>-- The Garden of Forking Paths --<

Brittle People and the Varieties of Compatibilist Free Will not Worth Wanting

I want to use two compatibilist tenets against each other: (1) that we should understand free will in a way resulting in free will being valuable and (2) that in determining whether an agent has free will, we should focus on what the agent would have done in counter-factual worlds.

Neither of these tenets is necessary to compatibilism, although I believe both are popular.  In particular, I think Dennett has popularized both.

Of course, anti-realists about free will have challenged (1).  In an underappreciated passage from the introduction to Living Without Free Will, Pereboom directly questioned Dennett’s insistence that free will is valuable.  That is one way to attack the compatibilist position.

But there is another way to attack the compatibilist view.  What if we humor the compatibilist?  What if free will must be valuable?  Does the compatibilist version of “free will” even satisfy that standard?  In other words, are the varieties of free will that Dennett (and others) asserts are worth wanting really worth wanting?

The Scorpion and The Frog

I’m surprised that, after studying free will for several years, I’ve never heard philosophers mention the story of The Scorpion and The Frog.

The story is simple.  A scorpion asks a frog to carry him across the river.  The frog is afraid of being stung.  But the scorpion reassures the frog that, if stung, the frog would drown, and therefore so would the scorpion.  The frog agrees.  Halfway through, the scorpion stings the frog.  They will both drown.  The frog asks the scorpion, “why?”  The scorpion says, “I’m a scorpion; it’s my nature.”

The Scorpion and the Frog illustrate a fundamental distinction: between defects in a person’s rationality (r-defects) and defects in a person’s desires and values (v-defects).  The scorpion has a v-defect, but not necessarily an r-defect.  The v-defect is clear: he wants to sting, and stings, innocents.  Is it the scorpion’s fault that he has the character he does?  No.  And then, in accordance with TNR-like principles, isn’t the scorpion excused?

To my eyes, the story of the Scorpion and the Frog exposes a blind spot in compatibilism.  Quite simply: compatibilists seem to never consider v-defects to be excusing conditions.  All of the standard accounts (Fischer’s, Dennett’s, etc.) seem blind to v-defects.  Fischer considers whether a person is reasons-responsive—regardless of what the reasons are.  Frankfurt considers whether a person acts in accordance with his highest desire—regardless of what that desire is.  Well, what if, through no fault of his own, that person’s highest desire is to torture and murder other people?

The scorpion does not necessarily have an r-defect.  Indeed, the scorpion can satisfy the compatibilist conditions of your choice.  He can be reasons-responsive and own his reasons-responsive mechanism.  He might act in accordance with his highest desire—to sting others (even if he drowns).  He might, in other words, be perfectly rational.

For example, the scorpion doesn’t say “well, it’s my character to be friendly and peaceful, but then this random, inexplicable urge to sting you gripped me.”  That r-defect would excuse the scorpion even in the eyes of compatibilists.  But he doesn’t say that.  He says, “I’m a scorpion; it’s my nature.”  Yet he still seems excused.

Instead of just considering defects that could impair a person’s rationality, we should also consider defects in a person’s desires and values.  They can be just as hurtful.  And they should be just as exculpating.

The "Then You Wouldn't Be You" Argument

I think that the concept of free will may be intimately related to personal identity.  Consider this curious phenomenon: compatibilists sometimes respond to skeptics by saying “then you wouldn’t be you.”  The dialogue might go like this:

Skeptic: I am a law abiding citizen.  I do not rob banks and burn down buildings.  But I could have been.  When I see a bank robber, or an arsonist, I sympathize with them.  And more importantly, I empathize with them.  I can put myself in the bank robber’s shoes, and in the arsonist’s shoes, and see how I, too, could have become a criminal.  The saying “there but for the grace of God go I” is deeply true for me.

Compatibilist: That’s non-sense.  If you robbed a bank, then you wouldn’t be you any more.  You’re just not a bank robber.  You’re a law abiding citizen.  We can change you, just like we can change anything.  But if you change something enough, eventually it stops being that thing and just becomes something else.

This is the “you wouldn’t be you” argument (YWBY).  It’s a powerful argument.  And it’s an important one, too.  I think there is a good chance that the YWBY argument is not clever sophistry on the part of compatibilists.  Rather, I suspect that the YWBY argument reflects a natural and defensible understanding of personal identity.

Free Will and Cognitive Biases Part 5: Projection and Alternative Possibilities

For a while, I’ve thought people (even myself) often blame others, too much, because we fail to imagine the psychological experience of the blamed person, and instead substitute our own.  We fail to sufficiently empathize—to put ourselves “in the other person’s shoes”.  And indeed, sometimes I regard the anti-realist views of Spinoza, Einstein and Darrow as expressing nothing but an empathy too extreme for most.  As Smilansky reminds us, “there but for the grace of God, go I.”

Now I seem to have found some data to support this view, which I wanted to share with the Garden.  Further, this data, and my general point, may bear some light on the importance of “alternative possibilities” throughout the literature on free will.  But first, let me describe the phenomenon in general.

Hume’s Slip

I just noticed that Paul Russell’s contribution “Hume on Free Will” is published at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (it was actually published 12/14/07, but I only read it now, perhaps because it was not free earlier).  As a big fan of Paul’s work, having both read his book on Hume and seen his wonderful lecture at Inland 2006, I had been waiting to read this article for years.  I was eager to read it because (i) I’m fascinated by the free will problem, (ii) Hume is my favorite historical philosopher, and (iii) his writings on the subject of free will always confused me, if only because he seemed to endorse compatibilism (gasp).

When I first started reading Paul’s work about Hume and free will, I couldn’t believe that Hume was a full blown compatibilist.  In particular, I wondered whether Hume’s true views about free will might have been kept somewhat hidden, like his views about religion, until after his death.  So I did some digging, and actually exchanged some lengthy emails with Paul about the topic, focusing on Hume’s later works.

To set the stage, let me say, I think Mele’s Zygote Argument is a great formulation of the classic dilemma facing any would-be compatibilist.  “You think you can have free will in a deterministic world?  Well, what if God designed your entire life, just like Shakespeare writing the life story of characters in his plays?  Surely *that’s* not free will?”  And, I genuinely believe, or at least suspect, that concerns like this motivate almost all incompatibilists.  So, in confronting Hume’s alleged compatibilism, I immediately focused in on this question: what does Hume think about God, predestination and responsibility for the story of the universe?  What would Hume say about the Zygote Argument?

Now, if my hunch about Hume was *entirely* wrong, Hume should have said, like most compatibilists (or quasi-compatibilists) today (e.g. Watson, Dennett, McKenna, Frankfurt---ignoring, for the moment, the subtleties of their views), “so what?  God designed my life?  Who cares?  I still satisfy the compatibilist requirements of your choice.  I still have free will.  I don’t see any tension here at all.”

But Hume, bless his heart, did *not* say that.  Here is Russell on Hume’s slip:

Yudkowsky on Free Will

Eliezer Yudkowsky, research fellow at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and a self-taught scholar (I read he scored perfectly on his SAT and ACT before deciding not to attend college), has started a series of posts on control, free will and moral responsibility at the popular blog OvercomingBias.com.

Yudkowsky is very clever, if not spooky smart, and feels strongly pulled (like me) towards one camp of the debate (in this case Dennett/McKenna style compatibilism), while admitting all along that the term "free will" is so poorly defined, and means so many things to so many people, that it might be better to get rid of the term all together.

In the most recent post, called "The Ultimate Source", Eliezer and I exchange a few remarks in the comments section.  I hope some of the Gardeners here find his posts and/or the comments worth reading.

Free Will and Wishful Thinking

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

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

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

Evil and Libertarianism

I want to follow up on one of Eddy’s older posts.  On July 10, 2006, in a post titled “Free Will in the World Cup”, Eddy asked:

“For that matter, why is it that in the case of other foolish and seemingly irrational acts, like suicide terrorism, people are so much less interested in applying their theory of mind modules to figure out what drives the behavior and so much more likely to just say it's evil (is there a boundary past which we give up trying to explain or simply cannot explain certain actions)?”

    Those words really resonated with me.  Surely, I thought, Eddy was picking up on a real phenomenon: people were less able or willing to understand the behavior of wrongdoers and more willing to attribute their behavior to evil simpliciter.  Indeed, Eddy was making a point I tried to make on September 11th 2004, in a post titled “Who Was Morally Responsible For September 11?”: “The world's response to the events of September 11, 2001 suggests that our intuitions about freedom and responsibility are, in some ways, mistaken…”

    When I wrote my post on September 11th 2004, I had not yet read about cognitive biases.  But last summer I did research on many such biases that might be relevant to the free will problem.  Fortunately, I discovered research documenting exactly the phenomenon that Eddy and I were talking about.  I quote my findings below:

Pereboom on the Weirdness of Compatibilism

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

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

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

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

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

Cokely and Feltz on the Folk Containing Both Compatibilists and Incompatibilists

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

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

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

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

Enjoy.