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? 

Comments

[Constantine Sandis]

How about a swerve of libertarians and a bundle of compatibilists?

[Tom Clark]

"...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."

However stupid and independent the mechanisms of which we're composed, seems to me the resultant higher-level patterns of personality, proclivity and action are sufficiently robust such that we're perfectly able, indeed forced, to hold each other responsible as unified loci of agency as a practical matter of social control. It's ordinarily impractical and unnecessary to deal with each other at the sub-personal level, although we're getting better at fixing things at that level, http://www.naturalism.org/medicalization.htm#construction But maybe you have in mind a notion of responsibility not linked to social control but rather to desert.

[Mark Young]

[[ [T]he 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.... ]]

We don't know now that human agency so decomposes, but suppose that we someday do. It seems to me that you'd say our present way of treating humans as responsible agents is (or was) a "plausible mistake" -- an error that it is reasonable to make today because we don't (yet) have the knowledge we need to see that it is a mistake.

But wouldn't it be more plausible to say that the mistake is in the notion that responsibility can't be manifested in a being composed of relatively independent and stupid mechanisms? What evidence do we have that that's so? On the opposing side we have the fact that there is a locus of agency for each human being -- each of us has a body that holds all these mechanisms together in one place. However much independence those mechanisms have, it is merely theoretical.

The hypothesis that there needs to be some unifying mechanism of agency is a sort of homuncular theory. Even if we could find a mechanism that penetrated and controlled the other mechanisms of the human mind, it would itself be subject to questions of how it works -- breaking it down into smaller, stupider and more relatively independent parts. I say it's better to drop that conjecture at the start.

PS: I like "swerve" and "bundle".

[V. Alan White]

Thanks for the post Neil--I think! I just read your excellent review and I agree with most all of it. As you can see, my main problem is that I think it's tough to give an even-handed introduction to positions on a complex issue like FW while very vigorously defending a particular position. (And as I say in the review, this may be more due to a miscalculation on the part of the publishers about what they want out of the Perplexed series.) But I'll stand by my "lam" assessment. Whereas compatibilists generally have become very interested in large-scale maps of the relation of FW to moral responsibility that cover a lot of ground in our moral lives, it seems to me that libertarians in general have retreated to fewer and more focused pin-points of FW topography in SFAs, specific instances of conflict, Buridan's ass situations and the like. It's that expansiveness of compatibilist vision against a narrower focus of libertarianism that I want to capture in "lam". And I think one main motivator for this kind of strategy is reaction to neuroscience and behavioral analysis in terms of mechanism. But of course libertarians probably won't see it that way.

And if I haven't been clear enough, people like Kane, PvI, Clarke, O'Connor, Mawson, and so on have my deepest respect for the sterling quality of their work. Genius and ingenuity can be respected even through deeply entrenched disagreement.

A collective term for the compatibilists? How about a "confidence"?

I'm not doing myself any favors here am I?

And of course re-reading my review for the umpteenth time I found at least one small grammatical infelicity that I missed. . .

Thanks again for the post.

[neil]

Tom, right: I mean to link responsibility to desert. Whether we have to retain moral responsibility in practice is an empirical question. Like all big social questions, it is hard to gather the relevant data, but I think a case can be made for saying that societies would be better off without a practice of holding people morally responsible. I address the topic briefly in my book.
Mark: on reflection I didn't put the point very well. Right now, we do know that human agency is implemented by numerous extremely dumb dissociable mechanisms. There is nothing else for it to be implemented by. The question is whether the higher-level pattern that emerges preserves sufficiently many features of unified, reasons-responsive, agency to make the ascription of moral responsibility plausible.
Alan: of course there is one scientific development that has made the climate more libertarian friendly: the virtual unanimity of physicists regarding indeterminism. Indeterminism might, as you suggest, entail chance, but chance does not entail luck. I analyse luck as a function of chance, lack of control and significance and show that a libertarianism that avoids luck by ensuring that chance is not sufficiently significant is a coherent possibility. It won't give you alternative possibilities but it might give you sourcehood.
How about a waver of semi-compatibilists?

[Guy Fulton]

The Calvin and Hobbes way of naming free will positions:

Calvinballers for libertarians - Because they play a game where the rules come out of nowhere;

Susies for compatibilists - Because they like to play games where the rules make sense, games which are constantly messed up by calvinballers;

And Hobbeses for semi-compatibilists - Who are content to play both games.

[V. Alan White]

Neil--

"I. . .show that a libertarianism that avoids luck by ensuring that chance is not sufficiently significant is a coherent possibility."

Forgive me for asking but please tell me more about that. Specifically I have been in an extended discussion with another Flickerer about the possibility of "metaluck": that the metaphysical contingencies of a particular world-bound process might have further implications for higher-level interpretations of that process. So, for example, if an indeterministic sequence of events happens to match one describable as deterministic by some cross-world deductive-nomological PvI-like scheme, is it only metalucky deterministic? That seems logically possible to me. Which, it would seem, reinstates luck at the higher level of assessment of what seems true in a given world, at least at the level of comparing possible worlds.

Does that make sense? Of course I fear the prospect of concatenated lucks as turtles all the way down.

[Neil]

Alan, the argument is long and a little complicated. But briefly... I think it might be better to focus on chanciness to see how libertarianism can avoid luck. Chanciness is necessary, though not sufficient, for luck. An event is chancy iff it occurs in the actual world, but fails to occur in sufficient proportion of nearby possible worlds (what proportion is a function of the significance of the event to the agent).

An event can therefore be undetermined without being chancy, and therefore without being lucky. A libertarian can insist that it is a necessary condition of an act's being free that it be undetermined, but need not require that the act be chancy; it might be that the agent phi-s in the actual world and almost all nearby worlds without the action's being determined.

[tnadelhoffer]

My suggestions:

A congregation (or perhaps cabal) of libertarians

A clattering of compatibilists

A seige of skeptics

*These last two came from this helpful list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_collective_nouns_for_birds

[V. Alan White]

Thanks Neil--that's a really helpful analysis. (I need to read your book obviously.) It seems overall that the degree of chanciness entails whether luck is involved on this account of indeterministic choice. Is there any way a libertarian could control that? In other words, how does the indeterministic actual choice fix or guarantee enough close-world counterfactual situations that so little chance is involved that it's negligible? It seems to me that without such an account we'd still have worries. I clearly see the sense of what you're saying from the "outside" as it were, but I want the "inside" control sense of all this as well.

[Neil]

Alan, libertarians often find themselves in the position of having to hope that the causal structure of the universe is thus and so (indeterministic in the right places and to the right degree). My suggestion is that they should hope that indeterminacy is such that agents act with direct freedom under conditions in which their acts are near-determined.

[Attlee]

If chanciness is a necessary, but not sufficient condition for luck, how is that the libertarian can avoid luck without providing a mechanism by which to distinguish undetermined acts from pure chanciness? is this not the critical question here? indeed, the question upon which all libertarians and incompatibilists inevitably founder?