In this article in the SF Chronicle, Chris Colin asks whether we deserve our salaries given how much of our lives are a matter of moral luck for us. He even asked John Perry, who apparently said something close to the following: "No, but don't worry about it!"
Enjoy, and happy St. Patrick's Day.
Well the Garden has been especially productive this year: congrats to Eddy Nahmias and family, who welcomed a new addition on March 3, Eve Kopec Nahmias. Eddy reports that Eve is both healthy and, most importantly, cute!
An announcement from David Hershenov:
The University of Buffalo Philosophy Department is proud to announce that John Martin Fischer has been chosen to deliver the Fall 2008 Hourani Lectures. His topic will be Free Will and Moral Responsibility. The Hourani Lectures are given every two years by philosophers working in either ethics or Islamic philosophy. The endowment generously left to the University at Buffalo Philosophy Department by the late George Hourani provides for an award of $12,000 to the speaker. Previous Hourani lecturers have been Jeff McMahan, Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Onora O'Neill, and Shelly Kagan.
Dates of the talks: 9/24, 9/26, 10/1, 10/3, 10/6, and 10/10.
Other details are available at the University at Buffalo Philosophy Department webpage.
Congratulations John!
Andras Szigeti tells me that he is organizing a course on moral responsibility as a central concern of philosophical ethics and metaphysics. The course will take place in Budapest, 14-25 July 2008 and will be hosted by Central European University's Summer University (CEU SUN). Instructors include Mark
Balaguer, Tim O'Connor, Terry Horgan, Janos Kis, Thomas Schmidt and Andras Szigeti.
You can find information about the course here. Applications for places with bursaries are still accepted -- the new deadline for these places will be announced shortly.
Are there are any Gardeners on the job market this year? If so, I'd be interested to hear their thoughts on issues such as the following:
1) What did you put for your AOS?
2) Did you try to market yourself more as an ethicist or as a metaphysician (or something else)? And how well did it work? Did you have to change your approach depending on the particular school?
3) Did you feel like having a specialty in free will/moral responsibility was harmful to your chances in any way? Was it beneficial?
4) Any advice for Gardeners who will be on the job market in the next couple of years?
I know we have talked about some of these issues on here before, but there may be people with fresh perspectives to share. Anyone should feel free to weigh in, though, even if you weren't on the job market this year. I get the feeling that marketing a free will specialty is a somewhat delicate matter, and I wonder how people go about handling it.
(P.S. I realize the job market is still going strong, so people should feel free to post anonymously if they want.)
(At least if by 'The Garden' you understand 'one of our contributors' and by 'bears fruit' you understand 'has a baby'.)
Our warmest congratulations to Kevin and Allison Timpe, who recently welcomed a healthy son into their family: Jameson Lloyd Cooper Timpe. Here are a couple of pictures of the cute little guy.
My antipodean friend and colleague Allan McCay sent me the link to this article, which describes a study on the ethical benefits of believing in free will. Gardeners may be interested to take a look.
Our very own Revisionist, Manuel Vargas, has been awarded a fellowship from the NEH for his project entitled, "Beyond Atomism and Monism: A Revisionist View of Moral Responsibility". (See Leiter's announcement here.) Congratulations, Manuel -- you make us proud!
On February 22 and 23, UCR will be hosting a conference called "Self, Agency, and Self-Awareness". You can see a PDF flier for the conference by clicking here. (Note, in particular, the information at the bottom of the flier about the format of the conference and the contact information for reservations.) It looks like it will be very interesting.
The Garden has been mighty quiet lately. Of course, winters aren't really the best time of year for gardens in general, so perhaps it's not too surprising. Still, I'd like to see us get back into some philosophy, so here's some food for thought.
Luck poses at least the following two problems for libertarianism: (1) It hurts, and (2) It doesn't help. That is, according to some objections, the indeterminism required for libertarianism actually diminishes control, whereas according to other objections, the indeterminism might not hurt, but it at least doesn't give agents any more control than they could have had without it. Ignore the second worry for now and focus instead on the first.
Consider a libertarian who accepts most of the details of Fischer and Ravizza's theory of moral responsibility, except that this theorist thinks that moral responsibility requires an ownership condition that requires the falsity of determinism. In particular, this theorist agrees with F&R that an agent need not know the details about the operation of her mechanisms in order to take responsibility for them. Now, if libertarianism is true, then some of our mechanisms operate indeterministically. But it doesn't seem like this fact would preclude an agent from taking responsibility for the mechanism. So why should we think that indeterminism would diminish control, then?
Maybe I'm missing some good reason to think that indeterminism diminishes control, but it seems to me that as long as you have taken responsibility for your indeterministic mechanism, you're good to go (at least with respect to the first threat posed by indeterminism).
Judging by the recent lack of activity, people have probably already gone on vacation from philosophy for a few weeks. I'm about to do the same myself, but before I go, I wanted to say two things:
First, we seem to be having the same comment problem that PEA Soup describes here. I'll try to check the spam filter for stray comments over the next couple of weeks, but my internet access will be intermittent, so just be patient if your comment doesn't appear immediately.
Second, I wish everyone a happy holidays! See you next year.
First, the department of philosophy at Florida State University is hosting the Werkmeister Conference on Free Will & Science in January. Check out the conference program by clicking on the link in the previous sentence.
Second, the excellent radio show run by Ken Taylor and John Perry, Philosophy Talk, is considering changing their name for reasons outlined by Ken Taylor here. He is asking for suggestions for a new name, so if you have any great ideas, head over there to let him know. Anything we can do to help keep this show on the air and widely distributed is, I think, well worth doing.
Click here to see how our Free Will Friends from Florida have contributed to the obligatory spreading of joy that the holiday season is all about. Or perhaps, as John Fischer suggested to me, this is what Michael, Al, and Randy must resort to in a desperate attempt to compete with the charms of UC Riverside. (Though it certainly has made me second-guess my decision to come to UCR...)
Be warned: clicking that link will lead almost immediately to an outburst of laughter, so click at your own risk, and probably not in a library, where I was the first time I saw it.
(Thanks to Chris Zarpentine, grad student at FSU, for putting this together. And thanks to Michael, Al, and Randy for their good humor.)
If you haven't read about it already, take a look at this rather disturbing case. In brief, the story is as follows. A British woman teaching in the Sudan asked her class what they wanted to name the teddy bear that was to be the class mascot. The children suggested the name 'Mohammed', and so that became the bear's name. What the teacher didn't know is that it is against the law in the Sudan to name an inanimate object after the prophet. The teacher was arrested, and now protestors are calling for her execution on Socratic grounds: insult to religion and polluting the minds of children.
What's going on here? Is this an example of a culture that rejects an epistemic condition on moral responsibility? Or is this merely a case of strict liability taken to the extreme? (Or something else?)
Markus Schlosser sends the following CFP. More info below the fold.
Call for Papers and Abstracts:
Normativity and the Causal Theory of Action
One-day conference, 18 July 2008
Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol, UK
Keynote speaker: Michael E. Bratman (Stanford)
The aim of the conference is to bring together proponents and opponents of the event-causal theory of action. Broadly, speakers should address the question of whether the causal theory can capture the normative and first-personal aspects of human agency. Submissions of full papers or abstracts for presentations of about 40 minutes are invited. Abstracts should be at least 400 words long, papers no more than 5000 words.
Submission deadline: Friday 29. February 2008
Full papers for circulation among participants should be ready by the end of May. Please e-mail submissions to markus.schlosser@bristol.ac.uk in doc, rtf or pdf format.
Wolfhart Totschnig from Northwestern University sends the following call for papers:
Title: 2nd Annual Conference of the Northwestern Society for Ethical Theory and Political Philosophy
Keynote speakers: Susan Wolf (UNC Chapel Hill) and David Velleman (NYU)
Dates: May 15th - 17th, 2008
Conference website (with call for papers): http://www.philosophy.northwestern.edu/conferences/moralpolitical/
Submission deadline: February 15th, 2008 We invite submission from both faculty and graduate students.
Back in April we had a nice discussion here at the Garden of Joe Campbell's Analysis piece, "Free Will and the Necessity of the Past". Well, the discussion continues.
Anthony Brueckner has a reply to Campbell forthcoming in Analysis called "Retooling the Consequence Argument", which he has been kind enough to let us post here.
Also, Joe Campbell has drafted a reply to Brueckner's forthcoming reply that he has been kind enough to let us post here.
Enjoy!
Although the navigation bar doesn't look nearly as cool as it used to, I think I fixed the problem it was having with Safari and Firefox. Let me know if anyone still can't access the tabs above. Thanks again for your patience. I'll try to work on making it look a bit cooler, now that it actually works.
It has come to my attention that the cool new navigation bar I put right beneath our weblog banner isn't functional in the Safari and Firefox web browsers. It should work fine in Internet Explorer, though (let me know if you use IE and are having problems with it). I'm still trying to figure out how to fix this problem, but in the meantime, I've temporarily fixed the situation with the new list at the top of the left-hand sidebar. Users of Safari and Firefox can access the different tabs by clicking on those links. I hope to be able to get the tabs working fine for everyone soon.
Thanks for your understanding!
In connection with the new edition of the Perry/Bratman/Fischer anthology Introduction to Philosophy, John Fischer, Patrick Todd, and I have been working on a companion website for students who are using the book, which includes a blog and other online resources. If you haven't checked it out yet, you might be interested to see it by clicking here.
But what you will be most interested in seeing is the interview with Michael McKenna (conducted by Patrick) that is posted below the fold, which we conducted for the purpose of putting it on the companion website (a shorter version of the interview is up on the blog at the intro site). Michael was gracious enough to put a lot of thought and effort into answering our questions in a way that would be accessible to undergraduates, and we are very appreciative of his help. We are posting the full interview here below the fold in the hopes that some Gardeners will find it interesting, as well. Thanks, Michael!
Just a heads-up -- the blog will be under construction over the next week or so as I try to spruce things up a bit and make it more easy to navigate. Posting and commenting shouldn't be interrupted, but it may look weird when you visit, so don't be alarmed.
This cartoon is a great postscript to our earlier discussion. Enjoy!
CALL FOR PAPERS: 11th Annual Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference
CARVING NATURE AT ITS JOINTS
The Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference is a topic-focused,
interdisciplinary conference co-sponsored by the Philosophy
Departments at the University of Idaho and Washington State University.
DATES
15-17 March 2008 (the conference ends shortly before the 2008 Pacific
APA)
LOCATION
Moscow, Idaho & Pullman, Washington
COMMITTED PARTICIPANTS
Peter Godfrey-Smith (Harvard), Keynote Speaker
Alexander Bird (Bristol)
Michael Devitt (CUNY)
Ned Hall (Harvard)
Marc Lange (UNC Chapel Hill)
Karen Neander (Duke)
L.A. Paul (Arizona)
Roy Sorensen (Dartmouth)
Achille Varzi (Columbia)
Kadri Vihvelin (USC)
Neil Williams (Buffalo)
SUBMISSIONS
Essays of 5-6,000 words (30-40 minutes reading time) will be accepted
until January 2nd, 2008. Papers from any area that address
philosophical issues related to the metaphysics and/or epistemology
of classification are requested. Graduate students and individuals in
other disciplines are welcome to submit essays.
Send your essay in PDF format and prepared for blind review as an
email attachment to <matthew.slater@uidaho.edu>. Please mention the
title of your essay in the body of the email.
NOTIFICATION
Individuals will be notified of decisions regarding submissions in
early February. Accepted papers will be eligible for publication in
volume eight of Topics in Contemporary Philosophy, an edited volume
to be published by MIT Press, pending editorial review.
CHAIRS & COMMENTATORS
If you would like to act as a session chair or a commentator, please
contact <josephc@wsu.edu> with your areas of competence.
CONTACTS
Joseph Keim Campbell, Washington State University <josephc@wsu.edu>
Matthew H. Slater, University of Idaho <matthew.slater@uidaho.edu>
INPC co-directors
Additional information can be found here and a flyer for the conference can be found here.
I would be very interested to see some Garden discussion of Saul Smilansky's very interesting recent article, "Determinism and prepunishment: The radical nature of compatibilism", which is in the most recent issue of Analysis. It's a quick read, so you should really read the original piece, but here's the basics:
Suppose compatibilism is true. Now consider a deterministic world where agents are free and responsible. In principle, we could come to know that someone is going to commit a crime, even before the person commits the crime. But there seems to be no relevant moral difference betweeen knowing that someone has committed a crime and knowing that someone will commit a crime. So compatibilists cannot in principle object to prepunishment (punishing someone for a crime that he has not yet, but will, commit) on moral grounds.
I wonder in particular what responses compatibilists might give to this line of reasoning. A first thought is that a compatibilist might draw the distinction between moral responsibility, on the one hand, and whether blame and punishment are justified, on the other. Strictly speaking all the compatibilist is committed to is the compatibility of determinism and morally responsible agency, and perhaps something else is needed in order to justify blame and punishment, something else which would entail that prepunishment is unacceptable. Other ideas?
No, this is not a book about experimental philosophy (note the 'F' instead of a 'Ph'), but rather a book about the TV show in the series called "The Philosophy of Popular Culture" put out by the University Press of Kentucky. (You can find the website here.) I mention it here only because our own Alan White contributed a chapter on free will entitled, "Freedom and World-Views in The X-Files". I encourage you all to check it out.
I'm always glad to see work on free will published in Analysis, partly because it means I'll be able to read the articles fairly soon after they come out, since they are usually bite-sized (though of course even a bite-sized morsel can pack quite a punch!). So I'm glad to see that the October 2007 issue has a piece by Saul Smilansky entitled, "Determinism and prepunishment: the radical nature of compatibilism". I haven't received my copy of the journal yet, but I look forward to reading this piece.
You may also be interested to know that Lynne Rudder Baker has an article forthcoming in the January 2008 issue (you can find the preprint here) on the Consequence Argument, in which she references Joe Campbell's excellent Analysis piece we discussed a bit earlier.
And finally, congrats to fellow Gardener Alan White on his forthcoming piece on time (co-authored with Nathan Oaklander), which also appears in the October 2007 issue.
Over at The Splintered Mind, Eric Schwitzgebel has an interesting post about the situationist critique of virtue ethics. Gardeners may find his response interesting, as it appeals to control and moral responsibility.
I find the post especially interesting because I have recently been thinking a lot about the relationship between skepticism about moral responsibility and the problem of moral luck. Of the four sorts of moral luck Nagel identifies in his article on the topic, all but circumstantial luck play a large role in the literature on freedom and responsibility, as far as I can tell. (The worry about deterministic causation is a worry about antecedent luck, Strawson's worry about self-creation is a worry about constitutive luck, and the worry about indeterministic causation -- which is the only one to explicitly use the word 'luck' -- is, I think, a worry akin to worries about resultant luck.) This suggests that there is another skeptical argument to be had from the idea of circumstantial luck, but I've never seen such an argument. How might it go? Well, maybe something like this (with an obvious nod to Strawson):
1) You do what you do because of the situations in which you find yourself.
2) If (1), then in order to be responsible for what you do, you must be responsible for finding yourself in those particular situations.
3) But you cannot, ultimately, be responsible for finding yourself in the particular situations in which you find yourself.
4) Therefore, you cannot be responsible for what you do.
If anyone is moved by something like this argument, I suspect that they will think Schwitzgebel's response to the situationist critique of virtue ethics is unconvincing. But...is anyone moved by something like this argument? I wonder why it gets so much less attention than the other three worries about luck mentioned above.
One cool feature of our blog that we don't really take advantage of very much is the Category feature, which is a way of sorting blog posts by topic. When we first created the blog way back in 2004, Gustavo and I just came up with some categories to put there and haven't really touched them since then. Well, you may have noticed that the categories we came up with were hopelessly broad (like 'free will') and as such quite unhelpful for sorting posts. Some contributors did place their posts in categories, but most didn't. The time has come to make the Category feature more useful, so here's what we've done.
Tamler had the brilliant idea that we should take a leaf out of PEA Soup's book, and have categories for each contributor's posts, so that someone could, for instance, find all of Manuel's posts with just one click. You can now do that. If you scroll down, you'll see the categories on the left-hand sidebar -- one for each contributor (who has actually posted something on the main page). I spent the last couple of hours sorting all of our archived posts, but the sorting of new posts will be up to you all. Whenever you post something, please remember to file it under the correct instance of the category schema "Posts by [your name]".
While I was at it, I deleted the other useless categories we had up there. If there are any other categories people think would be useful to have, let me know and we can start filing posts in them from now on.
Thanks for the suggestion, Tamler -- it's a great improvement to the usefulness of the Garden, I think.
The Florida Student Philosophy Blog has the scoop.
From September 13-15, 2007, Indiana University, Bloomington will be hosting the Conference on Agency and Responsibility: Perspectives from Metaphysics, Ethics, and the Emerging Sciences of Brain and Behavior.
This conference will bring together philosophers from the diverse areas of ethics, metaphysics, and the cognitive sciences at their intersection point of human agency. Invited speakers include Richard Holton (MIT), Jennifer Hornsby (Birkbeck College), Al Mele (Florida State U), Shaun Nichols (U Arizona), Adina Roskies (Dartmouth), Angela Smith (U Washington), and R. Jay Wallace (UC Berkeley).
A complete list of commentators and invited participants can be found at the conference web site. Registration is $40. Further information regarding registration and accommodations can be found online.
Further comments and inquiries can be directed to agenresp@indiana.edu.
Conference address: http://www.indiana.edu/~agenresp
Jonathan Matheson just wrote me an email requesting that I ask the Garden community for help finding publications on the epistemic condition on moral responsibility. So here I am. Garden, what've you got?
Three off the top of my head -- Carl Ginet has a Nous article called "The Epistemic Requirements for Moral Responsibility", Manual Vargas has his paper on tracing and the epistemic requirement in Midwest Studies, and I believe Eddy Nahmias's dissertation was on this topic, though I'm not sure whether there are any associated publications.
You all might be interested to read this recent article by David Hodgson called "Partly Free", which appeared in the July 5th issue of the Times Literary Supplement. David welcomes any comments you my have.
(You can find the original, unedited version of the paper on David's website here.)
Believe it or not, our blog is now three years old. That's right, the official welcome post was made on May 31, 2004.
What an excellent three years it has been. Thanks very much to all of our contributors -- all 48 of you! -- and to the countless others who have either commented on our posts or just stopped by for a visit. Thanks are also due to John Fischer and the UC Riverside philosophy department for financial assistance and administrative and moral support. I'm not sure that blogging has been around long enough for there to be any criteria for what counts as a "successful" blog, but any plausible criteria will certainly have to count the Garden as a success.
Some numbers for those who are interested in such things:
Total number of posts: 328
Total number of comments: 3242
Total number of visits to the Garden: 299,938
Average visits per day: 273
The admirably-managed Online Philosophy Conference is now in its second week, and there are two papers that Gardeners should find especially interesting.
John Martin Fischer has a paper on the Direct Argument, with comments by Randy Clarke and David Widerker. Check it out here and add to the discussion!
Derk Pereboom has a paper on compatibilism and deliberation, with comments by Dana Nelkin and Joe Campbell. Check it out here and add to the discussion!
Congrats to our very own Gustavo Llarull, who has won the Baricelli Award in recognition for his interdisciplinary work on philosophy and literature. His dissertation (in progress) explores the fascinating issue of what sort of contribution reading great works of literature might make to our moral sensibilities. (Dissertation spoiler: A significant contribution indeed!) As part of this honor, Gustavo is giving a lecture entitled "Narrative Self-Conception, Ethics, and Literature" to the UCR Comparative Literature Department this Wednesday from 11am-noon. Good work Gustavo!
I'm sure everyone will be excited to hear that Four Views on Free Will, by Fischer, Kane, Pereboom, and Vargas, is now in print. Click here to see the Blackwell site. This book makes an excellent contribution both to the contemporary debate and to the growing library of accessible books on free will that are amenable to teaching undergraduates. Congratulations and good work to all four of the authors, and especially to Manuel for conceiving and organizing the project.
P.S. When you pick up your copy of this book, be sure to spend a few moments in admiration of the index...
Allen Gehring has drawn my attention to a conference on Agency and Responsibility to be held at Indiana University, Bloomington this fall. More details are below, and the conference website is here.
Agency at the Intersection
We are pleased to announce the 2007 Conference on Agency and Responsibility, to be held at Indiana University, Bloomington on September 13-15, 2007. This conference will bring together philosophers from the diverse areas of ethics, metaphysics, and the cognitive sciences at their intersection point of human agency. Invited speakers include Richard Holton (MIT), Jennifer Hornsby (Birkbeck College), Al Mele (Florida State U), Shaun Nichols (U Arizona), Adina Roskies (Dartmouth), Angela Smith (U Washington), and R. Jay Wallace (UC Berkeley).
A complete list of commentators and invited participants can be found at the conference web site. Registration is $40. Rooms are available at the Indiana Memorial Union Biddle Hotel and Conference Center. Further information regarding registration and accommodations can be found online.
Join us for a three-day extended discussion on the beautiful wooded campus of Indiana University, home of outstanding departments of Philosophy, History and Philosophy of Science, and a large, world-class program in Cognitive Science.
Further comments and inquiries can be directed to agenresp@indiana.edu.
Conference address: http://www.indiana.edu/~agenresp
I just got the most recent issue of Analysis in the mail today, and very much enjoyed reading an article by our very own Joe Campbell, "Free Will and the Necessity of the Past". A very nice piece of work, Joe. For those interested, I'll summarize and discuss the piece a bit below the fold. (But you should really go read it, too!)
Patrick Todd over at Show-Me The Argument has posted an interesting argument against compatibilism based on the scenario used in Mele's Zygote Argument. Go check it out!
A recent study in Nature finds that damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (#3 on pic below) affects moral judgments in life-and-death situations. And the test they used to figure this out is none other than the beloved Trolley Problem. Read about it in this New York Times article as well as on this Nature website.
(Thanks to Stephen Schmid via Alan White for the NY Times link.)
Luke Misenheimer, a student at UNC, sent the following contribution. Thanks Luke!
I recently became interested in experimental contributions to the free will debate, and I decided to run a study to investigate a possible difference between the results of some earlier studies. Using questionnaires, I told subjects about an imaginary (more or less) deterministic universe, and then I asked whether a particular action in that universe could have been performed with a free will.
My questionnaires were based on those used in earlier studies, and in constructing them I wanted to make sure that I really drove home the determinism to subjects. In addition to describing the imaginary deterministic universe, my questionnaires did several things to make sure that subjects really got the deterministic message: - they italicized key deterministic phrases; - they reiterated points about the determinism of the universe both generally and with reference to a particular action; - they asked subjects whether an example action in the universe was determined, and I ignored the other responses of subjects who answered in the negative; and - they had subjects compare the imaginary universe to our own universe, which most subjects took to be indeterministic.
My study had two kinds of questionnaires, both of which did all these things. Both questionnaires described a universe in which things that happen around the time an agent is born determine all of that agent's actions. The only intended difference between the questionnaires was this: according to one questionnaire, these things completely cause the actions; according to the other questionnaire, these things can be used to perfectly prediction the actions. The full questionnaires can be found here.
I was worried that all the mechanisms designed to hammer determinism into subjects' heads would cause subjects given both questionnaires to give equally incompatibilist responses (or to give slightly different but still incompatibilist responses). Instead, subjects given the causation questionnaires tended to give *incompatibilist* responses, and subjects given the predictability questionnaires tended to give *compatibilist* responses! So: what, if anything, do you GFPers think this difference between causation and predictability means about the prephilosophical concept of free will?
I'm reading Galen Strawson's recent article, "Free Agents", which appears in the same Philosophical Topics issue where Kadri Vihvelin's paper that we discussed a couple of weeks ago is found. In it he makes this suggestive claim (where 'U-freedom' refers to the sort of freedom that we need to be ultimately morally responsible for our actions, in Strawson's sense):
"The basic argument that U-freedom is impossible is entirely a priori, but there are also extremely strong a posteriori reasons for thinking it impossible. It seems unavoidable if Einstein's theory of special relativity is anything like correct, for example -- a point that has received surprisingly little discussion in recent debate about free will." (p. 392)
Two questions about this: (1) How might such an a posteriori argument against U-freedom from special relativity go? And (2) How could such an argument show that U-freedom is impossible, given that the special theory of relativity is, at best, contingently true?
What follows is a brief section taken from a draft of the first chapter of my dissertation -- it's basically a suggestion for how to set up the debate that we are all engaged in. I'd be interested to see what people think.
At its heart, the problem of free will and determinism is about neither determinism nor free will. Or, rather, it’s only about determinism inasmuch as it is about a particularly troubling consequence of determinism – one that would still be troubling even if determinism were false. This troubling consequence is that what we do is ultimately a matter of luck. And it’s only about free will inasmuch as that particular term has been sufficiently disambiguated. Given the various ways the term ‘free will’ has been used, however, it’s almost better to just drop the term altogether in favor of whichever particular disambiguation one is interested in. The disambiguation I’m interested in is control. So, as I see it, the problem of free will and determinism is really a problem about luck and control. But what sort of luck am I talking about? And what sort of control?
Continue reading "A Suggestion for Setting Up the Problem" »
Just wanted to let ya'll know that the next episode of philosophy talk, on January 28th, will feature Harry Frankfurt. The episode is called, "If Truth is so valuable, why is there so much BS?" Check out the Philosophy Talk website for more details.
You can find video of The Daily Show's interview with Harry Frankfurt about his new book, On Truth, here. Unfortunately, this interview seems a little more one-sided than the previous one about On Bullshit. But it's still worth a look.
Doug Portmore over at PEA soup has started a wiki on philosophy journals. Here is his post about it. And here is the actual site. This seems like it will be very useful.
I find Al Mele's Zygote Argument compelling. (See the next to last chapter in his new book and also the paper we read in the GFP reading group not too long ago.) That argument comprises the following story about a goddess named Diana and the subsequent numbered steps.
Diana creates a zygote Z in Mary. She combines Z’s atoms as she does because she wants a certain event E to occur thirty years later. From her knowledge of the state of the universe just prior to her creating Z and the laws of nature of her deterministic universe, she deduces that a zygote with precisely Z’s constitution located in Mary will develop into an ideally self-controlled agent who, in thirty years, will judge, on the basis of rational deliberation, that it is best to A and will A on the basis of that judgment, thereby bringing about E. If this agent, Ernie, has any unsheddable values at the time, they play no role in motivating his A-ing. Thirty years later, Ernie is a mentally healthy, ideally self-controlled person who regularly exercises his powers of self-control and has no relevant compelled or coercively produced attitudes. Furthermore, his beliefs are conducive to informed deliberation about all matters that concern him, and he is a reliable deliberator.
1. Because of the way his zygote was produced in his deterministic universe, Ernie is not a free agent and is not morally responsible for anything.
2. Concerning free action and moral responsibility of the beings into whom the zygotes develop, there is no significant difference between the way Ernie’s zygote comes to exist and the way any normal human zygote comes to exist in a deterministic universe.
3. So determinism precludes free action and moral responsibility.
I want to discuss premise (1). I think the best way to explain the intution behind (1) is in terms of heaven-and-hell responsibility. That is, suppose that Ernie dies and finds himself about to be judged by Diana (the goddess who created him). Diana is deciding whether to send Ernie to hell, and decides that since E (the event Diana created Ernie to bring about) was so morally bad, Ernie should go to hell. She's about to toss him into the fire when he pipes up -- "But wait! Surely I don't deserve to go to hell. After all, you created me *in order that* I would do E. How can you possibly blame me for it?" Ernie seems to have a point here.
But what I'm wondering, and I'm hoping you can help me out with, is whether the idea of heaven-and-hell responsibility is doing too much of the work here. So what if we moved to another case, and this time consider another timely and supposedly omniscient person who hands out rewards and punishments based on merit: Santa Claus. Now, in this case, Diana still created Ernie in order that he would perform E. But forget the stuff about dying and facing judgment day. Now let us suppose that Ernie gets a big fat chunk of coal in his stocking this Christmas because Santa wasn't too happy with the fact that Ernie did E. If Ernie catches Santa putting coal into his stocking, does Ernie have a legitimate complaint? Can he say, "But wait! Surely I don't deserve this piece of coal in my stocking. After all, Diana created me in order that I would do E. How can you possibly blame me for it?"
So what I'm wondering is (a) whether people agree that the heaven-and-hell case is a good case to elicit intutions in favor of premise (1), (b) whether people think that the Santa case is just as good, and (c) if the answer to (b) is no, does this show that the intuitions elicited by the heaven-and-hell case are unjustified?
(And, just out of curiosity, what about another timely alteration of the case -- plug in God for Diana, Jesus for Ernie, and some significant event in Jesus' life for E. (The woman's name is 'Mary', after all.) What happens then?)
And by the way, happy holidays!
And speaking of new work, a new double-issue of Philosophical Topics (Vol. 32) is now out, edited by John Fischer. Check out the table of contents -- there's enough there to keep you reading for quite a while. Enjoy!
A philosopher sounds off in the MyTurn section of the most recent issue of Newsweek. Check it out!
As you are probably already aware, the new Jobs for Philosophers is now online at the APA website. A completely amateurish and unoffical search of the document (conducted by yours truly) brings out the following information:
Number of instances of the phrase 'free will' = 0
Number of instances of the phrase 'freedom' = 11 (but none use it in the sense we care about)
Number of instances of the phrase 'free' = 2(but none use it in the sense we care about)
Number of instances of the phrase 'moral responsibility' = 0
Number of instances of the phrase 'responsibility' = 2 (but neither uses it in the sense we care about)
Number of instances of the phrase 'agency' = 3 (one uses it in the sense we care about)
Number of instances of the phrase 'action' = 108 (all prefaced by the word 'affirmative')
Okay now for more interesting results:
Number of instances of the phrase 'ethics' = 267 (almost all in a sense we care about)
Number of instances of the phrase 'metaphysics' = 33
Number of instances of the phrase 'moral' = 16
Number of instances of the phrase 'moral psychology' = 0
For those of you on the market, happy hunting!
In an ongoing effort to fight the weeds that occasionally pop up here in the Garden (that's Garden-speak for comment spam), I have closed comments on all archived posts. The posts that appear on the main page will all still be open for comments, though. If for some reason you find yourself wanting to comment on an archived thread, just drop me an email and I'll open the comments again for you so you can contribute.
Happy Friday the 13th!
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?
Alan White brought to our attention the fact that Philosophers' Imprint has just published a new article that may be of interest to Gardeners:
Richard Holton, "The Act of Choice"
Enjoy!
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?
A criticism often levelled against libertarians is that they are doing armchair physics. Take Ted Sider's slogan for libertarians I mentioned earlier here at the blog: "I know from my armchair that physics is incomplete!" But is this criticism fair?
Libertarians do say that determinism is false. That much is clear. But what isn't clear is whether determinism, in this context, is the sort of thesis that could be shown true or false by physics. When libertarians deny that we live in a deterministic world, their formulation of determinism typically involves notions like the past, the laws of nature, causation, and logical entailment. Are these notions that would show up in formulations of determinism given by physicists? Could there really be empirical data to support claims about a logical entailment between two states of the world, given the laws of nature? In other words, is the sort of determinism denied by libertarians a philosophical (rather than a scientific) thesis? And if so, is it really fair to call libertarians armchair physicists?
In raising this question, I have in mind a parallel from the philosophy of time. A criticism often levelled against presentists (those who believe, roughly, that only present objects exist) is that their view is inconsistent with the pronouncement we get from the special theory of relativity that there is no notion of absolute simultanaeity. But in his article, "A Defense of Presentism", Ned Markosian responds to this charge by pointing out that there are two different ways of understanding the special theory of relativity. If we understand the theory robustly enough so that it includes the claim that there is no such notion of absolute simultanaeity, then we have reason to think that version is false, since this is a philosophically rich interpretation that goes beyond what the data strictly warrant. On the other hand, if we understand the theory so that it doesn't include the claim that there is no such notion of absolute simultanaeity, then we have reason to think this version is true, but it doesn't pose a threat to presentism anymore.
Is something similar happening with the attack on libertarianism? Could it be that any interpretation of the empirical data that includes the claim that determinism (in the philosopher's sense) is true is going too far beyond what the data actually warrant?
Just a quick FYI.
Todd Buras (Baylor) has a review of Gideon Yaffe's recent book, Manifest Acitivity, on his website. Have a look!
The end of the academic year, as usual, is making for less blogging all around the academic blogosphere, and the Garden is no exception. Here's something to help keep us alive during this dry spell. It's not substantive philosophy, but it's quite important from a practical point of view.
On Wednesday I was at my brother-in-law's graduation from CSU Long Beach and I was talking to my mother-in-law. I was explaining to her that I'm just now writing my dissertation prospectus and she asked, "So, what's your dissertation about?" Now, this is related to the old "What are going to do with your philosophy degree" or the "What does philosophy study" question, but it is much more specific and requires a more specific answer. After stumbling a bit trying to explain what the heck moral responsibility is, I decided then and there that I needed a "stock answer" prepared for times like that. On the way home, I tried out a few suggestions on my wife:
Me: "What if I said this -- I'm intersted in figuring out the conditions that have to be satisfied in order for us to appropriately hold one another morally responsible for our actions."
Anna: "What the heck is a "condition to be satisfied"? And what does it mean to hold someone morally responsible for an action?"
Me: "Don't normal people use the term 'morally responsible'?"
Anna: "Nope."
Me: "Okay, but surely people use the term 'blameworthy'. What if I say that I'm trying to figure out when it's appropriate to say that another person is blameworthy for one of their actions."
Anna: "Nope, people don't usually use the term 'blameworthy' either. Moreover, that way of putting it makes it sound like you are trying to figure out who should be blamed for what, but your interests are more abstract than that."
Me: "Yeah. Okay, maybe I need a concrete example. So what if I say this -- while it is appropriate to feel resentment toward other adults, it's not appropriate to feel resentment toward an infant. I'm interested partly in figuring out what the difference is between infants and adults such that we can resent one but not the other."
Anna: "You're getting closer, but just to let you know, nobody uses the phrase 'such that'."
And so on. So, I put the question to you, Gardeners. If you were trying to explain what you study to someone who didn't know anything about philosophy, what would you say? (It should be short and clear, but you can't cheat by just saying "I study ethics".)
Believe it or not, this month marks our blog's second birthday. That's right, it was in May 2004 that the Garden first found its way to the blogosphere. (Though I think it was closer to the end of May. Details, details.) As far as blogs are concerned, I'd say the Garden has been a huge success. I've learned a lot from reading and contributing to the various posts, and I've made some new friends along the way. Thanks to everyone who has helped make this a great place to exchange ideas, including all of our regular contributors and commenters. And special thanks to both the UCR philosophy department for helping to fund the blog, and to John Fischer for encouraging the idea and helping to keep it all running smoothly. I doubt that the blogosphere will ever replace good, old-fashioned face-to-face conversation over a pint at the local bar in Moscow, ID -- but it may just be the next best thing.
In case you're interested, below are our stats for the past two years. We're no TAR or Leiter Reports as far as the stats go, but we're certainly just as cool.
Total number of hits: 172,158
Average per day: 244
Speaking of conferences (see the post below about the OPC), here's another conference announcement:
The Bled Philosophical Conference on Freedom, Determinism, and Responsibility will be May 29th-June 3rd of this year. It looks like it will be a good conference. Participants include Mark Balaguer, Bernard Berofsky, Joe Campbell, John Carroll, Ish Haji, Stewart Goetz, Mark Heller, Terry Horgan, David Hunt, Tomis Kapitan, Neil Levy, Ned Markosian, Michael McKenna, Tim O'Connor, Paul Russell, Saul Smilansky, and a lot of other people too!
The website for the conference is here.
