Flickers of Freedom

Essentially shared responsibility

As this will be my last post I want to thank Thomas for inviting me, and everyone who has participated during a month that is extremely busy for most academics. For someone who has virtually no prior experience with blogging, this has been an interesting and rewarding experience, and I’ve learnt a lot from thinking about your comments.

In this last post, I want to raise awareness about a puzzle that might seem unconnected to issues of skepticism or incompatibilism about moral responsibility. However, it is a puzzle which I think can be solved with appeal to the very same idea that I appealed to in explaining incompatibilist intuitions: the idea that to be responsible for some event is for that event to be straightforwardly explained in the relevant way by one’s motivational structures. Consider the following case:

The Lake: Alice, Bill and Cecil each have a small boat in East Lake outside their town. One day last spring, each painted the boat and, unknown to the others, poured excess solvent into the lake. In the back of their heads, they all knew that this could affect the wildlife, but each of them decided that it would be a hassle to dispose of the solvent in a safe way and hoped that nothing bad would happen. However, as the solvent from all three diffused throughout the lake over the next few days, its concentration became high enough everywhere to prevent micro-organisms in the lake from reproducing during the next few weeks, thus leaving higher organisms without food and effectively wiping out all fish in the lake. The concentration of solvent exceeded the threshold for the microorganisms by quite some margin: although the solvent from only one of the three would not have been enough to kill off the fish, the solvent from two would have (and even a little bit quicker, as the solvent is slightly more poisonous at that concentration).

Let us assume that all three agents satisfied conditions of moral accountability. They were not being forced or manipulated to do what they did and they had both the capacity to reason and reflect on the values involved and the relevant sort of control over their own decisions and actions. Then they are responsible for recklessly pouring solvent into the lake. But before you read on, ask yourself if they are also responsible for the death of the fish?

Frankfurting Fatalism

When introducing determinism to students, we often make sure to distinguish it from fatalism, and compatibilists have worried that apparently incompatibilist intuitions among laymen are based on a conflation of determinism and fatalism. Recently, for example, Eddy Nahmias has suggested that some deterministic scenarios used to explore incompatibilist intuitions among laymen risk being understood along fatalist lines. But it is not so clear why we should worry about fatalism.

“Fatalism” can of course mean a variety of different things, among them what philosophers often mean by “determinism”. But on one way of understanding fatalism about some event, it is the idea that the event would have taken place whatever had happened before (within some suitable range of possible of earlier events). One form of fatalism about a particular action could thus be the idea that the agent would have performed that particular action whatever his preferences or beliefs. This, one might think, sounds like a direct threat to responsibility.

It seems clear, however, that most philosophers are committed not to think of this sort of fatalism as in itself a problem for responsibility. First notice the following (which might seem obvious, but not, as far as I can tell, explicitly discussed in the literature): standard Frankfurt cases provide examples of a kind of local fatalism. In such cases, an agent’s actions are explained by his beliefs, desires, values, etc. in normal ways, but had there been a risk that he would have performed some alternative action, some intervening mechanism secretly implanted in him by an outside party would have ensured that he nevertheless performed the same action. So whatever the agent’s state of mind (within the range that the mechanism can handle), he would have performed the same action: he was fated to perform that action, we might say. Obviously, the details of particular cases will determine the sort of fatalism involved—i.e. the fated event and the range of antecedent events relative to which it is fated. But whatever the details, it seems that anyone who thinks that agents in Frankfurt cases can be responsible for their actions should be fine not only with the absence of (relevant) alternative possibilities, but also with (some forms of) fatalism.

Is incompatibilism a spandrel?

In 1979, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and population geneticist Richard Lewontin adopted the term “spandrel” from architecture to signify products of selection that have not themselves been selected for, but are byproducts of the selection of some other feature. Since then, the term has gotten heavy use, and for good reason, as spandrels abound in all fields shaped by selection pressures. To take an example from perception: the bent look of an oar half emerged in water. The look is presumably a byproduct of a visual system selected and trained to identify geometric properties of objects under normal circumstances, not to produce distorted impressions when light from different parts of perceived objects pass through media with different refractive indices, as in the case of air and water.

In this post, I will suggest that incompatibilist intuitions might be spandrels in just this sense: unselected-for byproducts of a cognitive mechanism designed to determine whether a putative object of responsibility is explained by an agent’s motivational structures in normal ways. I will also suggest that if this is indeed the case, our incompatibilist intuitions provide no evidence in favor of incompatibilism. (This conclusion falls short of the error theory I promised earlier, but a post should only be so long.)

The Explanation Explanation of Incompatibilist Intuitions

I want to thank people for proposing various error theories in the comments to my previous post, and raising questions about who needs an error theory, and why. It has been interesting and very helpful. But it’s high time for me to stick my neck out and sketch my own favorite explanation of why people have incompatibilist intuitions.

At its first stage this is not an error-theory: it is an account of the conception of responsibility that invites incompatibilist intuitions and some aspects that might make the invitation more or less forceful. The account (partly developed in joint papers with my graduate student Karl Persson) starts with what might seem like a platitude: we take an agent as morally responsible for some object of responsibility O only to the extent that we take it that O happened because of the agent, in some suitably normal way. What will matter in this post is that attributions of responsibility are attributions of an explanatory relation between the agent and the object of responsibility, not exactly how the agent is involved in that relation. For all I say in this post, the relevant explanans might be one involving the agent’s choice, or the operation of reasons-responsive mechanisms, or some mesh of attitudes or values, or agent causation.

So far, this “Explanation Hypothesis” might seem trite, but everyday explanatory judgments are known to have a number of interesting features. Most importantly for our purposes, they are selective. If we are thinking about why some event E happened, we will focus only on one (or perhaps a few) events or conditions that were part of the causal prehistory of E, at the exclusion of others. If we are thinking about why a house burnt down, for example, we might focus on the fact that the house was hit by lightning, but not on the fact that the air contained oxygen, or on the fact that the house was built by combustible matter, or lacked a first-class sprinkler system. Though we understand that these other factors were necessary conditions for E, they are part of the explanatory background, as it were, typically because they are more generally expected and so less informative than the factors that we do focus on. Moreover, we focus on factors that have a comparatively straightforward or familiar explanatory connection to E. Though we think that the lightning that hit the house had a causal prehistory—a separation of charges in the neighboring atmosphere, say—our focus will be on the lightning, as the connection between it and the burnt down house is much more straightforward and familiar.

Let us say that to focus on certain factors as explaining E is to see these factors as the “significant” explanation of E. We can then make the Explanation Hypothesis more precise by saying that:

Everyone needs an error theory

On the one hand, many feel a tension between attributions of moral responsibility and explanations of actions in terms of factors outside the agent’s control, in particular deterministic explanations. On the other, many feel that if a normal person with a normal history does something willingly in a normal situation, with a clear view of significant aspects of the situation and her own motives, then she is responsible for her action, whether the historical processes that shaped her character were deterministic or not. Many of us, including some who are committed compatibilists or incompatibilists, feel pulled in both directions, to one degree or other, though we might find one view much more appealing overall.

Without these conflicting tendencies, philosophical discussions of moral responsibility would have been very different. But I think that these conflicting tendencies in themselves say something about the concept of moral responsibility. While the concept invites skeptical worries, the invitation is not front and center. No overriding incompatibilist condition is part of the concept of moral responsibility in the way that a condition of unmarriedness is part of the concept of a bachelor: if it had been, many more would feel that compatibilism is a wretched subterfuge. At the same time, the invitation is not written in esoteric code, as incompatibilist intuitions are easily triggered in lay people by brief descriptions of deterministic scenarios.

My own work on moral responsibility has been largely aimed at understanding the aspects of our thinking about responsibility that give rise to these conflicting tendencies. I think that this is an interesting task in itself given how important the tendencies have been in philosophical thinking as well as in politics, where ideologies are closely related to ideas about responsibility and desert. But I also think that an understanding of what is driving skeptical worries will help us figure out whether to take them seriously. Ideally, a case for one position should come with an explanation of why the contrary position has seemed tempting to so many. Ultimately, everyone needs an error theory.

In my next post, I will say a little about what I think is going on. Here I wanted to ask what you think about the conflicting tendencies. If you are a compatibilist but have some incompatibilist intuitions (however weak), how do you explain those intuitions, or similar intuitions among the folk? We know of course that Eddy and Dylan have such a theory* (or several of them), and in one of Eddy’s threads this summer John (Fischer) suggested that some incompatibilist tendencies come from he conflation of regulative and guidance control, but I suspect that there are other views out there. Likewise, if you are an incompatibilist, how do you explain compatibilist tendencies among the folk? If you have compatibilist tendencies yourself, how do you account for that? Are they the work of system 1 reasoning, or primitive retributive tendencies? I'm very curious to hear what you have to say.

*For the record, I have empirically grounded doubts about Eddy and Dylan’s fascinating proposal.

Thanks, and a brief introduction

Many thanks to Thomas for organising this, and to earlier featured authors and other contributors for keeping such lively and fruitful discussions going for months on end! I’m really excited about this opportunity to try out ideas in such an excellent venue, and get to know more people in this field.

Perhaps because of my background in metaethics, most of my work on moral responsibility has focused primarily on the nature of responsibility judgments, and only secondarily on providing an account of moral responsibility itself. In particular, I've tried to understand exactly why responsibility judgments, which form such a core part of moral and social cognition, are subject to familiar skeptical worries.

Questions about the nature of responsibility judgments are independently interesting, but I also think that they have important consequences for how to understand the debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists, for the truth-conditions of responsibility judgments, and for the reliability of the intuitions of undermined responsibility that drive the philosophical debate. (For example, I think that a proper account of responsibility judgments shows that the intuition that determinism undermines responsibility is akin to various familiar perceptual or cognitive illusions.) 

The plan is to first post about the main ideas driving my work, and then turn to topics that should have an independent interest. Very much looking forward to your questions and comments!