Flickers of Freedom

Explaining (away) reactive attitudes

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

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

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

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

Can We Separate Free Will from Moral Responsibility?

Why is it so strange for philosophers to separate free will from moral responsibility? John Fischer does so; but then, sadly, he takes the wrong turn, and rejects free will while keeping moral responsibility: from my demented perspective, that’s a classic philosophical case of throwing out the baby while keeping the bathwater (though it still seems to me that John continues to give fabulously inventive and instructive arguments that support and elucidate free will). So his misguided allegiance to moral responsibility notwithstanding, John has led the way in arguing that free will and moral responsibility are distinct issues. So why is it that there is such reluctance among philosophers to examine the free will and moral responsibility questions as separate issues? I can understand why some traditional libertarian views (such as Pico della Mirandola’s and C. A. Campbell’s) connect free will with moral responsibility; after all, their accounts of free will are specifically designed to make sense of moral responsibility.

But leaving those aside, why should contemporary compatibilists believe that their free will views must match up with moral responsibility (they certainly make no appeals to contra-causal powers or God-given powers to make ourselves either beastly or godly)? Why shouldn’t we think that Frankfurt’s higher-level reflectiveness is a very important elucidation of free will, but that it fails as an account of moral responsibility? Why shouldn’t we think that various levels of reasoning are very important to a more robust account of free will, but fail as grounds for moral responsibility?

To go even further afield: Why shouldn’t we agree that it is very important to consider alternatives (and they do not have to be mystical contra-causal alternatives) and what they contribute to our enriched understanding of free will (a contribution that Bob Kane makes to the literature) even if we are not convinced that Bob has been successful in establishing grounds for moral responsibility? Or might we agree that Dennett has made a wonderful contribution to our understanding of free will with his emphasis on the psychological importance of “self-making,” and that Manuel Vargas has a most insightful account of the importance to free will of “building better beings,” while being skeptical of the claim that such accounts also support moral responsibility (in the just deserts sense)? For this question I’m not really focusing on whether those free will accounts are or are not successful in supporting moral responsibility; rather, I’m more interested in why it is so rare for philosophers to accept an account of free will (in particular one of the fascinating contemporary compatibilist accounts) while rejecting the view that we also have moral responsibility; or from the other – misguided – direction, accepting an account of moral responsibility while believing we lack an adequate account of free will? That is, why is it so surprising (even incoherent?) to say: I think Frankfurt (or Dennett or Vargas or Nelkin) gives a great account of free will; but I agree with Kane or Shoemaker (or with Pereboom or Levy) when it comes to moral responsibility. Or one might say that Hume and Schlick have it right when it comes to moral responsibility, but Kane has focused on an essential condition for free will (which Hume’s account cannot meet). It seems surprising to me that philosophers don’t mix and match these views on a regular basis. Of course there is a tradition of linking free will with moral responsibility, so that they stand or fall together (a tradition extending from Augustine to Valla, on to Luther and Pico and all the way to Hume and Kant and Campbell and Frankfurt); but surely philosophers are not slaves to tradition. So why shouldn’t we take advantage of the wonderful possibilities of mixing these views?

Are Interpersonal Theories of Moral Responsibility Incompatible with Theistic Commitments?

Hi All, This post is related to my last post, although only indirectly.  As most everyone is aware, in theories of moral responsibility there is a divide between two different approaches.  (Of course, I do not mean to suggest that these categories exhaustively capture all contenders.)  The Strawsonian, interpersonal approach treats moral responsibility's nature as essentially interpersonal.  To understand it, we must do so in terms of fitting responses by others standing prepared to hold responsible.  Philosophers in this camp, as I see it, include P.F. Strawson, Jonathan Bennett, Gary Watson, R. Jay Wallace, Paul Russell, Stephen Darwall, and me too (in my recent book *Conversation and Responsibility*).  Ledger theorists, by contrast treat moral responsibility's nature as most fundamentally about the independent facts constituting an agent's being responsible, and the conditions for holding responsible must first satisfy conditions of veracity regarding whether an agent is responsible (was she free? did she know what she was doing?).  The responsibility facts, on this view, can be fully accounted for without the need to make any reference to the standpoint or norms of holding morally responsible. Philosophers in this camp include Jonathan Glover, Joel Feinberg (I think), Michael Zimmerman, and Ish Haji, among, I suspect, many others.  (John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza have suggested that the views might not be exclusive.  That might be correct, but set that aside here.)

One thing that has come to worry me about my own defense of an interpersonal theory, and something that, I suspect will infect other versions of interpersonal theories, is that my theory seems ill suited for certain ways of thinking about a morally responsible agent's relation to God.  I intended for my theory to be neutral as between different accounts of free will's nature (compatibilist or incompatibilist, for instance).  But it seems not neutral here.  The reason is simple: Views like mine, or instead, say, Darwall's, are views in which the one who is responsible and, for example, blameworthy, stands in a relation to those holding morally responsible, as co-deliberators in a moral community.  The members of the moral community are, in a sense, moral equals or co-participants, and one's standing as a responsible agent warrants one to engage with others under the presumption that she too could hold them to account.  But this seems ill-suited for one's relation to God, doesn't it?  Doesn't it seem that a more natural picture of the person who is blameworthy and liable to be held to account by God is better captured on the Ledger model?  On this model, God first knows the independent facts about the agent's responsibility, and the further judgments regarding the suitability of reward and punishment flow from these, but not, as my view would have it, as part of a conversation wherein the one blamed is in some manner entitled to or warranted in responding to those blaming her. 

Thoughts? 

 

Theism and Incompatibilism: Why?

Hi All,

Look, my time as guest blogger is winding down, and this time of year many of us are caught up with final exams, dissertation defenses, and all that stuff.  Lots of deadlines, and little time for blogging.  So I thought I'd wrap up with a series of lighter observations and invitations for discusssion. 

Here is one: When we all get together over a few cold beers at various APA sessions and what not, it often comes up in conversation that there is a striking sociological fact about our field: most incompatibilists currently working in our area tend to be theists.  It's not also often remarked that most compatibilists tend not to be theists, but I take this to be implied.  I myself, a compatibilist, am not a theist; I'm an atheist.  Now of course, there are not hard categories here.  But I am curious as to why this is.  Is it mere sociology?  Or do the arguments for compatibilism generally tend to favor a denial of theism while the arguments for incompatibilism generally tend to favor theism? 

Thoughts? 

Building Better Books

Manuel Vargas's Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility is now available.  Here is the abstract:

Building Better Beings presents a new theory of moral responsibility. Beginning with a discussion of ordinary convictions about responsibility and free will and their implications for a philosophical theory, Manuel Vargas argues that no theory can do justice to all the things we want from a theory of free will and moral responsibility. He goes on to show how we can nevertheless justify our responsibility practices and provide a normatively and naturalistically adequate account of responsible agency, blame, and desert.

Three ideas are central to Vargas' account: the agency cultivation model, circumstantialism about powers, and revisionism about responsibility and free will. On Vargas' account, responsibility norms and practices are justified by their effects. In particular, the agency cultivation model holds that responsibility practices help mold us into creatures that respond to moral considerations. Moreover, the abilities that matter for responsibility and free will are not metaphysically prior features of agents in isolation from social contexts. Instead, they are functions of both agents and their normatively structured contexts. This is the idea of circumstantialism about the powers required for responsibility. Third, Vargas argues that an adequate theory of responsibility will be revisionist, or at odds with important strands of ordinary convictions about free will and moral responsibility. Building Better Beings provides a compelling and state-of-the-art defense of moral responsibility in the face of growing philosophical and scientific skepticism about free will and moral responsibility.

  Congrats to Manuel!

More Agency at the Pacific APA, March 27-30

For those attending the Pacific APA, there are loads of sessions on agency apart from the one mentioned by Joe that should be of interest to readers of this blog. Also, apart from the main program, the Experimental Philosophy Society group session (Wednesday, 6:00-9:00) includes papers on agency and there will be a Society for Philosophy of Agency group session on Thursday evening (details on the latter will be posted soon) 

For now, Roman Altshuler was kind enough to compile a list of sessions in the main program that deal with agency broadly (and not just the free will debate) or include papers on agency. I have pasted the list below. (Apologies to anyone whose session was overlooked.)

The fun commences with the session on free will Joe mentioned and ends with a session on "Agency and Pathologies of the Self" featuring Al Mele, Walter Sinnot-Armstrong, Jesse Summers, and David Shoemaker.

 

What are we fighting about?

Thanks to Thomas for this chance to discuss free will with all of you -- I'm looking forward to your contributions.

I’ve been arguing that the question at the core of the historical free will controversy is whether we have the kind of control required to be morally responsible for our actions in the basic desert sense. (For an agent to be morally responsible for an action in this sense is for it to be hers in such a way that she would deserve to be blamed if she understood that it was morally wrong, and she would deserve to be praised if she understood that it was morally exemplary, and the desert is basic because the agent would deserve to be blamed or praised just for the reason that she has performed the action, given an understanding of its moral statues, and not, for example, merely for consequentialist or contractualist reasons.)  But this hypothesis has been challenged recently by several of you, including Manuel Vargas (Book 2013) and Michael McKenna (Article 2013). One objection is that the control required for desert-involving, but not necessarily basic-desert involving responsibility is what lies at the core of the debate.

I want to resist this, for the following reason. Consider a conception of moral responsibility that’s as close to the basic desert notion as it can be, but actually rejects basic desert: We retain our unrevised ordinary moral responsibility practice, the one that includes basic desert suppositions and justifications, and this practice is morally justified solely on the ground that of all the competing practices possible for us it’s the one that does best at realizing the relevant good consequences. The underlying ethical theory might be thought of as practice-consequentialism, and the moral justification is exclusively forward-looking because the practice is justified solely by forward-looking reasons. Manuel may be open to this sort of position.

I say that this position isn’t one that’s at issue in the historical debate, because on this view justifications for blaming and praising are exclusively forward-looking, and the traditional incompatibilist has no quarrel with the compatibility of an action’s causal determination by factors beyond the agent’s control and forward-looking justifications for blaming and praising. And this is because incompatibilists haven’t seen any incompatibility between an action’s causal determination and the agent being appropriately subject to measures that aim at goods like moral formation, protection, and reconciliation. The incompatibilist might well want to resist such a consequentialist justification of our ordinary practice of holding morally responsible, or any relevantly similar ‘government house” consequentialist justification of the ordinary practice, and I’m one of those incompatibilists. But this would for ethical and/or empirical reasons that are independent of the threat to control (or the threat posed by luck) that results from causal determination or from indeterminacy in action.

So I conclude that we’ve been fighting about whether we have the kind of control required for basic-desert moral responsibility.  (Well, OK -- maybe this isn't quite the whole story – there’s another incompatibilist strand, one that Dana Nelkin addresses in her book (2011), that relies on a link between blameworthiness and obligation, and justifies a challenge from determinism by way of the ‘ought implies can’ principle. But I’ll leave that for another post.)

Agree or disagree?

VBW Episode 13: Beanballs, Blood Feuds, and Collective Moral Responsibility

Fiery Cushman joins us and classes up the podcast in the process.  We talk about his recent paper on beanballs, collective punishment, and collective responsibility.   Towards the end, Fiery comes up with a really interesting proposal about moral responsibility that's definitely worth talking about on Flickers.    We also break down the story that was the subject of this post and discussion a while back.

Available at iTunes, Stitcher, and our website.

 

Difficulty and Degrees of Blameworthiness and Praiseworthiness

Theories of responsibility are often presented as giving necessary and sufficient conditions for responsibility, or blameworthiness in particular.  But we also often talk about people being more or less blameworthy, or more or less praiseworthy.  What factors affect our attributions of greater and lesser blameworthiness and praiseworthiness?  One dimension seems to be that of difficulty--e.g., how hard was it for you to avoid wrongdoing?  Another related dimension is the extent of sacrifice that would be required to avoid wrongdoing.  And similar considerations seem to underlie our attributions of more and less praiseworthiness--e.g., in supererogatory actions, but also in cases in which people do what they ought to do but where doing so is really hard or requires a lot of sacrifice. 

Sorting out what we should say about degrees of blameworthiness might affect our theories of responsibility in a variety of ways, too.  I’ll start here with just a few general observations and questions.  For example, when it comes to praiseworthy action, it might be assumed that doing something praiseworthy requires the ability to resist a temptation to do otherwise by acting badly, but perhaps we can rightly attribute great praiseworthiness on the grounds that the praiseworthy action is difficult to do or that it requires great sacrifice instead even if one could not have given in to temptation. 

Or take blameworthy action.  Is there room in extant theories of responsibility to capture the dimension of difficulty?  Can they be easily extended to account for degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness?  Or do they need supplementation? 

In general, what are the factors that make actions more or less blameworthy, and more or less praiseworthy?