Galen Strawson’s Modest Requirement for Moral Responsibility.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a non-Smilansky related discussion (I wish I’d thought of Illusionism!), so I thought I’d post some thoughts I’ve expressed in comment threads but never really put out there for public criticism and ridicule. So here goes:

John noted that in his upcoming Hourani lectures he will accuse Strawson of having an unreasonably demanding requirement for moral responsibility, what he calls “total control.” Others have attacked Strawson for arguing that we need to be ‘wholly responsible’ for our characters in order to be morally responsibility for our actions, claiming that this is asking for too much. Now ‘total control’ and “wholly responsible” can mean a lot of things, but I believe that they are often interpreted in ways that do not do justice Strawson’s theory.

The source of the misconception, I believe, lies in Strawson’s use of the causa sui concept. The problem with the causa sui language (along the entertaining Nietzsche quote that inevitably accompanies it) is that there is rarely a discussion of how much of our character we would have to ultimately responsible for in order to be causa sui.

This American Life and Moral Responsibility

Here's a link to a recent episode of This American Life that's brimming with free will/moral responsibility implications. It's the story of a group of prisoners who spend six months rehearsing and staging Act V of Hamlet for their fellow inmates. Many of the actors are murderers, rapists, or child molesters. One of them, Danny, has been in the high security prison for 14 years for murder. He says that when he first got there he thought he ought to die in prison. He was a danger to people outside of it. But, he says, a person changes. "I'm not the criminal I used to be. I know I won't commit any more crimes if I'm out there. But... I took a man's life. Do I deserve to be out there? I cannot say." This is the notion of the desert that I believe is at the center of the moral responsibility debate.

It's an extremely moving story, highly recommended.

What do We Mean by "Deserve"?

A recent exchange between Tom and Kip reminded me that I’m getting increasingly confused about desert, about what the concept means to most people. Narrowing down this question a little, it seems like there are a number of possible ways to interpret a claim like ‘Joe deserves punishment.’ Here are my contenders.

(1) Joe is a fair and appropriate target of punishment.
(2) Independent of any consequentialist considerations, Joe ought to be punished.
(3) All things being equal, it would be wrong for Joe not to be punished.
(4) Joe is an appropriate object of resentment or moral anger.
(5) Joe has done something that warrants punishment.
(6) Joe has done something that makes him a fair and appropriate target of punishment.
(7) Joe has done something wrong, and it is his fault; so (independent of consequentialist considerations) he ought to be punished [or it would be wrong for him not to be punished]
(8) Joe has done something wrong out of his own free will, and so he ought to be punished.
(9) Joe has done something wrong, and he is causa sui [or is the true source of what he has done] and so, independent of consequentialist considerations, he ought to be punished.

Do any of these (overlapping) interpretations capture the concept of desert, at least with regards to punishment? Is there a better way to describe it? One thing I’m interested in is whether the conceptual space allows for people to deserve punishment without having done anything—or done anything of their own free will. Another is whether anyone (incompatibilists most likely) thinks the concept has incompatibilist notions built into it. Finally, I wonder if ‘desert’ when applied to blame rather than punishment might mean something slightly different. To be clear, I’m not asking under what conditions our assignments of desert are justified. I just want to figure out what the word means to most people. Any ideas?

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

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

How Universal (and/or objectivist) are Theories of Moral Responsibility Supposed to Be?

Describing their methodology, Fischer and Ravizza write:

..we shall be trying to articulate the inchoate, shared views about moral responsibility in (roughly speaking) a modern, Western democratic society.  We suppose that there is enough agreement on these matters—at some level of reflection—to justify engaging in the attempt to bring out and systematize these shared views….Here we shall be identifying and evaluating “considered judgments” about particular cases – actual and hypothetical – in which an agent’s moral responsibility is at issue.  We shall explore patterns in these judgments  (Responsibility and Control, pp. 10-11.)

(1)  Does this method of seeking reflective equilibrium restrict the application of Fischer and Ravizza’s theory to Western Democratic societies?  Or are the conditions for moral responsibility meant to apply universally, even in societies that may have different intuitions about these particular cases?  The methodology appears to limit the scope of application to cultures, and individuals, who accept their intuitive starting points.  Therefore it’s at least possible (if, say, people in non-democratic non-Western societies have different starting points) that someone might be morally responsible for an act is culture A, while another might not be morally responsible for that very same act, committed in the very same state of mind, under virtually identical circumstances, in culture B.

(2) Assume I’m right that Fischer and Ravizza’s theory can only be applied in cultures that accept their intuitive starting points.  How common is this feature?  Would Kane be comfortable saying that indeterministic self-forming actions are required for moral responsibility in some cultures, but perhaps not in others.  Would Chisholm concede that in certain Mediterranean societies, you may not have to be a prime-mover unmoved in order to be free and morally responsible?  Is beta (or TNR) not valid for Jibaro Indians?   Does anyone—compatibilist, libertarian, skeptic—think that the conditions for moral responsibility in their theory apply universally, whether or not a particular individual or culture accepts their intuitive starting points?  I imagine the answer to this last question would be “yes!  almost everyone believes this!”  Am I right about that?

(3) For the record, here’s my very non-exhaustive list of people with theories that appear to have ‘universalist’ aspirations.   (In other words, the necessary and sufficient conditions of each theory are meant to apply across cultures no matter what.  If a necessary condition is not met, no moral responsibility; if the sufficient conditions are met, the agent is morally responsible):

Universalist: van Inwagen, Galen Strawson, Pereboom, Wolf, Frankfurt, Watson, Kane, Ekstrom, Spinoza, Hurley, Waller, P.F. Strawson (I think). 

Non-Universalist: Fischer and Ravizza, Double, Smilansky (I think), Vargas, Nichols (to come).

Maybe I’m wrong, maybe very few theories are meant to apply universally.  But then isn’t this a pretty bizarre way to look at moral responsibility—as something that is relative across cultures, maybe even within cultures, entirely dependent on the intuitions of the individuals within them?

What's an Incompatibilist to Do?

Assume the following for the sake of argument:

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

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

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

Can Moral Responsibility Skeptics Feel Schadenfreude?

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

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

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

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

Dia-blog-ical Stalemate?

As many have noted, this blog has hit an unprecedented lull recently. Let’s be honest, aside from a bunch of congratulatory notices, conference reports, and a few valiant attempts to get a substantive debate going, nothing much has been going on at the Garden. Below is a list of possible reasons for this state of affairs.  (Note: the list is exhaustive and presented in precise order of likelihood.)

1. No Robert Allen.  Although the catchphrase ‘bring back Allen!’ did not sweep the nation as I predicted, I think we’re all beginning to recognize the value of Professor Allen's spirited vituperative slightly unhinged assaults on experimental philosophy, free will skepticism, the Red Sox, and Kip Werking.   Since I am familiar with all of his targets and know that they can handle the weight of his over-the-top criticisms with aplomb, I repeat: bring back Allen. 
2. We’ve said it all.  Or most of it, anyway.  I fervently hope this isn’t the case, but the fact is the blog has been running for over two years and almost all of the important free will/moral responsibility issues have been touched on, and many have been done to death (much like Frankfurt-style examples maybe?  Forget I said that.  That was someone else.  Bad dog, Tess!).  Call to arms: someone say something new and inflammatory!  Or inflammatory at least...
3. It’s summer, we’re doing something else (lighten up Sommers!) Maybe, but if you look at past summers I bet you don’t find a dry spell like this one.
4. The Red Sox have made by far the fewest errors in the major leagues.  10 fewer than the next best fielding team.  The Red Sox. The Boston Red Sox. Leading the league in fielding.  This is a significant perhaps apocalyptic event that has ramifications all across the globe—much bigger than some butterfly flapping his wings in Peru.   It would be pure hubris to think that it would have no effect on our humble blog.
5. You have all been converted to free will skepticism.  And so, you think, what’s the point of blogging, what’s the point of doing anything.  All the paralysis, the diminished ambition, the despair that you have long feared has come to pass.  You feel that you no longer deserve praise for your accomplishments and that strips the value away from your work, interpersonal relationships, everything.  Your only joys consist in watching a bunch of Europeans run around for two hours tripping each other and faking injuries.   (Note: this is not an accurate assessment of the implications of free will skepticism.)  Solution: reconsider your original position and defend it once again.   Free will skeptics need opponents--it’s becoming too crowded in here! 

Why Should We Believe We're Morally Responsible?

In a 1990 Analysis paper, Saul Smilansky claims that Peter Van Inwagen’s argument (in An Essay on Free Will) for the existence of libertarian moral responsibility is weak   I would agree.  The argument focuses largely on his claim that he can’t take anyone seriously who denies moral responsibility, because in the next breath they’ll assert that stealing books is “shoddy.”   People who deny moral responsibility, according to PVI, contradict themselves with monotonous regularity.  I won’t go into the problems with this view here (but see Smilansky’s paper, available on his webpage, for one good response.)   Rather, just assume Smilansky is right.  What are the implications of this?  According to Smilansky, the whole structure of An Essay on Free Will collapses.  I believe that’s correct too.  Because here in a nutshell is PVI’s argument for the existence of libertarian free will.

(1)   We must have libertarian free will in order to have libertarian moral responsibility.

(2)   The claim that we lack libertarian moral responsibility is absurd.

(3)   Therefore we must have libertarian free will.

Without good arguments for claim (2), PVI has no right conclude (3).   At best, he can claim that either hard determinism or libertarianism is true.  But that is certainly not his goal in EOFW.  On the contrary, he claims that if he learned determinism was true, he would abandon incompatibilism.   I had noticed this gap in reasoning as well, and I asked PVI about it when he came to Duke a couple of years ago.  His response was roughly: “I simply think that the  probability that we lack moral responsibility is lower than the probability that incompatibilism is false.”   That seemed fairly reasonable to me at the time.  Lately though I’ve begun to wonder: what is that probability assessment based on? 

This is not a rhetorical question.  I’m really interested to know.   What grounds do we have to assign a high probability to the truth of ‘people can be morally responsible’ (in the strong desert-entailing sense)?   I think that this question can be asked not just of PVI and other libertarians but of anyone who asserts the existence of desert-entailing moral responsibility.  What are you basing this belief on?  Does the belief have strong support?   And to what extent does your theory of moral responsibility depend on a good independent justification for its existence? 

The Willies: Under Construction

After much soul-searching and procrastination, the Willies committee has decided to suspend operations.  As we were putting together the category list, we received an email laying out some concerns about handing out semi-serious Willies awards (like best book, best article of 2004-2005 etc.).  The author said (a) that it would harm the non-competitive spirit of the Garden, and (b) that most of us hadn't had time to read the books and articles that have come out that recently anyway.  I have my doubts about (a), but from personal experience I can vouch for (b).  Taking out the serious categories left us with a bunch of jokey categories many of which have been offered by Gardeners.  But while joke categories are great, it seemed silly to have an involved semi-formal nominating and voting process, and even sillier to then take the nominees to the big guns in the free will debate.   And so the 2nd Annual  Willies was put on hold.   Any suggestions about how (or whether) to resolve this problem are welcome, either here or via email to Manuel or me.   The good news is that the earlier post provoked some lively discussion that can hopefully be developed in the future. 

John Rawls: Free Will Skeptic?

If we define 'free will skeptic' as someone who does not think we are free in such a way that could justify moral desert then wouldn't this passage from A Theory of Justice place Rawls in the skeptic's camp?

Perhaps some will think that the person with greater natural endowments deserves those assets and the superior character that made their development possible.   Because he is more worthy in this sense, he deserves the greater advantages that he could achieve with them.  This view, however, is surely incorrect.  It seems to be one of the fixed points of our considered judgment that no one deserves his place in the distribution of native endowments, any more than one deserves one's initial starting point in society.  The assertion that a man deserves the superior character that enables him to make the effort to cultivate his abilities is equally problematic, for his character depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit.  The notion of desert seems not to apply to these cases. 

Add to this passage that the (small) part of our character that doesn't depend on family and social circumstances ALSO depends on things (like heredity) for which we can claim no credit, and you have full blown free will skepticism.   And I think that this is implicit in the passage anyway.   

Does anyone know if Rawls has written about these ideas in the context of the free will/moral responsibility debate? 

Explaining Away Responsibility

Thanks to Neal for posting Explaining away responsibility: Effects of scientific explanation on perceived culpability", by John Monterosso, Edward B. Royzman, and Barry Schwartz.  It’s quite relevant to the “Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?” debate.  Here’s the abstract:

College students and suburban residents completed questionnaires designed to examine the tendency of scientific explanations of undesirable behaviors to mitigate perceived culpability. In vignettes relating behaviors to an explanatory antecedent, we manipulated the uniformity of the behavior given the antecedent; the responsiveness of the behavior to deterrence; and the explanatory antecedent-type offered—physiological (e.g., a chemical imbalance) or experiential (e.g., abusive parents). Physiological explanations had a greater tendency to exonerate actors than did experiential explanations. The effects of uniformity and deterrence were smaller, and the latter only had a significant effect on judgment when physiological rather than experiential antecedents were specified. Physiologically explained behavior was more likely to be characterized as “automatic,” and willpower and character were less likely to be cited as relevant to the behavior. Physiological explanations of undesirable behavior may mitigate blame by inviting non-teleological causal attributions.

The results seem to support compatibilism as the intuitive view, since the subjects exonerated the agents only when the actions were caused in a certain way.  Of course, that certain way was “physiologically” which arguably causes every act, whether the subjects know it or not.   Indeed, the follow-up interviews suggest that the subjects are basing their assignments of responsibility on a dualist view of human agency.  (Eddy, this might be right up your alley.)   Those of us who aren’t dualists, then, could argue that the assignments of blame and culpability are based on an error, namely the error of thinking that some acts are not the result of physiological processes.   

In other words, I think both compatibilists and the incompatibilists can use these results to their advantage.

J'Accuse!

Actually, Richard Double accuses--I'm just the messenger.  But I've always wondered how libertarians might reply.   In his essay The Moral Hardness of Libertarianism Double writes:

I propose four premises to argue that most libertarians are hard-hearted (unsympathetic, not morally conscientious). (1) Libertarians believe that we may hold persons morally responsible only if they exercise libertarian free will. (2) Libertarians believe that we should hold persons morally responsible. (3) Most libertarians believe that we have scant epistemic justification that persons have such free will. I believe, but shall not argue in this paper, that libertarians who believe they have epistemic justification for libertarian free will are mistaken.  I add a fourth premise describing how soft-hearted persons would respond to accepting the first three premises, and conclude that those libertarians who do not believe they have epistemic justification that persons make free choices are hard-hearted.

Here's my version of the argument:

1. It is hard-hearted to think that someone should suffer punishment if we have little epistemic justification for the belief that he deserves to suffer. 

2. If an agent is not morally responsible for committing a bad act, he does not deserve to suffer punishment.

3. If an agent does not possess libertarian free will then he cannot be morally responsible for any act

4. We have little epistemic justification (EJ) for the belief that agents posses libertarian free will.

5. Therefore we have little EJ for the belief that agents are morally responsible.

6. Therefore we have little EJ for the belief that any agent deserves to suffer.

7. Libertarians believe that certain agents should suffer punishment. (Those who commit terrible crimes, for example).

8. Therefore libertarians are hard-hearted.

Double's point is this: Even if libertarians, both of the event-causal and agent-causal varieties, have come up with coherent theories of free will, they still have not provided any evidence that their accounts are actual.  (Or if they have, the evidence is of a highly questionable nature.) That brings the epistemic justification for their belief in free will well below what would be necessary to confidently deem someone deserving of punishment.

I have two questions, really.  First, what say you, libertarians?  And second, can this argument be revised to apply to compatibilists too?

(To ward off one objection: yes, I know that if there is no free will then libertarians would not be morally responsible for being hard-hearted.  But they would still be hard-hearted, responsible or not.)       

The Willies

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

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

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

Other nominations and/or category suggestions welcome...

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

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

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

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

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

Most Underappreciated Participant in the Debate: Bruce Waller

Most Respected Position within the Industry: Sophisticated Compatibilism

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

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

Best Writer: Susan Wolf.

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

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

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

What If the Hard Determinists Are Right?

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

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

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