Flickers of Freedom

Eddy Nahmias deserves credit...

At least, he would were it possible for anyone to deserve such a thing on the basis of their actions alone. Probably most of you have already seen this, but just in case...Working together with two students, Toni Adleberg and Morgan Thompson, Eddy has gathered some data on a really important topic: why women are so badly underrepresented in philosophy (especially in comparison to other discipline). The data mainly concerns when women leave. The really cool thing is how they are going to test the hypothesis they have generated on the basis of the data. 

The hypothesis is that women leave (in part) because they don't feel that the material is relevant to them and don't feel like they're able to succeed. Eddy and co hypothesise that the low proportion of female authors of texts on the syllabus might be playing a role in producing this alienation. They find that the proportion of female authors partially mediates alienation. To properly test a hypothesis you need to move from correlation to causation, of course, and that requires manipulating a variable. The obvious variable to tweak is the proportion of female authors on the syllabus.With the backing of GSU, from this fall graduate instructors will use syllabi with at least 20% female authors, which is double the current number.

Story here. Kudos to Eddy, Toni and Morgan, and to GSU.

Manipulations for manipulation cases

As promised, a new post on a different topic. Again, this is going to be driven by thoughts about cognitive science. I may be giving those of you who don’t know my work a rather distorted picture. Don’t be put off reading Hard Luck because you’re skeptical or uninterested in this kind of work. Hard Luck is philosophy, and science plays no significant role in its arguments. Hopefully, this post connects more closely to philosophical issues that the last couple.

Further thoughts on explaining away retributivism

As promised, a response to some of the comments made to my last post. I am going to make some general comments. Because this is so damn long, I am posting it as a new post. I will not make the responses explicit: instead I will use the comments section of the new post to respond. Very soom - in the next day or two - I will put up a new post on a different topic.

Explaining (away) reactive attitudes

I said I wasn’t going to talk skepticism anymore, and here I am, talking about skepticism again. Further evidence that lack of belief in free will predicts anti-social behavior! I want to follow up on a debate that has been occurring in comments on my previous post. I apologize in advance for two things. First, these remarks are not properly thought through. I’m trying out a line of response I think is interesting: isn’t that what a blog is for? Second, I’m going to assume a thoroughly naturalistic picture in what follows. I know some of you will reject the picture. I don’t pretend I can give you an argument that should convince you that you ought to accept the picture. I beg your indulgence in what follows.

Suggestions for Junior Featured Authors?

So, I am still working on the ever-evolving line up for the Featured Author series and I thought it would be nice to feature the work of some graduate students, recently minted PhDs, and post-docs who are working on action theory broadly construed.  So, if you know of any junior philosophers (or psychologists) who are working on agency-related issues and who might be interested in doing a stint here on the blog as a Featured Author, please let me know.   While it has been great having more established senior philosophers contributing to the series thus far, I think it is important that researchers who are just getting into the field get some additional exposure as well.  So, thanks in advance for your suggestions.

p.s.  Don't be modest!  If you fit the description above and you're interested in doing a stint as a Featured Author, send me an email and copy of your CV!  

Pickard Joins the Featured Author Fray

I am delighted to announce that Dr. Hanna Pickard has accepted my invitation to be a Featured Author here at Flickers of Freedom during January (2014).  Dr. Pickard is a Wellcome Trust Biomedical Ethics Clinical Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy and a Fellow of All Souls College at the University of Oxford. She is also a therapist at the Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust Complex Needs Service, which is a therapeutic community for patients with personality disorders and related problems. She specializes in the philosophy of psychiatry and clinical ethics, investigating philosophical issues that arise out of clinical practice and related science. Her central, current project involves articulating the nature of the concepts of responsibility and blame that are used within effective clinical treatments of personality disorder, and exploring their application within the criminal justice system and prisons. She also works on the nature of addiction, self-harm, violence, emotions, and psychosis.

Given my own interests in punishment theory and the philosophy of psychiatry, I am very much looking forward to Dr. Pickard's contributions.  I have a few other invitations in the works as well.  Hopefully, I will have some additional announcements soon.

Blocking a hard line reply to skepticism (or, tl;dr)

One reason the free will/moral responsibility debate is interesting is that it is multifaceted: different people approach these topics from quite different perspectives, with different sets of questions in mind and different kinds of tools. Some are primarily concerned with the metaphysics of agency, others with questions in moral philosophy (which themselves subdivide in various ways), still others are motivated by concerns in the philosophy of religion and yet others are motivated by questions to do with mind and cognition (which may be more or less empirically motivated).

The factors that make this set of issues exciting and vibrant might also sometimes cause confusion, though. I suspect that there is a great deal of talking past one another in the debate, and if we could clear up some differences of terminology, we might find that some opponents agree more than they thought. I will return to this suggestion in a moment.

Introduction

Greetings from the future! I write from Melbourne, Australia, where my principal employer, the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health,  is located.  We here are 14 hours ahead of New York and 17 hours ahead of California. I am often asked “what it’s like in the future?” Well, with the benefit of hindsight, which as you know is always 20/20, we can see that the long obsession with the compatibility of free will and causal determinism was a mistake, obscuring lots of other interesting issues to do with agency and responsibility. I’m going to try to talk about some of those issues this month, with an emphasis on cognitive science (at least that’s the current plan: we shall see). My next book, which has just been accepted by OUP, is on these kinds of issues (it is tentatively entitled Consciousness and Moral Responsibility^*). I don’t plan to talk – much – about skepticism (the new book is agnostic on the topic and the science I focus on in it doesn’t support skepticism in any kind of direct way). 

I want to start by thanking Thomas for the opportunity. It is a real honor to be included in the same company as Michael McKenna, Bruce Waller, Derk Perebook and Dana Nelkin (just to mention the most recent authors). Now on we go!

* I am currently thinking of a still from Nosferatu as a cover image. Suggestions for other options welcome! In case it helps to focus your mind, the book defends a particular account of consciousness, the global workspace account, and on that basis develops a theory of the functional role that consciousness of facts plays in responding to their content: it argues that this account entails that agents in pathologies of consciousness, like those suffering absence seizures, and ordinary agents whojust happen not to be conscious of the facts that give their action their moral significance, can't be directly morally responsible for those actions.

June's Featured Author: Neil Levy

It's that time of the month once again when I must pass the torch from one Featured Author at Flickers of Freedom to the next.  So, first, let me thank Bruce Waller for doing an outstanding job during the month of May.  I hope everyone enjoyed his provocative posts as much as I did.  As a fellow skeptic, it was especially rewarding to me to see what Bruce has been thinking about these days!  Hopefully, I will be able to cajole him into doing another stint down the road.  For now, I would now like to welcome June's Featured Author: Professor Neil Levy.  Neil is a Research Associate at the Oxford University Institute for Science and Ethics who specializes in free will and moral responsibility, and empirical approaches to ethics. He has published widely on many topics in philosophy, including bioethics, applied philosophy, continental philosophy and free will. His most recent books include Neuroethics (2007) and Hard Luck: How Luck Undermines Free Will and Responsibility (2011).  Please join me in welcoming Neil to the Featured Author series here at Flickers of Freedom.  As is always the case, I look forward to seeing everyone in the discussion threads!

The upcoming schdule for the series can be found below the fold:

Punishment without Moral Responsibility

I don’t want to cut off discussion of the previous post, particularly given the important questions recently raised by David, Eddy, Josh, and Neil; but there are only a few days remaining in May, and there is a question that particularly troubles me, and I should deeply appreciate having the insights of my Flickers friends.

For the reasons ably set out by Derk, Neil, and Galen, I believe we cannot justify moral responsibility, and that blaming, punishing, and rewarding in accordance with “just deserts” is fundamentally unfair. I gather that there are a few Flickers Folk who do not share that view; but that’s another issue. One of the most troubling challenges for those who reject moral responsibility is this: What do we do about punishment? Of course the ideal answer is easy: eliminate it, by concentrating on better early social and educational programs that provide genuine opportunities and prevent people from becoming violent criminals. In addition, there are some justice programs that seem to move in a positive direction (such as restorative justice programs). Still, no one believes that we can totally eliminate punishment, at least in the foreseeable future (though we might well dramatically reduce it from the insane current U.S. levels). As Dennett points out, even the restorative justice programs rely on a threat of punishment (if you don’t participate, you’ll be turned over to the standard program and probably imprisoned). Further, Dennett makes a very strong case that there is a deep unfairness in any form of imprisonment if one denies moral responsibility, and that the moral responsibility system is “the best game in town” until someone comes up with an alternative. Dennett’s essay, in which he further develops many of the important themes of his work and expands on them with great force and clarity, can be found at Tom Clark’s naturalism.org site (a rich resource indeed);  together with Tom’s insightful response, Dennett’s response to Tom, and finally my inadequate response: if my response had been adequate, I wouldn’t still be worrying about this problem, would I?

Our society contains some violent and dangerous people, and some must be isolated/imprisoned for the protection of society. But on my view, no one – not even Robert Harris – justly deserves to be punished/imprisoned. Saul Smilansky (in “Hard Determinism and Punishment,” 2011, Law and Philosophy) poses this problem as a reductio of hard determinism: in very inadequate summary form, Smilansky’s rich argument is that given the denial of moral responsibility, no one justly deserves punishment/imprisonment; thus those who deny MR would be obligated to replace punishment with “funishment,” making “prisons” as pleasant as possible (indeed, they would have to make prisons the equivalent of five-star hotels); but that would not only be inordinately expensive, it would also destroy any deterrent effect and might even encourage some people to commit crimes in order to enjoy the funishment facilities; so crime would increase, costs would be impossible, and the result would be something not even hard determinists would want; thus following the demands of denying MR results in a situation that those who deny MR would reject.

From my perspective, recognizing the fundamental unfairness of the moral responsibility system is the best way forward to developing a system in which we minimize punishment, provide genuine opportunity, and find better ways to shape people who are more thoughtful, have a stronger sense of positive self-efficacy, and are less inclined to violence; in short, denying MR promotes examination of the detailed causes of human behavior and of how to shape positive behavior. But even if we eliminated moral responsibility, we would still have the problem – maybe forever, at least for the foreseeable future – of what to do with those persons who pose a genuine threat to others. So my question is this: If we reject moral responsibility, and agree that no one justly deserves imprisonment, but we also recognize that we cannot do without some form of imprisonment for the protection of society, what would that imply? Would it involve the denial of MR in a fatal contradiction, or lead to Smilansky’s reductio of impossible “institutions of funishment”? Suppose one who denies moral responsibility says: Yes, we must imprison some people, even though they do not deserve it; and that’s a terrible thing; but I never suggested that denying MR would make the world perfect, only that it would make it better. Denying MR will not eliminate all the injustice in our world; some people will still have to be imprisoned for the protection of society, and we cannot turn prisons into institutions of “funishment,” because that is not economically possible and it might well be counterproductive; but it is better for us to recognize that in imprisoning a dangerous offender we are doing something that is unavoidable but still unjust, rather than pretending that we are dealing out justly deserved punishment. Recognizing that we are doing something unjust will motivate us to find better ways of shaping behavioral alternatives, and it will prevent us from making prison any more unpleasant than necessary (we will be more likely to imprison in places like Norway’s Bastoy Island rather than U.S. Supermax hell holes), and it will prevent us from imprisoning more people than absolutely necessary. If punishment cannot be eliminated, that is not a special problem for those who want to eliminate moral responsibility; rather, the problem is that the world is not just, and not all injustice can be eliminated from our world. No one justly deserves to be imprisoned, but we will not be able to eliminate prisons for the foreseeable future. Those who deny moral responsibility recognize that as a moral problem; but it is not a problem that is caused by denial of moral responsibility, and it is not a problem that opponents of moral responsibility should be obliged to solve before they argue that moral responsibility is morally wrong. Rejecting moral responsibility is a positive step toward reducing injustice, not a source of injustice.

Thanks again to Thomas for this wonderful site, and for this special opportunity; and to all who have made these discussions – certainly for me – very helpful. I’m looking forward to Neil’s postings; and in anticipation of that, here is a passage from Ecclesiastes: it is clear that when Solomon wrote it, he was inspired by Neil’s Hard Luck.

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.