Doppelganger Garden of Forking Paths

The Joker Among Our Cards

During the exchange concerning my recent post in support of libertarian views, an idea occurred to me that I would like to follow up, namely the analogy of a joker among the cards that are dealt us.

John Fischer has written that 'our behaviour may well be "in the cards" in the sense that we simply have to play the cards that are dealt us.' (Fischer, J. 'The cards that are dealt you' (2005), Journal of Ethics 10, 107 at 129.)  This drew the apt comment from Kip Werking that it misleadingly suggests there is a player of the cards distinct from the hand that is dealt, whereas in truth human beings simply are the cards that are dealt them by genes and environment.

My view can be understood as accepting this, but as suggesting that each of us includes, in the hand of cards that is dealt us and that constitutes us, along with  particular cards like aces, tens, jacks and so on, one powerful and flexible general-purpose card, like a joker.  The particular cards engage with circumstances and laws of nature to limit our conduct to a spectrum of possibilities, while the joker, our capacity for conscious choice, can combine with our other cards to steer a course within this spectrum of possibilities.

I am not suggesting this joker is a self or soul that itself makes decisions, or that it corresponds with any particular region of the brain.  Rather, it is a capacity that operates only in conjunction with our other cards.  It is however powerful and flexible:  so long as our other cards are not seriously deficient, for example because of mental abnormality or senility, the joker enable us to make reasonable albeit fallible decisions about what to believe (including what to believe about right and wrong) and about what to do, for good or ill.  And these decisions can in turn affect what particular cards we come to hold for the future, for better or worse.  Since we all have this joker, we all have some ultimate responsibility for our conduct, again at least so long as our other cards are not seriously deficient.

Why then do I think our cards include this joker, this capacity to decide?  In brief, I say there are very strong reasons to accept that conscious experiences make a substantial positive contribution to our decision-making, and that this contribution is not one wholly constituted by rule-determined processes:  if it were, as Alan Turing's arguments show, consciousness would be a superfluity.  There is however a plausible account of how conscious experiences can make a contribution that is not rule-determined, namely by providing feature-rich gestalt experiences that cannot engage as wholes with laws or rules of any kind but to which, as wholes, we can respond reasonably.  On this view, the role of consciousness is to contribute this response to our decision-making, giving us a capacity to make decisions that are not wholly determined by the engagement of pre-existing circumstances (including our characters) with laws of nature.  That is, it gives us our joker.

I guess Tom Clark would say this is gratuitously introducing a non-natural and contra-causal black box into our decision-making, whereas other views hold the promise of transparency.  But I say there are good positive arguments in support of my position, that it takes a wider view of what is natural, that we should not assume in advance that mechanistic explanations can be sufficient, and that we can understand non-conclusive plausible explanations pretty well (for most things, they are the best we can do).

Can a libertarian account deal with worries about manipulation?

I have just become a contributor to GFP at the invitation of Neal Tognazzini.  My homepage (not the most elegant I’m afraid) is here.

I want to take up the libertarian cause by responding to two points made by Joe Campbell in his comments on Haji’s “The Manipulation Argument”.  First, he says “no libertarian account has successfully illustrated the key to free human action,” and suggests that a libertarian response to worries about manipulation can be no better than a compatibilist response; and he criticises agent causation as being a “primitive unanalyzable concept”.

I’ve been trying to develop a libertarian account that does focus on how and why human action is free and that can deal with manipulation worries, as well as with Galen Strawson’s responsibility argument.  One article, an edited version of which was published in Times Literary Supplement last year, was the subject of some discussion on this website, but this discussion tended to skate over the main arguments.  (The article was written in part as an answer to Galen Strawson’s argument, and since he as philosophy editor for TLS okayed it for publication, I was encouraged to hope he saw it as having some merit.)   I also published an article (“Making our own luck”) to similar effect in Ratio in September last (which I can’t put on the internet until next September), and another on the role of consciousness in Philosophy Now in Jan/Feb this year.

The (bare) gist of my position is that, given our circumstances and laws of nature, the way we are provides available alternatives, inconclusive reasons (and how they appeal), and unconscious tendencies, and also the capacity to decide between the alternatives on the basis of the reasons; and what we do is what we decide in exercise of that capacity.  The constraining effect of the way we are is limited to determining alternatives, reasons and unconscious tendencies, and our decisions are not otherwise constrained by any distinguishing features of the way we are (we are all alike in respect of our capacity to decide):  to this extent, we are truly responsible for our decisions.  That applies whether the way we are is due to manipulation and/or natural causes and/or prior decisions.

I support this by arguing (1) that conscious experiences can make a positive contribution to decision-making; (2) that this contribution is not one wholly determined by rule-based processes; (3) that we can respond to whole feature-rich gestalt experiences that cannot engage as wholes with rules or laws of any kind; and (4) that the role of consciousness (and its advantage) is to enable us to contribute this response to decision-making.

This may be seen as a kind of agent causation, but I would suggest it is far from being primitive and unanalysable.

The focus in the free will debate at present is so much on compatibilism and incompatibilism that there seems to be little concern about what I see as of central importance, namely the role of consciousness in decision-making, and especially in plausible reasoning.  So I would really appreciate comments that squarely address the arguments of these articles, particularly the four points listed above.  And if anyone would like to investigate my arguments further, they could look also at an article in Philosophy in 2001 which first introduced my gestalt argument, and another in Journal of Consciousness Studies in 2002 which has the fullest exposition of it.