Balaguer Again

Back in June, I promised I would respond to Mark Balaguer’s claim that the free will question reduces to an entirely empirical question, about how human decision-making is actually implemented. Mark claimed that if we discovered that some of our decisions are undetermined (in the right way), we would discover we have libertarian free will. Briefly, I argued that we could know that human decision-making was indeterministic in the way envisaged by Balaguer without knowing whether we have libertarian free will because without some heavy duty philosophical argument we wouldn’t know whether we appropriately authored and controlled the decision. Mark promised that my worries would (or should) be allayed by his recent book (which Bob Doyle recently reviewed here). I have now had a chance to read the book.

First a word about methodology. Mark argues that metaphysics is about the nature of the world. Conceptual analysis about the structure of our concepts, not the nature of the world, so engaging in conceptual analysis is irrelevant to doing metaphysics. I think this is either false, or misleading. It ignores the fact that a great deal of philosophical argument is neither empirical nor merely about how we use words. It is comparison of cases to paradigms, construction of thought experiments, the discovery of similarities and differences, and so on. If conceptual analysis is just about how we use words, then perhaps Mark is right that we don’t need conceptual analysis to do metaphysics. But that doesn’t entail that metaphysics is just empirical (there is a difference between metaphysics and physics!). We still need lots of arguments. And chapter three of this book, which is devoted to showing that indeterminism in the right place secures libertarian free will, is full of arguments. So Mark oversells his claim that free will is an open scientific question (perhaps it would be more accurate to say that if you buy his many arguments, then the only question that remains to be answered is an empirical one. Of course, that would entail that Mark isn’t the radical he claims: lots of libertarians could make exactly the same claim).

Okay, now on to those arguments. Why does Mark think that if our decisions are undetermined in the right way, they are libertarian free? He focuses, as Bob spelt out, on torn decisions, which occur when: an agent has strong (though different) reasons for conflicting options, feels torn between them and decides without resolving what they have most reason to do. If the actual probabilities of torn decisions match the agent’s conscious assessment of the balance of reasons, then the decision is L-free, Mark says.  But why isn’t it simply a matter of chance how the agent chooses? In other words, why isn’t this view vulnerable to the luck objection? Mark says that if the agent chooses intentionally only from among options for which he takes himself to have compelling reasons and nothing external to the agent’s deliberative processes had any role in the decision, then the agent authored and controlled the decision. Now the standard objection here is that the agent did not control which of the available options between which he deliberated he actually chose; that contrastive fact was simply a matter of chance. Mark denies this. Why?

First, he claims that once we look at the case clearly, we can that the agent authors and controls the decisions. He denies that we need an analysis of authorship or control to achieve this. He points out that he is reliable at distinguishing persons from nonpersons, despite lacking a good theory of personhood. Why should he need a theory of authorship or control given this fact? Well the problem is this: I would stack my person-identifying powers up against Mark’s (and I suspect he would not claim to be better at person-identifying than me). So if we disagreed, we would be at an impasse. I would have no reason to accept his judgment, nor would he have any reason to accept mine. We would need to turn elsewhere. And that’s what we need a theory for. I claim that we are in exactly this situation, with regard to his undetermined agent: I don’t think that the agent controlled the decision (though I don’t doubt he authored it).

Second, Mark claims that the luck objection has bite only if indeterminism is located outside the agent’s deliberative processes. If the decision is made by spinning a tiny roulette wheel, and not by the agent’s deliberative processes themselves, then we would have grounds for saying that it was a matter of chance. But if – and this is supposed to be a wide open empirical hypothesis – the indeterminacy is located internal to the agent’s decision-making process, then it is the agent who authors and controls the decision.I want to know what criteria Mark has – or what criteria there might be – for the indeterminacy being located internal or external to the agent’s deliberative processes. So far as I can see, we identify the neural correlates of mental events behaviorally:  if a process or event is part of the minimum set of processes or events jointly sufficient for that mental event, then it is part of the relevant event. Given this fact, it seems to me that invoking the claim that the indeterminism might really be part of the deliberation, and that we can therefore set tiny roulette wheels aside, is invoking a distinction without a difference. In fact, tiny roulette wheels can be as much part of our deliberative processes as (what? What could be more internal to the process? I don’t know). So the intuitions that are provoked by roulette wheel cases remain relevant here.

 

Finally, Mark has a third argument: it is that his indeterministic setup gives the agent as much control (actually he says more control, but the basis for saying that is his mistaken claim about indeterminism being internal to the deliberative process) as could be had. Given that it is a torn decision in question – on which the agent takes themselves to have compelling reasons for multiple options – there is no way to secure more control. Determinism would leave the agent just as vulnerable to chance. Now, I think this is exactly right. And it would be strong argument if determinism entailed the avoidance of luck. But luck is as much a feature of deterministic worlds as indeterministic (or do you think the existence of the New Jersey lottery is proof of indeterminism?). As much control as we could possibly have does not entail enough control to count as free. 

Comments

[Philoponus]

Neil (if I may),

Forgive the intrusion, but help me, if you would, to understand what kind or level of (inner) control & authorship is in dispute here.

Suppose we have a sophisticated decision maker, who after years of study, has developed and adopted his own rigorous decision process. He applies it without exception to anything beyond “soup or salad” choices. At 30 years of age a major decision confronts him about continuing his academic career in physics or switching to a career that shows considerably more lifestyle and financial promise. He has already tested the water in quantitative finance and professional gambling and been remarkably successful in both as an amateur. His choice is whether to pursue one of these alternatives professionally or to stay in academia. The decision procedure which he invokes is very precise about the kinds of things he wants to realize in his life in the next 20 years, and it demands that he examine each of his alternatives in detailed, complicated ways. As he goes forward with this decision processes, all sorts of pressures are brought to bear on him from within and without. His money-loving but risk-averse wife wants him the 7-figure income from q-finance. His best friend wants to partner with him in professional gambling. His colleagues in physics want…. Conflicting desires and anxieties and loyalties continually buffet him as he proceeds, but he perseveres in applying his decision process and in the end makes exactly the choice selected by this decision process.

I see this is not a “torn decision” in Mark’s sense, but it seems to me that a torn decision, on any reasonable model of decision making, is a defective, failed or aborted decision process. The torn man abandons his decision process and plumps prematurely and impulsively(?) for some insufficiently considered option. A torn decision seems paradigmatically a decision in which the decider LOSES control of the decision process in the face of pressures.

Putting aside “torn” decision makers, my question becomes what is insufficient (“not enough control to count as free”) about the physicist’s control over his decision making? Ordinary language would surely say he chose freely, and the law would not have doubts about holding him responsible for such a choice. But somehow we are still to doubt that he was the in control and the author of his choice?
.

[Neil]

Compatibilists and many libertarians will accept that your agent decided freely, even if his decision was determined by reasons. Mark agrees. His claim is that we make determined decisions freely iff we are libertarian free agents, where to be an L-free agent is to make undetermined decisions (of the right kind). That's why he introduces torn decisions. You think torn decisions are failed decisions, but surely we are often torn in Mark's sense. Suppose the options your agent confronts are all different, with different balances of risks and rewards, and different types of challenges and payoffs. Your agent might know everything relevant to his decision, and still not be able to decide. Indeed he might see clearly that (given everything he believes and values) more than one of his option are rational for him. Sometimes we do just have to choose. My claim is that these decisions cannot be the locus of freedom, because they are chancy. If you think - like Mark - that we act freely only if we make torn decisions freely, then you will have trouble with your agent. But if you don't think torn decisions are free, or are necessary for the freedom of non-torn, then there is no prima facie difficulty (for the record, I am free will sceptic, so I don't accept your agent is free. But the story for that view is long and involved. You will find part of it in my paper I linked to in my post).

[John Dell]

Neil,

It sounds to me that in your emphasis on the roulette wheel example, and when you write, "I don’t think that the agent controlled the decision (though I don’t doubt he authored it)," you are assuming something like what Kane calls antecedent determining control is necessary for an action (or decision) to be both free and agent controlled.

I don't particularly have anything novel to contribute to this discussion, but I have read Balaguer's book. Today, I stumbled across a passage in Kane (1996) that I think is relevant both to Balaguer's view and to your critique of it. Given what you say above, I imagine you will disagree with what Kane says in the following, but I would like to hear a little more about why (e.g. is it just the strong intuitions you get from the roulette wheel cases?). Here's the passage (I wouldn't be surprised if you are already familiar with it):

"Now, if someone insisted that inability to guarantee an outcome before it occurs is a limitation of control, then I granted it. But I argued that this limitation is the price we pay for free will. In order to have ultimate control over their destinies, possessors of free will must relinquish antecedent determining control at pivotal points in their life histories. In order for their contributions to the world to be truly (i.e., ultimately) theirs, they have to relinquish a kind of control over those contributions that would guarantee in advance how they will turn out. This does not mean, as I argued, that possessors of free will do not have voluntary control over their destinies; it only means that when they engage in self-formation, what they choose is not determined by their already formed characters and motives. They become initiators of “value experiments” whose justification lies in the future and are not fully explained by the past (T46). But they take responsibility for setting themselves on one or another future branching pathway—making themselves as they go along out of a past that does not limit their future pathways to one."

As Balaguer admits his view is very similar to Kane's in certain respects (for example, in the plurality condition). I think Balaguer can, and does, take it that the limitation in guaranteeing a certain outcome is the price we pay for free will. But at least on Balaguer's view we can still guarantee the set of possible outcomes that the final outcome will come from.

What do you think?

[Mark Balaguer]

Neil,

First, thanks for your thoughts. As usual, they are interesting and thought-provoking. Here are a few responses…

1. Regarding the question of whether we need a theory of authorship and control: Suppose an agent A makes a torn decision D. I claim that if D is undetermined in the appropriate way (to use the lingo of the book, if it’s TDW-undetermined), then A authors and controls D. Part of the argument for that claim is that if D is TDW-undetermined, then we get the result that (a) A makes D in a conscious, intentional, purposeful way--as I put it in the book, D *is* an A-consciously-choosing event--and (b) D flows out of A’s conscious reasons and thought in a nondeterministically causal way, and (c) once A moves into a torn state and is going to make a torn decision, nothing external to her conscious reasons and thought has any causal influence over how she chooses. This certainly isn’t my whole argument, but it’s part of it. I claim that (even in the absence of a theory of control--i.e., in the absence of a necessary-and-sufficient-condition-type conceptual analysis of control), I can recognize scenario as an ordinary case of authorship and control. I can do this in the same way that I can recognize Madonna as a person even though I don’t have a theory or analysis of personhood. Neil seems willing to grant the point about authorship, but he denies that this is a case of control. He claims he’s just as good as me at recognizing ordinary control, and so he claims that we need a theory of control to settle the dispute.

I want to respond by arguing that a theory of control would be (i) virtually impossible to get (maybe even *really* impossible), and (ii) not much help anyway. I suspect that what’s really going on is that my notion of control and Neil’s notion of control are at least slightly different--in particular, Neil’s got a higher bar than I do. In any event, let’s suppose that we both went to the trouble of articulating theories or analyses of control. Then we would have two different notions on the table, Mark-control and Neil-control. And let’s suppose (as seems likely, but I won’t argue this point) that we both agreed that if D was TDW-undetermined, then A Mark-controlled D but she didn’t Neil-control it. If Neil’s notion of control were at least minimally reasonably--and I’m pretty sure it would be--then I’d be happy to conclude that D was Mark-L-free but not Neil-L-free. And, hence, we could conclude that if our torn decisions are TDW-undetermined, then Mark-libertarianism is true but Neil-libertarianism isn’t. I’m fine with this. Assuming that my notion of control is also reasonable, it gives us a defense of a reasonable version of libertarianism.

Consider the following question:

(Q) Is REAL control Mark-control or Neil-control?

Neil seems to think that we could make progress by answering (Q). I have serious doubt about this. First, there is no agreement about what sorts of facts settle (Q). One view is that it’s just a question about ordinary language; on this view, both notions are fine in themselves, but only one of them is the notion picked out by folk uses of ‘control’. But this is controversial. Others will claim that (Q) is about which notion better carves nature at the joints, or about which notion would be more useful for us in (what? building a good society?). And others will adopt still different views. I doubt there’s a unique correct answer to the question, ‘Which facts settle (Q)?’ Thus, it may be that Mark-control fares better by some yardsticks and Neil-control fares better by others. Moreover, in connection with any given yardstick, there may be no fact of the matter. E.g., folk usage may not be univocal. If Neil and I differ, why not think that others differ as well? Finally, even if we could answer (Q), it’s not clear that we should care. E.g., even if it could be established that (Q) is settled by facts about folk usage and that folk usage agrees with me--i.e., that folk uses of ‘control’ pick out Mark-control--it’s not clear that Neil should care about this. If his notion of control is reasonable (or interesting or important or whatever), then it remains an interesting fact that humans don’t have Neil-control over their torn decisions and, hence, that we’re not Neil-L-free and that Neil-libertarianism is false. Why would these facts be less important if the folk used ‘control’ to pick out Mark-control? And, likewise, if the folk used ‘control’ to pick out Neil-control, it wouldn’t undermine the import of the fact that if our torn decisions are TDW-undetermined, then we have Mark-control over them, and we have Mark-L-freedom.

2. Regarding the issue of whether some hypothetical undetermined event was *part of* a torn decision or *prior* to it (and hence external to it). Neil claims this is a distinction without a difference. My response is that we don’t know anywhere near enough neuroscience right now to know whether this is a distinction without a difference. Future physical-neuro-cognitive science could reveal good reasons for endorsing any of the following: (a) our torn decisions are determined--i.e., there are no undetermined events in the whole process; (b) there are undetermined events in the process but they are prior to the decisions themselves and are best thought of as nonmental events; (c) there are undetermined events in the process and they are best thought of as quantum parts of our torn decisions, so that the decisions themselves are undetermined; (d) there are undetermined events in the process, and there is no clear fact of the matter about whether they are prior to the decisions or parts of the decisions, because there is no nonarbitrary way to say exactly where and when the decisions begin, and on some reasonable ways of doing this the undetermined events are parts of the decisions, and on other reasonable ways of doing it, the undetermined events are prior to the decisions. I reject Neil’s distinction-without-a-difference claim because I think that our best theory could end up giving us reasons to endorse any of these options. I claim (and in the book, I argue) that (c) would vindicate libertarianism; and I think that (a) and (b) would undermine libertarianism and that (d) would suggest that there’s no fact of the matter whether libertarianism is true.

3. Regarding Neil’s last paragraph: I agree that if the *only* point I argued was that TDW-indeterminism yields as much control as deterministic scenarios, that would not be sufficient to establish my conclusion. But as Neil points out, I argue more than this. That claim wasn’t meant to stand on its own as a reason to endorse any of my conclusions.

[Philoponus]

Thank you, Neil. That helped.

I hope I am at least implicitly agreeing with your view that “present luck” is a (fatal) obstacle for accounts of free choice that need to at least partially “disconnect” our deliberations from the choices & actions that follow. I have never understood the view that for there to be free choices my deliberations may not determine (or may only underdetermine) my actions. The opposite, I think!

Every morning many of us with busy agendas decide what our schedule for the day will be. We decide what we will and will not do, and when and how. For the most part, barring emergencies, that schedule is what we follow today. Surely we want to admit that that our schedule choice determines what we do today—the idea that the schedule is just a rationalizing confabulation has the problem that it precedes the day and anticipates it very accurately. Sure we want to say that my scheduled day is a day I am in control of and have chosen. Contrast what we say about people who stumble through days with no schedules, just reacting to whatever the world inflicts upon them. They aren’t in control and “authors” of their day.

Is the libertarian worry that if my deliberations decide and determine some of my actions, therefore my actions were somehow predetermined at the Big Bang? Ha! By what? Good luck trying to find a physicist who will say we can even begin to produce a classical or quantum description of just the underlying brain processes that are covered by our deterministic laws. That I am in control of and determine (some of) my actions does not mean that this modest causality must or can be subsumed under the very general physical laws that pertain in this universe. You understand that the ultimate fate of the universe may be pre-determined without it being pre-decided whether I will have soup or salad today. Why would we even think so?

[Mark Balaguer]

Philoponus,
The idea behind torn decision is not that we abandon ordinary deliberations or decision making processes. There are many different kinds of decisions, and we deliberate more in some cases than others. But however much deliberating you do in a particular case, you can find yourself torn and needing to make a decision. It is just a fact of human life that sometimes--quite often, I think--we have to make decisions while feeling torn and not really knowing which option is best. Libertarians don't want it to be the case that we abandon deliberation or that we start making more torn decisions than we otherwise would or anthing like that. Libertarians are perfectly happy with the idea that we can sometimes figure out what the best course of action is by deliberating, and when we can figure this out, that's good. But they think that we sometimes fail to figure out which option is best. And so we sometimes have to make torn decisions. And what libertarians want is that when we DO make torn decisions--and we are GOING to make decisions like this no matter what--that it is US that decides which option is chosen and not something external to us.

[Michael PJ]

Mark,

I don't think you've quite answered Neil's worry about whether the indeterminancy is "internal" or not.

If we think of our hypothetical decision making procedure as a flow-chart, the suggestion you seem to be making is that we progress along it in the usual fashion until we reach a point where both sides of the argument are pretty much equal; we become "torn". At this point there is some kind of recourse to an indeterminate process. We could represent it on our chart as a box that gives an indeterminate 0 or 1. Now, if I understand Neil rightly, he is saying that from an agent's point of view, there is no difference whether this indeterminancy happens through some internal (perhaps "quantum", although that word gets misused a lot in these debates) process, or by, say, an external wire running to a roulette wheel in Vegas. Either way, it functions as a random box. These two cases would (I hope) correspond to at least one case of the distinction you are drawing; the question is why there is a significant difference.

The four cases you mention would be difference possibilities for the state of the distinction, but it would perhaps be helpful if you could give a sketch of why you think that, for example, (c) would vindicate libertarianism whereas (b) would not?

[Mark Balaguer]

Michael,
My argument that (c) would vindicate libertarianism is really long, and it's given in the book, so I won't try to repeat it here. (It's about a 40-page section that argues that if our torn decisions are undetermined in the right way, then they're appropriately non-random and L-free.) But let me say a few words about the internal-external issue. The way you put this worry is VERY similar to a worry that I raise in the book (the indented objection at the bottom of page 108). I respond to the worry on p. 109, so you can see my full response there. But let me say a couple of words about it here: The difference between the two cases is the difference between (i) a certain mental event being undetermined (in particular, a conscious, intentional, purposeful DECISION), and (ii) the mental event being completely determined by a prior nonmental event that happens to be undetermined. In case (ii), the fact that the event is undetermined seems irrelevant to me--for indeterminacy in a prior nonmental determining event doesn't increase authorship, control, or freedom (this is a point Dennett made more than 30 years ago). But the indeterminacy in (i) matters, for here we have an undetermined conscious decision. So there's a big difference between the two. It's not a distinction without a difference.

[Neil]

Thanks for the responses. I'll focus on Mark's (for obvious reasons), but I will also address John's worry that I am begging the question against libertarianism by demanding antecedent determining control. I don't have a good idea of what kind of control is required for free will but I do have reasons to think that what Mark calls Mark-control is (a) a form of control and (b) not sufficient for free will.

That is to say that I find Mark's contention that I have a different notion of control to him in mind plausible. I'm even happy to concede that Mark-control is sufficient for some purposes. But I doubt that Mark-control is sufficient for many purposes. I doubt it is sufficient for moral responsibility for instance. Suppose (to take a case more like those which feature in Kane than in Mark's work) the torn decision is between good and bad options. I deny that given that it is was a matter of luck that the agent chose 'good' rather than 'bad' that the agent is praiseworthy for the choice (I argue this in a paper in Dialectica). Obviously the same thing goes for the choice of 'bad' and blame. Nor is the kind of control here sufficient for the fulfillment of our life hopes. I deny (for the same reasons) that the agent can take pride in the choice, given that the pride has a constrastive content. It is this contrastive content that does the work: insofar as the agent is blameworthy for phi-ing (proud of phi-ing) rather than psi-ing, when phi-ing and psi-ing were the options which were open to him, having exercised Mark-control isn't enough.

Mark's second substantive response was on whether the indeterminism can be located internal to the agent. I'm a functionalist about most of the mental states involved in deliberation (all except consciousness). If it plays the right kind of causal role, it is part of the deliberative process. The internal/external distinction is no more important here than elsewhere in philosophy of mind. Again I have argued this elsewhere (in my 07 book, among other places). I just can't see what neuroscience could discover that could be relevant here. In any case, how can the location of a process matter to the freedom of the agent given that it is location alone that differs across cases? Mark just seems to have internalist intuitions here.

[Mark Balaguer]

Thanks again, Neil. You claim that Mark-control isn’t sufficient for free will, moral responsibility, etc. Well, I’m sure it’s not sufficient for Neil-free-will or Neil-moral-responsibility. But I think it’s sufficient for Mark-L-freedom and Mark-moral-responsibility. Now, we’re back to the question of what REAL free will is, and what real moral responsibility is. But I put no more stock in these questions than I put in the question of what real control is. It’s not obvious that there are facts of the matter about the answers to these questions, and even if there were, I don’t think their answers would be terribly important.

Another quick point: if someone, say Brenda, chooses A over B in a torn decision (and if the choice is TDW-undetermined), then you think it is a matter of luck that she chooses A. I agree that it’s lucky in SOME sense. But I think that in some ways, it’s not just a matter of luck. Because I think that in this scenario, Brenda authored and controlled the decision. SHE chose A. So I think there are various notions of luck that don’t apply to her decision.

Finally, a word about location: the reason this issue matters, in my opinion, is that it determines whether the agential action--the decision itself--is determined or undetermined. To say that this doesn’t matter is, I think, to say that it doesn’t matter whether libertarianism is true. If that’s how you feel, I’m ok with that. For it seems to me that what “matters” here probably just comes down to what we care about, and that varies from person to person. It matters to me. That’s just to say that I care whether we have L-freedom. I don’t know how MUCH I care, but I care some.

[John Dell]

Neal, thanks for taking the time to provide some of your reasons for thinking Mark-control is not sufficient for some purposes. I'm just shooting from the hip in the following, but here's a few thoughts...

Regarding MR, I think you are right to claim that if a person makes a torn decision between a good and bad option they are not praiseworthy. However, I think they are blameworthy *for choosing*. One of the things Mark emphasizes is that suspension of judgment is an option (i.e. when it comes to torn decisions, you don't have to choose). If faced with a choice between something that is severely negative and something positive, I think it is morally obligatory *not* to enter into a torn state (i.e. not to choose) because you run a serious risk of choosing the bad. So, I think there are going to be situations (or external constraints) that morally require you not to make a torn decision. (Though it is also important to recognize that Marks thinks there are times when your reasons do determine the choice; what we might want to say then, is that *some* good and bad cases are those where your reasons ought to determine the choice). On Marks view, it looks to me anyway, that you are responsible for your torn decisions because it is up to you whether to make a torn decision. But, if you do make a decision you cannot be praised or blamed for choosing the good or bad when it comes to torn decisions of that type, you can only be blamed for choosing (and maybe it could be argued that you can be praised for not choosing in some cases as well).

I have tried to keep it simple here, and just present the idea I'm chewing on, but this issue is really complex. So for example, there might be situations where you *must* choose between the good and the bad. Then what? Well, the first thing that comes to mind is that this wouldn't be a torn decision because you are forced to choose. Nevertheless, I am not so sure, it seems possible to me that you could come up with a case on Mark's view where you are forced into a torn state, but the outcome of that choice is still undetermined and a matter of *you* choosing. [the possibility of being forced into a state where you make a wholly undetermined choice is something I'm not sure what to think about]. In short, I think the issue of MR could play out in really interesting ways on a view like Mark's.

As for your other point, I agree with what you say about the fulfillment of life-hopes. One of the things I have been thinking about lately is how Mark's view can accommodate Kane's rendering of the "narrative self" and value experiments. I'm still throwing the idea around, but I think Mark's view can handle such friendly amendments just fine, and I believe that would be a good addition in explaining why his is a view of free will worth wanting.

[Neil]

In the book, Mark says that most of the issues regarding the what-kinds-of-free-will-do-we-have question are trivial. We obviously have Frankfurt-fw, and Humean-fw (for instance). The only question that isn't trivial is do we have L-fw (in what follows L-fw = Mark-fw)? But his reply to me makes me think he is basically committed to the view that that, too, is essentially trivial. It is not empirically trivial, of course: it is a matter of discovery for science. But it is philosophically trivial. Here's why: iff we have L-fw then we have L-moral responsibility, and L-control, and L-authorship. What are they are? Well, they're kind of responsibility (etc) we have if we have L-fw. And if we don't have L-fw, then we lack these further properties. But we do have Humean-fw and Humean moral responsibility and.... And we also have Frankfurt-fw and... By stipulating a notion of fw, moral responsibility, control, and so on, for each kind of process, the whole issue becomes entirely trivial. Either these things are worth caring about or they are not. The stipulative route leaves us with no way to say why they matter. So I think Mark will be forced to engage with my claim that l-fw doesn't render agents apt for responsibility judgments with contrastive content, on pain of triviality.

John: I agree that we oughtn't to be such that, faced with a choice between good and bad, we are tempted enough by bad to be torn. But agreeing with that doesn't commit me to saying either that we are responsible for being such that we are torn, or for choosing the bad. Moreover, there is nothing libertarian about the view you're suggesting here: it is more reminiscent of Arpaly and Angela Smith than of Kane and Balaguer.

[Nate]

Is an agent X's possession of Mark-L-freedom sufficient for the kind of authorship and control over her behavior required for resentment to be a fair/appropriate/deserved response to X's wrongdoing, where resenting X is taken to be a hostile emotion essentially involving the thought that X deserves, in the sense of basic desert, to suffer (to some degree) for his acting as he did?

Granted, more needs to be said about what desert is (though it's said to be basic desert), about what the hostility of the emotion amounts to, etc. Is the answer the question, once it's made clear, bound to be trivial?

[John Dell]

Neal: It seems I was not being clear, or I was insinuating something I did not intend to (or both)[that's what I get for shooting from the hip].

Let me try again (though you may not find the following any more satisfactory). In addition to Mark's point about suspension of judgment being an option when it comes to torn decisions, the idea I was working off comes from pp. 96-97 of his book. He writes (about the Ralph case; i.e. the New York or Mayberry case), "The fact of the matter is that Ralph's conscious reasons do not pick out a unique best option; but he does have reason to make *some* choice, that is, for not remaining in a state of indecision; thus, it seems clear that Ralph has good reason to *just pick* from among his tied-for-best options..." So what I was curious about is what about the cases where you *do* have reason for remaining in a state of indecision? Well, I think if the stakes are particularly high (as they would be in many good/bad cases) you do have reason for remaining in a state of indecision; i.e. you have reason not to make a choice because a bad outcome is a serious risk.

However, even in such a scenario I do not think it is unreasonable to say we are not responsible for our reasons not to make a choice. And by the same token, it seems to me to be fair to say if we do make a choice we are responsible for those reasons, and therefore, for choosing as well. Again, I think we are responsible for whether or not we make a torn decision. And I think in *some* cases we are blameworthy if we do make a torn decision, and those are the cases where we *ought* to have reasons *not* to make a torn decision (i.e. remaining in a state of indecision). So, given that our reasons impact whether or not we make a torn decision, contrary to what you write above, I think "we are responsible for being such that we are torn." And, I think in high stakes cases our reasons ought to determine our decision.

Now, in saying "there is nothing libertarian about the view" I suggested if you are assuming that the libertarian should require *all* of our decisions to be wholly undetermined (or TDW-undetermined), then I guess I would like to know why you think that. My point was more about how we have torn decisions *and* reason determining decisions, and I think it is interesting to look at how MR runs across those two kinds of decisions (maybe this idea is old-hat for you, I don't know. But I'm sure you at least recognize Fischer's point that determinism may well be compatible with MR, but not with free will; but I'm not sure what you think about Fischer's point either). Anyway, in continuing to follow Balaguer, he writes, "the only thing libertarians need to commit to is the thesis that our ordinary torn decisions are *in fact*, undetermined at the moment of choice in the manner of TDW-indeterminism...(120)" I don't see how anything I have said is inconsistent with the libertarian commitment described by Balaguer.

[Mark Balaguer]

A few points in response to remarks by Neil, Nate, and John. First, let me say a bit about Neil’s charge of triviality. In the book I argue that (a) if our torn decisions are undetermined in the right way (i.e., TDW-undetermined), then we’ve got as much control over them as we could have over any decision, and (b) we lose some control if they’re not TDW-undetermined, and (c) the sort of control we get here is worth wanting. I don’t argue that this is the one and only kind of control, but I think that (a)-(c) clearly motivate the idea that this is a genuine sort of control and freedom, and I think it can be argued that they ground a genuine sort of moral responsibility. So I think this gives us reason to think that if our torn decisions are TDW-undetermined, then an interesting, important kind of libertarianism is true. I don’t want to deny that there are other kinds of control and freedom and responsibility that are worth thinking about--Neil seems to have in mind varieties of these things that that we can never have, whether we’re talking about torn or non-torn decisions, and whether our decisions are determined or not--but I don’t think the existence of these other kinds of control and freedom undermines the interest in the kind of L-freedom I’ve described.

All of this is to motivate the idea that the question of whether we’ve got this sort of L-freedom is not trivial. I think it’s as interesting and important as most other questions about the nature of the world. And, as Neil agrees, the question is not scientifically trivial. It’s an open question. But he thinks there’s a sort of PHILOSOPHICAL trivialness here. Well, depending on what he means by this, I might very well agree with him. After all, one of the main points of the book was to argue that the only important metaphysical question here--i.e., the only important question about human decision making--collapses into a scientific question. And the questions that look philosophical--e.g., “What is (real) free will?”, “What sorts of freedom are required for (real) moral responsibility?”, and so on--turn out not to be relevant to questions about humans. They may be semantically interesting, or something like that, but nothing more.

Perhaps Neil will want to say that theses (a)-(c) above are themselves philosophical theses. Perhaps that was his original point, when he said that what I have really argued is that GIVEN all of my philosophical conclusions, there are no important philosophical questions left to answer. I don’t want to quibble over what counts as philosophical. To me, (c) just looks like a value judgment, and (a) and (b) are claims to the effect that certain kinds of events would or wouldn’t have certain kinds of properties. So I’m not sure why these claims would count as philosophical. But perhaps people will want to say that since the properties in question are philosophically interesting properties having to do with things like control, these are philosophical theses. Maybe. I’m not particularly wedded to the idea that they’re not philosophical.

A couple of points to John: First, I don’t think that whether a given decision is forced on you is relevant to whether it’s a torn decision. Being torn has to do with how you feel about the various options. If you choose while feeling that various options are tied for best, then it’s a torn decision, regardless of whether the choice was forced on you. Second, decisions about whether to decide or to remain in a state of indecision are, on my view, just like other decisions. They can be determined by your reasons (i.e., you can have compelling reasons for deciding or for remaining undecided) or you can be torn between these two options. And, yes, we can make torn decisions about whether to make a given decision. This, I think, is pretty rare, but there’s no reason why it can’t happen sometimes.

Finally, to Nate, I think fairness is interdefinable with various other moral terms. So if there are multiple kinds of moral responsibility, there are multiple kinds of fairness. If I’m MR1 for act A but not MR2 for it, then it would be fair1 to resent me but not fair2. Questions about what REAL fairness is seem not that important to me. But, for the reasons given above, I think the kind of fairness that falls out of my view--out of the kinds of control and freedom I’ve described--is an interesting and important kind of fairness.

[John Dell]

The opening sentence of the second to last paragraph in my last post should read: "However, even in such a scenario I do not think it is unreasonable to say we are responsible for our reasons not to make a choice."

Sorry if this caused anyone any confusion. It looks like I got a little 'not' happy.

[Paul Torek]

I think that questions of type

(Q) Is REAL control Mark-control or Neil-control?

usually do have answers, and that the best (only?) way to find out if they do is to pursue them. Folk usage is extremely relevant, but often not decisive; in that case the question does become which would be more useful to us in communication. (Which one carves nature at the joints is, to my mind, just a colorful way of stating the exact same desideratum: a "joint"-carving will be judged by resulting economy and precision.) Where the term in question is of primarily ethical interest, the "usefulness" does indeed roughly amount to helping us build a better society. Note also that where folk usage is clearly in favor of one contestant, the question of usefulness in communication is thereby settled.

So, all these criteria may boil down to the same thing.

[Mark Balaguer]

Paul,
I'm ok with the idea that folk usage is the main factor in settling these questions. (There may be other factors, but let's ignore that for now.) The problem, though, is that even if we assume that folk usage settles it, there might be multiple meanings at work in folk usage, and there may be various kinds of imprecision; so we can still fail to get a clear, unique answer. But my main point is that even if we do get a unique correct answer to questions like this, that won't necessarily undermine the interest or importance of concepts that DON'T correspond to folk terms. So even if English 'control' expresses the sort of control that I've got in mind, it may still be that the sort of control (or pseudo-control, as the case may be) that Neil has in mind is interesting and worth thinking about.

[Lyndon Page]

"I don’t argue that this is the one and only kind of control, but I think that (a)-(c) clearly motivate the idea that this is a genuine sort of control and freedom, and I think it can be argued that they ground a genuine sort of moral responsibility."

I can accept under the concept of torn decisions that this may be a "genuine sort of control and freedom," but I do question the claim that torn decisions can "ground a genuine sort of moral responsibility."

Under the portrayal of what a torn decision is, I can see no use in grounding moral responsibility there. In order to confirm the definition, by torn decision we are postulating the possibility that an individual arrives at a choice. Having completely equal reasons to choose either option of the choice, the individual then excercizes "freedom" by choosing one over the other. "Why" and "How" the decision is made is unknown. But given that the agent was genuinely torn, then the "Why" is meaningless anyways, by definition he had no concern or care as to which decision he made at that time. He may regret such a decision, but at the time of making it (the time in which we need an account of "moral responsibility"), he could not have "cared" which choice he was making, since they were equal. Am I mistaking the conception of a "torn decision"?

The "Buridan's Ass" conception I believe is a good analogy here. This may be an example of freedom, but I find it absurd that we would "ground genuine moral responsbility" in such a concept. If "Buridan's Ass" authored and controlled his choice and picked haystack A instead of B, and bad consequences happened because of choosing A instead of B, I would not dare say that "Buridan's Ass" is responsible for his bad decision. Likewise, in the torn decision, by definition of it being torn, the responsibility of the decision cannot rest in the "authoring and control" of choosing A instead of B, since this can be nothing more than the barest of luck as to the outcome. The individual believed at the time of making the decision that the outcomes of either choice were of completely equal merit, even if such belief in the supposed outcomes was false.

[Mark Balaguer]

Lyndon,

Three points: First, just to clear up something about torn decisions: We most certainly DO care which option we choose in these decisions. If you are torn between accepting a good job in a bad city and sticking with a bad job in the city you love, and if your deadline is right now, then you will have to make a torn decision; but you will care which option you choose. So the idea that if we're torn between two options, then we don't care which option we choose is just a false claim about humans.

Second, I am not suggesting that torn decisions are the ONLY decisions for which we can be morally responsible; I think we can be responsible for non-torn decisions as well, e.g., decisions in which our reasons pick out unique best options.

Third, I don't see why we wouldn't hold someone responsible for making a torn decision. Take Kane's business woman. She's torn between helping another person in need and getting to a meeting that will help her career. She has to choose right now, and she's torn. Say she chooses to go to the meeting. Would you really not hold her responsible for this? I would. And I think most people would. Imagine that she gave this as an excuse for stepping over the person in need: "It wasn't my fault, because I was torn between helping the person and getting to my meeting; if I wasn't torn, I would have helped the person; but I was torn, and so it's not my fault that I didn't help out." We would think that was a lame excuse.

[Lyndon Page]

1) I did not mean we do not care by meaning that it does not matter what we do, or that it would not have an important impact on our life. In an important "torn decision" we care very much which option we choose. By definition of it being torn though, we some how, arbitrarily, randomly (however it works), just pick one over the other. If we truly believe that there are equal reasons between the two options, then at the moment of choosing we have to have equal faith that both options give us the opportunity of equal return, and thus, at that moment, there is NO reason (logical, emotional, morally) for us to choose one or the other, given our belief in the equality of the opportunity outcome. Thus, we cannot "care" which option is chosen, with "care" just meaning that at that moment we believed both options to be equal and thus to have equal value to us, society, whatever the standard. If you tell me behind door 1 a million dollars, behind door 2 death, I will author the decision and I will care very much which option, including a great anxiety over which door I choose. I will probably act like I am making a tough decision even though there is absoluty nothing to base my choice on. On the other hand, I will recognize (perhaps at a less anxious moment) that I cannot care whether it is door 1 or 2 that I choose, given on the face of the door I have absoluty no reason for choosing one over the other.

2) I agree, I was not trying to imply this was the only path to freedom or responsibility, despite the narrow focus.

3) I think if* we can hold her responsible it is not on the basis of her randomly choosing between options she held on equal footing. The possible responsibility is in the lack of weighing the options carefully that gave her a supposed "torn decision" or it is failing to take one breath to consider a distressed human being, etc. If she truly came to a torn decision, then her responsibility is not in the blind choice she made between the two options. I am sure we can think of a more heinous case, one which 99.9% of people would automatically choose the "right" thing to do, but some "defective" individual instead of "knowing" the right thing to do, arrives at making a torn decision. When that individual does wrong, it would be odd to say that his responsibility lies in his authoring the torn decision in the wrong direction. Instead it seems that the problem is whatever "defect" that turned the problem into a torn decision to start with. Sorry, thats kind of a limited thought experiment, the problem is much deeper than that, such as how often we have torn decisions, which you have talked about elsewhere.

[Mark Balaguer]

Lyndon,

The 2-door case isn’t really a torn decision. It’s more like a Buridan’s ass decision, because the reasons for choosing the two doors are identical--to get the million dollars. But the job case is different. In that case, the reasons for the two choices are different. One choice has reasons having to do with career advancement, and the other has reasons having to do with quality of life. You say that if the person is torn, then he/she has no reasons for choosing either way. But that seems wrong to me. The person has lots of reasons for both choices--and they’re different reasons; the problem is just that the person doesn’t know which set of reasons is best.

As for moral responsibility, a couple of things: (1) I don’t think we hold the businesswoman responsible *because* she made a torn decision. I think we hold her responsible for her decision; whether it was torn is irrelevant. She’s responsible for choosing not to help the person, whether her choice was torn or not. (2) I don’t think that making torn decisions is evidence that the person didn’t carefully deliberate. Extremely careful deliberations can lead to torn decisions, and extremely careless deliberations can lead to non-torn decisions in which the person thinks that he/she has a unique, best option. The two things don’t seem to me to have anything to do with each other.

[Paul Torek]

Mark,

You are of course quite right that the correct answer to questions like (Q) can yield multiple concepts rather than unique. I meant to acknowledge this, but I had to cut my post short.

And neologism is a wonderful thing. "Torn decisions" is a clear and aptly named concept. Let's see if it takes off, and makes it into contexts where free will and responsibility are paramount, such as the courtroom. If it does, it probably answered a need that we had. In what contexts do you think it is most needed?

[Lyndon Page]

Mark, first off thanks for the responses,

I was not trying to pull-the-wool over your eyes with the million/death choice, I agree that is a Buridan's Ass decision. I was using that example to show that we can care deeply about the outcome of a decision, but not care about which choice we make, since both choices are of equal merit to us. In that sense, the Buridan's Ass decision should be the same as the torn decision. Even in a torn decision, if it is truly torn, my options are completely equal, Door A or Torn Option A, Door B or Torn Option B, I have no reason to care (in the limited sense explained earlier) which option I choose. On the face of the torn options, from my limited perspective (I cannot see behind the doors in the other case), both choices are equal, and although I know that one is probably a better choice than the other, I do not know which one it is, both options of the torn decision are the same to me, and hence: I cannot really care* which one I choose at that moment in time.

All I was saying is I do not believe the torn decision adds anything to the responsibility of the businesswoman situation. The choice she makes, her flip of the coin between the two options, the fact that such a flip landed on one choice instead of the other, does not ADD to her responsibility. In other words, torn decisions do not "ground a genuine sort of moral responsibility," which you had claimed earlier. They have a rather superfluous nature. I think we must look elsewhere, instead of the bare outcome of the torn decision in order to find her responsible for such a decision. The mechanism of authorship, her blind choosing between two equal positions, is not a significant factor in the responsibility. She may be "responsible" for the decision she made, good or bad, torn or not, but such responsibility is grounded in deliberation practices, poor moral character, somewhere else, and not grounded in the torn decision itself.

[Mark Balaguer]

Paul: I’m not sure what the applications might be to legal contexts. I am most interested in the pure philosophical issue. After that, what’s most interesting to me is what it tells us about ourselves and our daily lives. I think that if you reflect on this, you’ll find that you make lots of decisions everyday that are more or less torn decisions. And reflecting on this, I think this has consequences for what ordinary, everyday human rationality is. It is not the kind of rationality that a computer would have; our choices aren’t always picked out by our reasons. But on my view, this does not make us less rational. We can be rational and at least partially arbitrary at the same time. And this, I think, is a *good* thing. I wouldn’t trade it in for full-tilt rationality in which all our decisions are determined by our reasons. In my view, that would be boring and depressing. Torn decisions make it possible for us to be rational and *spontaneous* at the same time. If we were never torn--if our reasons always picked out unique best options, and if we were always aware of what the best option was--then we could be spontaneous only by being irrational. And that, I think, would be bad. So I think the fact that we often have to decide while being torn is a good thing.

Lyndon: I agree that tornness doesn’t add to the moral responsibility that attaches to a decision. That’s not what it’s supposed to do. Rather, the idea is that INDETERMINACY can add to things like freedom and responsibility. This can be brought out by the following series of points: (i) First we notice that we do sometimes make torn decisions (this is just a fact about humans); (ii) next, I argue (in the book) that IF our torn decisions are undetermined in the right way (i.e., TDW-undetermined), then there is an important sort of freedom and moral responsibility that attaches to them; (iii) finally, I argue that if these torn decisions AREN’T undetermined in this way, then at the very least, there is a decrease in freedom and responsibility (because something other than the agent would be do the determining, because we know by assumption that the agent’s conscious reasons and thought aren’t doing it, because it’s a torn decision). So, in short, the idea is that if we focus on torn decisions, we can see that this is a place where indeterminacy can generate or increase freedom and responsibility, and hence we can get a kind of libertarianism. But nowhere in the argument, do I claim that being torn generates or increases the amount of responsibility that a person has for a given choice. The idea is that given that a decision IS a torn decision, then indeterminacy can generate or increase freedom and responsibility.