Free Will and Wishful Thinking

To see how wishful thinking might relate to the free will problem, consider Shaun Nichols’ excellent article “The Rise of Compatibilism: A Case Study in the Quantitative History of Philosophy.”  In that article, Nichols wrote:

“Many of us incompatibilists think we know the answer to this: it’s wishful thinking!  Philosophers embrace compatibilism because they want it to be true. This view is, I think, common among incompatibilists.”

Of course, compatibilists are not the only ones who raise suspicions about wishful thinking.  When I think of wishful thinking, I think of libertarianism—which strikes me as not unlike creationism in its speculative physics and religious undertones.  But even those who would deny the existence of free will are not immune to these accusations.  I can think of at least the following five ways in which wishful thinking can infect free will theorists:

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:

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?

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.

Financial Times on Free Will

Financial Times has a short review of three new books on free will: Freedom & Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power by John Searle; Conversations on Consciousness: What the Best Minds Think About the Brain, Free Will, and What It Means to be Human by Susan Blackmore; and Four Views on Free Will by John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom and Manuel Vargas.  You can read the review here.

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.

New Dennett on Free Will

Online Papers in Philosophy alterted me to a new article on free will, by Daniel Dennett, which is forthcoming in Psychology and Free Will.  The article is called "Some observations on the psychology of thinking about free will" and you can find it here.

The article include some provocative quotes:

"More recently, the World Question Center on edge.org mounted its 2006 question: What is your dangerous idea? and my friend Richard Dawkins dashed off–and later regretted sending and tried unsuccessfully to retract–a piece inspired by his friend John Cleese’s hilarious scene in Fawlty Towers where he beats his automobile, “punishing” it for its poor performance. The image is unforgettable, but the conclusion Dawkins was tempted to draw was a non sequitur indeed…"

"What if the parallel, in free will, to keeping your head down (in golf), is believing in an afterlife? Or believing in the Old Testament God? Is that too steep a price to pay for free will? What if you’re simply unable to muster the conviction? Have we lost our virginity for free will?"

"A world without punishment is not a world any of us would want to live in."

Cognitive Biases and Free Will Part 3: Oodles of Biases

Google tells me that the fundamental attribution error (FAE) was first mentioned at the Garden of Forking Paths on Halloween 2004—by myself. This was about twenty months before I discovered Wikipedia’s list of cognitive biases (which I highly recommend) and before I knew anything much about that literature.

But to show that I’m not the only one who considers such biases to be important for the issues discussed here, consider this passage from a book by John Doris (who recently contributed to the GFP Reading Group):

“It is not obvious, then, that situationism unduly complicates standard approaches to the infamous “problem of free will.” Their troubles – if one thinks they have troubles – are of their own making. My trouble is that I think situationism does uniquely problematize two notions central to thinking on responsibility – normative competence (Wolf 1990) and identification (Frankfurt 1988) – notions important in developing compatibilisms with enough psychological texture to provide satisfying underpinnings for the reactive attitudes.”

[Where situationism asserts that: “behavior is—contra the old saw about character and destiny—extraordinarily sensitive to variation in circumstance.]

Note the tension between “it is not obvious, then, that situationism [would make problems for] standard approaches to the free will problem”, on the one hand, and “situationism does uniquely problematize two notions… important in developing compatibilisms…” I would say that Doris is being too modest here about the consequences situationism has for compatibilism.

But situationism and the FAE (two similar, but distinct, concepts which show how people underappreciate the influence of the environment) are just the beginning. As a casual glance of the list of cognitive biases shows, there are oodles and oodles of such biases, and many of them would seem to be relevant to the free will problem.

Cognitive Biases and Free Will Part Two: The Dual Process Challenge Continued

In a wonderful interview with Galen Strawson, fellow Gardener Tamler Sommers asks:

“I don’t know. Take the case of Timothy McVeigh—his execution was shown to the families of the victims on Closed Circuit TV. Why? So that the families could experience “closure.” Don’t you think that kind of retributive impulse presupposes a belief in moral responsibility? If a malfunctioning computer, or a mouse, had caused the death of their loved ones, would they have had to watch the destruction of the mouse (or computer) in order to attain this closure?”

Tamler’s example of the malfunctioning computer, or mouse, is fascinating to me. In September 2006 I cited a similar example from Bertrand Russell:

“No man treats a motorcar as foolishly as he treats another human being. When the car will not go, he does not attribute its annoying behaviour to sin; he does not say, ‘You are a wicked motorcar, and I shall not give you any more petrol until you go.’ He attempts to find out what is wrong and to set it right. An analogous way of treating human beings is, however, considered to be contrary to the truths of our holy religion.”

I forgot to mention a third example, where Richard Dawkins, another famous British atheist and intellectual, makes a strikingly similar statement (without giving any credit to Russell):

“He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist?”

These quotes (and others like them) summarize the essence of my view on free will. Here, I want to talk about a natural compatibilist response to them. Then I want to suggest that this compatibilist analysis is superficial, and that, if we dig deeper, and consider the dual process challenge, we discover that there is more going on in these scenarios than the compatibilist suggests.

First, the compatibilist analysis. The first thing I thought, when I read Tamler’s question, is:

“Of course not! A simple computer or mouse doesn’t satisfy any reasonable compatibilist criteria for free will/action/agency. It doesn’t satisfy any mesh theory, like Frankfurt’s hierarchy of desires and identification criteria, or Watson’s concern with values. It isn’t moderately reasons-responsive. No compatibilist will find this example compelling.”

And indeed, without more, I can readily understand why compatibilist wouldn’t find these sorts of examples compelling. Even if humans are machines, they are not simple machines. We have a few more bells and whistles. This distinction is crucial to the compatibilist, and may prevent hir from seeing any wisdom in such examples/quotations. And I think this is unfortunate.

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?

Berofsky on Global Control

The latest issue of Philosophical Studies includes an article by Bernard Berofsky on global control (it also includes an article from fellow Gardener Kevin Timpe).  It is good to see this subject, which fascinates me, getting more attention.  But I found Berofsky's article to be frustrating reading.  My own feeling is that other compatibilists like Fischer and Mele and (or semicompatibilists and agnostics, as they prefer to be called) have wrestled with incompatibilist (or non-realist) global control arguments more, and given them more credit.  But others may, of course, decide for themselves and I would be very interested to know what other commentators think.

Let me offer some quick notes on the article:

Free will and prescriptive claims

In this post I would like to call attention to a phenomenon that interests me: the lack of prescriptive claims in free willist philosophy.

To begin, consider Shaun Nichols’ division of the free will problem into three different projects: a descriptive project, a substantive project, and a prescriptive project.  The descriptive project involves determining “the character of folk intuitions surrounding agency and responsibility”; the substantive project just asks whether these intuitions are correct; and the prescriptive project asks how we should revise our moral and responsibility practices in light of these other conclusions.  I think Nichols’ distinction is very insightful and I’m embarrassed to say that I have not kept these three projects distinct in my own thinking/writing on the free will problem.

As I’ve noted before, some philosophers have addressed this last intersection between ethics and the free will problem: Michael Slote, Richard Double, Derk Pereboom, and Saul Smilansky (if you know of any others, I would be interested to know who they are).  Furthermore, all of these philosophers approach this prescriptive project from a more skeptical perspective.  One conclusion about this follows: compatibilists and libertarians have not much addressed the ethical consequences of their views.  This, at least, is my own impression of free willist views: they argue that freedom exists but rarely address what would happen if didn’t exist.

This suggests a fascinating possibility: orthodox views do not address the ethical question because it is irrelevant.  Compatibilists and libertarians would act the same towards wrongdoers whether they had free will or not.  The other possibility is that compatibilists and libertarians would act differently towards wrongdoers if they did not have free will.  But, in answer to this question of how they would act differently, I (perhaps through no fault but my own) only hear silence.  So I would put the question to free willists: what does free will secure for you, in the context of our moral responsibility practices, which non-realism about free will cannot, other than the ability to know/believe/say “free will exists”?

Cuypers on Externalist Autonomy

In the latest issue of Philosophical Studies, Stephen E. Cuypers has written an excellent critique of externalist compatibilist autonomy and of Mele’s view in particular (“The Trouble With Externalist Compatibilist Autonomy”, Philosophical Studies 129:171-196). One recent development in my own view (the evolution of which never ceases to surprise me) is the embracing of an element with which I’ve always sympathized: internalism about moral responsibility. I just do not think there can ever be a rational basis for judging an agent as being morally responsibility, or not, for choices depending upon factors over which the agent had no awareness whatsoever—however convenient such a view might be for soft compatibilists who would like to distinguish between CNC controlled agents and “mere determinism.” Experimental philosophers, such as Josh Knobe, may compile data showing that the folk are not internalists—indeed, I suspect they are externalists in multiple ways—but I would regard these as widespread performance errors, no different than the countless other varieties of human irrationality (for a list of such irrationalities, see the Wikipedia article “

List of cognitive biases”).

Related to the question of internalism/externalism is the question of whether a view on freedom or autonomy should be historical. In the literature it seems common to distinguish between hard compatibilists—who are more willing to endorse a bullet-biting historical view—and soft compatibilists—who give historical factors more consideration. Harry Frankfurt has given perhaps the most eloquent statement of the hard compatibilist theme:

“A manipulator may succeed, through his interventions, in providing a person not merely with particular feelings and thoughts but with a new character. That person is then morally responsible for the choices and the conduct to which having this character leads. We are inevitably fashioned and sustained, after all, by circumstances over which we have no control. The causes to which we are subject may also change us radically, without thereby bringing it about that we are not morally responsible agents. It is irrelevant whether those causes are operating by virtue of the natural forces that shape our environment or whether they operate through the deliberate manipulative designs of other human agents (2002).”

I have had more difficulty in identifying soft compatibilists. Mele’s emphasis upon historical considerations has suggested him as perhaps the most prominent soft compatibilist, if he is one (I understand that he defends agnosticism about whether compatibilism or libertarianism secures human autonomy). Once one begins to make this distinction between soft and hard compatibilism, however, one realizes that these views are not discrete but rather help constitute a spectrum of more or less historical views. Thus, I doubt that even the most time-slice hard compatibilist could attribute moral responsibility to a murderer who came into existence one second before the murder, loaded into the murdering position (I welcome any suggestions for defenders of this view). Similarly, it seems to me that many or most defenders of human freedom (or autonomy) are willing to attribute moral responsibility to a murderer even if the relevant CNC control is not immediately local but ultimately distant. For example, it seems that many or most defenders of human freedom (or autonomy) would be willing to attribute moral responsibility to a murderer even if God (or whoever) designed the entire trajectory of the universe before it came into existence: Frankfurt, Fischer, Watson, Dennett and (if I understand his view correctly) Mele—even if Frankfurt, Watson and Dennett are willing to tolerate somewhat more local manipulation than Fischer and Mele are. Paul Russell seems to call this latter problem the notion of manipulation “at the horizon” (see his contribution to Kane’s Oxford Handbook). Gary Watson reserves this latter notion of ultimately distant manipulation for the term hard compatibilism and concluded his contribution to the Journal of Ethics issue in honor of Harry Frankfurt: “The philosophical alternatives for those who take freedom seriously (as I think we all must, in practice) are hard.”

INPC Pics

Here are some rough comments on my experience at the INPC.  I am also posting plenty of pictures.

The rest is below the fold...

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?"

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?”

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! 

Free Will and Capital Punishment

As an intern for the Public Defender, I have spent the last two weeks observing a capital murder trial.  It has been one of the most fascinating experiences of my life.  I sat just a few feet from the defendant.  The trial touched upon the human condition, free will, metaethics, religion, and the dark side of human nature. 

At the beginning of the trial, when I saw photos of the victim senselessly stabbed and lying in a pool of blood, I—who am otherwise quite progressive on issues of punishment—started to feel sympathetic towards the death penalty.  I almost felt glad that the defendant done this evil deed in the state of Virginia.  Free will skeptics, it seems, tend to also have progressive views on capital punishment.  As a consequentialist, however, I don’t recognize a deontological constraint upon executing criminals (nor do I recognize any deontological principle of retribution), although I doubt that such executions maximize the good.  But the Public Defender challenged my new sympathy when he raised the issue of free will during closing arguments and began to trace the history of the defendant’s life.  The Public Defender began a project, not unlike what Gary Watson accomplishes in Responsibility and the Limits of Evil, whereby a character we once regarded as evil becomes tragic.  As Spinoza wrote “I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.”  My sympathies realigned themselves towards their previous and more natural state.

The Public Defender urged that the defendant was “on a trajectory” since childhood to commit crime.  The murder, so the argument went, was fated and inevitable.  The prosecutor argued back, just as vigorously, that the defendant hadn’t been “on a trajectory.”  On the contrary, he made “choice after choice after choice.”  Clearly, the prosecutor regarded a “choice” and a “trajectory” as incompatible—and expected the jury to share these incompatibilist intuitions.  But, of course, if the amount of indeterminism in human nature and our local environment is negligible—and the prosecutor had no way of verifying that it isn’t nor did he feel the need to raise the issue—then the defendant had been “on a trajectory.”

Why Should Compatibilists Care About Being Causa Sui?

Why Should Compatibilists Care About Being Causa-Sui?

In The Transfer of Non-Responsibility, John Fischer criticizes a principle that may be essential to incompatibilism. One can find something like this principle, which Fischer calls the Transfer of Non-Responsibility (TNR), in Van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument, Manuel Vargas’s work on “tracing,” Derk Pereboom’s four-step argument (which traces antecedent factors back to those beyond an agent’s control), and Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument.  Fischer notes that Thomas Nagel’s view in Moral Luck relies upon something like the Transfer of Non-Responsibility.  Likewise, Robert Kane built something like TNR into his definition of Ultimate Responsibility—although I think he altered it sufficiently so that it does not defeat his libertarian project.

Most of this work involves the compatibility question.  But there are exceptions.  Strawson’s Basic Argument, for example, is silent about determinism.  This is so because it includes the notion, not that moral responsibility requires determinism (Hume’s argument), but rather that indeterminism cannot help.  One can combine this notion with the Consequence Argument or the four-step argument (while denying that agent-causation can help or denying that it is actual) to see that TNR lies at the heart of this ancient dispute about free will.

I’m not sure I entirely understand Fischer’s paper, but he seems content to show that TNR fails in at least some cases, such as Erosion (does he also agree that TNR succeeds in other cases, such as Snake Bite?).  This allows him to show that the proponents of TNR have failed to established incompatibilism—and that the world remains safe for semi-compatibilism.

To keep this post short, I will not paste the Snake Bite and Erosion examples here (one can find them in Fischer’s paper).  Suffice it to say that Erosion attacks TNR in the same way that Frankfurt Examples attack the Principle of Alternative Possibilities: by considering cases of overdetermination and appealing to folk or unexamined notions of moral responsibility.

While grappling with these issues, Fischer suggests that Saul Smilansky’s view may provide some insight: “One possibility is that there are significant problems for both compatibilism and incompatibilism, as Saul Smilansky has recently contended.”  As one whose sympathies lie more with free will skeptics and hard compatibilists such as Honderich, Strawson, and Smilansky, I want to argue that Fischer’s intuition here is correct and suggest why.

My reaction to Erosion is not unlike Kane’s reaction to Frankfurt examples: Erosion seems to me to rely upon intuitions that the skeptic does not have and cannot be expected to have.  Fischer’s argument relies upon the claim that Betty is “(intuitively) morally responsible for bringing it about that there is an avalanche that crushes the enemy base.”  But neither Pereboom, Strawson, nor myself (and, in at least one sense, neither Honderich nor Smilansky) would say that Betty is morally responsible here.  Our point is not so much that Betty, the agent in Erosion, must not be morally responsible for her actions—skeptics do not have a monopoly on the definition of moral responsibility—but rather that if TNR does not establish her innocence in Erosion, it does no work in Snake Bite either (or in the other examples cited to support TNR).

The problem is that concerns about (what Honderich calls) origination and (what Strawson and Smilansky call) being-causa-sui are as problematic in cases which involve overdetermination as they are in those which do not (“single-path” cases).  Betty is just as much not-causa-sui in Erosion as she would be without overdetermination.  The same is true of Frankfurt Examples, and this helps explain why they have failed to persuade incompatibilists.

Furthermore, it is not the case that concerns about origination or being-causa-sui are unrelated to concerns about TNR.  Rather, these worries about “ultimacy” are intimately related to that principle.  For example, TNR is built into Galen Strawson’s Basic Argument for the impossibility of free will.  By applying TNR, one traces back antecedent factors until one reaches what Saul Smilansky calls “the given.”  It is this discovery of the given that forces one to realize that people cannot be causa-sui.  So, to ignore concerns about origination or being-causa-sui is to ignore at least one reason for the importance of TNR. 

At this point, however, we are in danger of reaching what Fischer calls a “Dialectical Stalemate.”  The problem seems to be, not that one side is mistakenly applying the definition of moral responsibility but rather, that there is no such one definition.  Some potential definitions demand origination while others do not.  If skeptics can consider Erosion and declare Betty innocent while semi-compatibilists declare her guilty, how can one side persuade the other to use their definition?  More precisely, why should compatibilists care about being-causa-sui?

Gardeners: What is your reaction to Erosion?  And why should being-causa-sui be relevant to morally responsibility?  Or, if being-causa-sui is irrelevant to moral responsibility, why is it irrelevant?

Vaccinating Against Vice

Here at the Garden, I've mentioned earlier my enthusiasm for "transhumanism". According to this philosophy, the enhancement of human abilities, and the surpassing of human limitations, is ethically desirable. Most transhumanists also believe that accelerating progress in technology will allow significant enhancement sooner rather than later.

Transhumanism is still a small movement. Nevertheless, Oxford's Nick Bostrom defends these ideas in academia--especially against critics on the President's Council on Bioethics (PCB). Of course, I am also interested in the "determinism problem" and so naturally I explored the intersection of these two subjects.

I was glad to discover that the two complement each other. One appreciates the relationship between transhumanism and the determinism (mechanism?) problem when one focuses upon the superhuman--or posthuman--figures which appear in both literatures. Posthumans are prominent in transhumanist literature because they are its direct subject matter. But posthumans also frequently appear in discussions of "free will" and the reason why this should be so is less clear. I feel that their relevance to "Agency Theory" deserves more attention.

Final Reconciliation

"It seems to me that nothing approaching the truth has yet been said on this subject." - Thomas Nagel, Freedom and the View from Nowhere

I am quoting Nagel because I think he is wrong. I sympathize with his claim, because like Nagel, I do think that much of the contemporary debate about freedom and responsible is unconstructive. Much of the dialogue seems to be like a computer inefficiently allocating memory--thrashing--and could benefit from shaking off some prejudices. But, unlike Nagel, I think that a tremendous amount of material uncovering the truth on this subject has been written. The truth has just remained beneath the surface of the debate. To bring it to the surface, I want to ask this question: what can hard determinists and hard compatibilists teach each other?

The strategy I am suggesting here might encompass a majority of thinkers on the subject today: hard determinists (and those who deny free will exists) as well as (hard) compatibilists. My thesis is this. The philosophical term of art "freedom of will" does not admit of a sufficiently precise definition for either hard compatibilists or hard determinists to claim victory against the other; on the contrary, within the wide space of potential definitions both sides are attracted to the ones that they prefer for psychological or social reasons. Once attracted to their particular definitions, hard determinists and hard compatibilists--contrary to Nagel--have succeeded in constructing a variety of models describing their idea of free will, as well as arguments defending its existence or nonexistence. Consider Galen Strawson's Basic Argument, Derk Pereboom's Generalization Strategy, or the various models of compatibilism such as those suggested by Fischer and Ravizza, Frankfurt, and so on. Are these arguments not persuasive that, whatever it is Strawson and Pereboom are talking about, we lack it; whereas, whatever it is that Fischer and Frankfurt are talking about, we have it? Both sides have not succeeded in persuading the other, and cannot be expected to do so, because both sides are not talking about the same thing. (Continued below the fold)...

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

Who Was Morally Responsible For September 11?

Excuse me for posting again on the same day, but I could not let September 11 pass before remarking upon its importance to questions of freedom and responsibility.

There are many, such as those at the Center for Naturalism, who maintain that the problem of free will is not idle philosophy but rather has important pragmatic implications for the world. Let's call these people free will progressives (FWPs). The reasoning of FWPs is similar to the following. Throughout history human beings have used a certain method, the "orthodox method", to address immoral behavior. According to the orthodox method, we inform potential criminals that their crimes will be punished, and therefore they will be deterred. Indeed, over the years one can forget the utility of punishment and simply decide that to commit a crime just is to deserve punishment -- even if punishment would have no deterrent effect. The orthodox method, however, is but one method of many to address misbehavior. Human beings have come to rely too much upon the orthodox method, and justify this reliance with mistaken accounts of human agency.

Is this accusation just? The world's response to the events of September 11, 2001 suggests that our intuitions about freedom and responsibility are, in some ways, mistaken, and need to be, as FWPs insist, corrected.

First of all, consider the position of the US President. George Bush is an extremely religious person. I have not asked him but I am quite sure that he believes in human freedom -- in the absolute sense that Robert Kane and Galen Strawson describe. He also believes in heaven and hell. Indeed, Galen Strawson has characterized absolute freedom as that which would justify eternal suffering in hell and eternal reward in heaven. So it is not very surprising that Bush first responded to the news of September 11 with a commitment to retaliation:

"Sounds like we have a minor war going on here. I heard about the Pentagon. We're at war. . . . Somebody's going to pay."

Curiously enough, this apparent commitment to retaliation and lack of interest in other ways to respond to the conflict was not shared by the 9/11 commission. Consider these following quotes, which suggest to me that a belief in absolute freedom and retaliation is an unwise defense policy:

"The first phase of our post-9/ 11 efforts rightly included military action to topple the Taliban and pursue al Qaeda. This work continues. But long-term success demands the use of all elements of national power: diplomacy, intelli-gence, covert action, law enforcement, economic policy, foreign aid, public diplomacy, and homeland defense. If we favor one tool while neglecting others, we leave ourselves vulnerable and weaken our national effort."

"The report stated that "the goal to `prevent terrorism' requires a dramatic shift in emphasis from a reactive capability to highly functioning intelligence capability which provides not only leads and operational support, but clear strategic analysis and direction."

Jessica Wilson at The Leiter Reports seems to agree. Her words recall those of that famous disbeliever in free will, Spinoza:

"These sorts of offensive and defensive responses are so uniformly the government response to terrorism that it might be easy to miss the fact that they do effectively nothing to discourage terrorism, and on the contrary, do a great deal to encourage it. Israel’s violent responses to Palestinian terrorism have not been effective in stopping this, and nor have been the violent U.S. responses to Iraqi terrorism. Apparently nothing could have been better for Al Qaeda recruitment than the U.S.’s brutal invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq."

"I am not a wise person, though I aspire to be. But I know how a wise person responds to aggression. When a wise person faces aggression, they do not immediately and blindly strike back, thus potentially initiating a cycle of endless violence and retribution. Rather, they consider why they have been struck. Have they, perhaps, done something to offend the aggressor? If so, muses the wise person, perhaps they might avoid future aggression by removing the source of the offense."

According to Wilson, Bush's belief in freedom, in the absolute sense, and the retaliation that such freedom would justify, has had disasterous consequences. His belief has resulted in a sort of blindness to the antecedent causes of terrorism, and consequently blindness to alternative methods of preventing terrorism. Momentary reflection explains why. Retaliation is meaningless if there is nobody to retaliate against; suicide attackers cannot be punished. Likewise, terrorism is not something that can be dealt with adequately after the fact. It must be addressed and extinguished before future attacks. Merely threatening potential criminals with the threat of punishment will no longer suffice, and should not be relied upon.

Gardeners, to what extent does the free will problem have practical implications for the world and our justice systems? To what extent are the accusations of Free Will Progressives correct? Do defenders of free will rely too much upon retaliation?

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.