>-- The Garden of Forking Paths --<

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.