Flickers of Freedom

Neil Levy at The Brains Blog

Our own Neil Levy has a couple of very interesting posts on implicit attitudes and responsibility as guest author at The Brains Blog.  Please do check it out!

The Last Post: Not Just a Bugle Call

This will be my last post: I want to leave plenty of room for Eddy. I’ve had a good time doing this: it has stimulated me to think of things in different ways.  I wrote a whole paper as a result of thinking through responses to a post. I even ended up defending x-phi (on other occasions I’ve expressed reservations about it). It didn’t turn out at all like I expected. I was going to talk about neuroscience, but that didn’t happen.

Scoring goals for luck (and soccer)

In comments, I have had a go at explaining how luck works to eliminate responsibility. I claim that the conjunction of constitutive luck – luck in how one is, roughly as a product of genes and environment – and present luck (for example, luck in how one makes decisions) eliminate moral responsibility by preventing one from taking responsibility for one’s constitutive luck. Every action, mental or overt, by which one might take responsibility is either the product of one’s constitutive luck (think of when someone who has been brought up to believe in God wonders about God’s existence; typically there will be a variety of factors that dispose toward an affirmative answer) or will therefore be subject to present luck (things will be more finely balanced, and chance influences can be decisive). In this post, I thought it might be useful to step back and illustrate luck at work in a different domain: sport.

Zygotes and intuitions, part 2.

Todd claims that the John and Mary case is impotent against the zygote argument as Todd interprets it. Todd says (fairly) that our audience ought to be agnostic, not the committed compatibilist. So pointing out to the agnostic (who doesn’t know what to say about the compatibility question but has the intuition that Ernie is not morally responsible) that the design case is just like an ordinary determinism case shouldn’t shake their intuition that Ernie is not responsible, or prevent it motivating premise 1. When our agnostic first contemplates determinism, he doesn’t know whether to think it is responsibilit- undermining or not. Now someone convinces him that determinism is analogous to something that is responsibility-undermining. Recalling that he was initially agnostic shouldn’t lead him to think that this new consideration isn’t forceful.

Zygotes and intuitions, Part 1.

Two thirds of ‘my’ month is over, and you’re still waiting patiently for some philosophy. Here it is. I will shortly proceed to monger some intuitions about zygote cases. What I plan to do now is a two-part post. The first will reflect on the dialectic of these cases, just to try to show why I think that x-phi remains one appropriate way to respond to them, and why I think that these cases turn importantly on intuitions (these thoughts prompted by Randy Clarke, who helpfully directed me to Patrick Todd’s recent paper in Phil Studies on these cases. The second post will attempt to buttress the compatibilist response to the zygote cases, in the usual way (‘usual’ for this kind of philosophy).

Manipulations for manipulation cases

As promised, a new post on a different topic. Again, this is going to be driven by thoughts about cognitive science. I may be giving those of you who don’t know my work a rather distorted picture. Don’t be put off reading Hard Luck because you’re skeptical or uninterested in this kind of work. Hard Luck is philosophy, and science plays no significant role in its arguments. Hopefully, this post connects more closely to philosophical issues that the last couple.

Further thoughts on explaining away retributivism

As promised, a response to some of the comments made to my last post. I am going to make some general comments. Because this is so damn long, I am posting it as a new post. I will not make the responses explicit: instead I will use the comments section of the new post to respond. Very soom - in the next day or two - I will put up a new post on a different topic.

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.

Introduction

Greetings from the future! I write from Melbourne, Australia, where my principal employer, the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health,  is located.  We here are 14 hours ahead of New York and 17 hours ahead of California. I am often asked “what it’s like in the future?” Well, with the benefit of hindsight, which as you know is always 20/20, we can see that the long obsession with the compatibility of free will and causal determinism was a mistake, obscuring lots of other interesting issues to do with agency and responsibility. I’m going to try to talk about some of those issues this month, with an emphasis on cognitive science (at least that’s the current plan: we shall see). My next book, which has just been accepted by OUP, is on these kinds of issues (it is tentatively entitled Consciousness and Moral Responsibility^*). I don’t plan to talk – much – about skepticism (the new book is agnostic on the topic and the science I focus on in it doesn’t support skepticism in any kind of direct way). 

I want to start by thanking Thomas for the opportunity. It is a real honor to be included in the same company as Michael McKenna, Bruce Waller, Derk Perebook and Dana Nelkin (just to mention the most recent authors). Now on we go!

* I am currently thinking of a still from Nosferatu as a cover image. Suggestions for other options welcome! In case it helps to focus your mind, the book defends a particular account of consciousness, the global workspace account, and on that basis develops a theory of the functional role that consciousness of facts plays in responding to their content: it argues that this account entails that agents in pathologies of consciousness, like those suffering absence seizures, and ordinary agents whojust happen not to be conscious of the facts that give their action their moral significance, can't be directly morally responsible for those actions.