Flickers of Freedom

Attributability and Daddy Issues

I am a fan of attributability as a conception of responsibility.  The trick, as we all know, is to get clear on just what that means.  Even if you don't think attributability is a conception of responsibility, it is surely necessary for responsibility, so getting clear on what it consists in is in everyone's interest.  One popular theory of attributability is a kind of evaluative judgment view: an action or attitude is properly attributable to me just in case it is ultimately dependent on my evaluative judgments.  I'm wondering, though, about the following possible counterexample to this view.

After the Free Will Renaissance

Some folks who weren't going to be attending the Pacific APA asked me to post my SPA Meeting remarks on the future of the free will debate (thanks Andrei and Luca for organizing that session!). For those interested, here were the core of those remarks: 

1. The past 40 years of work on free will work has been dominated by philosophers working out the consequences of a problematic given to us by the Great Trinity
2. We’re approaching Event Horizon for that work, i.e., the point where that work will have significantly less visible influence on subsequent generations. 
3. What comes next is hard to see, and indeed, it is entertaining but Ultimately Fruitless to speculate about what comes next.  
4. However, since reality is no constraint on The Provocative, I’ve made some prognostications that are at least as plausible as any random selection of theses 

For the details, read on.

Penn State, the Victims, and Justice

Now that Eddy's well-deserved slurp-fest is winding down, I was hoping to get peoples' thoughts on this raw, heartfelt piece on the Penn State tragedy by Charles Pierce. Specifically this passage.

There will now be a decade or more of criminal trials, and perhaps a quarter-century or more of civil actions, as a result of what went on at Penn State. These things cannot be prayed away. Let us hear nothing about "closure" or about "moving on." And God help us, let us not hear a single mumbling word about how football can help the university "heal." (Lord, let the Alamo Bowl be an instrument of your peace.) This wound should be left open and gaping and raw until the very last of the children that Jerry Sandusky is accused of raping somehow gets whatever modicum of peace and retribution can possibly be granted to him. This wound should be left open and gaping and raw in the bright sunlight where everybody can see it, for years and years and years, until the raped children themselves decide that justice has been done. When they're done healing — if they're ever done healing — then they and their families can give Penn State permission to start.

Many have applauded Pierce and echoed the sentiment in this passage, and it seems pretty plausible to me as well.  Yet the thrust of it seems inconsistent with most philosophical theories of responsibility and desert.   The idea that the raped children should decide from themselves when justice is done is at odds with the principle that offenders' just-deserts should be tied only to their personal culpability for the offense.   According to Pierce, what Penn State deserves should be determined long after the offenses and not by a set of principles or even a jury--but by the victims.    Obviously there are tons of complications here, so let me just ask: do you agree with (a) Pierce's claim that the program's deserved fate should be determined primarily by the victims of these terrible crimes, and (b) that our current theories of desert (both philosophical and judicial) are at odds with this claim?

Brain Science and Responsibility

Not ready for prime time, they say.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/01/science/telling-the-story-of-the-brains-cacophony-of-competing-voices.html?ref=science

Hard determinism, punishment and funishment

If we are hard determinists, we think that no one deserves to be punished, and that to punish criminals would be unjust. However, many criminals still need to be incarcerated away from the rest of us. In my recent Law and Philosophy piece, I argue that hard determinists are committed to "funishment" instead of punishment: the criminals need to be compensated for the deprivation involved in incarceration, by making things as much fun as possible for them; being funished would be like spending time in a top resort with all expenses paid, except that one couldn't leave. But, in addition to the huge expense, changing punishment to funishment would radically reduce the deterrent effect. Thus it would increase crime, involve many more people in the criminal justice system, result in a social backlash, etc. In short, it would prove a nightmare even for hard determinists. In fact, I argue that it is a reductio of hard determinism. Hard determinism is in practice self-defeating, trying to implement it would make things worse, in terms of hard determinism, and hence hard determinists should not want their theory implemented.

My paper is here:

http://www.springerlink.com/content/737x22827633400p/

Saul Smilansky

MAOA and Criminal Responsibility

Matthew Baum has a new piece in Neuroethics entitled, "The MAOA Predisposition to Impulsive Violence: Is it Relevant to Criminal Trials?"  I, for one, think it is relevant no matter what one's philosophy of punishment happens to be, but I would love to have a discussion here on Flickers about the issue.  So, hopefully, folks will take the time to read the article and post their thoughts!  

Here is the abstract:

In Italy, a judge reduced the sentence of a defendant by 1 year in response to evidence for a genetic predisposition to violence. The best characterized of these genetic differences, those in the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), were cited as especially relevant. Several months previously in the USA, MAOA data contributed to a jury reducing charges from 1st degree murder (a capital offence) to voluntary manslaughter. Is there a rational basis for this type of use of MAOA evidence in criminal court? This paper will review in context recent work on the MAOA gene–environment interaction in predisposing individuals to violence and address the relevance of such findings to murder trials. Interestingly, the MAOA genetic variants impact future violence and aggression only when combined with the adverse environmental stimuli of childhood maltreatment. Thus nature and nurture interact to determine the individual’s risk. Based on current evidence, I argue there is a weak case for mitigation. But should future experiments confirm the hypothesis that individual differences in impulse control and response to provocation found in MAOA-L men (without abuse) are significantly magnified when combined with childhood maltreatment, the case could turn into a stronger one.

p.s.  I also wanted to congratulate and thank Neil Levy for all the work he's done getting Neuroethics off the ground.  I think the journal has published some of the most interesting and important work on agency and responsibility during the past few years.  Minimally, I think the journal filled a much needed niche.  

Looking Forward and Backward

In the philosophy of punishment, it is commonly assumed that the primary difference between the two main competing theories of punishment—i.e., retributivism and consequentialism—is that the former is backward looking whereas the latter is forward looking.  However, I think this distinction doesn’t adequately capture the core difference between retributivists and consequentialists about punishment.  My main concern is that while consequentialists must necessarily look partially to the future to determine how much an offender ought to be punished, they must also take several important backward looking considerations into account.

For instance, the severity of the crime itself is going to be relevant to how much an individual ought to be punished since more severe crimes are more costly to victims and society and hence more resources need to be expended to ensure these crimes are both deterred and prevented.  Both the offender’s volitional control and his mental state at the time of the crime are going to be relevant as well.  When it comes to the actus reus, we want to know whether the offender acted voluntarily rather than involuntarily, etc.  In the case of mens rea, we want to know whether the offender acted knowingly or purposely rather than merely negligently or recklessly.  Moreover, we will want to know whether the offender had a positive excuse or a justification for violating the law.  In each of these instances, the backward looking considerations are going to shed light on the most appropriate punishment since they provide us insight into what is likely going to be necessary to deter and prevent similar crimes and to rehabilitate the offender in question.  Similarly, the offender’s past criminal activity/record and past experiences with the justice system are relevant since these historical factors will give us insight into what to expect in the future.

Strawson vs. Strawson

 Speaking of retribution…  I was teaching my interview with Galen Strawson in my intro to ethics class last week and was struck by something that never occurred to me before.  It’s in the discussion of his remark that “even Hitler is off the hook” if we deny moral responsibility: (I’m going to quote him at length but the crucial part for the purposes of this post comes towards the end):

 “Me:  So how should we regard Hitler and Stalin and other villains of history? Should we view them like we view the Lisbon earthquake, or the Plague?

 Galen: In the end, and in a sense: yes. Obviously it’s wildly hard to accept. For some people I think it’s impossible to accept, given their temperament (they might not be able to make sense of their lives anymore). As I said, I can’t really accept it myself—I can’t live it all the time. If someone harmed or tortured or killed one of my children I’d feel everything almost anyone else would feel. I’d probably have intense feelings of revenge. But these feelings would fade. In the end they’re small and self-concerned. Only the grief would last.

Maybe one way to put it is this: People in themselves aren’t evil, there’s no such thing as moral evil in that sense, but evil exists, great evil, and people can be carriers of great evil. You might reply, Look, if they’re carriers of evil they just are evil, face the facts. But I would have to say that your response is in the end superficial. After all, we don’t call natural disasters evil.

There’s another thing to say about the Hitler case. Our sense that he must be held to be utterly responsible for what he did is both cognitive and emotional, and it usually seems to us that these two factors can’t possibly come apart. The cognitive part, the sense that it is just an absolute objective fact that he is wholly responsible in the strongest possible way, seems inseparable from the non-cognitive part, the moral nausea, the disgust, the anger, I don’t know what to call it. They seem inseparable in the way that blood is inseparable from a living body (that was Shylock’s problem). And since the non-cognitive emotional part is plainly a completely appropriate reaction it can seem that the cognitive part must be, too.

 Nevertheless, I think they can come apart. Many of our emotional responses can stay in place when we confront the fact that there is no ultimate moral responsibility. We don’t stop retching involuntarily when we realize that there is nothing objectively disgusting about a smell of decay. No doubt some of our emotional responses are essentially connected to belief in ultimate moral responsibility. But I think even the most emotionally intense desires for revenge and retribution, say, can be felt in a way that does not presuppose ultimate moral responsibility.”

There are a number of ways to interpret Galen here.   Originally, I thought Galen was highlighting the irrational and distorting effects of our retributive emotions—they can mislead us into thinking that someone like Hitler is objectively morally responsible.  That, I believed, was the purpose of involuntary retching analogy.  This is an idea we see a lot around here (I may have defended it myself at one point, or maybe several): retributive emotions had important adaptive functions and therefore have a powerful tough-to-shake influence on our beliefs and judgments.  But in search for the truth about moral responsibility and desert, we need to bracket these emotions and minimize their distorting effects.

But a funny thing struck me about the retching analogy when I read through it again in class.  I looked at it and thought: wait, what does that mean—“there’s nothing objectively disgusting about the smell of decay?”  Really?  There’s nothing objectively disgusting about a rotting corpse?  What could possibly be objectively disgusting if a rotting corpse isn’t?   I couldn’t think of anything.  And this made me think that Galen was misconstruing what we mean by ‘objectively disgusting.’  All we mean when we say that something is ‘objectively disgusting’ is that most normal people are disposed to do things like wretch involuntarily when encountering it.  That’s all there is to ‘disgusting.’   If a disgust skeptic or nihilist came along and argued that nothing could have the metaphysical properties required to be ‘truly disgusting,’ I would reply that he was overintellectualizing the facts, that the metaphysics in this case was in the eyes of the metaphysician. 

 (Hopefully, you see where this is heading now...) But this is precisely what a certain famous father of Galen's argued about moral responsibility!   For someone to be morally responsible just means that people are disposed to have a certain kind of emotional response to them.  Any further metaphysical requirement--say, the demand for ultimate responsibility—is in the eye of the metaphysician. According to Strawson, the moral responsibility skeptic is ‘overintellectualizing the facts.’

So here’s my question.  Assuming that the disgust skeptic has an overinflated idea about what it takes to be ‘truly disgusting,’ what (if anything) makes judgments about moral responsibility any different?  Why isn’t P.F. Strawson’s reply to Galen and other skeptics just as effective as the reply to the disgust skeptic?  Where’s the disanalogy?    

 

Free Will Debate on Youtube

 Thanks to Bob Doyle for bringing the following series of videos to my attention.  Each one is from a worskshop in Barcelona this past October that was entitled "Is Science Compatible with Our Desire for Freedom?" 

Agency and Responsibility in Scientific American

There are three recent pieces in Scientific American that readers of this blog might find of interest:

1. "How Free Is Your Will?" by Daniela Schiller and David Carmel.
2. "Neuroscience in the Courtroom," by Michael Gazzaniga.
3. "Inside the Mind of a Psychopath," by Kent Kiehl and Joshua Buckholtz.

As always, happy reading!