Flickers of Freedom

Bypassing and Free Action

[A quick final thought on some of Eddy Nahmias's contributions from Josh Knobe.]

I'm delighted that Flickers has chosen to devote this month to showcasing the work of Eddy Nahmias, and I thought this might be a good opportunity to say a few words about one of his most innovative and important discoveries -- the phenomenon he calls bypassing. 

The basic idea behind bypassing is simple enough. Suppose people are told about a universe (Universe A) in which everything that happens is caused by some prior state or event. Now suppose that they are asked whether they agree with the statement:

• In Universe A, what a person believes has no effect on what they end up being caused to do.

Surprisingly enough, people say that this statement is true! In this sense, people seem to think that causal determinism would involve our agency being 'bypassed.' 

In looking at this result, it might at first seem that people are clearly making some kind of mistake. So one might at first think that this phenomenon is just getting in the way of our ability to understand how people really think about free action. But it seems to me that the experimental evidence is pointing more and more toward exactly the opposite view. In particular, the evidence seems to suggest that people's bypassing intuitions are actually showing us something fundamental about how people see free action as different from other kinds of behavior. 

You've Read Eddy...

Now you can listen to him! VBW 27 is now up with special guest Eddy Nahmias.   Not surprisingly, we talk a lot about the topics of his posts this month.   Check it out.

Determinism can be Rational: A potential error theory for more sophisticated incompatibilist intuitions

My first two posts have been speculative jaunts.  My next 2-3 posts will discuss recent work related in one way or another to my ‘bypassing’ thesis.  As a thesis about people’s beliefs about free will, it basically holds that people think we have free will regarding a decision or action X if and only if (or, I prefer: roughly to the degree to which) X is not caused by processes that bypass our reasoning and reasons (and to the degree to which X is properly caused by our reasoning and reasons).  I also think this thesis, or something nearby, is the correct thesis about free will.  I know, stated in this way it is pretty vague (e.g., what counts as “properly caused by”?  I certainly don’t mean that the reasons or reasoning have to be the proximate cause of X).  Nonetheless, I think this thesis provides a useful way to understand some of the free will debates, especially as they relate to ordinary people’s views and some of the recent scientific discussions of free will.

As some of you know, Dylan Murray and I have used the bypassing thesis to develop an error theory to explain ordinary people’s apparent incompatibilist intuitions.  We argue that, among non-philosophers, the majority do not take determinism to rule out free will, and of those who do, most interpret determinism to involve bypassing of agents’ relevant mental states (e.g., people often take determinism to mean that the agent’s decisions or beliefs have no effect on what the agent ends up doing).  Since determinism, as such, does not involve bypassing, and since bypassing undermines free will and responsibility on just about any theory of free will, we cannot conclude that most people have genuine incompatibilist intuitions.  Furthermore, most people who do not interpret determinism to involve bypassing also do not interpret it to rule out FW or MR.  (For our recent PPR paper, see here; email me if you can’t get access to article.  For a recent response to our paper, see this post and paper by David Rose and Shaun Nichols.  And since I probably won’t post something on it later, feel free to say something here about what you think of our methodological claims in the first section of our paper or anything else about it.)

In response to this ‘bypassing error theory’, several people have said something like this: “Well, that’s fine and good to explain some of the untutored folk responses to determinism, but that can’t explain the incompatibilist intuitions of most incompatibilist philosophers or students who have a better understanding of determinism, including the fact that it does not entail bypassing of this sort (e.g., they would not agree that in a deterministic universe, “People’s decisions have no effect on what they end up doing” but they would still say people in deterministic universes lack free will and moral responsibility). So what do you say about these more sophisticated incompatibilist intuitions?”

Very Bad Wizards Ep. 26 (with special guest Jesse Bering)

Hi all, VBW 26 with author, cognitive scientist, and Slate columnist Jesse Bering is now available on iTunes, Stitcher, and our website.   We talk about evolutionary psychology, rape defenses, homophobia, and sexual perversions of all kinds.  All kinds, trust me.   And in two weeks, don't miss VBW 27 with our own public intellectual and blogger of the month Eddy Nahmias.  We already recorded it, fun conversation, almost all free will related.  

Back to you, Eddy...

Pluralism about Moral Responsibility or Meta-non-meta-skepticism (or is it Meta-meta-non-skepticism?)

Tamler Sommers (2011) argues that different cultures have different practices regarding moral responsibility (and fair punishment)—for instance, people in honor cultures are apt to think it fair to punish people who have no control over bad actions, such as relatives of the bad actors, which is very different than, say, people in modern Europe who think responsibility requires personal control.  From this empirical fact, which seems well-substantiated, Tamler ends up concluding meta-skepticism about moral responsibility: There are no non-relative facts about moral responsibility.  It might follow that if one takes free will to refer to whatever control conditions or capacities are understood as necessary to be morally responsible, there are no non-relative facts about free will either.

What do people think of the following line of response to Tamler’s view--or perhaps it’s an embellishment of it--and perhaps also to some forms of first-order skepticism about MR?

Begin with what I take to be a plausible view, that pluralism about responsibility and desert is true where pluralism is the view that (a) there are normative facts about whether various systems of morality (including their beliefs and practices regarding MR, blame, praise, punishment, etc.) are better or worse than other systems, but (b) it is very likely, as a contingent feature of complex human nature and a wide diversity of cultural histories and geographies, that there are more than one (roughly) equally good systems of morality and responsibility. 

Thanks and Plans

Hi everyone!  I’m very excited to be the Featured Author this month, and humbled to follow such an incredible lineup—imagine a conference with several talks each by Mele, Fischer, Nelkin, McKenna, Levy, Waller, Smilansky, and Pereboom!  We really owe a lot to Thomas for breathing new life into this blog (and other blogs that have adopted his idea).  I also want to thank him for inviting me into this forum and for being such a great collaborator and friend over the past decade, even for being, as he aptly put it, “a pain in my philosophical ass.”

Given the nature of a blog, I really shouldn’t plan too much, but I’ll give you some sense of what I hope to do.  My first post will come soon on “Pluralism and Meta-non-meta-skepticism”, which should pick up a bit on where Neil left us (great posts and discussion, Neil, and sorry I could not participate much while I was traveling last month, especially the one on soccer and luck).  I hope to post another 4-5 entries over the course of the month, depending on how discussions go.  Here are some topics I’m thinking about--I’m open to suggestions about which of them (or other issues) people would like to discuss most: 

-An error theory for more sophisticated incompatibilist intuitions

-My latest response to manipulation arguments (using interventionist causal theories)

-How a new theory of counterfactuals (in general) is crucial for compatibilists

-Recent x-phi results using scenarios describing perfect prediction by brain scanning

-My naïve theories regarding punishment

-Some old posts I started and never posted on Transfer principles and on metaphysical flipflopping

I apologize in advance if I am ever slow to respond to comments or simply fail to respond to some of them. 

July's Featured Author: Eddy Nahmias

Another month has gone by and yet another Featured Author has done an extraordinary job stoking the philosophical fires here at Flickers of Freedom.  So, thanks again to Neil Levy for such a wide variety of thought provoking posts!  As Neil mentioned in his final post, it is now time to pass the torch to this month's Featured Author--Eddy Nahmias.  Nahmias is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department and the Neuroscience Institute at Georgia State University. He specializes in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, free will, moral psychology, and experimental philosophy. He is currently working on a book, Rediscovering Free Will: Autonomy and Responsibility in the Age of the Mind Sciences (OUP forthcoming).  He also recently co-edited Moral Psychology: Classical and Contemporary Readings (Wiley-Blackwell 2011).

As a former student and long time collaborator and friend of Eddy's, I have always enjoyed being a pain in his philosophical ass.  So, please join me this month in both welcoming and harassing another one of our resident compatibilists!

p.s.  The response to my earlier requests for junior Featured Authors has been amazing.  I have five folks tentatively lined up with a few more in the works.  But before I make a formal announcement and set up the schedule, I have some other things  I need to square away first.  For instance, I am planning to move both Flickers of Freedom and Experimental Philosophy to a new domain (which will hopefully also include a new online, open-access journal I am in the process of developing). So, stay tuned for details!

The upcoming schedule is below the fold.