sense corresponding roughly to the concept of attributibility, the other corresponding roughly to the concept of accountability. Sosa then suggests that some of the surprising recent results can be understood in terms of certain factors pushing subjects more toward one or another of the two possible interpretations.

Does Improbability render an Alternative Irrelevant?

In a recent article ("Frankfurt-Style Cases and Improbable Alternative Possibilities," Philosophical Studies 130 (2006): 399-406), Gerald Harrison argues that a Frankfurt-case need not eliminate all alternative possibilities in order to show PAP to be false.  This, by itself, isn't too surprising--many others have made the same general point (among my favorites here are Fischer-scenarios).  According to Harrison,

an agent may have the opportunity to do othwerise in an indeterministic world yet lack the ability to do otherwise in the sense relevant to PAP (401).

But what I do find puzzling is Harrison's argument for this claim.  He thinks that an alternative can be irrelevant even if it contains a free action/decision.  The kind of case Harrison uses is a Hunt-inspired blockage case.  But in order to avoid the objections to full blockage cases, Harrison gives a case in which all alternative possibilities but one are blocked.  The remaining alterntative is possible, just highly improbable. 

So here's my version of his kind of case.  We're at the next  APA, and I see Dan Speak at the smoker.  In general, I like Dan.  Who woudn't?  But in this case, Dan has recently snubbed me and my moral character is such that I am strongly inclined to kick people that have snubbed me.  Given this, I am strongly inclinded to kick Dan in the shins.  But my moral character isn't such that I must kick Dan in the shins--there is an accessible possible world in which I freely refrain from kicking him.  It's just very, very improbable that I won't.  All other possible worlds are blocked.  As it happens, what is probable becomes actual and I kick Dan.

According to Harrison, not only am I morally responsible for kicking Dan in the shins, but I also lack the ability--in the sense relevant to PAP--to not kick Dan despite my access to such a world.  I lack the ability to not kick Dan simply because my doing so is highly improbable. 

It is not enought that the agent have access to some alternative in which they [sic.] act freely, there must in addition be a sufficiently high probability of actually accessing the alternative in question (405).

I wonder why the mere improbability of an alternative that includes a free action/decision would mean that that alternative was irrelevant to my moral responsibility.  Furthermore, if it is, just how improbable would it need to be to be irrelevant?  Any thoughts?

You, Mele, Doris, Knobe, and Woolfolk

Because YOU demanded, because it cannot be stopped— at most we can only hope to contain it — the GFP is hereby announcing . . .

The Inaugural Session of The Garden of Forking Paths Reading Group!!!!

(imagine majestic music and dancing spotlights)

Here's the scoop:

If you are down (and you know you want to be): You will read Doris, Knobe, and Woolfolk's paper "Variantism about Responsibility." It is available on ye olde Papers Blog here.

You will read this before the week of August 21st.

Sometime during the week of August 21st, resident Super Famous Philosopher Al "Da Shark" Mele will unload some ruminations and deliberations pertaining to the afore-mentioned paper. You will then post responses and thoughts of your own. Electronic conversating will ensue, and the legend of the GFP Reading Group will be born.

You have a month. Be ready or it won't be purty.

New Perspectives on Free Will and Moral Responsibility

On November 10, 2007 some people you may have heard of will be at USF talking about free will, moral responsibility, and the like.

Speakers will include Joshua Knobe, Eddy Nahmias, Angela Smith, and Dan Speak. Responses will be given by Randy Clarke, John Fischer, Michael McKenna, and Dana Nelkin.

The motivating idea behind this one day conference was to create an opportunity where some up-and-coming-but-not-yet-tenured folks could give invited papers and receive replies by already-well-known-and-tenured stars. This will be something of an experiment, but if it all goes well I hope to repeat the process in subsequent years, thereby providing a semi-regular venue whereby junior folks could receive feedback by established stars and get some additional pre-tenure visibility. I would have loved to double the roster for this round, but given that this is an experiment and given time and space constraints I had to keep it to only four speakers and four respondents. Still, any Gardeners who feel like coming to SF in November to hang out at the conference are more than welcome.

(I've heard rumors that elsewhere there may be a general free will conference coming together for next year, so conference-interested people should keep their antenna up.)

More information and updates on the USF free will/moral responsibility conference, including the TBA schedule, will be posted here.

More on My Way

I’m reviewing My Way for the Philosophical Quarterly. It will probably be a short review, so I won’t have time to do much more than express admiration. Nevertheless, I’m reading the book carefully. I wanted to try out some (rather inchoate) thoughts on fellow gardeners.

How Many Mechanisms?

The question of mechanism individuation is one that has always worried me about the theory. Here’s my latest way of attempting to get at the problem.

Let’s begin with Alison McIntyre’s Insects. The case goes like this:

Bill is offered a plate of fried crickets to eat. He doesn’t find the idea of fried crickets particularly appealing (though he isn’t disgusted by the idea), so he declines. However, had he decided to accept the offer, he would have had to look more closely at the crickets, which would have prompted an overwhelming revulsion to the idea of eating them, rendering him incapable of doing so.

Fischer (and Ravizza) think that Bill is responsible. They hold that the mechanism that Bill acts on, in the actual sequence, is reasons-responsive. Were Bill to accept the offer and look more closely at the crickets, a different mechanism would have been triggered. That mechanism would not be reasons-responsive, but that fact is irrelevant on the actual sequence. Bill’s revulsion is like a Frankfurt intervener, and like such an intervener its presence ought to be bracketed in assessing the reasons-responsiveness of the mechanism upon which he acts.

But now consider Insects*. Suppose that upon being offered the fried crickets, Bill experienced mild revulsion, a revulsion insufficient to render him incapable of accepting the offer. Nevertheless, he declines. Everything else is as before. In Insects* revulsion is part of the actual sequence. Will Fischer still say that he is responsible for turning down the offer, because the mechanism upon which he actually acts is different to the mechanism that would be triggered were he to accept the crickets? In that case, he is committed to saying that there is a mild revulsion mechanism, as well as an overwhelming revulsion mechanism – and the way is open for us to introduce a variety of further revulsion mechanisms (mild, moderate, and so on).

Perhaps Fischer will say there are just two revulsion mechanisms: non-overwhelming and overwhelming revulsion, and so long as Bill acts on non-overwhelming, he is responsible.  There’s an empirical problem with taking this route. Real compulsions are experienced as mounting states of discomfort, which is finally relieved by giving in. If we go the two mechanisms route, we are committed to saying that when people give in too soon to their compulsions, they are responsible for doing so. But when does a compulsion become overwhelming? There’s a strong case for thinking that there is no moment at which this occurs. At very least we can say this: for any actual degree of compulsion, the person could hold out a second longer were she given sufficient incentive to do so. So the compulsion is not yet literally overwhelming. But then it is never overwhelming.

Fischer might say that a compulsion counts as overwhelming just in case it is sufficient, in the actual circumstances, to cause the agent to act upon it. But that comes uncomfortably close to saying that a compulsion is overwhelming when it causes the agent to act – and then we want to know how this kind of causation differs from ordinary determinism.

Suppose, on the other hand, Fischer says that in Insects* Bill is not responsible for refusing the offer, because his revulsion, which would become overwhelming were he to accept the offer, operates in the actual sequence (that is, because he acts upon a mechanism that is not moderately reasons-responsive).  Here’s a challenge to this line. I introduce a variant on the counterfactual intervener here. Counterfactual interveners are generally poised to remove agents’ abilities. My counterfactual intervener is poised to restore them. So suppose Bill experiences mild revulsion at the thought of eating crickets, and refuses the offer. But the counterfactual intervener stands by to ensure that were Bill to accept the offer and look at the crickets, his revulsion would not intensify.

Now, Fischer is committed to holding counterfactual interventions fixed. So he must say that since Bill is not responsible for accepting the offer in the absence of the intervener, he continues to be not responsible once the intervener is added. But this now seems implausible. Since Bill’s revulsion is not overwhelming, and nothing would prevent him from eating the crickets were he to accept the offer, he seems responsible for refusing. Thus this response fails.

Finally, it is worth thinking a bit more about positive versions of the counterfactual intervener. Recall Sharks. In this case, an agent who decides not to rescue a drowning child is not responsible for failing to do so, because (unbeknownst to him) a ring of sharks would have eaten him had he dived into the water. Now suppose that there is a counterfactual intervener, poised to intervene to stun the sharks were the agent to dive in. Fischer seems committed to holding this counterfactual intervention fixed. Intuitively, this seems to me the wrong result.

It proves more difficult to transfer this kind of case into the head of the agent. But the very difficulty provokes further questions. The difficulty is this: we need an answer to the question, what makes it the case that the agent acts from a compulsion in the actual sequence, given that the counterfactual intervener remains poised to make the agent moderately reasons-responsive (ie, to remove the compulsiveness, if the agent makes more of an effort to resist)? The dilemma here is that Fischer will not want to say that what makes it the case is that the desire simply causes the action, because that comes to close to saying that causal determinism rules out moral responsibility.

My Way

Papers from the INPC symposium on John Fischer's My Way are now available in the latest issue of Philosophical Books (subscription required). I forebear commenting on David Zimmerman's last footnote!

A Question About Ability

Consider this uncontroversial principle about ability.  Call it 'PEA' for 'Performance Entails Ability':

(PEA) If an agent performed an action, then she was able to perform that action.

On first glance, PEA seems so obviously true that it would be absurd to question it.  But I have my doubts about it.  My doubts might be due to some confusion about what it is to be able to perform an action, though, so if you think I'm way off, please point me in a better direction.

I have my doubts about PEA mainly for two reasons: 1) I incline toward Source Incompatibilism, and I tend to think that talk about 'abilities' carries with it some sort of implications about sourcehood which wouldn't be satisfied in a deterministic world even if agents still perform actions in a deterministic world, and 2) Manipulation cases in which arguably, an agent performs an action (because his brain was directly manipulated), but there still seems to be some sense in which the agent himself wasn't able to perform the action, due to the sourcehood connotations of 'ability'.  Come to think of it, maybe those are the same reason.

So I'm wondering -- do you think talk about abilities carries with it any connotations of sourcehood, and if so, would it be at all plausible to deny PEA?

Source Incompatibilism and the Direct Argument

I know I've touched on this topic before, so I'll make this quick.  I just had another thought about it.

Many people seem to think that source incompatibilists need to be committed to the soundness of some version of the direct argument.  But I don't think that's right.  The source incompatibilist, in fact, can argue for the incompatibility of determinism and responsibility in a way that exactly parallels the strategy of the leeway incompatibilist, as follows:

1) Determinism is incompatible with sourcehood.

2) Sourcehood is required for moral responsibility.

3) Therefore, determinism is incompatible with moral responsibility.

This argument, it seems to me, is an "indirect" argument for the incompatibility of determinism and responsibility, but it's not one that goes via PAP.  Of course the source incompatibilist will have to give some reason to accept the premises, but the leeway incompatibilist has to do that too.  There needs to be an argument for why determinism rules out the ability to do otherwise and an argument for why we should accept PAP. 

Two reasons why I think source incompatibilists should argue in this indirect fashion rather than via the direct argument.  One -- objections to the direct argument will not ipso facto be objections to source incompatibilism.  Two -- it doesn't define 'sourcehood' in terms of moral responsibility (as, for instance, 'whatever control or origination or whatever is required for moral responsibility), and so keeps separate issues separate.

Cohen on the Impossibility of Responsibility

In a recent article in Philosophical Studies ("Openness, Accidentality, and Responsibility", Feb. 2006, pages 581-597), Daniel Cohen puts forth a novel argument for the conclusion that moral responsibility is impossible because the necessary conditions for morally responsible agency cannot all be satisfied at the same time.  But I'm not convinced.  And here's why.

First, let me lay out his argument.  The argument runs as follows:

1)      If S is responsible for doing A, then S’s doing A is not accidental.

2)      If S’s doing A is not accidental, then S’s character determines that she do A.

3)      If S is responsible for doing A, then it is open to S not to do A.

4)      If it is open to S not to do A, then either S’s character underdetermines her doing A, or it is open to S that her character be such that she not do A.

5)      If it is open to S that her character be such that she not do A, then S is not constituted by her character.

6)      S is constituted by her character.

7)      If S is responsible for doing A, then her character both determines and underdetermines her doing A.

Since we are led into a contradiction, this argument constitutes a reductio on moral responsibility.  Cohen presents the argument near the beginning of his paper, and then spends the rest of the paper defending each of the premises.  Here's the basic idea.

Premise (1) seems relatively uncontroversial to me, so we'll take that as given.  Premise (2) is where the action comes in.  Cohen lays out three possible ways that he thinks an action may be accidental, and then argues that the accidentality in each is due to underdetermination.  He concludes that in order for an action to be not accidental, it must be determined by the agent's character.  The three ways an action may be accidental are:

a)      where S’s belief/desire set underdetermines her action

b)      where S’s process of reasoning underdetermines her belief/desire set

c)      where S’s psychological dispositions underdetermine her processes of reasoning

(I guess I should also mention that Cohen is here working with the following conception of what happens when someone acts: "As manifested in the occurrent environment, S's psychological dispositions (or her 'character', as I shall say) cause S to engage in a process of reasoning which results in her having a particular belief/desire set.  The strongest of S's desires then cause S to act as she believes is necessary in order to satisfy that desire.")

As an example of accident (a), Cohen gives someone's being tied to a chair, as an example of accident (b), Cohen gives addiction, and as an example of accident (c), Cohen gives brainwashing.  In each of these cases, a connection that is crucial to the metaphysics of agency is undermined.  But -- and here's the important point -- Cohen thinks that in each case, "simple indeterminacy is sufficient to undermine [the] connection".  All of his cases to support this claim involve some sort of random process in the agent's brain that makes it indeterminate whether the agent's belief/desire set will result in that particular action, or makes it indeterminate whether the agent's process of reasoning will result in that particular belief/desire set, or makes it indeterminate whether the agent's psychological dispositions will result in that particular process of reasoning.  In each case, Cohen thinks that S's doing A is accidental, and concludes that what is required for non-accidentality is determination by character.

But here's the problem.  If I'm reading Cohen correctly, he appears to be arguing as follows: "If there were a random process in S's brain at any of junctures (a), (b), or (c), the result at those junctures would be accidental, and hence S's doing A would be accidental.  Therefore, in order to avoid accidentality, we need the result at each juncture to be determined by the agent's character."  But it seems to me that this reasoning leaves out an implicit (and false) premise, namely: "If the result at each juncture were not determined by the agent's character, then the result would be due to mere randomness."  But isn't this to confuse indeterminism with randomness?  That is, just because a random process in the agent's brain would seem to make the result at each juncture accidental doesn't mean that we need determinism to fix the problem.  We might also be able to use an indeterministic process that is (somehow) not purely random.  I agree that this is one of the tough challenges for the libertarian -- to explain how indeterminism can nevertheless not be mere randomness -- but it's certainly a challenge that many libertarians are willing to take head-on, and so it seems at best unfair of Cohen to gloss over this point.  There might be a way to get rid of randomness without adding determinism.

Moving on.  Premise (3) would be rejected by anyone who denies PAP.  (Cohen considers the Frankfurt examples, and gives a response to them, but I won't get into that.  The type of Frankfurt-example he considers isn't a "prior-sign" example, and I'm inclined to think that the strategy he uses against it wouldn't carry over to the prior-sign cases, but that's just a hunch.)  I take it that this is not trivial -- that Cohen's argument relies on PAP is a weakness that other arguments for the impossibility of responsibility, like Strawson's, do not share.

The rest of the argument is pretty straightforward.  If you think an agent has alternative possibilities, and you accept Cohen's picture of what happens when someone acts (above), then the alternative possibilities could be placed at one of the three junctures mentioned above (a, b, or c).  But if it's placed at any of these junctures, we're back to the underdetermination problem argued for in connection with premise (2).  The alternative possibilites could also be placed, according to Cohen, prior to the psychological dispositions.  That is, "the agent might have been differently disposed to reason than she is actually disposed".  But if the alternative possibilites are there, then you run into an incoherence if you try to spell out how that's a case of openness for the agent, because the agent just is, in an important way, her character.

So, I find the argument interesting, and I recommend it as reading for all, but I utlimately reject Cohen's conclusion because I think both premise (2) and premise (3) are false.  (In fact, I'm also inclined to reject his picture of what happens when someone acts, and so reject his argument since it relies on that picture, but that's for a different post.)

David Friedman on Moral Luck

Although I don't share Robert Kane's metaphysical libertarianism, I do tend to be politically libertarian.  So I subscribe to David Friedman's weblog.  I only mention this because Friedman has written three posts so far on the subject of moral luck (one, two and three).  He has not cited any of the relevant literature, however (in particular, he has not cited Nagel's work; see the SEP article on moral luck).  Friedman distinguishes between two senses of moral responsibility, which remind me of Watson's distinction between self-disclosing and accounting moral responsibility (Watson, Gary, 1996,  "Two Faces of Responsibility." Philosophical Topics 24: 227-248).  Smilanksy's The Ethical Advantages of Hard Determinism makes a similar distinction between the "substantive" and "accountancy" parts of morality.  Like Smilansky, Friedman is concerned about egalitarianism (as discussed, for example, in Smilansky's On Free Will and Ultimate Injustice).  On his weblog, Friedman writes:

"The conclusion is radically egalitarian–more radically than most egalitarians would like, since it applies not only to the difference between rich people and poor people but to the difference between good people and bad people as well. Strip off everything external, everything a person is not himself responsible for--genes, wealth, upbringing, nature and nurture both--and it is hard to see what is left on which differences in desert could be based."

Gardeners, I would ask you the same question that Friedman asks: "...I think it is more interesting to try to deal with the egalitarian conclusion of the argument from moral desert on its own terms.  What, if anything, is wrong with it?"

Particularism and Responsibility

Hello all,

I'm curious about the possible ramifications for theorizing about responsibility if one accepts a particularist conception of morality-that is, one that rejects the centrality if not the relevance, of moral principles (e.g., as defended by Jonathan Dancy).    Thus far, I haven't uncovered much of any discussion of this.  Are any of you aware of something I may have overlooked?

Thanks!

Compatibilism and Indeterminism

One of the benefits of compatibilism about determinism and moral responsibility is that our ordinary conception of ourselves isn't "held hostage" to any arcane scientific discoveries.  Or, at least, this is a sentiment that I've heard expressed by some compatibilists (notably John Fischer).  So even if it turns out that the appropriate interpretation of quantum mechanics (for instance) is deterministic, we don't have to give up our view of ourselves as responsible.

Given this sentiment, I take it that it's as much a part of compatibilism that moral responsibility is compatible with indeterminism, as well.  But one rarely hears this claim defended.  And now I'm wondering about it.

Consider, for instance, Fischer and Ravizza's account of guidance control, which is supposedly both necessary and sufficient for moral responsibility (at least regarding the freedom-relevant condition of MR), no matter whether determinism is true or false.  According to F&R, an agent is responsible for an action that issues from the agent's own, moderately reasons-responsive mechanism.  And they spell out what it means for a mechanism to be moderately reasons-responsive in terms of how the mechanism responds at other relevant (though not necessarily accessible) possible worlds.

My worry is -- is their account of guidance control compatible with indeterminism?  Suppose that the world is fundamentally indeterministic in a way that doesn't get cancelled out, so we have indeterminism at the macro level as well.  If the indeterminism is at the right place, we'll now have two worlds that are exactly the same in terms of the past and the laws of nature, but that differ with respect to the action that issues from the mechanism under consideration.  Is this a problem for moderate reasons-responsiveness?

More specifically, I'm worried that something like the Luck Objection that usually is raised against libertarian accounts of free will might be legitimately raised against this particular compatibilist account as well.  Does the agent really have guidance control if what action actually issues from the mechanism under consideration appears to be a mere matter of luck?  And if in some of the relevant possible worlds, the mechanism issues in A, but in other relevant worlds the mechanism issues in B, is the mechanism still appropriately reasons-responsive, even though the reasons would seem to be the same in both worlds?

I haven't thought this through too much, so I'm not saying that this objection is a good one, but I'd be interested to hear what people think.

Real Brain Manipulation?

Here's an interesting article on controlling human beings by remote control.  Is it only a matter of time before Frankfurt-cases become a live possibility?  Dah dah DAH. (That's ominous music, in case you were wondering.)  Thanks to Casey Hall for the pointer.

Recent work on moral responsibility

Elinor Mason (The University of Edinburgh) has written an overview article on recent work on moral responsibility, titled (appropriately enough) "Recent Work on Moral Responsibility." It can be found here:

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-0149.2005.00375.x

For those without the relevant electronic subscription, here's the citation: Philosophical Books
Volume 46 Issue 4 Page 343 - October 2005.

The Contours of Being Causa Sui

I finished Smilansky’s Free Will and Illusion, which I recommend to anyone interested in the denial of free will.  Smilansky was supervised by Galen Strawson—author of perhaps the best argument against the existence of free will.  Smilansky is an eloquent spokesperson for free will denial.  As he says, “we are the unfolding of the given.”  In this book, Smilansky elaborates on Strawson’s ideas and reaches a more ambivalent conclusion. 

I don’t agree with this conclusion. Smilansky’s mistake, I think, comes early in Free Will and Illusion, when he rejects consequentialism.  Like Smilansky, Pereboom also takes issue with a prominent form of consequentialism, utilitianism, in his Living Without Free Will.  I want to challenge both Smilansky and Pereboom on this issue in (work in progress) article “Who’s Afraid of Creeping Exculpation?”

Smilansky distinguishes between two varieties of compatibilism, Effects Compatibilism and Control Compatibilism (this can be confusing because Tamler Sommers, another skeptic about free will, has referred to Consequentialist Compatibilism instead Effects Compatibilism).  On Smilansky’s view, Effects Compatibilism doesn’t do justice to the Core Conception, or the fundamental idea that responsibility requires up-to-us-ness.  But a consequentialist can reply: we are not ignoring the Core Conception; it is obsolete.  According to Strawson, in the long run, nothing is up to us.

Nevertheless, Smilansky raises a good question: does consequentialism precede or follow free will denial?  Consider this dilemma.  Many (including myself) have the intuition that being causa sui is more conducive to retributivism.  But why?  Suppose that punishing a causa sui agent does not maximize the consequentialist goals of one’s choice.  There is no obvious reason why one should practice retribution in this situation.  Consequentialism seems to precede free will denial.

The dilemma is even more problematic than that.  To the extent that punishment forms an agent’s character, then one might find it impossible to punish a causa sui agent.  Causa sui agents invent themselves from scratch.  An agent who incorporates punishment into its self-formation is not pure causa sui. 

But there are several problems with this objection. For one, punishment might not form an agent’s character so much as it forms an agent’s behavior.  Punishment does not seem to make bad people good so much as it makes bad people stop.  Secondly, perhaps, according to our natural conception, people are not pure causa sui.  Instead, perhaps we regard people as incorporating nothing foreign into the self except punishment and rewards.  Punishment and reward do seem to be essential features of our concept of personhood. This raises the question of to what extent an agent might be partially causa sui.  Can one entertain the thought, for example, of being causa sui with respect to friendliness and intelligence, but being “the unfolding of the given” with respect to taste in music or members of the opposite sex?

Just as we might divide one’s personhood into causa sui and “unfolding of the given” portions, so might we divide one’s lifespan into portions. A causa sui agent is (by definition?) causa sui at the moment of its creation. But can such an agent cease to be causa sui? This seems to be the case, for example, when even those people who believe humans are causa sui nevertheless insist that people should be punished and rewarded. So long as the agents continue to be causa sui, punishment and reward can have no effect upon their characters (but perhaps they punish and reward for different reasons). Would these ex causa sui agents nevertheless be responsible for their actions? Or alternatively, once causa sui, always causa sui?

Gardeners:

1. Is being causa sui more conducive to retributivism? Alternatively, is free will denial more      conducive to consequentialism? If so, why?
2. Does meta-ethics precede or follow the free will question?
3. Is it conceptually possible for an agent’s personhood or lifespan to be divided into causa sui and “unfolding of the given” portions? If so, how do these complexities affect an agent’s moral responsibility (or lack there of)?

Harry Potter on Compatibilism and Self-fulfilling Prophecies

You won’t read it in the NYT Review of Books or the Journal of Philosophy, but… Harry Potter is a compatibilist! I don’t think there are any significant spoilers in the passage I’ll quote, but if you are too worried about spoilers and haven’t read the latest Harry Potter book yet, then Do Not

Here’s the relevant passage –a dialogue between Dumbledore and Harry:

“But Harry, never forget that what the prophecy says is only significant because Voldemort made it so. I told you this at the end of last year. Voldemort singled you out as the person who would be most dangerous to him –and in doing so, he made you the person who would be most dangerous to him!”

            “But it comes to the same— ”

            “No, it doesn’t!” said Dumbledore, sounding impatient now. (…) “If Voldemort had never heard of the prophecy, would it have been fulfilled? Would it have meant anything? Of course not! Do you think every prophecy in the Hall of Prophecy has been fulfilled?”

            “But,” said Harry, bewildered, “but last year, you said one of us would have to kill the other –”

            “Harry, Harry, only because Voldemort made a grave error, and acted on Professor Trelawney’s words [i.e., the prophecy]! If Voldemort had never murdered your father, would he have imparted in you a furious desire for revenge? Of course not! (…) Voldemort himself created his worst enemy… (…) He heard the prophecy and he leapt into action, with the result that he (…) handpicked the man most likely to finish him…” (…)

           “But, sir,” said Harry, making valiant efforts not to sound argumentative, “it all comes to the same thing, doesn’t it? I’ve got to try and kill him, or—”

            “Got to?” said Dumbledore. “Of course you’ve got to! But not because of the prophecy! Because you, yourself, will never rest until you’ve tried! We both know it! Imagine, please, just for a moment, that you had never heard that prophecy! How would you feel about Voldemort now? Think!” (…)

            “I’d want him finished,” said Harry quietly. “And I’d want to do it.”

            “Of course you would!” cried Dumbledore. “You see, the prophecy does not mean you have to do anything! (…) In other words, you are free to choose your way, quite free to turn your back on the prophecy! But Voldemort continues to set store by the prophecy. He will continue to hunt you… which makes it certain, really, that –”

            “That one of us is going to end up killing the other,” said Harry. “Yes.”

            But he understood at last what Dumbledore had been trying to tell him. It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some people, perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledore knew –and so do I, thought Harry, with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents –that there was all the difference in the world.

J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Ch. 23, p. 512

It sounds like J. K. Rowling has been reading John M. Fischer’s “Frankfurt-style Compatibilism”, right? (Along with, perhaps, R. Moran’s and D. Velleman’s work on self-fulfilling beliefs). Incidentally, I think the prophecy in the Potter book can be construed both as the counterfactual intervener in a Frankfurt counterexample and as a standard self-fulfilling belief.

FW/MR Journals

I’ve been doing a bunch of bibliographic work lately, and it seems that a select number of journals publish a significant percentage of the free will/moral responsibility literature.  There are a couple of possible explanations for this fact.  But it also got me thinking about what journals might be the best to aim for when attempting to get work published in this area.  Here are some of the journals that have had articles on free will/moral responsibility in them recently (I’ve no doubt left some out—those that only solicit articles, I’ve left out on purpose):

American Philosophical Quarterly, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Ethics, Faith and Philosophy, Journal of Ethics, Journal of Philosophical Research, Journal of Philosophy, Journal of Social Philosophy, Mind, Nous, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Review, Philosophical Studies, Philosophical Topics, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Southern Journal of Philosophy

Some of these are obviously better than others.  But I’m curious how others see the breakdown, particularly since as a young scholar I don’t have a particularly strong grasp on these issues.  If you had to rank these publications according to the desirability of getting a FW/MR article published in them, how would you do it?  I’m not interested in cardinal ordering, but say groups in the following categories:  (I) Most Desirable, (II) Highly Desirable, (III)Pretty Desirable, and (IV) Hey, it’s a publication.  Also, feel free to add any journals, particularly to (I) and (II) that you think I may have overlooked.

NOTE:  I’m a little wary of asking people to voice their opinions on this issue publicly, particularly since GFP, as far as I can tell, doesn’t allow anonymous postings (though perhaps Neal or someone else can set the record straight).  Some might have good reason for not wanting their opinions on this subject to be made public.  However, I’m reminded of a much more controversial discussion of journals on The Leiter Reports (found here) where individuals actually named particular journals that they thought were 'irresponsible' and that junior faculty may think twice about submitting to if the tenure clock is ticking (I found this a very interesting thread).  And that discussion dind't allow anonymous postings, so perhaps there is some precident.  If anyone has suggestions on how we might have this discussion without people having to worry about negative ramifications of participating, I would be greatly appreciative.

New Issue of Midwest Studies

Bloglines informs me that the latest issue of Midwest Studies is available.  You can find the issue here.  This issue is a feast for anyone who is interested in agency theory or the free will problem.  For those who lean towards free will denial, it includes Derk Pereboom's reply to critics, as well as two articles by Mark Bernstein and Randolph Clarke (I've been anticipating this last article for a while) dealing with the same issue.  There are plenty of other fascinating articles by others too, including one by Laura Ekstrom (at my school William & Mary) and one by the Garden's own Manual Vargas.  Enjoy! 

Attributionism

A quick follow up to the discussion of the question "What is moral responsibility?" My paper on the preferability of a volitionist account of MR to an attributionist account has just been published in The Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, which (for those of you who don't know) is a web-based, peer-reviewed journal attempting to establish itself as a leader in the field.

The paper is here. Hope some of you find it interesting.

What Is Moral Responsibility?

In the comments  on my previous post, David asks the following question:

can you recommend any readings I might look at that attempt to explicate or defend a definition of moral repsonsibility? As I said above, I'm most interested in definitions and not - as seems to me more usual in the literature - conditions that need to be satisfied in order for one to be held morally responsible.

That seems to me to a bloody good question. The standard answer, if there is one, is the one which I had previously given David: aptness for the reactive attitudes. But it has always seemed unsatisfactory to me. I think part of the problem is this: though the definition might 'fix the reference', it actually doesn't tell us what moral responsibility consists in (so far as I can see). Moral responsibility must be some kind of relationship between an agent and her acts; it doesn't require any observers, or even the persistence of the agent after the act (for what it's worth, I have the same problem with definitions of knowledge: the problem with JTB is not that it open to counterexamples, but it leaves me in the dark as to what knowledge actually is).

So I want to echo David's question, and ask, further, for clarification. Am I missing the point? Is there nothing to say about what MR consists in, beyond giving necessary and sufficient conditions for it? Does anyone - in the literature or here - have anything illuminating to say that will answer David's and my question?

Todd Long on Moderate Reasons-Responsiveness.

I’m reviewing the Campbell, O’Rourke and Shier volume. The review will be short, so I won’t be able to say much about it (it’s always hard to review collections in any case). But of course I’ll have lots to say about many of the papers. Rather than waste my brilliant insights, I’ll post them here, if I think they might interest anyone. I begin with Todd Long’s interesting discussion of Fischer and Ravizza’s (F & R’s) account of moral responsibility.

Long aims to force some kind of revision on the F&R account of responsibility. That account states that an agent is responsible if she acts upon a moderately reasons-responsive mechanism of her own, where a mechanism is an agent’s own if she has taken responsibility for it, and a mechanism is moderately reasons-responsive if regularly receptive to reasons, including moral reasons, and at least weakly reactive to reasons.

Long tests the sufficiency of the F&R account by means of some variants on Frankfurt-style cases. F &R claim that agents in Frankfurt-style cases are not morally responsible for their actions if the intervention actually occurs, because the condition outlined above is not satisfied: specifically, in these cases the agent does not act upon a mechanism of her own. F & R argue that in the alternative sequence in Frankfurt-style cases (the sequence in which there is an intervention), the agent acts upon a different mechanism than in the actual sequence (in which she acts upon her own). And in most such cases this seems right. But Long aims to construct cases in which the mechanism is the same in both sequences.

In one such case, the alternative sequence intervention consists in the intervener adding new inputs to the very same mechanism that is at work in the actual sequence; specifically, he adds reasons directly into the agent’s deliberative mechanism. In the other case, the intervener subtracts reasons from the deliberative mechanism. In both cases, the intervention causes the agent to perform a wrongful action that, in the absence of the intervention, she would not have chosen.

Now, should F &R say that in these same-mechanism cases in which the intervention is actual, the agents are morally responsible for their actions? Long believes that they are committed to saying yes – and that “yes” is in any case the right answer (in other words, Long does not believe that his cases are counterexamples to F & R). He points out that F & R allow that an agent can be morally responsible for an action without being blameworthy for it, and he claims that this what we should say here.

I can think of two kinds of case in which an agent is morally responsible for an action without being blameworthy for it. In the first, the agent is not blameworthy because she is praiseworthy. In the second, the agent is not blameworthy because the action is morally neutral.  Obviously, the kind of case Long has in mind, in which the action is wrong, does not fit either category. It seems to me that in this kind of case the separation of moral responsibility and blameworthiness is unmotivated here. What blocks the reactive attitudes, here, which doesn’t block moral responsibility? In any case, if Long’s move works, then it turns out that F & R’s account is a lot less interesting than we thought it was. We thought it allowed us to make interesting discriminations between cases, but it turns out that it doesn’t. All the action needs to shift to the (so far mysterious) account of aptness for the reactive attitudes instead.

But Long is right that the move Fischer makes in response to his cases is equally implausible.  Fischer argues that the agents in the Frankfurt-style cases are not responsible, for precisely the reasons that agents are generally not responsible in these cases: because they do not act on the same mechanism in the sequence in which there is an intervention. Long is right that making this move multiplies mechanisms beyond necessity, and that it leaves F & R without a properly general account of moral responsibility. We need to be able to hold mechanisms fixed across scenarios, or we shall not be able to make the needed comparisons to assess moral responsibility. In any case, it seems implausible to individuate mechanisms by their inputs.

I’m going to suggest a third possibility: build upon the epistemic conditions F & R build into their theory. I suggest adding the following condition to their undeveloped epistemic condition:

In order to be morally responsible for an action, an agent must either (a) make her choice in the light of a sufficient number of true beliefs about the situation or, (b) in cases in which (a) is not satisfied, be responsible for her ignorance.

This condition seems circular, because it has the unanalysed notion of responsibility in (b). But I don’t think this is fatal, because we can cash out (b) in terms of (a) and the rest of F &R’s account. So ‘responsibility’ in (b) can be analysed out.

In Long’s cases, the agent is not morally responsible, because she acts on the basis of false beliefs, or in the absence of sufficient true beliefs, and she is not responsible for her ignorance. Now compare Long*, in which the intervener acts so as to insert either sufficient true beliefs, or to remove a sufficient number of false beliefs, for the agent to make the right choice. In this case, the agent is morally responsible (praiseworthy), it seems to me, but Long will need to hold that thought she is morally responsible, she is not praiseworthy. It is a virtue of the suggested amendment that it treats these high tech interventions in exactly the same way as low-tech interventions in people’s beliefs: lying to them, say, or telling the truths.

This might in fact be not so much an addition to the F & R account as a fleshing out. Their epistemic condition states that “in order to be praiseworthy or blameworthy, a person must know (or reasonably be expected to know) what he is doing”. Conditions (a) and (b) simply put some flesh on this claim.

Responsibility and the emotions

In their revised paper, posted on this very site, Nichols and Knobe argue for a claim that harmonises the emprical findings on (in)compatibilist intuitions so far: people have both compatibilist and incompatibilist intuitions. More precisely, they have an incompatibilist theory of moral responsibility, and will therefore answer theoretical questions about blame (and praise? this hasn't been tested) in an incompatibilist manner. But when they are presented with examples that engage their emotions, they respond in a more compatibilist manner, blaming those who do wrong, even if they know that their actions were determined.

Now, the interesting question (for me) is how we should resolve these conflicting intuitions. Should we go modus ponens or tollens? It is a commonplace that strong emotions can distort our judgments, so there is some reason to go with the theory, and reject the compatibilist intuition, but philosophers increasingly recognize (inspired in part by the work of scientists like Damasio) that emotions can also be an essential ingredient in accurate cognizing. So there is some pressure to reject or modify our theory in the light of the emotion.

Nichols and Knobe cite evidence that emotions can sometimes distort attributions of responsibility. We judge people as more responsible when our negative emotions are aroused, even when our emotions are aroused by an unrelated event. But (as they recognize) evidence for a dissociation between justified assessments and the emotion is not evidence that the emotions will not usually play a role in guiding assessment properly; just because you can induce an illusion does not show that the faculty you're fooling is unreliable (call the belief that it does Wegner's fallacy).

Here is a very quick and, as it stands, inadequate, argument for the view that we should regard the relevant emotions as distorting, rather than enabling, our judgments here. Begin by asking what emotions are for. Plausibly, we evolved to feel affect because it enhanced our inclusive fitness. Sometimes having the capacity for the right emotions will lead to better outcomes than not having it. For instance, it is often irrational to punish transgressions, because the cost of enforcing the punishment is high (transgressors are often strong; they've grown fat on ill-gotten gains). So if we assess the costs and benefits of punishing cooly, we will refrain from punishing. But having the disposition to punish transgressors might be adaptive. If transgressors know that we will punish them, whatever the costs, they might refrain from transgressing in the first place. The emotion of anger bridges the gap, motivating us to punish when a cooler analysis would counsel us to cut our losses.

Now, why do we have compatibilist responses to wrongdoing, from this evolutionary perspective? Not  because agents in a deterministic world are really responsible. Presumably our emotions are not sensitive to such metaphysical issues. Instead, our emotions are sensitive to whatever enhances our inclusive fitness in the long run. We can expect to feel indignation and resentment toward agents who require collective control because they threaten our fitness-relevant interests. Presumably, it is only necessary that these agents share the surface properties of rational beings for our emotions to be triggered. And we find just this in the way doctors react to psychopaths: because they seem bad rather than mad, even psychiatrists who hold a theory according to which psychopaths cannot be blamed find themselves resenting them.

Since the reactive attitudes will be triggered by merely surface properties of agents, then, they cannot be regarded as reliable guides to responsibility. We therefore ought to disregard them when we engage in assessing responsibility.

Gardeners Take Note

The 2006 INPC (Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference) will be on the theme of "Action and Moral Responsibility."  Committed speakers include Randy Clarke, John Fischer, Al Mele, Michael Moore, Derk Perboom, Paul Russell, Peter van Inwagen, David Widerker.  The call for papers will likely not come out until August, but certainly keep your eyes open for it.

The Scope of Moral Blame

What is it to blame someone?  Sometimes I wonder (like right now, for instance) if incompatibilists have a different answer to this question than compatibilists.  And then I wonder -- if they do have different answers, might this fact account for some of the conflicting intuitions?  Let me explain.

I've recently encountered an answer to the above question that, at first, strikes me as much weaker than I ordinarily conceive of blame.  This answer is given by Nomy Arpaly, in her recent book Unprincipled Virtue.  Here is what she says:

"I take blame not to be an inner version of a social sanction or a 'practice', but a belieflike attitude similar to fear or various kinds of esteem.  Blame is not something primarily required or prohibited, like punishment, nor even something that can be appropriate or inappropriate, the way that a brave attitude is appropriate for a soldier.  It is first and foremost warranted or unwarranted, the way that my fear of getting a flu shot is warranted only if flu shots are dangerous to me...To hold someone blameworthy is not, in itself, to hold that any course of action is appropriate in regard to him, but rather to hold that a certain attitude toward him is epistemically rational: there was ill will, there was a wrong act, thus blame is warranted.  In this way, on my view, blame is analagous to holding someone to be a bad businessman or a lousy artist." [172-173]

I think most will agree that blameworthiness needs to be separated from whether punishment is appropriate.  What I wonder about is whether this version of what it is to blame someone seems watered down, so to speak.  Upon reading this paragraph, I almost feel like saying, "Oh, is that all blame is?  A 'belieflike attitude' that can be more or less epistemically rational?  But even incompatibilists think that determinism doesn't rule out the appropriateness of judging our beliefs rational or irrational, so if this is what blame is, why should determinism rule out blameworthiness?"

Would it be consistent for an incompatibilist about determinism and moral responsibility to also be a compatibilist about the type of blameworthiness Arpaly describes?  And if so, are compatibilists and incompatibilists talking past each other (at least when it comes to the topic of blame)?

Determinism and Disneyland

Okay, I think I am convinced that moral responsibility doesn't require the ability to do otherwise.  I find the Frankfurt-type counterexamples compelling in this regard.  And perhaps even independently of the counterexamples, I think it makes more sense to say that moral responsibility must depend on whether or not you endorse what you are doing, or like what you are doing, or identify with your action, etc. than on whether or not you could have done otherwise.

That said, however, I'll also say that I'm not convinced that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism.  In fact, I think the two are incompatible.  Determinism, I think, is less like a Frankfurt-style counterexample and more like Disneyland.  Let me explain.

You know that Disneyland ride where you get into a car that's fixed to a track and then you ride around on the car?  Well, every time I go there I always have to fight to get the seat with the steering wheel. (We all want to be the driver, don't we?)  And occasionally I succeed, and I get to pretend like I'm driving the car.  Of course, I'm not actually driving the car, and I realize this. 

But now suppose that I don't know that the car is on a track, and in fact I think that I am controlling the car.  I turn the steering wheel to the right when I come to a turn, and (what do you know?) the car goes to the right.  I have no idea that I didn't have any effect on the direction that the car turned. It seems to me that this is what determinism would be like, if it were true.  In this case, I think I'm not morally responsible for the fact that the car went to the right.  Of course, I may be morally responsible for something -- like turning the wheel, or something like that.  But not for the fact that the car went to the right.

Compare this to a case where I am actually driving a real car that's not on a track and I turn right, but unbeknownst to me there was a counterfactual intervener that would have manipulated my brain and made me turn right had I shown an inclination to turn left.  As it happens, I turn right on my own and the counterfactual intervener need not intervene.  In this case, I think I am morally responsible for the fact that the car went to the right.

It may be that what's worrying me is sourcehood.  And I'll admit - it's the fact that determinism is an actual-sequence mechanism that bothers me, whereas a counterfactual intervener is just a alternative-sequence mechanism.  So, the question for you source incompatibilists out there -- why is determinism more like Disneyland?  What about its being an actual-sequence mechanism makes the difference?  And for you compatibilists out there -- why isn't determinism like Disneyland?

Time and the Compatibilist

A Friday provocation...

Compatibilists claim that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism. Even if facts about the universe at t, in conjunction with the laws of nature, entail that an agent acts in a certain way at t1, that agent may be morally responsible for acting in that way. Now suppose that time travel to the past is one day a practical possibility. In that case, it might be possible to go back in time to a point prior to t1 and punish (or reward) an action, even though it has not yet occurred. Compatibilists seem committed to holding that this kind of punishment would be just. But this is extremely implausible, so implausible that an account of moral responsibility that entails it cannot be accepted.

Compatibilist Replies and Responses

Incoherence

The compatibilist might argue that the scenario is incoherent. Suppose the punishment meted out by our time traveller (call him Tim) represents a novel intervention in the history of the malefactor, in the sense that prior to the traveller’s observation of the act at t1, no such punishment had occurred. In that case, an event (the malefactor’s punishment) both would and not have occurred at some time prior to t1. Familiar paradoxes raise their head at this point, but here I want to draw your attention to a less familiar problem. If Tim is able to intervene in the history of the malefactor (call her Marie), to make it the case that she is punished for an action before it takes places, even though before Tim observed Marie performing the wrongful act the punishment had not taken place, then determinism as defined above would not hold. It would not be true that Marie is causally necessitated by the state of the world and the laws at nature at t to perform her wrongful act at t1. Not only might she possess the ability to act in such a way that, were she to act in that way, the laws of nature or past states of the world at t1 would have had to be different (Lewis 1981), but at least one person – Tim – could act in such a way as to bring it about that past states of the world at t1 actually are different. But if this is the case, then determinism is false. There is no world in which determinism is true and backwards punishment is possible.

Response

The plausibility of this compatibilist reply depends crucially on the kind of punishment envisaged and on the metaphysics of time. On an eternalist view of time, an intervention of the kind envisaged in the reply seems to be impossible. On this view, time is fixed and we cannot change the past even if it proves possible to observe it. But kinds of punishment that do not alter the past seem possible, and other views of time may be true. First, backwards punishment may be possible on the eternalist view. It would have to be the case that the punishment, though caused by time-travelling Tim, always preceded the wrongful action. There is nothing incoherent about this idea (it needn’t involve closed causal loops, for instance), but it does raise some complications. If the punishment now precedes the crime, how can we be sure that it isn’t causally necessary for the commission of the crime? Perhaps Marie, embittered by what she perceives as her unjust treatment, turns to a life of crime in protest. In that case, her punishment does seem unjustified, and the counterexample to compatibilism fails. However, there seem to be ways in which this problem can be avoided. Perhaps the events which constitute punishing Marie take place prior to t1, but do not have any impact upon her actions at t1 since she does not learn of her punishment until after that time (perhaps her bank account is emptied by Tim).

Even if this problem were to prove insurmountable, an eternalist view of time might prove false. Suppose the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, but that macroscopic determinism governs the multiverse. In that case, it would be possible for Tim to observe Marie’s wrongful action at t1, and travel back in time to punish her, secure in the knowledge that his punishment would not intervene in the causal chain leading to her action. His punishment would, to be sure, impact causally upon the Marie punished, but the Marie punished and the Marie who performed the original wrongful act would not exist in the same universe. Nevertheless, since macroscopic determinism is true, Tim could be confident that his punishment is just: the Marie punished would have performed the wrongful act without his intervention. On the Strawsonian view, which underlies many compatibilist theories of moral responsibility, the reactive attitudes are a justified response to the good or ill will of agents (Strawson 1962). Tim knows all he needs to know about the quality of Marie’s will to justify punishing her.

Alternative Possibilities

The compatibilist might insist that she is not committed to the justifiability of backwards punishment, since she holds that alternative possibilities (understood in a distinctively compatibilist manner) are a necessary condition of moral responsibility. Since Marie is punished before her wrongful act, she is punished before she chooses between alternative possibilities; she is therefore not morally responsible for the act at the time of the punishment and the punishment is unjust.

Response

Marie will have alternative possibilities, in the compatibilist sense, at the time of her action, even if she undergoes backwards punishment. If it is ever true that agents are responsible for X-ing in a deterministic world because, if they had wanted to Y instead of X-ing, they would have Y-ed, then Marie is responsible for the wrongful act. But since we know that Marie will freely (in the relevant sense) perform the act, her punishment is just. In any case, many compatibilist have now abandoned the thought that alternative possibilities are a necessary condition of moral responsibility (Fischer and Ravizza 1998; Dennet 1984; Frankfurt 1969).

Biting the Bullet

The compatibilist might insist that backwards punishment is just. We balk at the thought, she might argue, because though the world in which we live is or might be deterministic, the future is unknown. Perhaps none of us have alternative possibilities metaphysically open to us; nevertheless the future is epistemically open. Because we do not know the future, we cannot punish people for what they will do: we might wrong, and if we are, we act unjustly. But in the time travel scenario, the future is known, and backwards punishment is just. The gut reaction that it is not is simply the product of the illegitimate perserverance of intuitions which are a response to epistemic openness.

Response

Suppose the wrongful act performed by Marie is very wrong – on the order of mass murder, for instance – and that the only time at which we can punish her is significantly prior to t1. In that case, the view that it is just to punish her is highly counterintuitive. Of course, worries about personal identity might arise, but they seem no more pressing than the similar kind of worries which arise with ordinary (forwards) punishment. Suppose that the only way to prevent Marie from committing her crime is by killing her prior to her even contemplating the crime. Compatibilists need not think that this is just (they need not subscribe to a consequentialist account of punishment, for one thing), but they are committed, it seems, to holding that it is less unjust than killing an innocent person at random. And that seems highly counterintuitive.

Since we know that Marie will commit the wrongful act at t1, there seems no reason not to punish her at some time prior to t1 (assuming that punishment is ever justified). Once epistemic worries are set aside, as they are in the time travel scenario, it does not seem to matter, from the point of view of justice, whether punishment precedes or follows the crime. And that is a hard bullet for the compatibilist to bite.

The Willies

As the euphoria subsides, and with all Red Sox business settled, I have to find new ways to proscrastinate. So since everyone else seems to have their own awards show...

The First Annual Free Will and Moral Responsibility Awards. (The Willies?)

Note: My nominations reflect a mild bias toward my pre-conversion skepticism (the days when I believed that there was no such thing as just-deserts and that even if there were such a thing, loathsome teams with bloated payrolls and pear-shaped catchers would not receive them).

Other nominations and/or category suggestions welcome...

Best Essay Title: (And the Willie goes to…) “Determinism al Dente” (Derk Pereboom)

Truest Essay Title: “Luck Swallows Everything.” (Galen Strawson)

Best Opening Paragraph: : Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that “to solve the problems of philosophers you have to think even more crazily than they do.” This task (which became even more difficult after Wittgenstein than it was before him) is certainly required for the venerable problem of free will and determinism.
--Robert Kane

Greatest Paper to Have Had a Positive Impact on the Debate: “Freedom and Resentment.”

Greatest Paper to Have Had a Negative Impact on the Debate: (I better keep that one to myself.)

Most Underappreciated Participant in the Debate: Bruce Waller

Most Respected Position within the Industry: Sophisticated Compatibilism

Least Respected Position within the Industry. (tie) Free will Skepticism/Nihilism; Agent-Causal Libertarianism

Best Neglected Paper: “Hard and Soft Determinism.” (Paul Edwards)

Best Writer: Susan Wolf.

Most Neglected Aspect of the Debate: Evolutionary accounts for the belief in free will. (What a coincidence...)

Best Derogatory Remark about Compatibilism:
Bronze--: “Wretched Subterfuge.” (Kant)
Silver-- “Quagmire of Evasion.” (James)
Gold-- “The most flabbergasting instance of the fallacy of changing the subject to be encountered anywhere in the complete history of sophistry… [a ploy that] was intended to take in the vulgar, but which has beguiled the learned in our time.” (W.I. Matson.)

Lifetime Achievement Awards: John Fischer/Gary Watson/Robert Kane

What If the Hard Determinists Are Right?

Suppose for a moment that the hard determinist thesis is correct. Determinism is true and conseqently we do not have free will and no one is robustly morally responsible--deserving of blame or praise--for anything. Gardeners: what do you think follows from this state of affairs? How would it affect (a) your individual perspective on life, assuming the world stayed pretty much the same as it is now, and (b) social policy and legislation in a society that attempted to be consistent with hard determinism?

For some reason I am more interested in (a), but I welcome any thoughts on (b).

Note: This question is not restricted to hard determinists and free will deniers. Indeed, I'm especially interested to hear how compatibilists and libertarians would react to this state of affairs (assuming they were convinced of its truth).

Alternative Possibilities and the gap

These remarks are inspired Gary Watson’s paper ‘The Work of the Will’, but since they go beyond it, I’m posting this as a main entry rather than in the ‘What We’re Reading’ forum. Watson distinguishes between internalist and externalist views of the will. The analogy is with belief: on an internalist view of belief, belief has an internal relationship with truth, such that there can’t be a gap between ‘I believe that p’, and ‘I take p to be true’ (hence Moore’s paradox). Analogously, an internalist view of the will holds that there is no gap between ‘I ought to phi’ and ‘I have compelling reason to phi’. For an externalist, these are separate questions: an externalist might ask herself ‘Phi-ing is best, all things considered, but should I phi?’ Internalists have a harder time explaining contra-normative choices – like akrasia – then externalists, for whom its no problem to see how people might choose to act against their own judgments. For an externalist, that’s what the will is for: to bridge the gap between judgment and action.

Now, I suspect that internalist/externalist divide , in one of its guises, is at least as significant as the compatibilist/ incompatibilist as an explanation of fundamental disagreements concerning moral responsibility. Externalists – like me – think that there must be a gap somewhere in the chain leading from judgment to action for responsibility to get a grip. Internalists deny that there needs to be any such gap.

This comes out clearly in the debate over responsibility for states of the agent. As an externalist, I look for the gap which make the attribution of responsibility appropriate, and when I don’t find it I deny that the agent is responsible for the state. So, for instance, I hold that agents are (typically) not responsible for their beliefs because I have an internalist conception of belief (i.e. I hold that to judge that the totality of the evidence supports p just is to believe that p). I think there must be a gap for responsibility to get a grip. Why the need for the gap? There are a couple of ways to motivate it; in my case, I think considerations of fairness play an important role, since I think that agents can only be held responsible for wrongdoing if they had the opportunity to avoid the action or state (of course, there are obvious objections to this line of thought which invoke Frankfurt-style cases. I think the best way to meet those objections is by invoking an externalist notion of responsibility for character: we are responsible for the intentions we freely form and the decisions we freely make, even in the absence of alternative possibilities, just in case we are responsible – in the alternative possibilities sense –for the states of character expressed in those decisions or intentions).

Internalists deny that responsibility requires a gap. They point out, correctly, that belief formation (for example) is an instance of agency, and argue that agency is sufficient for responsibility. In other terms, they argue that guidance control is sufficient for moral responsibility; regulative control is not necessary.

I think there is a tendency in the literature to think that the demand for alternative possibilities is naturally associated with libertarianism. I think this is a mistake: the demand for alternative possibilities is the product of externalism, not of any version of incompatibilism. And the internalist/externalist distinction cuts across the compatibilist/incompatibilist distinction.

Soup and Encyclopedias

Gardeners, I would just like to call your attention to some new posts at PEA Soup:

In the post "What Can We Learn From The Experience Machine?" Scott Wilson writes about how, in his experience, students respond differently to two relevantly similar thought experiments, Nozick's Experience Machine EM, and his own "The Duplicitous Significant Other (DSO)." The EM is intended to refute "hedonism (about welfare)" and the question between consequentialist or deontological ethical systems has been raised here at the Garden (for example in the comments to the Who Was Responsible For September 11? thread). However:

"I have come to the conclusion that the EM is not a good test of what people actually believe about value, and that the DSO is. The problem with the EM is, I think, its strangeness."

In an earlier post, The responsible and the deterrable, Michael Cholbi expresses how he feels something is wrong with Alan Wertheimer's "Deterrence and retribution." (Ethics 86 (1976): 181-199). Cholbi provides a quick background for the readers of PEA Soup:

Retributivists about criminal punishment often criticize consequentialist views on punishment, especially those that hold that deterrence is the aim of punishing an individual, on the grounds that such views would permit the "punishment" of those who are not responsible for criminal wrongdoing. If. e.g, if children, the insane, and others lacking in mens rea could be deterred from crime by the credible threat of punishment, why not punish these individuals, despite their lack of responsibility for their criminal acts? Indeed, retributivists ask, if we could deter individuals by occasionally punishing those who lack actus reus (those whose actions do not even meet the behavioral standards for criminal conduct), why not punish those who haven't even engaged in criminal conduct?

Wertheimer criticizes this consequentialist view but Cholbi remains unconvinced:

"In effect, Wertheimer's argument replies to the retributivist criticism by claiming that there are no individuals as imagined in the criticism: individuals who are not responsible for their wrongdoing, but who can be deterred, or vice versa. So the class of the deterrable and the responsible is the same class of individuals."

"For reasons I can't identify, I find this argument troubling."

I am less familiar, as a philosopher, with these general issues of ethics than with, for example, the specific issues over freedom and responsibility. Because of this, I find other blogs to be helpful introductions to other areas of philosophy. By the way, I use Bloglines to keep track of my favorite blog updates. It's a wonderful tool and I would recommend it to every Gardener.

Now I would like to take the opportunity to mention another helpful resource: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The Stanford Encyclopedia is especially helpful if, for example, you need to catch up on the relationship between freedom and theology, because a conference on that subject is fast approaching! At least two Gardeners will be presenting at The Divine and Human Freedom Conference at Wheaton (October 28-30): regular contributor John Fischer, who touches upon these issues of divine freedon in the comments to Manuel's post Free Will and Geography, and Derk Pereboom, who has posted a comment on Clarke's book about Libertarianism.

Finally, here are some entries in the Stanford Encyclopedia which should help:
Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom by Linda Zagzebski
Divine Freedom by William Rowe
Divine Providence by Hugh J. McCann

Free Will by Timothy O'Connor
Incompatibilist (Nondeterministic) Theories of Free Will by Randolph Clarke
Arguments for Incompatibilism by Kadri Vihvelin
Compatibilism by Michael McKenna
Compatibilism: The State of the Art by Michael McKenna
Causal Determinism by Carl Hoefer

Consequentialism by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
Punishment by Hugo Adam Bedau
Legal Punishment by Antony Duff

The Center for Naturalism

For my first post here at the Garden, I would like to introduce the Center for Naturalism (which has been mentioned in the comments). The Center promotes the view that human beings are part of the natural order. Accordingly, naturalists reject notions of free will which rely upon conceptions of humans as exempt from the laws of nature or possessing special powers. The founder, Tom Clark, defends a view similar to semi-compatibilism (or the misinterpretation that semi-compatibilism commits one to A. belief in moral responsibility and B. disbelief in free will). He cites Dennett and Flanagan as others who maintain like positions.

Clark has just written Davies' Really Dangerous Idea. This article criticizes Paul Davies remarks in the September/October issue of Foreign Policy, where he claims that the scientific and philosophical assault on free will is one of the world's most dangerous ideas. Like Clark, I would maintain that only the rejection of (what I call) functional responsibility would be dangerous. Other notions of responsibility, involving ultimacy, origination, unpredictability, agent-causation or quantum mechanics, are themselves dangerous and deserve scrutiny. Furthermore, those who feel concerned about the scientific and philosophical assault on free will, such as Davies, are not always clear about which type of responsibility they are referencing (Clark accuses him of equivocating).

Curiously enough, in that same issue of Foreign Policy, Francis Fukuyama identifies another philosophical position, which I would also defend, as the world's most dangerous: transhumanism. Others identify ideas, such as "Religious Intolerance" and "War on Evil", which truly are menacing.

Also, the Center for Naturalism maintains a Yahoo group, Applied Naturalism which I have just joined. This group introduced me to another Yahoo group, Determinism, which seems to have a thriving discussion of issues involving free will and moral responsibility. Perhaps the Gardeners will find these resources to be helpful and interesting.

Pathologies of volition, attributability and responsibility

Intuitively, it seems that attributability (the degree to which an action can be attributed to an agent) and responsibility are, if not synonymous, nevertheless inextricably linked. That is, the higher the degree of one of them, the higher the degree of the other. When I am compelled to act by an outside force, if I am not responsible for the action it seems that this is because it is not attributable to me. Here I shall argue that though attributability and responsibility come in degrees, they can come apart. I shall use some pathologies of volition (as I shall call them) to illustrate.

Volition, I claim, can be broken down into three separable elements; which together make up attributability. These elements are (i) the extent to which the action stems from the agent’s action plans, which rationalize the action for the agent and for others; (ii) the extent to which the agent is aware of (i), and (iii) the degree to which the action is experienced as willed. I shall expand on these points as I go.

Now consider some pathologies of volition:

(1) Utilization behavior (UB). In utilization behavior, the agent (usually following frontal lobe damage; its also seen in Alzheimer’s) responds, apparently compulsively, to the affordances (roughly, the possibilities for use suggested by an) an object. So if you put a glass of water in front of them, they drink. If you put a pair of spectacles down, they put them on – even if they’re already wearing a pair.

(2) Anarchic (or alien) hand (AH): this is the kind of pathology seen in Dr Strangelove. One hand of an otherwise quite rational and responsive agent responds to affordances all by itself. It may pick up food from someone else’s plate and put in the patient’s mouth, or make a move in a checkers game (in one case, the hand made the move, the patient took it back with his other hand, only for the hand to repeat the move).

(3) Tourette Syndrome (TS): In TS, the agent experiences a build up of tension, which eventually becomes (apparently literally) unbearable. The tension can only be relieved, usually well before the point it becomes unbearable, by engaging in the (often inappropriate) behavior associated with the syndrome: ticcing, but also swearing or insulting others. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder seems to exhibit a similar symptomology, though here it is the compulsive act which relieves the tension.

Consider, also, one kind of non-pathological behavior. A great many – probably the great majority – of our actions are routinized, and performed without conscious consideration of our options. Here I have in mind such ordinary activities as switching on a light, driving a car, making a cup of coffee. Though we can be aware of our actions as we engage in these activities, we typically are not. We perform them automatically.

Now this kind of automatic activity is attributable to us. Moreover, we are typically responsible for it (we hold people responsible for their driving). So conscious intending of an action is not necessary for attributability or responsibility. It’s not clear to me whether automatic action is experienced as willed. But the other two ingredients of attributability are in place. The action is accord with the agent’s action plans, and (it seems) the agent is aware that this is the case.

We might say that actions with the highest degree of attributability have all three ingredients. Consciously intended actions are usually like this. Automatic actions have enough of the ingredients to be clearly attributable. But the pathologies of volition have fewer of the ingredients.

In UB, the behavior is not in accordance with the patient’s action plans. She has no propositional attitudes which rationalize her behavior to herself or to others. But she is apparently unconcerned; she does not take her action to conflict with her action plans (perhaps her very short-term action plans are themselves environmentally driven). And she apparently experiences her action as willed.

In TS, the action is not in accord with the patient’s action plans. She does not want to insult this passer-by (for instance). But unlike UB, she is aware that her behavior conflicts with her action plans. Finally, like UB she experiences the behavior as willed. Indeed, she is able (to some extent) to choose when she acts. If the stakes are raised and self-control is required, she can hold out much longer (though she must give in eventually).

Finally, in AH all three ingredients are missing. The patient does not experience the action as willed at all. Instead, she experiences her hand as controlled by an alien force.

Intuitively, then, we can say that AH is the least attributable to the agent. I want to suggest that the extent to which the action accords with the action plans is the most significant ingredient of will, so both UB and TS are clearly unwilled. But TS seems to have a higher degree of volition than UB. Why? Because the agent retains the ability to judge whether or not the action accords with her action plan. This element seems to feed into (iii), the extent to which the action is experienced as willed. Obviously, too, an agent can only attempt to exercise self-control if she is aware that something is at stake.

Somewhat paradoxically, however, responsibility diverges somewhat from attributability. I am inclined to regard the long-term sufferer from AH as most responsible – because she retains overall control over her body, and is aware that toward one part of it she must adopt the objective attitude. UB patients are least responsible, since they do not have intact action plans available to them to which they can compare their moment-by-moment actions. And TS sufferers come somewhere in the middle; responsible for just when (and perhaps how) they give in to their urges.

Samba and Responsibility

I recently watched a pair of interesting movies out of Brazil- City of God and Bus 174. In various ways, the movies are about the enormous population of street kids in Brazil, and its effects on society and the kids themselves. The conditions these kids are growing up in (they certainly aren’t being “raised”) makes you wonder how any of these kids manage to get out the cycle of poverty, violence, etc. Naturally, it also raises interesting issues about moral responsibility, including: whether these kids can appropriately be said to be responsible, and the point at which it makes sense to think of them as responsible (some kids start robbing and killing before they are 8), the extent to which social institutions can be said to be responsible for this state of affairs, and the generally under-explored issue of the extent to which circumstances plays an important role in agents becoming responsible and giving them opportunities to act that do not require an unreasonable amount of what Bernard Williams once aptly called “moral weighlifting.”

I don’t have anything especially insightful to post about these issues (or, at any rate, I want to think more about them before I got out on any limbs), but I really recommend watching ‘em (and thanks to John Fischer for recommending Bus 174 to me originally!).

If you do see “City of God” you should also take a look at the documentary also on the disk- the interview with the police chief is amazing.

Against Retribution II

This is a very strange article from today's Guardian. It reports on a recent Frankfurt Allgemeine Zeitung article by Wolf Singer, who is a neuroscientist. Singer argues that brain disease excuses agents from criminal responsibility, and that as a consequence assessments of responsibility are hostage to the current state of the art in psychiatry, brain imaging, and related disciplines. Failure to detect brain disease is not proof of the absence of brain disease.

That raises some interesting questions, for instance about the fairness of current legal practices. But these are not Singer's concern. Instead, he argues that we should stop looking for evidence of brain disease at all: criminal behavior is all the evidence we need. Actually, its not quite clear what his view is. It might be that criminal behavior is evidence of neurological or psychological disorder, or it might be that since hard determinism is true punishment is never approriate.

The article reports that Ted Honderich described Professor's contribution as "breathtaking". It's hard to tell that whether this was meant as praise or blame. Honderich is a clever guy, so I assume it's the latter. Because of course its just not true that brain abnormality excuses. Some kinds of abnormality - for instance, those that make it difficult or impossible for the agent to appreciate the nature of her action or to control it - excuse, but others don't. Some abnormalities are aggravating conditions (eg, high intelligence), others are just irrelevant (my kleptomia won' get me off a speeding ticket). Perhaps courts do have a tendency to excuse people with brain diseases, but that might just be an expression of caution: the accused is not guilty beyond reasonable doubt.

A harder case is the one mentioned in the first paragraph of the article, the criminal with a brain tumor:

Last month, the case against Patrizia Reggiani was reopened in Italy. She is serving a 26-year jail sentence for having ordered the killing of her husband, the fashion supremo Maurizio Gucci. At the first trial in 1998, expert witnesses dismissed her lawyers' claims that surgery for a brain tumour had changed her personality. The new trial has been granted because her lawyers believe that brain imaging techniques developed since then will reveal damage that was previously undetectable, and strengthen their case for an acquittal

Suppose that the tumor has not affected her moral knowledge or her control over her behavior; why should mere character change excuse?

Deny or Deflate?

A friend of mine has long thought that moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism. He recently became convinced that indeterminism is no more hospitable. Now he's not sure what to think.

Not surprisingly, my friend is loath to accept that he was wrong all along about responsibility and determinism. But he says he finds it hard to believe that no one's responsible for anything. At least, he says, he can't give up responding to people as though they're responsible--sometimes getting mad at someone, sometimes becoming indignant, sometimes thinking that someone's punishment is deserved.

My friend has heard of a philosophical approach according to which, to determine what, say, responsibility is, we collect the truisms about responsibility and then find the item in the world that best fits them (provided, of course, that something fits well enough). In this way, he's been told, we sometimes learn that things aren't what, in our armchair theorizing, we thought they were. My friend wonders whether, taking this approach, he ought to say that we are, after all, responsible, though perhaps responsibility isn't quite (maybe not even close to) what we thought it was. And he wonders whether, if this is what he should say, he should then say he's now a compatibilist, or instead say that his incompatibilism was, in a way, correct after all, or perhaps say neither of these things.

He's asked me for advise, but, frankly, I don't know what to tell him.

What is Determinism?

I don't mean to take this question away from Manuel -- after all, he does have a track record for not knowing what anything important in the free will debate means, so it's likely that this question would have come from him sooner or later. But I think it's an important question, and it's one that I'm not sure I know the answer to.

It's not that I don't have a general idea of what philosophers mean when they say things like, "Determinism rules out the ability to do otherwise". So, the general idea, I take it, is this: Determinism is the scientific doctrine that says that the past and the laws of nature together entail a unique future. But this is a rather informal statement of a thesis that is probably rather more complicated.

Add to the mix that some philosophers seem happy to use the phrase "causal determinism", while others do not. For instance, Carl Hoefer gave a talk here at UCR not too long ago, and during his talk I discovered that he thinks "causal determinism" is a misnomer. On his view (if I recall it correctly), determinism is merely a thesis about logical entailment -- causal considerations are not involved. Yet many philosophers still use this term -- should they? What could it mean?

A side question is this: Given that contemporary scientific research seems to pronounce it likely that we live in an indeterministic world -- how relevant is the traditional compatibility question anymore? Certainly indeterminism is not obviously congenial to freedom either, but why shouldn't our focus be more on that question?

Blame My Counterpart

This may be a byproduct of my inadequate understanding of counterpart theory, but I’ve been recently pondering an objection to modal realism with counterpart theory from the perspective of moral responsibility. The objection goes something like this.

I’m worried that modal realism comes with its own sort of determinism. Suppose that I do something for which I am morally blameworthy (and hence morally responsible) – say I cheat on my ethics exam. If modal realism is true, then there is a world (in fact probably very many worlds) in which I do not cheat. Or, rather, there is a world in which a counterpart of me does not cheat and it is in virtue of this counterpart that we in this world can truly say of me that I could have refrained from cheating. So far so good.

But if I have counterparts who act in every way it was possible for me to act, isn’t there some sense in which I do what I do because there was no other option open to me? It almost seems as if all my counterparts said “I have dibs on this course of action!” and I was the slowest to speak, so the course of action I got to follow was the only one left. After all, if one of my counterparts who refrained from cheating had only cheated in exactly the same way I actually did, I would have acted quite differently and perhaps refrained from cheating myself. Why, then, can’t I blame my counterparts for “making” me act in the way I did? And likewise, why can’t they blame me?

Again, I suspect this line of thought is due to a misunderstanding of counterpart theory, but why shouldn’t I feel somehow restricted upon realizing that my counterparts got to act in every possible way I could have acted, and I just got the leftovers? Any help is appreciated.

Automatism and Reasons-Responsiveness

I've mentioned before that though I think that the Fischer/Ravizza account of MR is the best on the market, I don't think it handles all our deeply held intuitions. Some of my intuitions seem better explained by a characterological account of MR. In this post, I want to sketch one case which the F&R account doesn't seem to handle satisfactorily.

Its an actual kind of case. Sometimes, people perform morally significant acts in a state of automatism. Essentially, they're sleepwalking. These people engage in all kinds of skilful behavior. The case of Ken Parks is illustrative here. Parks had a history of childhood sleepwalking, but he had not experienced it for decades. One night, he arose from his bed, drove 23 kilometres (this was Canada - about 10 miles, I think) to his parents'-in law house, where he stabbed them both. He then drove to the police station, where he said that he thought he had killed someone. At the point, he noticed that his hands were badly cut. He was charged with the murder of his mother-in-law (with whom he had always got on well) and the attempted murder of his father-in-law, but acquitted on the grounds that he was in a state of automatism at the time.

Of course, we can be sceptical concerning the facts. Assume that they are stated (for evidence that this kind of case is possible, see the New York Times Magazine story here ). Now, my intuition is that the courts were right to excuse Parks, because he wan't himself when he acted. He had no history of violence, he liked his parents-in-law and they him; he had no motive for the action. But it seems to me that F&R have to hold him responsible. Parks is certainly reasons-responsive and -reactive at the time of murder. He responds to the affordances of objects (that is, he uses artifacts in the manner he has learned, in a skilful way). He drives through the streets of Scotdale without hitting anything. He might even stop at traffic lights. Is he responsive to moral reasons? That's where F&R will have to concentrate, I think, to give the right result here. He's certainly not responsive to moral reasons qua moral reasons. He doesn't explicitly consider what he has moral reason to do. But neither do normal agents, most of the time. Instead, it may well be that we typically respond to moral affordances: the person who falls is to-be-helped, not because the categorical imperative demands it, or it maximizes utility, or whatever the correct account of morality is, but because I have internalized that kind of response. I'm not sure that I ever ask myself what morality requires of me, rather than what the goods at stake in the actual situation require. If that's right, though, then Parks too might be moral reasons-responsive, in a regular enough way for him to count as a responsible agents on the F&R account. But since he's not himself, I'm inclined to excuse him from responsibility.

Is this is a counterexample to the account? If not, why not? I'm here to learn...

Recent Work on the Concept of Responsibility

Hello all,

I'm working on an update of my Stanford entry on moral responsibility. Since other entries (e.g., on compatibilism and incompatibilism) deal with those theories that attempt to spell-out the conditions on being responsible, my task has been to focus on the concept of responsibility itself. Below is a draft of some paragraphs on recent work in this area that I'm planning to add to the end of the entry. Using a distinction Gary Watson drew in his "Two Faces of Responsiblity," I've tried to map what I take to be an interesting trend, namely the increased attempt to articulate different aspects of the concept of responsiblity. As I note at the end, I think there's a connection between the drawing of these distinctions and the move toward revisionism discussed here in an earlier post.

I'd be happy for any feedback/corrections from this very able group. Some of the parenthetical citations are not yet complete. Thanks!

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Traditionally, most philosophers writing on moral responsibility have attempted to articulate an account of those conditions on responsible agency that mapped onto what was presumed to be a unitary and shared concept of moral responsibility. However, more recently a number of authors have suggested that at least some disagreements about the most plausible overall theory of responsibility might be based on a failure to distinguish between different aspects of the concept of responsibility, or perhaps several distinguishable but related concepts of responsibility.

Broadly speaking, a distinction has been drawn between responsibility understood as attributability and responsibility as accountability. (Terminology in marking this and similar distinctions varies. Here I adopt the terminology used in Watson 1996.) The central idea in judging whether an agent is responsible in the sense of attributabilty, say for an action, is whether the action discloses something about the nature of the agent's self (Watson 1996, p. 228). Some hold additionally that a judgment of responsibility in this sense includes an assessment of the agent's self as measured against some standard (though not necessarily a moral standard)-i.e., that our interest is in what the action discloses about the agent's evaluative commitments (Watson 1996, p. 235; Bok, p. 123, nt. 1. For reservations about whether responsibility in this sense entails an evaluative judgment, see Fischer and Ravizza,(?); Haji, p. 8; and Scanlon 1998, p. 248). Perhaps the clearest example of a conception of responsibility emphasizing attributability is the so-called "ledger view" of moral responsibility. According to such views, the practice of ascribing responsibility involves assigning a credit or debit to a metaphorical ledger associated with each agent (see Feinberg, pp. 30-1; Glover, p. 64; Zimmerman, pp. 38-9; and discussion of such views in Watson 1986, pp. 261-2; and Fischer and Ravizza 1998, pp. 8-10, nt. 12). To regard an agent as praiseworthy or blameworthy in the attributability sense of responsibility is simply to believe that the merit or fault identified properly belongs to the agent.

To be responsible for an action in the sense of being accountable (or "appraisable" according to the terminology of some) presupposes responsibility in the sense of attributability. However, to judge that an agent is responsible in the further sense of being accountable entails that the behavior properly attributed to the agent is governed by an interpersonal normative standard of conduct that creates expectations between members of a shared community (whereas the standard invoked above may or may not be thought to generate interpersonal expectations). In this way, the concept of moral responsibility as
accountability is an inherently social notion, and to hold someone responsible is to address a fellow member of the moral community (Stern, Watson 1987, McKenna). By emphasizing the way the reactive attitudes were tied to expectations of good will grounded in our interpersonal relationships, P. F. Strawson drew attention to this social aspect of responsibility. Recent attempts to further articulate how best to understand the relevant notion of holding responsible and its relation to being accountable reflect his on-going influence.

An agent is praiseworthy or blameworthy, in the sense of accountable, if one is warranted, or justified, in holding her responsible. On one popular view, holding someone responsible is interpreted as regarding him or her as an appropriate candidate for the reactive attitudes and possibly other forms of reward or censure based on what the agent has done (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, pp. 6-7; Wallace, pp. 75-77; Watson 1996, p. 235; and Zimmerman, ch. 5). On another view, holding someone responsible is fundamentally a matter of making a moral judgment accompanied by an expectation that the agent who performed the act
acknowledge the force of the judgment or provide an exonerating explanation of why she performed the action. To hold someone responsible is thus to be one to whom an explanation is owed. On this view, the reactive attitudes and associated practices are derivative from this more fundamental expectation (Oshana, p. 76-7; Scanlon 1998, pp. 268-271). Since the reactive attitudes and associated practices may have consequences for the well-being of an agent (especially in the case of those blaming attitudes and practices involved in holding someone accountable for wrong-doing), they are justified only if it is fair that the agent be subject to those consequences (Wallace, pp. 103-117; and Watson 1996, pp. 238-9). The fairness of
being subject to those consequences has often,in turn, be interpreted as the source of the idea that praise and blame are justified only if they are merited (Wallace, pp. 106-7; Zimmerman, ch. 5. For the claim that the relevant notion of fairness need not be understood as desert, see Scanlon, pp. 283-7).

The recognition and articulation of diversity within the concept (or amongst concepts) of moral responsibility has generated new reflection on the nature of and prospects for theories attempting to spell-out the conditions on being morally responsible. While some continue to believe that a plausible unified theory can be offered that captures the conceptual diversity sketched above, a number of others have concluded that the conditions for the applicability of our folk concept is either metaphysically indefensible or morally suspect (Bok, ch. 1; Double 1996a, chs. 6-7; Honderich, 1988, vol. 2, ch. 1; Nagel, and G. Strawson 1986, 105-117, 307-317). For example, some have argued that while a compatibilist sense of freedom is
necessary for attributability, genuine accountability would require that agents be capable of exercising libertarian freedom (Honderich, 1988, vol. 2, ch. 1). Others have granted that while the folk concept of accountability may rest on a notion of fairness as desert, the relevant notion of desert is itself morally objectionable (Scanlon, p. 274; Kelly). Of course, there have always been those--e.g., hard determinists--who have concluded that the conditions on being responsible cannot be met and thus that no one is ever morally responsible. However, a noteworthy new trend amongst both contemporary hard determinists
and others who conclude that the conditions of our folk concept cannot be satisfied has been the move to offer a revisionist conception of moral responsibility rather than to reject talk about responsibility outright (For this general trend, see Vargas 2004 and forthcoming). Revisionism is a matter of degree. Some revisionists seek to salvage much if not most of what they take to be included in the folk concept (e.g., Honderich 1988, vol. 2, ch. 1; Scanlon, pp. 274-277; and Vargas 2004), while others offer more radical reconstructions (see Pereboom, Smart,and Smilansky).

Experimental Philosophy Blog

This new blog on "experimental" or empirically informed philosophy focuses on interdisciplinary research in philosophy, legal theory, and psychology. It's run by one of our contributors, Eddy Nahmias, along with Al Mele, Josh Knobe, and Thomas Nadelhoffer. Right now there's a discussion on whether incompatibilism is intuitive, and another, related one, on the role of intuitions in philosophy. Check them out!

New Papers!

Don't forget to check our Papers on Agency Blog, which now has new pieces by John Fischer, Pamela Hieronymi, Neil Levy, Saul Smilansky and Manuel Vargas. (To regularly access the Papers on Agency Blog, go to the the right-hand column, scroll down, and between "Archives" and "Other Homepages" you will find the link Online Papers).

A brief overview: Fischer's papers address recent criticisms to his r.r. view; Hieronymi argues that, although belief is not voluntary, it is subject to two robust forms of agency; she then draws a parallel between intention and belief which yields the following conclusion: in the same sense that you cannot believe at will, you cannot intend at will; Levy's paper discusses new Trolley Problem type examples; Smilanksy examines Fischer's recent approach to the moral luck problem (which allegedly threatens compatibilism). Finally, Vargas's PPQ paper will be helpful to better understand the discussion that Dan Speak has just launched here in the Garden on the need (or not?) to revise our folk concepts regarding moral responsibility.

On Revising our Folk Concepts

Our own beloved Manuel Vargas has been pushing a revisionist line regarding freedom and moral responsibility. In short, (and he can correct me if I misrepresent his view) revisionism is the view that our ordinary folk concepts of freedom and responsibility are hopelessly jacked up. There's really no hope of untangling the various threads in a way that can be both internally coherent and consistent with the empirical data. So we ought to stop trying. Instead, we ought to admit defeat, abandon the project of salvaging the folks concepts, and get to work on a revised story of responsibility.

Recently I admitted to Manuel that I think his project is a good one and that I wish him well in his efforts. But, I claimed, this is because I am inclined to see revisionism as a kind of fall-back position. If the traditional efforts to salvage the folk concepts ultimately fail, it will be good to know that smart people have been working on what can take their place. Still, I'm not a revisionist. I'm not yet prepared to admit defeat. I still hold out hope. (There's a way in which my position here is like the "flip-flopping" van Inwagen countenances and about which John Fischer has complained).

But here's my worry. It's not clear to me what would count as sufficient pressure to force revision. Manuel's sensitive reply has been to give me his best sheepish grin and ask what more pressure one could want than 2500 years of failed philosophical efforts to make the folk concepts clear. This isn't a bad point. Makes me wonder if I've backed myself into a corner.

To get myself out of this corner, I want to think more about the kinds of pressures that can force us to revise our folk concepts. As I'm seeing it, there is a dynamic tension between the "evidence" that the concepts can't be legitimized and the value of maintaining the concept. When a particular folk concept has little riding on it, then the amount of evidence needed to dislodge it is less, and vice versa. So, there are two questions I'd like to explore. First, what counts as evidence for the failure of a concept. Second, what values hang on the preservation of the folks concepts. Manuel, obviously, thinks there is enough evidence but this is largely because he also thinks that less hangs on the concepts than I do. I think it would help to make our answers to these questions as explicit as possible.

Here's what might help. Suppose we could amass a list of circumstances in which there is some pressure on a folk concept and in which some revisionsist conception is in the offing. In some of these cases, the folk concept will have prevailed. In others, we will have made the switch to the revised concept. And, in some others, it will still be up for grabs. I'd like to get some of these cases out in the open. Then, perhaps, we might see more clearly what drives the preservation of folk concepts and what supplies sufficient pressure for revision.

cases that come to mind:
Scientific revolutions
consciousness
epistemological skepticism (Have we revised our concept of knowledge?)
People used to blame and punish animals under the law (having trials and executions, etc.).

What else comes to mind?

Welcome!

Thanks for visiting The Garden of Forking Paths ! It's still under construction, but feel free to look around and leave comments. Soon we will have papers online and more links, so remember to check back occasionally to see what's new ! If you have any questions or comments, contact the coordinators.