Do Dogs Have Free Will?

Well, apparently most folk think so.  Last year, Dylan Murray (now at Berkeley's PhD program) and I ran some studies asking participants (Georgia State undergrads) their level of agreement/disagreement with a series of statements about free will.  Since I don't think we'll ever do anything with these results, I thought I'd post some of them here for people to mull over (thanks to Steve Beighley for putting these selected results in graphic form).  Nothing particularly surprising, though I was a bit surprised to see how many people thought dogs, chimps, and apes have free will.  (The bar graphs indicate all responses, while the circle graph takes out 'neutral' responses to compare proportion of agree vs. disagree responses.) 

If you have any thoughts, please post them here.  (If you are interested in seeing more of these results, or my reams of free response results to questions like "What is free will?", because you might want to analyze them for some purpose, please email me.)

Download Responses to Free Will Statements

Comments

[Bill]

So the average person thinks that 'creature consciousness' includes a free will component. I'm not surprised, since it is common sense that animals appear to emit unpredicatably varying behaviors that nevertheless are generally within the bounds of what our knowledge of their instincts would suggest they would do. Such is the external appearance of free will, I think.

And, in support of the folk opinions, there is after all the fruit fly research into "proto-free-will" in insects.

[neil]

Interesting set of data. There is a prima facie conflict across responses. Many of them seem to identify 'free will' with an agency condition, and not an epistemic or cognitive capacity. Thus the denial that adults have more free will than children, and that dogs have free will. This conflicts with the claims that the more understands one's situation/oneself the more free will one has.

The finding that identification of neural processes do not threaten free will for the folk seems to conflict with the bypassing story about the experimental philosophy advanced by someone or other...

[V. Alan White]

Very interesting results--thanks so much Eddy for sharing them.

In one section of my intro/FW course I discuss how animals from flatworms to human beings have graduated degrees of individuality, and in closer comparison to us, I get students to reflect on dogs, because they are a social kind of animal and most students have lots of experiences with dogs to draw on for discussion. They quickly arrive at the conclusion that dogs have genuine individual personalities much as we do, and largely on that basis they tend to infer that if we have FW, then they do also.

Responses to your questions about apes and dolphins tend to suggest that attributions of FW and perceived levels of intelligence are associated. I wonder--would students carry that association over to machine intelligence? My sense from talking about that in class is that they generally would not. But after watching Watson trounce top-flight Jeopardy champs (even with the humorous incident of answering "Toronto" for a "US Cities" question--which actually made Watson seem even more human!), I wonder if in the future passing a Turing-type test might entail as well an attribution of FW to some descendent of Watson.

[Tamler Sommers]

Very interesting results. To me, they confirm doubts I've had for some time about the usefulness of the free will concept. The word just means too many different things to too many people to come up with a theory that will capture all or even most of them. Frankfurt, for example, assumes as a starting point that animals don't free will to motivate his hierarchical theory of free will. If you deny that assumption, the theory can't really get off the ground. And it is an assumption as far as I remember--no argument whatsoever is given for it. His theory is in part an explanation for the belief that animals lack free will.

So the obvious implication of these results is this: from now on, we should jettison all talk of free will and focus only on moral responsibility and blameworthiness. (Because there is no confusion or controversy whatsoever about what THOSE concepts mean.)

[Joe Campbell]

Tamler,

I agree with you that the expression "free will" is currently useless. In my book, I call this the "free will" crisis, the debate about whether to align "free will" with the ability to do otherwise, or sourcehood (ultimacy), or the most fundamental freedom necessary for moral responsibility (or some other concept).

The folk seem to share our befuddlement. I think the "free will" crisis can be solved though. Maybe that makes me a revisionist! What "free will" should mean is "up-to-usness," for all free will theorists can wrap their heads around this.

But even that might not solve the problem; it depends on how we cash-out "up-to-usness." Note that sometimes "free will" tracks cognitive capacities (dolphins and apes are more likely to be judged to have free will than dogs; free will less likely in a coma than in money-or-life type situations) and sometimes it tracks active powers (dogs have free will; you don't get more of it as you grow older). If it turns out that the relevant active powers include some of the cognitive capacities, or vice versa, such "confusion" might be expected.

Two ways to go. One could hold that up-to-usness is a fundamental power essential to both active powers and cognitive capacities. When such an ability is noted, folks are inclined to say "He/she has free will." Further, folks might be more or less sensitive to noting the relevant ability. Maybe "free will" just is "the power to act" and various cognitive capacities are counted as signals that this power.

I'm not sure whether this will track all of our judgments about the relevance of cognitive capacities. Another way to go is to say that free will is a collection of powers: cognitive capacities plus active powers.

[Tamler Sommers]

Hi Joe,

I'm excited to see your book--it sounds like you've been on to this for a while.

One question though: is it really up to us (no pun intended)to designate a new meaning for the term "free will"? Say we decide that it should mean sourcehood, and then we start to analyse what it would take to be the source of our own actions. Would this be a genuine theory of free will if 40% of the population doesn't see the term as meaning sourcehood? Or would it just be a theory of soucehood? In other words, maybe "free will" has become a fragmented concept like "conservative" or something--it's neither possible nor desirable to try to develop a theory that would account for all the different meanings.

It's interesting though, I don't see these remarks as at all relevant to the question of whether we have "free will"--the hard incompatibilism vs. compatibilism or libertarianism debate. But that's because the players in the debate by and large agree on what kind of free will they're accepting or denying--the "necessary for moral responsibility" kind. Of course, there are many exceptions... the Notre Dame crew and I guess John, since you can't be a semi-compatibilist and think of free will that way, right?

[Tamler Sommers]

Hi Joe, looking back at your comment, I realize that I pretty much missed the point of your suggestion about "up to us"--which might be able to capture all these divergent meanings. But the general idea may still hold: if you're right, why not talk about "up to us-ness" rather than "free will" if (a) we understand what that means and (b)"up to us" is what many of us mean by free will most of the time? Why get caught up in those two words that can confuse people and lead to arguments over terminology. It reminds me of "hero" after 9/11. There was a brief movement in sports journalism not to use the word "hero" because that word should be restricted for people like the firefighters who went into the burning towers. But that didn't last because people understand when "hero" refers to firefighters and when it refers to David Ortiz. So there was no need to get worked up. Actually, now I'm not sure if this example supports my point or refutes it or is irrelevant.

[V. Alan White]

I had the privilege of reading Joe's drafts and can attest to its excellent treatment of "the hard problem" (as I would put it) of the meaning of "free will".

Obviously if one treats the categories of compatibilism and incompatibilism as contradictories, then one is committed to some possibility of the metaphysical settled nature of the referent of the term "free will" in relation to the issue of determinism. Deep skeptics like Richard Double and, in his own way, Ted Honderich, should alert us to the possibility that those views might be mere contraries, and not contradictory--they could both be false. That's why defining "free will" is the real hard "crisis" problem--how do we link the term to the relevant reality?

And that's why I think Watson and Fischer and Smilansky and Wolf and others in very different ways have refreshed our reflections on these things in the last decades. What matters? Do we need to solve the hard problem to move forward in establishing criteria for what we owe to each other (thinly veiled reference)? Or is it a contrarian avoidable controversy?

Actually I'm old-school at heart, and still seeking some proper referent for the term. But I'm open to semantic nihilism here--our ingenuity in the advocacy of error and tendency for certitude in the face of counterevidence are unfortunate tendencies in even the best strands of philosophical debate.

[Neil]

I work on free will and on the science of agency. The two debates relatively rarely intersect, because - as I do them - they target different capacities, with agency being much lower level than free will. If I understand Joe's proposal, we would identify the two. We could do that, but two things happen that Joe might not like. First, many of the philosophical questions simply disppear. Is free will compatible with determinism. Yes. Nothing to see here. Second, the role of philosophers domishes considerably. Most of the questions become empirical, and philosophers have only the relatively minor role they play in cognitive science (indeed, the best equipped philosophers are those who work in cognitive science).

[Neil]

"Domishes" is of course a technical term.

[Joe Campbell]

Tamler: Right, I think if you look at the history of philosophy, at least, a case can be made that free will is up-to-usness. Nor is it out of the question that this is what the folk mean by the expression, though I don't pretend to have data supporting that.

I wish I had a theory of meaning but I don't! I only know that I don't like the current view that seems to be driving a lot of work in experimental philosophy, e.g. that meaning is determined by folk usage and that's it. Poll the folk and you'll find out what "free will" means. There's got to be room for what Strawson calls "revisionary metaphysics," right? Part of what we're doing is helping the folk figure out what key philosophical terms mean. Someone comes up with a good theory, various philosophers use key terms from the theory, and eventually the folk follow suit. Something like that is how it works, I think. What I've done is offer a theory. It could be ignored and my suggestion would be no better than the "hero" suggestion noted above.

Neil: Part of what I am trying to do in my book is create a kind of unification theory of free will, something that would bring traditional theorists (Lehrer, van Inwagen) and source theorists (Fischer, Pereboom) together. As I said, there are two ways this might work, depending on if you think free will is a fundamental power or a collection of powers. Some of what you suggest show the pitfalls of going the former route. I'm split but if I was forced to make a choice I'd go the latter route.

I disagree, though, that if (say) free will is just the power to act that that means that most of the interesting philosophical questions go away. One way in which this could be spelled out is in terms of agent causation and there is no consensus about whether agent causation is compatibilist or incompatibilist. Part of the split above is connected to this issue: is the power to act JUST the power to perform an act (which dogs, etc. have as well) or is it more robust (like agent causation)? When I think of it as mere action I tend to think free will is really a collection of powers.

I agree that much of the work on free will will come down to a set of empirical issues but that is a good thing! The same would be true on any naturalistic theory of free will (Balaguer, for instance). But philosophers would only be out of work if everyone accepted the theory, which is unlikely. Also, much of the work of free will theorists is really the metaphysics of moral responsibility, and that is not merely a set of empirical issues. I don't think I'll be putting philosophers out of work!

[Tamler Sommers]

Alan,

Could you say a little more about your question: "Do we need to solve the hard problem to move forward in establishing criteria for what we owe to each other (thinly veiled reference)?"

My suggestion, I think, is that the answer is no. Which is not in any way to say that Watson, Fischer, Wolf, and Smilansky have not made important contributions. Obviously they have. Rather, the suggestion is that their important contributions are not essentially tied to the project of defining or analyzing the term "free will." (I would not say this, however, about the term "moral responsibility") Do you agree with that?

Joe, I'm with you on your opposition to the view that the folk view doesn't necessarily determine meaning. But I'm genuinely curious about the benefits of revising the meaning of "free will" and then having the folk follow suit. What do we gain by analyzing the term free will as "up to us"ness that wouldn't already gain from just analyzing what it means for an act to be up to us and examining the implications of this analysis as it relates to moral responsibility?

[V. Alan White]

Tamler--

I agree completely. That was partly my point.

In support of Joe, may I offer the example of our ongoing refined definition of death. In 1968 a Harvard ad hoc committee authored a revolutionary document that strongly urged redefining death by a whole-brain death criterion. Nothing objectively about mortality had changed since the appearance of humans--we died, and yet how we know that we die did. First we used a pulmonary definition, then a cardio-pulmonary one, and then focused on the brain. Our informed knowledge about death changed--death didn't. What we came to know about ourselves as being irreversibly "gone" finally allowed us to declare people with beating hearts dead. We revised our concept in light of what we came to know about the world. The revision was fundamentally philosophical.

As I have said here before, I use a similar example about dinosaurs in my FW class; we use to think of them as reptiles based on some empirical resemblances. Further evidence changed that to conceiving them as dinopteros--literally terrible birds. But we retain the old term though no longer literally mean it. Seems like we could do that for "free will" as well as "dinosaur".

People do something they call "choosing of one's own free will". That phraseology ain't gonna go away. But as Joe--and in his own way Neil--argue--what we mean by it can change, but only by means of evidence, not ad populum fallacy. The thorny thing is agreeing on what matters as evidence, and in some ways the incompatibilism/compatibilism debate seems actually to get in the way of assessing what counts as evidence here. In some ways I see the move to responsibility-emphasis accounts of free will issues as a practical one that just goes around the incompatibilist/compatibilist debate.

[Robert Allen]

Tamler,

Back in the day, I endorsed the idea that we could dispense with the medieval notion of free will yet make sense of responsibility. As you know, I was quite the Compatibilist. Lately, though, I have had misgivings; in fact, I've done a full-blown Wittgenstein-like about face. If individuals really don't make free choices, a la Augustine/Anselm, then they are in no sense responsible for their ensuing actions. How could they be? If I alone do not cause my bad choices, if their source lies elsewhere, then I would seem to have a good excuse for my wrongdoing. If it's all part of a process set in motion by someone/something else, then I'm simply not blameworthy. At best you might say I'm 'caught up in' bad behavior. But to truly hold ME responsible: doesn't that mean that you believe that I chose wrongdoing when it was in my power to avoid so choosing? As long as I believe that my will is somehow hamstrung, won't I reject as unfair any judgment to the effect that I am responsible for my misbehavior? Somewhere Wittgenstein says that he believed that he would be judged by God "out of his own mouth." I take this statement to mean that he thought the Almighty would be relying on his own understanding that he could have done better, made better choices. Professor Perry in his recent Dewey Lecture encourages us to dispense with Augustine's notion of free will, as it is a religious construct. Yet, he is not a skeptic when it comes to responsibility. For my part, if I ever became convinced that that notion didn't apply to reality, I would join forces with you and become a Hard Determinist, if not a Red Sox fan.

[Tom Clark]

Robert: "If I alone do not cause my bad choices, if their source lies elsewhere, then I would seem to have a good excuse for my wrongdoing. If it's all part of a process set in motion by someone/something else, then I'm simply not blameworthy."

Saying that there's a source for my wrongdoing outside myself makes it sound as if I don't also play a role, when in fact I'm just as real as the causes that formed me. Seeing that I'm not ultimately responsible in an Augustinian sense still leaves proximate responsibility intact - the contribution to behavior of the real agent that acts - which is all that's necessary to justify moral responsibility as a practical matter of guiding good behavior. The will might be determined but it isn't hamstrung or ineffective compared to other phenomena, it needs to be controlled. I don't see why you'd complain about MR judgments as unfair once you see them as functionally necessary for having the sort of society I assume you want. Go Sox!

[Robert Allen]

Yes, Tom; I would be partially responsible for my choices under the envisioned circumstances. I have endorsed that concept before and sometimes it still resonates with me. I guess my point is that that's as good as it gets with Compatibilism and lately I've been wanting more: viz., judgments of responsibility based on avoidable choices, not just expedience. (Plus I'm Roman Catholic and I've decided to get orthodox.) So I have turned to the medievals and not been disappointed. I mean the stuff is philosophically rich, especially if you are into good old-fashioned tell Hume to get lost cogitation. More importantly, their Agent Causalist view of free will seems true; at least nothing I have read implies otherwise. My current adversary John Perry says things like it is at odds with “what we know about how the world works.” But isn’t that the whole question here: Do we make our choices in accord with natural laws? So, empirical considerations simply don’t philosophically move me. (Plus, the current trend is away from Physicalism.) I want someone to prove to me that Agent Causalism is incoherent, not just unscientific. Thanks for responding, though, and I trust that we can agree on one thing- 35 days until Opening Day!

[Tamler Sommers]

Alan, I found this remark really interesting:

"But as Joe--and in his own way Neil--argue--what we mean by it can change, but only by means of evidence, not ad populum fallacy. The thorny thing is agreeing on what matters as evidence, and in some ways the incompatibilism/compatibilism debate seems actually to get in the way of assessing what counts as evidence here."

What counts as evidence in your mind?

Robert,

That is quite an about-face! Meanwhile I've come towards the middle the other way... I've pulled back from my earlier hard determinism to a solid "I'm not sure." The key question, as you and Tom note, is whether it's fair to hold people responsible for actions caused by factors that trace back beyond the agent's control. My intuitions on that shift back and forth, depending on whether we're speaking abstractly, as a matter of theory, or in practical real-life situations.

[Mark Young]

I have questions.

First, is fairness compatible with determinism?

If not, why not?

But if so, would it be fair for the little red hen to keep her bread all to herself, or would fairness require her to give equal shares to all the animals?

If it would be fair for her to keep the bread all to herself, wouldn't that be because she /is/ responsible for making the bread /all by herself/?

And if you think that fairness in a deterministic world would require her to share the bread with all the other animals, then (in heaven's name) why?

[Robert Allen]

Mark,

Even if she is responsible for making the bread all by her lonesome, that certainly doesn't cancel her obligation to help those less fortunate. That moral obligation exists regardless of what the natural laws in her world look like. I find these questions to be entirely separate. Perhaps what you mean is that if she is born unfair and lives in a deterministic world and never encounters anyone/anything that manages to alter her disposition, then she cannot be blamed for her unfairness. Still, we might hold her to egalitarian standards so as to be that change agent in her life.

[V. Alan White]

Tamler--

Thanks for asking. "Acting of one's own free will" is still appropriate language for assessing matters of responsibility, at least in most commonplace instances. But consider legal venues. FW-type issues have been statutorily dismissed (1984) at the Federal level by knee-jerk congressional reactions to the John Hinckley case (1982)(the second component of the Model Code, as used in the Hinckley case, involved a "substantial capacity" to conform one's conduct to the law (that's Wolf's asymmetrical ability to choose the good BTW), and is now not a legal criterion in that jurisdiction; UT, MT, ID, and KS have also rejected any independent defense on the basis of absence of mens rea--the full concern of the Model Code--which (again) includes reference to FW as well as one of rational intent. One can interpret this two ways. One is that these four states and the Feds have fled from FW altogether--if one embraces an incompatibilist/libertarian of FW (FWinc). The other is that they have absorbed responsibility claims within the confines of a classic Hobbes/Humean/Hobart compatibilist definition of FW (FWc)--one that associates freedom with freedom of action (hypothetical freedom to do otherwise given different decisions; FWinc is concerned with whether one could rationally choose to act; this FWc I mention is concerned with whether one could have done the act--which is a matter of physical freedom fact (did the accused commit the act (and could have hypothetically done otherwise)?).

So legally, the question of whether we acted of our own FWx (where x=inc/c) is more up in the air than ever.

Now these facts show that practical matters of responsibility have driven our grasp of any related concepts of FWx in terms of legal responsibility, at least with respect to what's on the books.

I would note however that these movements in changing law were not especially rational and reflective--they were mainly political and reactive.

But--if the fact-claimed values operative in the moral concepts that drove these changes are primary, then any highfalutin claims from the compatibilism/incompatibilism debate dissolve into irrelevance. Viz.--if having the right guy trumps why the guy did it--then if the guy had FWinc is irrelevant and maybe incoherent.

Values must connect to facts to be relevant to actual moral claims, even though there is no general logical connection between facts and values. I can't see how the compatibilism/incompatibilism debate on its own merits can be decisive here with respect to responsibility without assuming such relevance of a definition with FWc/FWinc. And that would be circular.

So perhaps we should concentrate on what responsibility means, and work back to FWx from there. The alternative--seems to me--is to prefer the a priori to the actual world. (Is this committing to pragmatism over the conceptual? Perhaps.)

Thanks for making me think.

[Tom Clark]

Robert,

"I want someone to prove to me that Agent Causalism is incoherent, not just unscientific."

Having set aside any empirical constraints on the concept of agency (they don't philosophically move you), you're only constrained by what's logically possible. It's always seemed to me that strong agent causation involves something logically *impossible*, namely being causa sui. But if in deciding to go orthodox you’ve taken up belief in God (a being without any causal antecedents), then believing in what some have called the "little god" of libertarian free will isn't much of a leap. Belief in such things isn't a matter of public evidence (since you've cut loose from empiricism) but simply a matter of armchair rationalism as practiced by the medievals and their modern day fans like yourself.

You say “lately I’ve been wanting more,” recognizing that this is a motivated investigation on your part. Since you say the whole question is "Do we make our choices in accord with natural laws?" presumably a good answer would involve reducing the biasing influence of such motivations as far as possible. So an antecedent question is whether armchair reason alone is a sufficient check against projecting one’s desires onto the world when answering the big questions. I'm not convinced that it is, http://www.naturalism.org/projecting_god.htm

[Mark Young]

Robert,

My concern is with the claim that it might not be "fair to hold people responsible for actions caused by factors that trace back beyond the agent's control". It is the appeal to fairness that I find problematic. The little red hen's action, whether morally admirable or morally reprehensible, is fair. She withholds bread from those who refused to help her in her year-long quest to make the bread. She might plausibly be called "cruel" or "petty" (maybe), but I see no plausible basis for calling her "unfair".

Now if she is, as you and I both say, responsible for making the bread all by herself, then the question that comes to my mind is In what way could it possibly be unfair to hold her responsible for making the bread? Surely it cannot be unfair to hold someone responsible for something that they actually are responsible for. (Unless, I suppose, it's an epistemic problem, as in "He has no way of knowing that she is responsible for that, and so it is unfair of him to hold her responsible.")

More importantly, if it is fair for her to withhold bread in the deterministic world (as I hold it to be), then why is it fair? The only reason I can see is that she did make the bread all by herself. If the others had helped at all, it would be unfair (and so morally reprehensible) of her to hold back bread from those who did help (absent some other kind of payment for that help). Also, it is not simply the fact that the laws of the universe have brought the bread into her possession that makes it fair for her to withhold it from the others: if that were so, then the dog could simply take the bread and it would then be fair for him to withhold it from the little red hen. No, the fairness arises because she, and she alone, is responsible for making the bread.

Of course in the deterministic world the little red hen's actions trace back to factors beyond her control. But how does that make it unfair for her to keep the bread for herself? I don't see how it can, and so I don't see how we can avoid the conclusion that she is (even in her deterministic world) responsible for making the bread all by herself. And so further I don't see how it can be unfair to hold her responsible for making the bread all by herself.

[Robert Allen]

Tom,

As anyone who knows me will tell you, I love my armchair. Given to me by a friend after its former occupant took ill and now situated in a corner of my basement sanctuary next to a shelf full of anti-empiricist literature, chess manuals, military histories, sports biographies, and Martin Gardner essays to keep me tethered to reality, it is also perfect for watching MLB/NFL and ranting against Wisconsin's despicable governor. As to the charge of wishful thinking, I freely confess that "I believe to understand," though I think that that attitude is different than "projecting one's desires onto reality." But I will check your website to make sure. Regarding creation ex nihilo, I am working on a paper solving the reasons problem for AC by applying Aristotle's notion of a Material Cause: choices are not created out of nothing but one's beliefs and desires, a la the carpenter's wood. I have checked with the other freely flickering Clark(e), Randy, who has informed me that no one else has tried this maneuver.

[Tom Clark]

Robert, make sure you're well warmed up before trying it, good luck!