Flickers of Freedom

Anger with Agent-Involving States of Affairs

Here’s something that’s happened quite a few times at talks at which I argue that moral anger (i.e., moral resentment and indignation) is threatened by free will skeptical considerations – University of Arizona last weekend was a case in point. Someone will say that nothing about free will skepticism challenges anger with impersonal states of affairs, such as the picnic’s being rained out or the car battery’s dying, and then propose that nothing about free will skepticism threatens anger with agent-involving states of affairs either. So even if it’s agreed that being angry with an agent because of the bad thing he’s done is out, anger with bad agent-involving states of affairs would still be in the clear.

A worry about this proposal is that anger with impersonal states of affairs seems unstable. You’re initially angry that the car battery died, but my sense is that this fairly quickly turns into different sorts of negative emotional attitudes, like frustration and disappointment. One feature of this sort of anger is that it disposes the angry person to look for some agent to be angry with – the people at the car shop who should have noted the problem, or the person responsible for taking the car for a check-up. When no fitting agent can be found, the anger tends to turn to emotions like frustration and disappointment. Anger with states of affairs seems ephemeral, and maybe this is because it only makes sense when it’s directed at an agent.

Another worry is whether anger with agent-involving states of affairs can be distinct at the emotional level from anger with the agent. Take Manuel’s (2005) character Jeff the Jerk, the middle level manager who callously fires his workers. A free will skeptic, intent on living in accord with her view, says to him when it’s clear to Jeff that she’s angry: “Jeff, I’m not angry with YOU for being such a jerk, but I am angry THAT you’re such a jerk.” That there would be such a distinction at the emotional level seems implausible. One might respond by arguing this is just a function of the epithet-concept ‘jerk,’ since it would seem to be strongly agent-focused, and so not readily state-of-affairs-focused. So imagine instead that the free will skeptic says to him: “Jeff, I’m not angry with YOU for being so callous, but I am angry THAT you’re so callous.”

This statement might be true, but I’d say the attitude is unstable, and will tend to change either into an emotion like frustration or disappointment or else into anger with the agent. So my tentative verdict is that anger with agent-involving state of affairs isn't a promising alternative for free will skeptics.

Agree or disagree?

The Free Will Debate and the Limits of Philosophy

Are there limits to philosophical method as a way of rationally adjudicating disputes? One thought is that such limits are illustrated by several disputes within the free will debate. For a first, manipulation cases are designed by incompatibilists to sway intuitions in a dialectical situation in which prior reasoning has not broken a standoff between compatibilists and incompatibilists. The incompatibilist can hope that intuitions about such cases will generally go her way. She can bolster her case by arguing, for instance, that it’s inappropriate to privilege intuitions about ordinary cases that don’t involve manipulation. But she cannot justify the claim that when in the end the compatibilist’s intuitions don’t conform to hers, he is irrational. One plausible diagnosis is that for the compatibilist, reflective equilibrium involves affirming responsibility in any properly constructed manipulation case (one in which all of the defensible compatibilist conditions on responsibility are satisfied) and retaining responsibility in the ordinary deterministic case, while for the incompatibilist reflective equilibrium goes the other way, denying responsibility all the cases instead.

Another illustration involves a move the leeway theorist can make against Frankfurt examples. As I see it, in a good Frankfurt example there will be a trigger for intervention whose occurrence the agent could have but does not cause.  It’s open to the Frankfurt-defender (e.g., Widerker 2006) to argue that the agent’s moral responsibility is derivative of his responsibility for not causing the occurrence of the trigger. I’ve argued that invoking derivative responsibility at this point is suspect because the good Frankfurt example differs relevantly from the paradigms of derivative responsibility, in which the agent knowingly makes it the case that he will not satisfy uncontroversial conditions on responsibility, and he foresees that he might then perform the action at issue. But the intuition that an agent can only be blameworthy if she has an exempting alternative is strong. For many, it might be so strong that reflective equilibrium involves retaining this intuition and affirming that the agent in the Frankfurt example is only derivatively responsible despite the departure from the paradigm case. But for many others, reflective equilibrium involves going Frankfurt’s way instead.

Are we stuck at this point? One option for manipulation cases is for the compatibilist to claim that the incompatibilist needs to provide an additional argument that the agent is not morally responsible in the manipulation case, or for the incompatibilist to contend that the compatibilist needs to provide an additional argument that the agent is morally responsible in the manipulation case. But ex hypothesi, the point of such examples is to adjudicate philosophical standoffs just by intuitions about cases, and if the intuitions aren’t forthcoming, the standoff remains in place. And in addition, I’m thinking that the only way philosophy provides for adjudicating standoffs in these kinds of situations is by intuitions about cases. So if the hoped-for intuition isn’t generated in the best sorts of cases, or if it will always be swamped in the process of reaching reflective equilibrium, it seems that philosophy has reached its limits for adjudication, and we need to live with philosophically irresolvable disputes. Is this right?

Determinism and 'Ought' Judgments

Consider the claim, derived from the ‘ought implies can’ principle, that:

If S ought not to have done A, S could have refrained from doing A.

My sense is that free will skeptics will typically have a hard time denying this claim, even if they are source incompatibilists and accept Frankfurt cases. Many compatibilists, such as Ish Haji (1998) and Dana Nelkin (2011) have a similar sense.  But then, on the supposition that determinism rules out the ability to do otherwise, it also threatens 'ought' judgments.

One way of saving ‘ought’ claims from determinism involves dividing senses of ‘ought’ (C. D. Broad 1952). It’s standard to differentiate between ‘ought to do’ and ‘ought to be’ claims (e.g., Lloyd Humberstone 1971). For instance, Mark Schroeder’s (2011) distinguishes the action-related deliberative sense of ‘ought’, and the evaluative ‘ought’, as in ‘Larry ought to win the lottery’ where Larry has been subject to a series of undeserved misfortunes. Kate Manne (dissertation 2011) argues – plausibly to my mind -- that the evaluative ‘ought’ also applies to actions. She proposes that an evaluative ‘ought’ claim does not (at least directly) entail a ‘can’ claim, even when it concerns an action, while an ‘ought to do,’ which expresses a demand of an agent in a particular circumstance, does entail that she can perform the indicated action. We might call this last type an ‘ought’ of specific agent demand.

So here’s the thought. From my free will skeptical perspective, given determinism and that determinism precludes alternatives, when one tells an agent that he ought to refrain from performing some action in the future, the ‘ought’ of specific agent demand isn’t legitimately invoked, but the ‘ought’ of axiological evaluation can be. Such a use of ‘ought’ proposes to an agent as morally valuable a state of affairs in which he refrains from performing the action and recommends that he not perform it. We might call this the ‘ought’ of axiological recommendation. Such a prospective use of ‘ought’ is not at odds with determinism. Suppose it turns out that the agent performs the action anyway. If there was good reason to believe in advance that agent has or could develop the requisite motivation, and especially if there was good reason to think that articulation of the ‘ought’ judgment would contribute to producing it, this use of ‘ought’ would typically be legitimate.

Does this sound right? And how bad would it be if we had to settle for ‘oughts’ of axiological recommendation?

 

What are we fighting about?

Thanks to Thomas for this chance to discuss free will with all of you -- I'm looking forward to your contributions.

I’ve been arguing that the question at the core of the historical free will controversy is whether we have the kind of control required to be morally responsible for our actions in the basic desert sense. (For an agent to be morally responsible for an action in this sense is for it to be hers in such a way that she would deserve to be blamed if she understood that it was morally wrong, and she would deserve to be praised if she understood that it was morally exemplary, and the desert is basic because the agent would deserve to be blamed or praised just for the reason that she has performed the action, given an understanding of its moral statues, and not, for example, merely for consequentialist or contractualist reasons.)  But this hypothesis has been challenged recently by several of you, including Manuel Vargas (Book 2013) and Michael McKenna (Article 2013). One objection is that the control required for desert-involving, but not necessarily basic-desert involving responsibility is what lies at the core of the debate.

I want to resist this, for the following reason. Consider a conception of moral responsibility that’s as close to the basic desert notion as it can be, but actually rejects basic desert: We retain our unrevised ordinary moral responsibility practice, the one that includes basic desert suppositions and justifications, and this practice is morally justified solely on the ground that of all the competing practices possible for us it’s the one that does best at realizing the relevant good consequences. The underlying ethical theory might be thought of as practice-consequentialism, and the moral justification is exclusively forward-looking because the practice is justified solely by forward-looking reasons. Manuel may be open to this sort of position.

I say that this position isn’t one that’s at issue in the historical debate, because on this view justifications for blaming and praising are exclusively forward-looking, and the traditional incompatibilist has no quarrel with the compatibility of an action’s causal determination by factors beyond the agent’s control and forward-looking justifications for blaming and praising. And this is because incompatibilists haven’t seen any incompatibility between an action’s causal determination and the agent being appropriately subject to measures that aim at goods like moral formation, protection, and reconciliation. The incompatibilist might well want to resist such a consequentialist justification of our ordinary practice of holding morally responsible, or any relevantly similar ‘government house” consequentialist justification of the ordinary practice, and I’m one of those incompatibilists. But this would for ethical and/or empirical reasons that are independent of the threat to control (or the threat posed by luck) that results from causal determination or from indeterminacy in action.

So I conclude that we’ve been fighting about whether we have the kind of control required for basic-desert moral responsibility.  (Well, OK -- maybe this isn't quite the whole story – there’s another incompatibilist strand, one that Dana Nelkin addresses in her book (2011), that relies on a link between blameworthiness and obligation, and justifies a challenge from determinism by way of the ‘ought implies can’ principle. But I’ll leave that for another post.)

Agree or disagree?

Featured Author: Pereboom

It's once again that time of the month when I thank the previous Featured Author--in this case, Dana Nelkin--for doing an amazing job drumming up discussion, giving readers of the blog lots of interesting issues to mull over, etc.  It's a lot of work coming up with multiple posts, moderating and approving comments, actively participating in the comment threads, etc.  So, please join me in thanking Dana (as well as Al, Saul, and John) for all their hard work and for reminding us why we started this on-line community in the first place!  

That said, please also join me in welcoming this month's Featured Author--Professor Derk Pereboom. Pereboom  is Professor of Philosophy at Cornell University.  He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1985, and taught at the University of Vermont before moving to Cornell.  He is the author of Living without Free Will (2001), Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism (2011), and a co-author of Four Views on Free Will (with Robert Kane, John Martin Fischer, and Manuel Vargas, 2007).  He has published articles on free will, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and history of modern philosophy.  

Hopefully, everyone is as excited as I am to see what Derk comes up with for us this month. Rumor has it, he will be posting about issues he addresses in his forthcoming book.  It should be fun!  So, see you in the discussion threads!

The upcoming schedule for the Featured Author series is below the fold: