Doppelganger Garden of Forking Paths

Parfit Comes Out...

...as a semi-compatibilist (of sorts).

I’ve just read Chapter Ten of Derek Parfit’s long promised On What Matters (and only Chapter Ten, since I’m disposed to believe that many things matter more than wading through 659 pages on Kantian ethics). In it, Parfit comes out as a ‘reversed’ semi-compatibilist: he’s a compatibilist about free will but an incompatibilist about moral responsibility. A few comments below:

Crime, Neuroscience, and Free Will

Over on the new Law and Neuroscience Blog, Thomas Nadelhoffer has a post that might be of some interest to Gardeners.  He concludes with a series of questions that will probably need to be answered in the years to come.

Thomas wonders,

As we become increasingly better at predicting violent recidivism, drug relapse, and the like, should this affect our basic notions of agency, free will, and responsibility? Assume, for instance, that for a certain sub-class of offenders-e.g., psychopaths with substance abuse problems-we are able to predict that 90% will violently reoffend within two years of being released. Should this change our views concerning their free will and autonomy? If not, why not? If so, why? If we keep inching our way towards 100%, is there a point at which we should conclude these individuals are no longer free?

I'm inclined to think that our ability to predict such behavior shouldn't wholly undermine responsibility.  After all, compatibilists are committed to the claim that 100% predictability doesn't undermine responsibility--and not just 100% predictability of some action type (e.g. violence against others), but 100% predictability of some action token (e.g. violence against that person at that time).  Moreover, libertarians like Kane need not change their views.  If the reason we can predict recidivism so well is because the agents in question have  formed themselves into violent individuals, then mere prediction won't undermine their responsibility.  Of course, we might worry if (1) we could predict action tokens with perfect accuracy, and (2) the reason we could do so was because the relevant mechanisms producing behavior bypassed our powers of reflective self control.  But I seriously doubt neuroscience can satisfy (1) or (2).

In any case, you should head over to the Law and Neuroscience blog with your thoughts.

Desert and Responsibility

Happy Friday Gardeners. I am curious to find out what other Gardeners' thoughts are on the view of desert that I hold to. The view is (perhaps deceptively) simple:

(D) S ought to be treated as a P if S is a P.

Principle D captures what I refer to as "ultimate desert". Ultimate desert is about what S ultimately deserves – this could run opposite to what we think S deserves in cases where we don't have all the facts about S. This could easily be framed in terms of the traditional heaven-or-hell desert.

Since there are (a fortiori) lots of cases where we don't have all the facts, the first principle needs a more practical corollary:

(D*) S ought to be treated by O as a P if O is warranted to believe that S is a P.

Principle (D*) captures what I refer to as "warranted desert". Warranted desert is about how O ought to treat S with respect to what O believes to be true about S. In cases where O's warranted beliefs about S's run contrary to facts about S, warranted desert could yield moral imperatives that run contrary to the moral imperatives derived from ultimate desert. Obviously (D*) would not suffice to answer the heaven-or-hell question.

Ultimate desert implies a 3^rd person omniscient perspective (viz., the God's eye view), which is something we lack outside of thought experiments. In real life scenarios, we have to make the best effort we can to uncover the facts and inspect our reactions to the images that those facts represent, and thus warranted desert is the domain we primarily operate in. Both (D) and (D*) are sufficiently minimal to allow compatibility with different theories on "how a P ought to be treated" is interpreted (ethical theory will play the determining role here).

The Law and Neuroscience Blog

I thought some of the Gardeners might be interested in The Law and Neuroscience Blog we just launched as part of the MacArthur Law and Neuroscience Project.  If you have any thoughts or suggestions, please don't hesitate to send them along.  Given that one of the LANP research networks is dedicated to exploring issues at the cross roads of criminal responsibility and neuroscience, I think that much of what gets posted on the new blog should appeal to the folks who frequent the Garden!  Indeed, in the next few weeks, I plan to post something about the relationship between free will and neuroscience as they relate to the criminal law--an issue that has recently been explored by LANP legal coordinator Stephen Morse (U Penn) (see here). Hopefully, I will see some of your familiar cyber-faces in the comment threads!

An Error Theory for Incompatibilist Intuitions: More X-Phi on Free Will

My student, Dylan Murray (a Neurophilosophy Fellow here at Georgia State), and I have carried out a study to examine whether ordinary people sometimes say determinism threatens free will and moral responsibility because they misunderstand determinism to entail things like fatalism or epiphenomenalism.  (Our results suggest that the answer is yes and that they do so more than ‘sometimes’!)  This study is also aimed, in part, to challenge the idea that Nichols and Knobe’s studies (Nous 2007) demonstrate that most folk have incompatibilist intuitions (and that the compatibilist intuitions they express are driven by emotional bias).  Hence, the results of this study supplement results from Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer & Turner (2006) and Nahmias, Coates & Kvaran (2007) suggesting that most people do not have incompatibilist intuitions.

We present the study and arguments in a draft of a chapter for the forthcoming volume, New Waves in Philosophy of Action (Palgrave-MacMillan), edited by J. Aguilar, A. Buckareff and K. Frankish, and it can be found here (figures appear at the end of the paper):

Download N&M Experimental Philosophy on Free Will DRAFT 7_20_09

We also plan to do some follow up studies and write a journal article.  So comments on the studies and the arguments are most welcome. 

Here’s the abstract:  We discuss recent work in experimental philosophy on free will and moral responsibility and then present a new study. Our results suggest an error theory for incompatibilist intuitions. Most laypersons who take determinism to preclude free will and moral responsibility apparently do so because they mistakenly interpret determinism to involve fatalism or “bypassing” of agents’ relevant mental states. People who do not misunderstand determinism in this way tend to see it as compatible with free will and responsibility. We discuss why these results pose a challenge to incompatibilists.

San Diego is lovely this time of year

Just got this announcement, which may be of interest to some Gardeners. 

Philosophers,

We are encouraging submissions for a neurophilosophy and philosophy of neuroscience discussion at the 2009 Autonomous Neurodynamics Meeting.  In particular, we are interested in talks:

1) On the limitations of dynamical systems or neurocomputational modeling.

2) On conceptual or historical issues related to homeostasis, epilepsy, or control theory.

3) On addiction, seizures, and the loss of control generally.

4) On empirical research related to Free Will.

The conference has always had a philosophical component, but only today have the organizers moved to devote an entire block to philosophical issues. 

 

Abstracts due by July 17, 2009.

Conference Meets in San Diego July 27-29th, 2009.

More here. 

Warning: the time frame is ludicrously short for submitting something (i.e., tomorrow!) because the conference is at the end of this month. 

Big Dutch Conference on Responsibility

Some Gardeners and friends will be there. 

Details here.

Some Concerns

Ahoy Garden,

Recently, I've been contacted by several Gardeners who have worries that the comment threads are being frequently hijacked, and are increasingly antagonistic.  Being relatively new to this whole 'administrator' thing, I consulted with the cabal that secretly controls the Garden in the hopes of reaching a solution.  We wanted a solution that (1) preserves the Garden's philosophical integrity, and (2) continues the Garden's tradition of open participation.  Ideally, there is no tension between (1) and (2).  However, as a good number of people have pointed out to me, many comment threads have been hijacked and dominated by a small number of individuals.  Imagine, for example, that there was a post exploring the differences between Robert Kane and Laura Ekstrom's event-causal theories of libertarianism.  The comment thread of such a post is not an appropriate venue for me to dismiss libertarianism, or call it incoherent, or criticize all the other participants in the discussion simply because they have failed to see the light (i.e., compatibilism).  So when you post a comment, remember: comments are for advancing a particular discssion; they should not be viewed primarily as opportunities for expressing your pet philosophical theory.

I feel a bit funny telling y'all this, but we really want the Garden to flourish.  Unfortunately, if things don't improve significantly, we might be forced to take more drastic measures--specifically, moderating comments.  However, I sincerely hope that it will not come to that.  But again, if things don't change quickly and dramatically, then we will have to institute some new policies here at the Garden.

And while I'm doing administrative stuff, I'd like to encourage all the Gardeners who haven't posted in a while to work up a post.  I'm sure y'all are working on a lot of interesting stuff, have some good ideas, and have free time--either because it's summer or because your university has given you an unpaid vacation.  Whatever the reason, I'm sure people will be excited to see posts by someone other than Justin Coates.

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, etc., feel free to contact me (my email address can be found in the ABOUT section of the blog).  Hopefully this will be all I ever have to say about this matter.

P.S. Why can't the National League win the All Star game?

Rorty on Sellars and Blameworthiness

This summer I'm house-sitting for a professor, and this has given me access to quite a few books that I haven't (but should have) read.  The other day, as I was enjoying a cold one on the balcony, I thumbed through Sellar's Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, and the following quote from Richard Rorty's introduction caught my attention.

Knowledge is inseparable from a practice--the practice of justifying one's assertions to one's fellow humans. It is not presupposed by this practice, but comes into being with it" (4).

Not being an epistemologist, I'm not really in a position to evaluate the merits of Rorty's claim, but I have recently begun to think that something parallel must be true with respect to blameworthiness.  Replacing "knowledge" with "being blameworthy" and "assertions" with "actions" yields:

Being blameworthy is inseparable from a social practice--the practice of justifying one's actions to one's fellow humans. It is not presupposed by this practice, but comes into being along with it.

Now this seems fairly plausible to me, but I suspect it's pretty controversial.  However, if it is true, then it suggests that blameworthiness doesn't have priority (explanatory or otherwise) over the practices of blaming.  I'm wondering (a) whether other Garderners find this claim plausible (and if not, why not), and (b) what, if any, implications would it have for how we theorize about the nature and conditions of moral responsibility (e.g. if true, maybe we have to pay more attention to the exact nature and character of the practices of holding responsible)?

A Perceived Gridlock regarding Torn Decisions

My concern here is with a specific type of “torn decision,” in which an agent’s decision cannot follow directly from the endorsed contents of their self (such as moral convictions, rational deliberations, self-governing policies, volition structures, and so forth). In statistical terms, the probability of this agent deciding in favor of any one of the options before her is .5. It is important to note that the agent is not indecisive because she is confronted with prospects she takes to be abhorrent/unthinkable options, nor is she torn because her decision is, to her, trivial/insignificant. She is “torn” because the constituents of her agential self either do not specify what she should do or they conflict with one another, resulting in a .5 probability of her deciding one way or the other.

 

Perhaps an example would help: Agent Z has, for some time, endorsed only Republican candidates. Simultaneously, he has come to care deeply about the reduction of pollutants released into the atmosphere. These commitments, surprisingly, do not conflict until the election of 2010, wherein the Republican candidate openly opposes pollution controls, and the Democratic candidate supports them. For sake of simplicity, suppose that, to Z, all other factors regarding the election and the two candidates cancel out. He is in the voting booth, and must vote one way or the other, having previously decided that not voting is an unthinkably unpatriotic thing for him to do.

 

Libertarians, such as Kane and Balauger, seem to view such torn decisions as the paramount opportunity for freedom (or L-freedom). Here, alternative possibilities are generated and the agent indeterminately “just decides,” perhaps “in light of” prior deliberation and desires, and perhaps as a self-forming decision, but always by selecting from 2 or more genuinely available courses of action. Compatibilists, on the other hand, would seemingly tend to view such moments as examples of diminished autonomy, wherein such notions as identification, ownership, and self-governance are inapplicable. The decision is not adequately controlled by the agent’s reasons-responsive mechanism and/or volitional structures (given that, should the decision-moment occur 1000 times, one result will happen 500 times, and the other result will happen 500 times), and so is not one that is made fully autonomously.

 

What is irksome to me is that I am not comfortable with either of these horns, so to speak. The so-termed “libertarian” view seems to ride on the presumption that, when the agent “just decides,” it is she who is making the decision and so it is she who makes the leap beyond indeterminacy. But exactly who or what is this “she” that/who is deciding? If her present beliefs, commitments, and desires cannot guide her one way or the other, it seems as though there is no “she” that makes a decision. A volitional spasm, perhaps, but not the personality of an agent. At the same time, at least some of our torn decisions do seem to constitute important moments in our agential history, defining, in a way, who we become as persons and agents. And so for compatibilists to poo-poo such decisions as paradigm examples of non-autonomous (or at least, less-than-fully autonomous) decision-making seems mistaken, as well.

 

How might we move beyond this gridlock? That is, what is the sort of agency proper to non-randomly made torn decisions (of the kind discussed here)?