Flickers of Freedom

The Allure of Initial Design Arguments

Thanks again for Tom Nadelhoffer for this great opportunity.  This'll be my last post (this time around), as I'm off Saturday morning for the JTF Board Mtgs in Philadelphia.  I hope to be able to reply on the comments thread either as I travel or early next week, but don't expect my usual neurotic electronic alacrity.  Thanks to everyone: we have a great "Free Will" community!!

I want to shift gears a bit.  Of course, manipulation worries are pressing, especially but not exclusively (in my view) for compatibilists.  I have pressed manipulation arguments against what I have called "mesh" theories, and various contemporary philosophers, including Derk Pereboom and Patrick Todd have recently given powerful and challenging versions of these arguments.

Here I want to talk about a related, but, in my view different kind of argument, the Initial Design Argument.  Al Mele has given an elegant and influential version of such an argument: The Zygote Argument.  Whereas many people seem to think that such arguments provide a big problem for compatibilism, I want to call this into question.  (Note: Al Mele himself simply takes it that the Zygote Argument presents a problem for compatibilism; he does not however conclude that it is a decisive problem or embrace incompatibilism.)

Overturning the Hierarchy

Gary Watson and Irving Thalberg both noted this problem many years ago--in the 1970s.  (A very cool decade, by the way.)  But it has been ignored or, in my view, underappreciated, in favor of the "regress problem" and "manipulation worries"--admittedly, big problems for the hierarchical picture of agency.  Here's the issue.  On the hierarchical model, in particular, Frankfurt's, it seems that deliberation or practical reasoning is conceptualized as about one's own mental states, rather than courses of action in the world.  But this just seems distorted or in any case inaccurate as a picture of what's going on in practical reasoning.

So, I have a first-order desire for that (tantalizing) second martini, and a first-order desire to resist the temptation and not have a second martini (the first was great, but surely enough!).  Now Frankfurt conceptualizes my practical reasoning as focussed in the first instance on MYSELF, i.e., on my first-order desires.  My deliberation is about which of my first-order desires should lead me to action.  But this just seems inaccurate and, well, somewhat narcissistic.  Isn't it more accurate in general (maybe there are special cases) to describe me as deliberating in the first instance about courses of action, and not my mental states?

Moral Responsibility and the Real Self

The last post dealt with the relationship between identification and the real self.  Let's here assume that identification can indeed specify the "real self", for the purposes of agency.  Now I want to ask: what is the relationship between the real self (so understood) and acting freely (and thus moral responsibility)?

The obvious problem seems to be weakness of the will (sorry Neil and also Socrates).  It seems that one can act from weakness of the will and be morally responsible for the weak-willed behavior; but weak-willed behavior presumably does not express the real self (the motivational states with which one identifies). 

What has gone wrong?  Frankfurt and Watson sought to give a more nuanced (and plausible) view of acting freely (and thus moral responsibility) than the simple view that one acts freely to the extent that one gets what one wants.  On this view, in Frankfurt's terms, one acts freely insofar as one does what one *really* wants to do.  Frankfurt goes on to specify what one really wants to do in terms of identification, and he gives successive elaborations of identification (in terms of elements including, but not limited to, higher-order volitions.)  This suggests that one acts freely insofar as one acts in accordance with one's real or true self.  But this implies that genuine weakness of the will--in which one freely acts against what one identifies with--is impossible, in my view an implausible result.

Identification and the Real Self

Thanks very much to Thomas Nadelhoffer for the invitation.  I really appreciate it.  And greetings to everyone from Muenster, Germany, where I have a research post at the Center for Advanced Study on Bioethics and am on sabbatical this Fall.  Soon (Oct 18-20) we are having a conference on autonomy here in Muenster, and I look forward to seeing Al Mele (who will give a paper) and other friends.

I thought I'd kick this off with some questions/puzzles. 

Let's say you have a view of the conditions for moral responsibility which includes (crucially) "identification".  On a view such as Frankfurt's (and others), an agent is morally responsible for some action at least in part in virtue of identifying with the motivational state that issues in action (or perhaps with the action).  But I wonder: how can Frankfurt (or in general the proponent of such a view) distinguish what or who the agent *really is* from what or who the agent *wants or wants ideally to be*.  In other words, how can Frankfurt or the proponent of an identification-based account of moral responsibility distinguish between the "real self" and the "ego-ideal".