Flickers of Freedom

Making Determinism Incompatible with Too Much

Most incompatibilists want to argue that the truth of determinism would rule out free will and certain types of moral responsibility but that it would not thereby rule out too much.  For instance, hard incompatibilists typically want to say that, while determinism would rule out free will of the sort required to truly deserve moral credit and retribution for one’s acts, it would not undermine ‘compatibilist capacities,’ make our efforts (or lives) meaningless, delegitimize analogues of reactive attitudes, or undermine our human relationships.  Other incompatibilists, including most libertarians, seem to want to avoid saying that determinism would rule out too much, because for all we know, determinism could be true.  It would be one thing for a team of physicists at MIT to discover that determinism is true and hence we lack free will and genuine moral responsibility; it would be another for the physicists, by discovering determinism is true, to show, for instance, that we needn’t bother trying to avoid undesirable outcomes, that our decisions make no difference to what happens, that we can take no pride in anything we do, that intentional action is impossible, and/or that our love lives have been a sham.  So, most incompatibilists seems to aim to show that determinism is incompatible with free will in such a way that does not thereby entail that it is incompatible with too many other capacities, possibilities, and other features of human life.  [Right?] 

Conversely, compatibilists may gain an advantage if they can show that incompatibilist arguments risk proving too much—if they show that such arguments use principles or premises that suggest that determinism would have consequences it shouldn’t seem to have (e.g., that it would give those damn MIT physicists too much power).  Call this the “proves-to-much strategy.”

Here, I will offer the first of two posts developing a proves-too-much strategy against the two strongest arguments for incompatibilism (my ideas are not fully thought out—hence the blog post—but hopefully both can give us something to blog about—it’s been way too quiet here!).  This one will deal with the Consequence Argument (CA).  (The next post, should it exist, will suggest that Manipulation Arguments prove too much because, turning them on their head, they show that we should consider agents in deterministic worlds in principle no different than an ‘internally identical’ systematically manipulated agent, but we would treat such manipulated agents as lacking a lot more than people like Pereboom want determined agents to lack.)

The collective noun for libertarians

'Lam' according to the inimitable Alan White ('inimitable' is an overused word: it's use should be restricted to describing Alan until further notice to allow it to regain its power). The remark appears in Alan's review of Tim Mawson's new book, Free Will: A Guide for the Perplexed (my own review of the book is here). Libertarians come in lams, Alan thinks, because they are in full retreat in the face of the "steadily growing scientific literature that shows that human nature and action is overwhelmingly a function of biological mechanisms that only very arguably could be influenced by anything like quantum processes -- and then only by sheer chance." I must say my reading of the prospects for libertarianism is quite different from Alan's. Mark Baluguer Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem argues convincingly that nothing in contemporary neuroscience is incompatible with libertarianism. I do see a possible threat in contemporary cognitive science to free will, but the threat is to any kind of free will, not libertarianism: the threat is that agency will decompose into so many relatively independent, and sufficiently stupid, mechanisms that it will become implausible to think of human beings as sufficiently unified loci of agency to hold them responsible for what they do (I do think extant versions of libertarianism are flawed, but my arguments are conceptual rather than based on the science).

So I'm not sure that we should follow Alan's suggestion and adopt 'lam' as the collective noun for libertarians.  Better suggestions? And for compatibilists? 

Your best friend calls you and tells you he/she's really sick? How do you show you care?

I'm thinking about writing a paper that might involve some discussion of what it is for something to be "up to" someone. Can you point me to attempted analyses or explications of this notion?

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X-Phi on Free Will Needs a Makeover

 The approach that experimental philosophers take to the free will problem relies on two claims, both true:

1. Compatibilist and incompatibilist philosophers defend their theories by appealing to the intuitions of their audience.
2. So, evidence about the nature and prevalence of these intuitions can have significant substantive implications about the plausibility of these theories.  

In order to draw out these implications, however, the studies have to probe for the correct intuitions—namely, the ones that philosophers appeal to in their theories.   Unfortunately, most studies on free will are not designed to investigate those intuitions.  And this raises serious doubts about the philosophical conclusions that they wish to draw from the results. 

So what are the intuitions that X-phil studies are designed to investigate?  Well, with a few exceptions, they probe for intuitions about the compatibility question itself, in other words, on the conclusions of compatibilist and incompatibilist arguments.    The first Nahmias et al studies offered various ways of describing determinism and then asked respondents if people could be free/MR in such a world.  Nichols and Knobe did the same: they describe two universes, deterministic and indeterministic, then asked abstract, concrete, and emotionally charged questions about whether agents (or a particular agent) could be MR in the deterministic universe.   Virtually all subsequent studies have followed suit—in large part perhaps because they wish to develop or respond to earlier work in the literature.  When subjects give, say, compatibilist answers, the philosophers often conclude that incompatibilism is not so intuitive after all (at least under certain conditions).   But in order to draw that conclusion, the intuitions that incompatibilists rely upon would have to be the ones investigated in these studies.  And they’re not.      

In one sense, this should be obvious.  Would this be a good argument for incompatibilism?

1. Intuitively, free will and MR is incompatible with determinism
2. Therefore, free will and MR is incompatible with determinism.

Of course not.  Incompatibilists do not simply assert that the truth of their conclusion.  They develop (often ingenious) ways of revealing the threat of determinism to free will and MR.  In doing so, they certainly appeal to intuitions, but to intuitions about cases and narrower principles (the principle of alternate possibilities or the ‘transfer of non-responsibility principle’ or Rule B etc.), never on the compatibility question itself.

 Interestingly, in their first 2006 article, Nahmias et al anticipate an objection along these lines.  (And to my knowledge, no one has addressed this issue since.)  But their response doesn’t work.  After conceding that their surveys do not probe for the intuitions that are supposed to underwrite key premises in van Inwagen’s consequence argument, they write:

However our results do offer some indirect evidence against the intuitive plausibility of the Consequence argument. Our scenarios present conditions in the past that, along with the laws of nature, are sufficient conditions for the agent’s action. So, the fact that most participants judged that the agent in the scenarios is free and responsible seems to suggest either (a) that they have the intuition that the Transfer principle does not apply to free choices, or (b) that—regardless of the soundness of the Consequence argument—the concept of choice the argument invokes to reach the conclusion that “we have no choice about any truth about the future,” does not accord with the concept ordinary people consider relevant to free will and moral responsibility

This reply appears to assume that philosophically unsophisticated subjects should have somehow internalized or implicitly grasped the consequence argument before ever hearing it!  Van Inwagen has received credit for reviving incompatibilism in the past century in large part because he found a non-obvious way of showing the threat of determinism to free will.  Again, the whole point of developing an incompatibilist argument (rather than just asserting the conclusion) is to draw out implications of determinism that might otherwise go unnoticed.   

None of this is to say that the work in the field so far has no value.  I think the results are fascinating.  Learning about the effects of factors like psychological distance, emotional salience, personal temperament on our free will judgments is hugely important.  But right now, a lot of the insight and ingenuity that experimental philosophers are justly famous for is focused on the wrong questions.  My biggest worry is that the current probes are becoming entrenched in the literature and will be hard to get away from just by virtue of how prevalent they are.  At a recent conference in New Orleans, I raised this kind of objection (inarticulately, it was New Orleans) to Adam Feltz, and he replied that his probes were “industry standard.”   And he’s right.  It’s time to change that standard, developing  new types of probes that target intuitions about the premises of philosophical arguments rather than the conclusions. 

Thoughts?

[Note: For a somewhat more detailed defense of the ideas in this post, check out my article in Philosophy Compass (http://www.experimentalphilosophy.org/papers/Sommers.pdf)  especially section 4. ]  

Perplexed? Maybe you need a new guide!

The second edition of the Oxford Handbook of Free Will is out. Thanks to Bob Kane for putting it together.

Elements of Moral Cognition

John Mikhail's long-awaited book Elements of Moral Cognition is finally available.  The Rawlsian/Chomskyean line of reasoning explored by Mikhail in his previous research on moral grammar is fully fleshed out in this book, so I expect it to have an immediate and lasting impact on the growing field of moral psychology.  

Abstract:

Is the science of moral cognition usefully modeled on aspects of Universal Grammar? Are human beings born with an innate “moral grammar” that causes them to analyze human action in terms of its moral structure, with just as little awareness as they analyze human speech in terms of its grammatical structure? Questions like these have been at the forefront of moral psychology ever since John Mikhail revived them in his infl uential work on the linguistic analogy and its implications for jurisprudence and moral theory. In this seminal book, Mikhail offers a careful and sustained analysis of the moral grammar hypothesis, showing how some of John Rawls’ original ideas about the linguistic analogy, together with famous thought experiments like the trolley problem, can be used to improve our understanding of moral and legal judgment. The book will be of interest to philosophers, cognitive scientists, legal scholars, and other researchers in the interdisciplinary fi eld of moral psychology

Basic Desert

Call for papers for a special issue of Philosophical Exploration on Basic Desert:

http://www.maureensie.info/Website_Maureen/BasicDesert.html