Origination and Moral Responsibility

Suppose there are two people: A & B. They are mean to each other. A treats B with a lack of respect which causes B to yell at A which causes A to treat B with a lack of respect, etc. It isn't clear when this began, whether it began with A's mistreatment or B's yelling.

Is the answer to the question "Who started it?" important or revealing, when it comes to issues of moral responsibility? If both of them are sustaining it, doesn't that make them both equally morally responsible (all other things being equal)? Or does it matter who started it?

Comments

[Kip]

Those concerned about origination, like Pereboom and Strawson, would (I think) trace the relevant factors *past* the question of "which of these two started the argument."

Both A and B are going to have some personality/values/desires/disposition that lends them keep fighting. People with a different personality-endowment (so to speak) might have been provoked without reacting at all... maybe such a person has a docile personality.

What separates these docile people, who are provoked and don't fight, from A and B here who continue to fight? Their personality, their values, desires, etc. What concerns Pereboom and Strawson, etc., is the possibility that these things are a matter of luck. One person inherits a fighting personality, another person inherits a docile personality - but neither had any control over this personality formation (not in the beginning), and they are in this sense hapless victims of the forces that created them.

Now, there are serious objections to this view. One could say that it isn't a matter of luck what your personality is. Similarly, one could say that nobody inherits a personality because, before the personality exists, the person also doesn't exist. I think these sorts of arguments have a lot of force. Yet it is not clear how far they go: clearly we change our personalities/values/desires over time, and so our identity is not strictly coextensive with them.

[Joe Campbell]

Of course Strawson and Pereboom want to go back further but what is the motivation? Why go back to points in time prior to the start of the argument if who started the argument does not matter to the issue of blameworthiness? They both seem equally blameworthy, regardless of who started it.

[Kip]

Now we're talking about who has the burden of proof. You're saying "why go back farther than who started the argument?" I could reply: "why *not* go back farther than who started the argument?"

If you read your comment carefully, rou rely on the tacit premise:

P: if who started the argument does not matter to the issue of blameworthiness -> then don't look at points in time prior to the start of the argument

This P seems entirely unmotivated to me. And so I'm not sure why the burden has shifted to me to explain why we shouldn't go past the beginning of the argument.

Here's a more constructive answer: Pereboom and Strawson go past the start of the argument because, given their concern about constitutive luck, this is where the luck-relevant events happen. Nothing about the start of the argument, in your case, changes the fact that the luck-relevant events happen well before the start of the argument. So the start of the argument is simply irrelevant to their concerns.

Here's another way to think about it: Pereboom and Strawson provide respective arguments to motivate their views, the Basic Argument and 4 Case Argument. You can apply both of these arguments to your A-and-B-fighting scenario. Both arguments would work essentially the same way, and both arguments would end up tracing back to factors before the start of the argument. In other words, nothing about your A-and-B-fighting example undermines the way that these arguments are intended to work (if they do).

Finally, here's an analogy:

At time T0: Evil Genius kidnaps two drivers A and B, puts them in a car, cuts their brakes, and tells them to race so that the loser will die in a fiery crash and the winner will live

Halfway through the race at time T1: A and B keep accelerating past each other. At one point A overcomes B, and then B accelerates more and overcomes A. Etc. It is not clear who started this chicken and the egg scenario. Every time that A overcomes B, he must go faster, which increases the danger of crashing, hitting innocent people, and killing the losing B - and vice versa is true when B overcomes A.

By this analogy, you are asking who is morally responsible. You are saying that they are both equally morally responsible, and that, at time T1, it doesn't matter who started the chicken-and-egg battle.

In response, Pereboom and Strawson are saying: look at time T0. Morally relevant things happened there. And in reply, you say that those T0 events are irrelevant, and should be ignored. But that doesn't seem right.

[Joe Campbell]

Kip,

Here is my argument against your the conclusion of your comments:

1/ Arguments by Strawson and Pereboom presume that (A) origination is necessary for moral responsibility.

2/ The A&B example runs counter to (A), for it shows that origination does not matter.

3/ Therefore, the Strawson and Pereboom arguments are flawed.

Here is my argument for (2):

2-1/ It doesn't matter who started the fight.

2-2/ If (causal) origination were necessary for moral responsibility, then it would matter who started the fight.

2/ Therefore, (causal) origination is not necessary for moral responsibility.

This is just a better argument than the ones by Strawson and Pereboom.

[Kip]

Two responses.

1. Your reply, in a nutshell, is that reasonable people (i.e. you) don't feel the intuitive force of the Basic Argument or 4 Case Argument. That's more of ad hoc statement than a philosophical argument. At best, we would want an error theory for where Pereboom and Strawson went wrong.

(Note also that Pereboom and Strawson don't "presume that origination is necessary" so much as they provide detailed arguments leading to the implication that origination is necessary. They never ask you to make that ad hoc assumption, and readers can reach the implication without needing to stipulate to it beforehand.)

2. You assume 2-2 without argument. I challenged this in my previous comment, but I still don't see any reason to believe that 2-2 is true. Suppose, for example, that the origination-requirement makes moral responsibility practically impossible. This is basically what Strawson and Pereboom do. In that case, it still doesn't matter who started the fight - there's no responsibility either way. So skeptics like myself have no reason to agree with 2-2. I am not sure why you've stated it like an uncontroversial assumption.

[Neil Levy]

My response, which got lost thanks to my ipad, was much more banal than the exchange that Joe and Kip are having. My answer: it depends. Joe disrespects me. I respond by yelling. Either it is the case that my response is proportionate to the disrespect or it is not (where it is proportionate if a response of at least that strong is justified given the disrespect). If it is disproportionate, then were Joe to respond in turn, I bear some of the responsibility for the escalating conflict. If it is proportionate, then I do not bear any responsibility for the conflict.

Not entirely unrelatedly: strategies which sometimes forgive defection outperform strict tit for tat on iterated prisoner's dilemmas.

[tomkow]

There is a correlate to your worry that comes up when one thinks about self defense.

A pushes B and B pushes back. We might want to say that A did wrong and B is only exercising his right to self defense. But now B is doing the pushing so why isn't it now okay for A to push back &c.

You can find my proposed solution to that problem here
http://tomkow.typepad.com/tomkowcom/2011/03/self-defense.html
Perhaps you will find it useful.

[Joe Campbell]

Thanks tomkow!

I agree with you, Neil. But then sometimes -- in at least some judgments of blameworthiness -- (causal) origination does not matter. (Obviously it is more complicated than this. CA Campbell and Kane and others talk about a limited number of grounding free actions. But this gets us back to the question we end up with.)

Kip: I intended to delete the very last sentence of my last post. It is contentious and it makes it seem as if I am directly comparing their arguments with my argument, and I'm not doing that.

Further, I don't want to give the impression that the basic argument and the four-case argument aren't compelling arguments. They are very compelling, which is why I still think about them. It is a formidable challenge to come up with a response. I have complicated responses to each but they are not blog-worthy.

I'm trying to side-step the Strawson/Pereboom arguments, trying to focus on whether (causal) orgination always matters. Then there is the question of when it does matter -- as Neil shows it might. Is it orgination or something less?

The point is that the example suggests that SOMETIMES (causal) orgination doesn't matter to blameworthiness. Why think it is essential to moral responsibility?

You say Strawson and Pereboom show that origination is necessary. Fine. What is that argument? Let's talk about that.

[Bruce Waller]

A very interesting and edifying discussion, with interesting side comments (Neil Levy's insightful point concerning legitimate resentment suggests a way that those who deny moral responsibility altogether might appropriately respond with resentment to disrespectful behavior -- without the claim that the disrespectful person deserves to be harmed in response; but that is a topic for another setting). On the question of origination, is the case posed by Campbell one in which we are operating WITHIN the assumptions of the moral responsibility system? That is, within that system, we might well say -- if the response to the disrespectful behavior is intemperate, and the controversy escalates to shouting -- that both are wrong, and both deserve blame, it doesn't matter who started it. But the sort of origination claims pushed by Pereboom and Galen Strawson are going much deeper and challenging the whole system of moral responsibility: when we consider origination, then the whole system seems unfair (this idea is presented with great verve and charm in Strawson's interview with Tamler Sommers, in Sommers' marvelous book of interviews, A VERY BAD WIZARD). So even if we blame both equally within the system, and there origination doesn't matter (and WITHIN the system of moral responsibility, considerations of origination are generally avoided -- that seems the point of the threshold-plateau arguments) it would not follow that origination is irrelevant when the system itself is being questioned.

[Kip]

Joe,

No worries - I know you were being cheeky.

I hate to beat a dead horse, but I still think that you've given us no reason to believe your 2-2. Without a reason, your argument doesn't seem (to me) to get off the ground.

I also gave you an analogy/counter-example earlier in this thread (about racing and an evil genius). I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

You write: "You say Strawson and Pereboom show that origination is necessary. Fine. What is that argument? Let's talk about that."

Well, I'm not sure I have much to contribute to the scholarly literature on these arguments. I would just say that I think that:

A. I think there are many ways to argue that fw/mr don't exist.

B. Arguments about constitutive luck are (to me) the most interesting and compelling of those arguments. (Arguments about the flaws in human rationality are far less interesting to me.)

C. Concerns about origination are essentially concerns about constitutive luck - i.e. that without origination we are victims of constitutive luck.

D. Both Strawson's and Pereboom's arguments are essentially based on constitutive luck. They do not assume that constitutive luck is real and mr-undermining. They simply walk you down a path that apparently gives rise to that intuition.

E. There is a paradox about constitutive luck: constitutive luck implies that you might have been different. But if you were different then, arguably, you wouldn't be you. There is a tension between changing someone a little, without killing their identity, and changing them a lot - which arguably kills them and creates a new different person. It's not clear where the line is drawn. Perhaps this is why Strawson has such strange views about personal identity.

[ledge]

As a teacher, my mother's response to "He started it!" was "Yes well you carried on with it".

[Joe Campbell]

Thanks, Bruce. This is a good argument. In important respects, I have to agree that Pereboom and Strawson get at something deeper than A and B. That's why I study the former arguments. But here’s an argument to the contrary. I think of it as a version of the paradigm case argument.

Information about appropriate judgments of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness comes from experience. We learn the concepts by comparing ordinary cases, cases much like the A&B example. If our concept of "moral responsibility" is based on ordinary cases, then how could we ever come to the judgment that moral responsibility requires causal origination? It isn't as if we experience (causal) origination. My question is, how could a need for (causal) origination arise? Ordinary cases seem to suggest that we are partial causes of our overt bodily behavior, not original causes.

I suspect you'd just say that the Pereboom/Strawson arguments provide the justification for origination being necessary for moral responsibility but I’m not sure about that.

[Joe Campbell]

Kip,

I just want to point out that you keep trying to direct us back to the Pereboom/Strawson arguments and I’m trying to take our attention away from those arguments. But maybe we should look at the arguments.

Consider my premise 2-2, which both you (Kip) and Bruce question, in light of the Pereboom/Strawson arguments.

2-2/ If (causal) origination were necessary for moral responsibility, then it would matter who started the fight.

Maybe this is better:

2-2’/ If origination were necessary for moral responsibility, then facts about the causal history of the fight (like who started it) would matter.

Both Pereboom and Strawson begin with arguments for incompatibilism and move to free will skepticism from that point. But clearly in the context of their arguments for incompatibilism, causal history matters. Yet it seems equally clear to me that in everyday judgments of blameworthiness (as illustrated in the A&B example), causal history of the type associated with determinism simply does not always matter.

My worry – and this is a genuine worry, I’m not just trying to be difficult – is that we are lured into thinking that the global, philosophical arguments tell us something important about the nature of moral responsibility but they don’t and they can’t. For our understanding of moral responsibility comes from the kinds of judgments we make in everyday cases. And with that various presuppositions are also made.

[Brent]

“My worry – and this is a genuine worry, I’m not just trying to be difficult – is that we are lured into thinking that the global, philosophical arguments tell us something important about the nature of moral responsibility but they don’t and they can’t.”

This statement was written by a philosopher? Or are you an everydaycasopher. You don’t figure out relativity by remembering how gravity felt at lunch. And you can’t use your feeling of resentment towards the guy who cut you off in traffic this morning to somehow legitimize that resentment. I’d argue the exact opposite. Citing the prevalence or reliability of everyday emotions or intuitions adds nothing of value to the conversation, because, after all, they are no more than the unjustified, though perhaps previously useful, evolutionary byproducts of an extremely social, only somewhat intelligent mammal. Off track a little.

Only this: I find “but they don’t and they can’t” rather unsupported.

[Bruce Waller]

Joe, The question of how we came up with the idea of moral responsibility is a fascinating one, and I like your paradigm argument. But supposing that something like that is how we first gain the concept of moral responsibility, wouldn't there still arise the question of whether there is ultimately any justified application? For example, however I gain the concept of ghosts, the question of whether any ghosts actually exist will involve a very different sort of examination.

[Kip]

Joe,

Feel free to stop me if I start to "hijack" this thread.

I understand that you want to avoid Pereboom/Strawson type arguments. But you also want to talk about, not just moral responsibility, but also origination. Talking about origination and moral responsibility, without talking about two of the most important arguments on that topic, just seems strange, if not unhelpful.

That said, here are two brief comments in reply.

1. The counter-argument to your 2-2, and 2-2', is to consider what happens if origination-concerns make moral responsibility globally impossible. In that case, origination is still relevant. But the specifics of the past don't matter, in any contrastive sense, because all pasts lead to no moral responsibility. That's what I was trying to say earlier when questioning 2-2. Consider also my analogy about racing and the evil genius.

2. I understand your concern about the importance of "everyday cases." The counter-concern is that everyday cases are based on common sense, and common sense is sometimes wrong. Consider Copernicus: he did not rely on the kinds of judgments that people make every day to derive his heliocentric theory. No, he used global, scientific, counter-intuitive arguments to try to show that people were making a widespread error. It seems to me that the kind of rhetorical move you're trying to make (avoiding global philosophical arguments in favor of everyday responsibility practices) would prevent someone from making a Copernicus-type discovery about errors in our responsibility judgments. It's possible that our everyday, familiar responsibility practices are in error and cannot be fully trusted - in the Middle Ages it was common practice to burn cats for entertainment.

One last thought: this entire discussion is centered around "moral responsibility." But it's not clear to me (and others) that this term has any definition settled enough to decide the questions we ask. It is a very curious term; I don't think I ever hear it in everyday cases. (There's something ironic about using everyday cases to decide the meaning of a term that nobody uses in everyday language.) I think that "moral responsibility" and "free will" might not be defined well enough to do the work that we want of them. Like Richard Double said.

[Joe Campbell]

Solid criticisms! Maybe this is a way to better make the point.

Suppose there is no free will. We are still going to need a term to distinguish those who have more control over those who have less control: adults over children, "normal" adults over psychopaths, etc. So there is an important sense in which the level of control is not distributed evenly throughout the world, as the Strawson/Pereboom arguments suggest. I prefer to use the term "free will" to designate the most basic power underlying this sense of control.

One could give "free will" higher standards. So high that not only humans lack it but NO POSSIBLE CREATURE could have the property of free will. Whether we use "free will" to designate the higher- concept property or the lower-concept property seems like a verbal dispute.

I'm sorry but if you tell me that there is a kind of free will that I lack but even the gods lack, I can't get worked up about that. I'm not going to lament that I can't be a round-square either. If you tell me there is a kind of freedom that my neighbor has yet I lack, that means something to me. But this presupposes that at least one of us has some more basic kind of freedom.

It isn't my fault that our practices reveal an underlying belief in free will that no skeptical argument can dislodge. Maybe our belief in free will is irrational, maybe we shouldn't believe it. I'm just suggesting that our standard practices -- the ones which fuel our understanding of moral responsibility -- suggest that in fact we do believe that we have free will.

[Brent]

Occasionally, I can't help myself feeling resentment towards rude people. Likewise, if someone killed a friend, I couldn't guarantee that I'd act rationally. But as I sit here, and at the end of the day, I fully recognize that my lapses to judgment were/would be entirely unjustified. So "our practices" don't necessarily, as you seem to argue, reveal an underlying belief in free will, as much as temporary weakness, which has nothing to do with me ultimately believing in FW/MR or not.

My being afraid of the dark does not imply that I believe in ghosts. I am simply dealing with a leftover evolutionary behavior.

[Nate]

Kip said: "One last thought: this entire discussion is centered around "moral responsibility." But it's not clear to me (and others) that this term has any definition settled enough to decide the questions we ask. It is a very curious term; I don't think I ever hear it in everyday cases. (There's something ironic about using everyday cases to decide the meaning of a term that nobody uses in everyday language.) I think that "moral responsibility" and "free will" might not be defined well enough to do the work that we want of them. Like Richard Double said."

I also doubt that "MR" has a unique, correct meaning in English or even in philosopher's English as a technical term. But take all of the proposed accounts of MR in the literature: Strawson-MR, Arpaly-MR, Scanlon-MR, etc. There might be further disambiguating that we need to do, but these notions are tolerably clear. Consider "S deserves harm on account of his Ying" or "S revealed himself to be evil on account of his Ying". These sentences, unlike "S is MR for Ying", are quite common in ordinary life. It isn't crazy (though not obviously correct either) to think that their meanings are determined (entirely) by their use in ordinary cases. So while I agree that we probably have to banish "MR" and replace with it "Philosopher-X-MR"(or stipulate definitions of "MR") in order to make sense, once we do this, the ordinary use argument on all of the new terminology (which is actually entrenched in ordinary discourse) is available to Joe.

I agree with Bruce that we don't settle whether the application of "X-MR" is justified by figuring out how we learned the concept or by identifying what the majority thinks its extension is. Another example: everyone in Salem (speaking Salem-English) believes there are witches walking around in black hats. ("See the black hat Bobby? That's a witch.") They also believe that all witches contact the devil. This latter belief might be meaning constitutive for 'witch': if a woman wore a black hat, but didn't communicate with the devil, everyone in Salem would deny that she was a witch. So everyone in Salem asserts sentences like "Patsy is a witch", but, given the facts (no devils), they should all believe that there are no witches. Perhaps "deserves to suffer" (or some other MR concept) is like "witch". If we can identify a false meaning constitutive belief (the analogue to "witches contact the devil"), e.g. when S is X-MR for Y S originated his Ying, then the skeptics presumably win. Even if we can't, we could still use the Pereboom sequence of cases argument to show that the notion is incoherent: ordinary use of "X-MR" has such and such extension as revealed by the fact that people don't hesitate to say "S is X-MR", but ordinary use of "X-MR", as revealed by the sequence argument, has no extension.

[Kip]

Joe:

Let me address you last point. You wrote:

"I'm sorry but if you tell me that there is a kind of free will that I lack but even the gods lack, I can't get worked up about that. I'm not going to lament that I can't be a round-square either. If you tell me there is a kind of freedom that my neighbor has yet I lack, that means something to me. But this presupposes that at least one of us has some more basic kind of freedom."

There are two replies.

1. Let's not conflate "does free will exist?" with "is free will valuable?" This is a point that Pereboom makes in the intro to his Living Without Free Will. It might be that A. fw doesn't exist, and B. fw also is not valuable.

2. But here is a reply that I think you will find more compelling. Consider this argument, not from Pereboom or Strawson, but Richard Dawkins:

http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_9.html

In the argument, Dawkins basically says that people are like complex machines. And so, whenever people misbehave, it is not because they are evil or responsible, it is because they are broken, or misprogrammed, or need debugging. According to Dawkins, an honest view of human nature would lead to a "medicalized" society where people are never evil, just sick.

Now it seems to me that:

A. if Dawkins is right and society should be medicalized, then that might be because we lack origination-type free will. In this view, even the gods could not be evil or responsible, just sick.

and yet:

B. this would still have profound implications for our view of human nature and our responsibility practices.

In other words, you say that you "can't get worked up about that", if free will is impossible. But I, and most people, would get very worked up about the possibility that society should be medicalized. Dawkins gets so worked up that he calls it the most dangerous idea in the world. It would cause a sea change in our views of ourselves and others. So I think the fact that free will is impossible, if it is, doesn't necessitate that we shouldn't care.

[V. Alan White]

I have some sympathy for what Joe is saying. In some sense the purely conceptual results of the FW controversy are damned--we need practical ways to deal with those who we know probably have been caused to do what they do; Colorado, Arizona mass killings with surviving killers; we just shuffle our intuitions uselessly as with my own state of WI's case of self-snuffed evil in the Sikh murders. But did you see I used the term "evil" to describe Page? He was evil as assessed by the public, even if he was sick. Yes, we excused Hinckley--and changed the laws drastically for doing so. Why? Pragmatism. Sometimes the forceful pragmatic sense of justice trumps theoretic analysis of responsibility. That's a fact. Is it right in some ultimate sense? Maybe the real issue is theoria versus brute feeling--and I am not sanguine which wins that sociological game. I am sympathetic and even philosophically optimistic as to purely theoretical analyses of responsibility. I am abjectly pessimistic as to their pragmatic implementation. Maybe our collective emotions simply cannot be persuaded by purely rational means. If so, a form of emotionally-informed pragmatism triumphs, by definition. The success of the Tea Party today is chilling evidence of this.

[Brent]

Why all this reverence for "brute emotion?" And no, evil is not a useful term, even if the folk and the politicians yell it from the hill tops. In fact, using the word ‘evil’ obviously prevents us from understanding the underlying problems to prevent them in the future. The Aurora shooter is probably yet another schizophrenic. Just calling it "evil" lets us "good guys" sweep it under the rug and say "shucks, some people are just evil." I hope you can see how dangerous this is. All problems, human behavior most of all, must be analyzed in the purely scientific (including philosophical) realm with the purpose of correcting and preventing such behavior in the future.

Things that shouldn’t ever influence the determination of truth: emotion, intuition, what the majority of the world thinks, the everyday practices of the majority of the world, the possible implications (usually incorrect) of said truth. And yet you see this base mixture of ‘common sense’, instinct, and slavish commitment to the status quo used shamelessly pretty frequently in philosophy (I’m looking at you compatibilists).

I can’t shake the feeling that compatibilists are satisfied with justifying the status quo. The great virtue of emotion free conceptual philosophy is that it can suggest what we might be doing wrong, even if it’s counter intuitive to our arbitrary human nature.

[Eddy Nahmias]

There's lots to say about this interesting debate (thanks Joe), but I just wanted to make sure Alan's last comment is not supposed to tie compatibilism to the Tea Baggers!

Actually, there is a strain in the conversation that suggests compatibilists are just trying to salvage free will and responsibility for pragmatic or emotional reasons (and that Dawkins and Sam Harris are able to handle the cold truth, while, as Harris says in his book, compatibilists are doing 'theology').

While I'd like to say that such claims are simply bullshit, I fear that will look like I'm just reacting emotionally. So instead, I'll just ask for some evidence for such claims. (And use of Strawsonian arguments, appeals to ordinary usage and practices, or paradigm-case-style arguments are not evidence for such claims.)

[Brent]

Yes, 'reactive attitudes', 'deep selves', and giving 'could' an invented alternative meaning, does seem to remind people of the frantic, desperate sham arguments used in theological apologetics.

Perebloom's 4 cases.
G. Strawson's basic argument.

I've never seen a reply even remotely convincing to either. If someone thinks there have been adequate head-on responses to Perebloom’s 4 cases, do link!

[Kip]

I just want to say that I really like Alan's comment. And I agree that we, as society, are not mature enough to implement radical reforms to the criminal justice system that take into account concerns about constitutive luck. I'm skeptical of the practicality of even merely quarantining people, a la Pereboom.

(I'd be interested to hear what Eddy thinks about constitutive luck... does he think it exists?)

In one article I wrote in law school, I claimed that we are living in the "Behavior Therapy Dark Ages." We have neither the predictive, preventive, nor rehabilitative technologies to treat evil people like they are merely sick. So, when I say that we should do so, I mean that in only a theoretical and idealistic way.

[Justin Caouette]

The comparison between Teabaggers and Compatibilists seems to be a bit of a cheap shot, if that was the intent of your comment, Alan. It seems as though it may not have been but I'm unsure. Regardless, I share Eddy's worry...

Brent, a few things;

You said "I can’t shake the feeling that compatibilists are satisfied with justifying the status quo. The great virtue of emotion free conceptual philosophy is that it can suggest what we might be doing wrong, even if it’s counter intuitive to our arbitrary human nature."

If the truth of the argument between the compatibilist and the incompatibilist turns out justifying the status quo then why shouldn't the compatibilist be satisfied?

Also, you said "And yet you see this base mixture of ‘common sense’, instinct, and slavish commitment to the status quo used shamelessly pretty frequently in philosophy (I’m looking at you compatibilists).

In response, couldn't one say that you see this basic mixture of 'intuition','common sense' and a slavish commitment to oppose the 'status quo' used shamelessly pretty frequently in philosophy (I'm looking at you incompatibilists)? Isn't the intuition that free will and determinism are incompatible doing work for some? This seems utterly slavish at times.

I don't have a horse in the race (as I haven't published yet), however, I find the attack against the compatibilists in this thread to be littered with cheap shots (coupled with some good arguments, of course). I see this sort of approach levied by tea baggers as well (just saying).

On a more serious note I have a question for the card carrying incompatibilists.

The implications of not having free will go well beyond our ascriptions of responsibility. In Ish's new book(Reason's debt to Freedom) he argues that moral obligation (among other concepts)is dependent upon free will. Do incompatibilists see this as a concern at all? I was hoping a few of you might speak to the implications of not having free will beyond losing the concept of moral responsibility. Maybe a reference or a link to where a discussion about these concerns is discussed?

--Thanks

[Joe Campbell]

Kip: I think of moral responsibility in terms of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. And I’m not talking about heaven and hell or punishment. It is consistent with everything that I say that all forms of punishment are immoral; that no one is blameworthy for anything (though some are praiseworthy); etc. I’m really thinking of rather mundane cases of moral responsibility. Any praise or blame would count as long as it is coupled with the belief that the individual is worthy of the praise or blame. If you tell B to stop yelling at A, that the behavior is wrong, you seem to think that B is blameworthy in some sense; not that it would be fitting to punish him but public or private admonishment is not out of the question.

Brent: I like the idea of “leftover evolutionary behavior.” I think it applies to some kinds of blaming-behavior but not all. I’m not going to stop giving my friends advice, advice that would be entirely inappropriate to direct at children. The advice might carry with it aspects of praise and blame. However I think of it, I don’t think of it as “leftover evolutionary behavior.” That I can and do advise my friends in these ways, that I admonish them and expect them to learn from their mistakes, and that they behave the same way toward me in this respect, is precisely one big part of what makes them my friends and not mere strangers.

Al and Eddy: I agree with Eddy. I’m not trying to give a pragmatic justification for punishment. The pragmatic defense is for the moral responsibility framework, just in case a rational response to the skeptical arguments is not possible (PF Strawson).

But I’ve been toying with some rational responses too. The idea that no one can control anything strikes me as an over-the-top claim that is clearly false. What I’ve intended to show is that we carry with us subtle distinctions about levels of control that we apply on a continual basis, which explains why we behave differently toward dogs than children, or towards children than adults. We have no problem talking – in these contexts – about levels of control, levels of ability.

But then the free will skeptic tells me that there is no control, no ability. On the one hand we have levels of ability but on the other there is no control or ability. That makes no sense. Since I’m unwilling to drop the levels-of-control/ability talk – which I need and use on a daily basis – I’m unwilling to accept free will skepticism.

There is nothing pragmatic about this argument.

[Bruce Waller]

While I greatly admire the "theoretical" points made by all the contributors concerning moral responsibility (and those who deny moral responsibility CAN consistently admire such insightful work) I must register a dissent from the idea that we are "not mature enough to implement radical reforms to the criminal justice system"; and I believe we ought to implement reforms to our profoundly unjust and grossly inegalitarian "distributive justice" system as well. We may not have reached the enlightenment of behavioral science, but we are far from a "behavioral therapy dark age". But thinking in terms of "therapy" is not a promising approach: the universal denial of moral responsibility is NOT premised on the notion that everyone is sick (though that is a common assumption, found even in the remarkably insightful work of P.F. Strawson). The most promising means of reform are NOT based on such a clockwork Orange model, but on a more positive psychology model (increasing the sense of self-worth, of self-efficacy, enhancing self-control -- the sort of work advanced by Bandura, the more recent Seligman research, and Baumeister). Furthermore, we know a great deal about what sorts of social structures and social systems reduce criminal behavior (and they are not the radically individualistic and harshly punitive systems like that of the U.S.). The moral responsibility system inflicts harsh and ineffective and unjust punishment on countless people; that is a pressing real problem, far beyond theoretical musings. I cannot accept that we should wait for a better season to start making these reforms (a basic reason why our society appears not ready to make those reforms is that our rugged individualist and deeply retributive society is held back by those societal assumptions). This is a profoundly UNjust system, that should be changed; and if not now, when?

[Brent]

What Bruce said.

Also for Justin. "I was hoping a few of you might speak to the implications of not having free will beyond losing the concept of moral responsibility. Maybe a reference or a link to where a discussion about these concerns is discussed?"

I'd recommend reading anything by Clarence Darrow, if you haven't already. His worldview, which is very consistent throughout all of his works, and remarkably modern for his time, is completely non reliant on free will. He offers what I think a lot of free will apologists think is impossible: a functioning, pragmatic, even optimistic worldview that doesn't require free will or MR. (he’s a pessimist about human nature and ability though, but that’s slightly different)

Also, more specifically, he wrote a lot about the practical implications of criminology without MR, which I think would be interesting to those free willers who are concerned about radical changes to the justice system.

[Thomas Nadelhoffer]

Eddy,

If it could be shown that all forms of compatibilism and semi-compatibilism are ultimately forms of revisionism about free will and responsibility--and, as you know, I think this can be shown (which is a discussion for another day)!--then it wouldn't be surprising if it turned out that the compatibilist motive for revising our traditional notions of agency and responsibility were driven by some combination of emotional and pragmatic concerns. If you weren't emotionally attached to the free will and responsibility world view or you didn't think that believing in some form of free will and responsibility made a practical difference, then why not simply side with the skeptics? After all, both compatibilists and skeptics agree that we don't have what libertarians claim we have--namely, the unconditional power to do otherwise and the kind of deep desert that goes along with it. So, if you're not either emotionally attached to the view that we have free will and moral responsibility or you don't think it's practically important that people continue to think we have free will and moral responsibility, then why not drop the talk about free will and moral responsibility altogether rather than merely revising the way we talk about these things? To put an even finer point on the question: Why continue to use language that you know damn well has an awful lot of metaphysical, moral, religious, and political baggage if you could simply use less loaded language instead? The most plausible explanation is that compatibilists (a) are emotionally attached to free will and moral responsibility, (b) believe that free will and moral responsibility are important, practically speaking, or (c) both (a) and (b)!

[Eddy Nahmias]

Well, to be brief, I disagree that compatibilism is a form of revisionism about free will and responsibility. The term "free will" indeed has some metaphysical and religious baggage, but I'd call it misplaced wrapping paper over a compatibilist set of intuitions, practices, and yes, emotions. So, I don't think I'm emotionally motivated to preserve a false doctrine (but I know we don't always understand our own motivations! That's a limit on our free will, which brings me to another question that I will now post as a new thread...)

[Bruce Waller]

Joe, A fascinating and vigorous thread, and it's all your fault: you started it.

[Paul Torek]

Sorry I'm late to this party!

Joe,

I like your post and your comments up through this: "our understanding of moral responsibility comes from the kinds of judgments we make in everyday cases." But from there, I hoped to see you connect that point to some of the criticisms you've received. Here's my roadmap; see if you'd like to take a drive on this path.

Arguments have premises, including the arguments of free will skeptics and of those who deem origination central to responsibility. To be effective, these premises need to find ground among audiences who haven't already accepted the conclusion. Average Joes, if you'll pardon the expression :) Now your Average Joe might feel much intuitive attraction to the principle, when it is put to him, that (call this RO) you can't be *R*esponsible for anything unless it *O*riginated with you. And he may also feel much attraction to the claim, (O), that people routinely do *O*riginate their actions. And also to the judgment (NM) that in the A-and-B case, it does *N*ot *M*atter who started it.

Suppose we convince AJ (Avg Joe) to give up claim O. He no longer thinks that Nothingness is coiled like a worm at the heart of Being, creating our actions ex nihilo.

AJ is caught in a paradox, and needs to reach reflective equilibrium. (NM) and (RO) seem to be in conflict - and I would venture to say that for most AJs, (RO) is going to lose the battle. But wait, FW/MR skeptics to the rescue! On our theory, they say, NM and RO are both true; problem solved!

AJ is not likely to be satisfied, for NM has been "vindicated" for all the wrong reasons. AJ thought that both were responsible; now you tell him that neither were.

To imply that origination-based skepticism survives the A-and-B challenge unscathed, because skepticism affirms NM, is to engage in illegitimate bootstrapping. It is to make use of a philosophical position built on certain arguments, when what is being questioned is a central premise of those arguments.

Thomas,

The reason to continue to use language that you know damn well has an awful lot of metaphysical, moral, religious, and political baggage, is that there is no less loaded language to be had. The deliberate avoidance of certain terms can be very conspicuous, and loaded in its own way.

I've been to funerals where nobody used the words "death" or "died". Now maybe that's a good thing, all things considered. Or maybe it hampers the grieving process and stifles deep personal communication. It probably depends on the family, which way is best. But make no mistake, it's loaded language, stark in its absence.