Flickers of Freedom

Farewell: Live Long and Prosper

My time as Featured Author has come to end. I would like to thank Thomas once again for being such a gracious host and for making Flickers one of the premier blogs on the web! I would also like to thank all those who took the time to participate this month—the number of comments (and the quality of those comments) was impressive and I am leaving with great feedback, plenty to think about, and perhaps even some new research projects!

I am ending a few days early so others can post announcements, etc. before Susan Dwyer takes over next month. I am also leaving in two days for Aberdeen, Scotland for the Justice Without Retribution Conference and need a day to get ready. I’m looking forward to continuing this conversation with Derk Pereboom, Bruce Waller, Saul Smilansky, Ben Vilhauer, Michael Corrado, Elizabeth Saw, Farah Focquaert and other skeptic-friendly philosophers in Aberdeen. After a month of being beaten up by defenders of basic desert, it will be nice to be on friendly territory...It’s just too bad Thomas and Neil won’t be there!

I sign off with a homage to Leonard Nimoy (LLAP) and a final question: How would Spock have viewed the reactive attitudes? What would he think of resentment and indignation, blame and shame? Since he himself would not have experienced the reactive attitudes or shared the retributive impulse, would he have accepted or rejected basic desert moral responsibility? Would the rational-old Spock have thought basic desert MR is *justified* if he didn't experience the reactive attitudes and emotions?

Will the Real Compatibilist Please Stand Up

In the comment thread to my last post, I sensed some confusion regarding the compatibilist position on basic desert moral responsibility. Perhaps this confusion is warranted, since not all compatibilists are clear on what they are defending. Are they defending a backwards-looking form of moral responsibility (what I’m calling basic desert moral responsibility) or are they simply defending a forward-looking conception of moral responsibility? Are they defending a non-consequentialist, non-contractualist conception of MR or are they appealing to pragmatic, consequentialist, or contractualist justifications? Perhaps there is no single answer here (my guess is that there isn’t). Nonetheless, I thought it would be helpful to disambiguate a few possible varieties of compatibilism and see which, if any, represent the majority of compatibilists. This is probably a fool's errand but I think some clarity here would be helpful. I was also hoping that some of you would be willing to define your own positions using these distinctions, or at least offer up additional distinctions. 

 

Free Will Skepticism, Just World Belief, and Punitiveness

What would be the consequence of accepting free will skepticism? What if we came to disbelieve in free will and (basic desert) moral responsibility? What would this mean for our interpersonal relationships, society, morality, meaning, and the law? What would it do to our standing as human beings? Would it cause nihilism and despair as some maintain? Or perhaps increase anti-social behavior as some recent studies have suggested (Vohs and Schooler 2008; Baumeister, Masicampo, and DeWall 2009)? Or would it rather have a humanizing effect on our practices and policies, freeing us from the negative effects of free will belief? These questions are of profound pragmatic importance and should be of interest independent of the metaphysical debate over free will. In this post I will focus on the putative pragmatic benefits of believing in free will and desert-based moral responsibility, rather than arguing directly for free will skepticism.

If it turns out that belief in free will, rather than being a good thing, actually has a dark side, then this would help remove one of the major obstacles in the way of accepting free will skepticism (e.g., concerns over its negative consequences). It would also support disillusionism over illusionism as the proper course of action for free will skeptics.

Phenomenology of Free Agency

In recent years there has been a renewed interest in the phenomenology of free agency (or what is sometimes called the phenomenology of free will or first-person agency). Some great work has been done by Horgan et al. (2003), Nahmias et al. (2004), Bayne and Levy (2006), Kozuch and Nichols (2011), Deery, Bedke, and Nichols (2012), and others. In this post I will try avoid, if possible, debating whether the phenomenology is compatibilist or incompatibilist, veridical or illusory, or undermined by the behavioral, cognitive, and neurosciences. I will instead try to convince you that there are aspects of the phenomenology that all parties should agree to and should equally set out to explain. (I’m in the mood for some bridge building!) I doubt I will succeed but it’s worth a shot, right? Okay, here I go....

Free Will Eliminativism: Reference, Error, and Phenomenology

I would now like to turn to another important, but often overlooked, aspect of the free will debate: the role of reference. Shaun Nichols, Manuel Vargas, and Oisín Deery have done some amazing work on this subject, and it’s Shaun’s article in my edited collection that got me thinking seriously about reference. This post is based off of my recent Philosophical Studies paper (DOI 10.1007/s11098-015-0453-x), in which I argue for free will eliminativism in the form of a response to Shaun Nichols. I will summarize my argument below and see if I can convince any of you that free will eliminativism should follow regardless of whether we adopt a descriptive account of reference or a causal-historical approach. 

 

Consciousness and Moral Responsibility

At the Central APA two weeks ago I took part in a session on Neil Levy’s excellent new book Consciousness and Moral Responsibility (2014). As some of you may know I also wrote a book on Free Will and Consciousness (2012) a couple years back. This topic interests me quite a bit so I would like to make my first post this month about the relationship between consciousness and desert-based moral responsibility.

Below is a shortened version of my APA comments on Neil’s book. If you haven’t had a chance to read the book yet, you can read my précis of it here.

Plan for the Month

I am honored to be this month’s Featured Author. While my whiskers are graying and my titles continue to change, I still like to consider myself a junior member of this great community. I have a great deal to learn from all of you and I am approaching this month as a learning opportunity. Throughout the month I will bounce ideas off of you and introduce some of my own work, all in an attempt to solidify my own thinking and to determine its weak points. I would like to begin by thanking Thomas Nadelhoffer for his gracious invitation. I would also like to thank him for making Flickers of Freedom such an amazing forum and the premier free will blog on the web! I have learned a great deal here at Flickers and I am a bit intimidated to follow in the foot steps of all the previous featured authors. I have some big shoes to fill. I would also like to say (and I’m not just buttering you up) that the free will community is one of the friendliest and most supportive communities in all of philosophy (don’t prove me wrong this month ;). All the senior members of the community—at least those I have met or corresponded with personally—have been nothing but supportive and encouraging, even when they hold positions at odds with my own. As a group we often disagree but we are not disagreeable. I am really looking forward to interacting with all of you this month. 

Passing the Torch!

It's once again time for the changing of the guards here at Flickers--which means it's also time to thank the previous month's Featured Author for stoking the philosophical fires for our online community. I really appreciated Alan's "back to basics" approach since it encouraged me to think a bit more broadly about some of the narrower issues that are usually my focus.  He also did a great job highlighting the philosophically under explored issue of the role free will does (and should) play in the criminal law (especially when it comes to the insanity defense). So, I, for one, think Alan was a bit too hard on himself in his farewell post!

I do nevertheless think that the community here at Flickers needs to do a better job participating in the discussion threads more generally (myself included). It takes a lot of time and energy to be Featured Author (and organizing the series takes some time and energy as well). It's unfortunate when these efforts are not rewarded. I realize we're all busy. I also realize that blog activity (here and elsewhere) waxes and wanes often for no discernible reason. But I think we ought to each show our thanks (and contribute to the community) by trying to post at least one comment per Featured Author. That's not a lot to ask for the embarrassment of philosophical riches that the Featured Authors work hard to provide month in and month out. That said, I just want to thank Al once again for providing us with food for thought during February. I realize blogging can sometimes seem like a thankless task. But appearances are deceiving! Both Al's efforts last month and the efforts put forth by the rest of the Featured Authors who came before him have made this blog a better place for discussing the ideas that collectively captivate us.

On that note, let me step away from the pulpit to welcome this month's Featured Author--Gregg Caruso. Gregg is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Corning Community College (SUNY) and Editor-in-Chief of Science, Religion and Culture. He received his B.A. in Philosophy from William Paterson University and his M.Phil and Ph.D. in Philosophy from the City University of New York, Graduate Center. He is the author of Free Will and Consciousness: A Determinist Account of the Illusion of Free Will(2012) and the editor of Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility (2013) and Science and Religion: 5 Questions (2014). 

Dr. Caruso's research interests include philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and metaphysics, with a particular interest in consciousness and free will. His most recent work focuses on the problem of free will and the phenomenology of freedom. In particular, he argues that our subjective feeling of freedom, as reflected in the first-person phenomenology of agentive experience, is an illusion created by certain aspects of our consciousness. His broader work engages issues at the intersection of the behavioral, cognitive, and neurosciences. He is especially interested in theoretical accounts of consciousness and what recent developments in the behavioral, cognitive, and neurosciences can tell us about human agency and free will. He is also interested in exploring the implications of free will skepticism for ourselves, society, morality, meaning, and the law. In particular, he is an optimistic skeptic maintaining that, not only can we preserve meaning, morals, and purpose without belief in free will and desert-based moral responsibility, but that we would be better off without such beliefs. [See his TEDx talk on The Dark Side of Free Will.] His other interests include science and religion, ethics, social and political philosophy, and issues related to moral responsibility. 

Given that Gregg is a fellow skeptic about free will, I am especially keen to see what he comes up with this month.  So, for those of you who cling tight to your notions of free and responsible agency, get ready for some fun times here at Flickers. Hopefully, March will prove to be the month we skeptics finally grow our ranks! If not, it certainly won't be Greg's fault (or anyone else's for that matter)!

p.s.  Here is the lineup for the FA series thus far:

2015:

April:                Susan Dwyer
May:                 Katrina Sifferd
June:                Thomas Nadelhoffer 
July:                 Helen Steward
August:            Sarah Paul
September:    Heidi Maibom
October:          Natalia Washington 

2016:

June/July:    Patricia Greenspan