Flickers of Freedom

On with the Show!

First, I hope everyone is getting settled into their new semester. Justin Caouette and I hope to start working on some new ideas for the blog in the coming weeks and months. For now, we have our first Featured Author coming up in just a few days. So, I wanted to both thank and welcome Michelle Ciurria. Here is her bio:

Dr. Ciurria is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of New South Wales’ Practical Justice Initiative. Prior to this appointment, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology Program at Washington University in St. Louis, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She received her Ph.D. from York University in 2014. Her research is published in such journals as the Journal of the American Philosophical Association, Philosophical Psychology, Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, and Feminist Philosophy Quarterly.

Dr. Ciurria is a specialist in responsibility theory, applied ethics, moral psychology, and feminist philosophy, with interests in feminist social epistemology, argumentation theory, and philosophy of psychiatry and psychology.

Her current research project, which she calls ‘extended responsibility,’ aims to provide a robust, interdisciplinary, and ecologically valid model of responsibility, which draws on converging research across multiple fields. This differs from the classic approach, which was primarily concerned to define the internal constituents of responsibility. Recent research across multiple fields suggests that this methodological approach is flawed because human capacities and traits are, in fact, dependent upon, covariant with, or constituted by external factors.

Dr. Ciurria’s project in extended responsibility aims to draw on contemporary research to develop a superior model. It explores six key dimensions of responsibility: (1) the interpersonal, (2) the neurobiological (focusing on extended cognition), (3) the social-psychological, (4) the collective (focusing on collective agency), (5) the epistemological, and (6) the political. This integrative approach accomplishes three things: (1) it corrects a methodological (individualist) bias in the scholarly literature on responsibility, (2) it integrates connected strains of thought across what might at first seem to be disparate research projects, and (3) it provides a robust, evidence-based model of responsibility that can be used effectively by institutions and policy-makers to enhance the collective uptake of responsible agency.

Given how many overlapping interests I have with Ciurria's own research programs, I am excited to see what she comes up with the series.  She has also contributed a few posts here in the past (see here, here, here, and here), so if you'd like, you can whet your philosophical appetite while she works on her first post for her stint as Featured Author. In the meantime, stay tuned!

The upcoming Series is as follows:

2017:

Jan.           Michelle Ciurria (Jan. 23rd-30th)

Feb.           Jules Holroyd (Feb. 13th-19th)

March:     Matthew Silverstein (Week TBD)

April:        Maria Alvarez (Week TBD)

May:         Rowland Stout (Week TBD)

Plus, Paul Russell has agreed to contribute to the series and Daniel Dennett has expressed a tentative interest as well. So, more is in the works.

 

 

Looking Forward!

First, I hope everyone is having a safe and relaxing holiday break. After a semester that brought a gnarly hurricane through Charleston, it has been nice to have such lovely weather for the holidays (the flip side of having to deal with hurricane season). So, I am thankful for that! I am also thankful that Michael Bratman took time early in the month to stoke some philosophical embers about agency and action theory. While not all featured authors discuss free will--which is the main topic of the blog--the issues they raise in action theory, moral psychology, and the like are nevertheless relevant. So, here's to an exciting line up of Featured Authors in 2017 (see below)!

I also wanted to thank Justin Caouette for agreeing to help me with the blog moving forward. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I would like to see this blog continue to grow and improve, but after years of trying to push Flickers in the right direction, I have come to realize that I need some help (especially from the next generation of philosophers of action). So, I am slowly going to transition to being the founder of the blog. Hopefully, others will join Justin in being editors (or co-editors) of the blog. I would like Justin and other junior philosophers to pick up the reigns and move us towards the models adopted by what I take to be the two most successful philosophy blogs on the web: (a) The Brains Blog, and (b) PEA Soup. I am happy to do my part, but Justin and I could really use some help. If you're interested in playing a formal role, please shoot me an email! Either way, stay tuned. Hopefully, 2017 will see some changes and improvements here at Flickers! 

For now, here is the Featured Author line up for the next few months:

2017:

Jan.           Michelle Ciurria (Jan. 23rd-30th)

Feb.           Jules Holroyd (Feb. 13th-19th)

March:     Matthew Silverstein (Week TBD)

April:        Maria Alvarez (Week TBD)

May:         Rowland Stout (Week TBD)

Needless to say, I am excited to see what they come up with for us to ponder. Hopefully, more people from our community can join us in the comment threads! In 2017, let's make Flickers great again!

Related articles

Moving Upward, not Forward? - Flickers of Freedom

Featured Author Series

Dear All,

Just a reminder concerning the upcoming schedule for the Featured Author series (see below for details). First, I wanted to once again thank Suzy Killmister for doing a great job stoking the philosophical fires here at Flickers during September. From manipulation and paternalism to addiction and autonomy, she hit upon a wide range of interesting issues. As always, it is nice to have Featured Authors who don't usually contribute to the blog. The more voices and opinions, the better! Hopefully, doing some time guest-blogging will encourage Killmister and other Featured Authors to participate in discussion threads here down the road.

That said, later this month, we will host  another guest-blogger as Featured Author--namely, Michael Bratman (who will be posting in late November and early December). Here is Bratman's biography:

I have been at Stanford University since 1974.  I was Olmsted Visiting Professor in Yale University's Program on Ethics, Politics and Economics, in Fall, 1994.  My  book publications are Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason (1987), Faces of Intention: Selected Essays on Intention and Agency (1999), Structures of Agency:  Essays (2007), and Shared Agency: A Planning Theory of Acting Together (2014).  I am also a co-editor of Introduction to Philosophy:  Classical and Contemporary  Readings. I have been awarded an ACLS Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Stanford University Humanities Center. I am a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. I directed a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College Teachers in 1993. My paper, "Plans and Resource-Bounded Practical Reasoning," Computational Intelligence 4 (1988): 349-355, jointly written with David Israel and Martha Pollack, was the recipient of the 2008 International Foundation of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems influential paper award.

 

Needless to say, I am excited to see what Bratman comes up with for our readers! So, please join me in welcoming him (and once again thanking Killmister)! The Featured Author series continues to march along. Please join the show. Unfortunately, participation in the discussion threads has been waning. I am as guilty as anyone else. I realize we're all busy. But nearly each month, we are fortunate to have Featured Authors who spend their time and energy trying to generate interesting discussions about the kind of work we do. It's a shame when we pass on the opportunity to play along. So, please join me in the comment threads later this month when Bratman puts up his first post! He's the final Featured Author of 2016! Let's make blogging about agency great again!

On that note, here is the upcoming schedule:

Nov.          Michael Bratman (Nov. 28^th-December 2^nd)

Dec.          No Featured Author

2017:

Jan.           Michelle Ciurria (Week TBD)

Feb.           Jules Holroyd (Feb. 13th-19th)

March:     Matthew Silverstein (Week TBD)

April:        Maria Alvarez (Week TBD)

May:         Rowland Stout (Week TBD)

I have a few more people who are planning to do a stint (e.g., Paul Russell), but we have yet to firm up the plans! If you have any suggestions, please let me know (as always)!

Passing the Torch!

It's once again the time for the monthly changing of the guards here at Flickers. But first, I wanted to thank Josh Knobe one more time for an illuminating series of posts as the Featured Author in July. He did a splendid job of fanning the philosophical flames during his stint. It was a great way to relaunch and revamp the series and a nice foray into some of the exciting interdisciplinary work being done on people's ordinary intuitions about agency, free will, and the self. Hopefully, others got as much out of Josh's posts as I did.

That said, now that August is here, we have a new Featured Author to look forward to in the coming weeks! Suzy Killmister is an Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut, with a joint position in the Philosophy Department and the Human Rights Institute.  She is  currently writing a book on personal autonomy, provisionally titled Taking Autonomy's Measure. She is also working on a number of papers on the concept of dignity, and the connection between dignity and human rights. Needless to say, I am very much looking forward to seeing what she has planned to share with us this month. Please join me in welcoming her to the series (and the blog)! She will be introducing herself in the days ahead.  So, stay tuned.

The upcoming program for the Featured Author series can be found below the fold.

 

Reigniting the Torch

Dear Flickerers, 

It has been a while since we last had a Featured Author. After a bit of a hiatus, I am happy to say that it is now time to relaunch the program (see the upcoming schedule below)! First up, is our own Joshua Knobe--Professor of Cognitive Science and Philosophy at Yale University. Here is what he has to say about himself over on his homepage:

I am an experimental philosopher, appointed in both the Program in Cognitive Science and the Department of Philosophy. Most of my work involves using the kinds of experimental methods associated with cognitive science to address the kinds of questions associated with philosophy. 

A lot of my recent research has been concerned with the impact of people’s moral judgments on their intuitions about questions that might initially appear to be entirely independent of morality (questions about intention, causation, etc.). It has often been suggested that people’s basic approach to thinking about such questions is best understood as being something like a scientific theory. My co-authors and I have offered a somewhat different view, according to which people’s ordinary way of understanding the world is actually infused through and through with moral considerations.

For an overview of this research program as a whole, the best place to look is probably the paper Person as Scientist, Person as Moralist. (Or, if you are looking for something quicker and more entertaining, you could try this funny video.)

Josh has worked on a wide range of issues ranging from free will and intentional action to consciousness and the self, to name a few.  He has also edited several important volumes on experimental philosophy (see the books to the left) and he runs The Experimental Philosophy Page (see here). If you want to watch an interesting recent discussion with Josh you can find him talking shop about psychology and experimental philosophy with Daniel Kahneman (see here). He also did a great interview recently with Shelley Lynn Tremain for Discrimination and Disadvantage as part of the Dialogues on Disability Series (see here). 

Unlike most of the upcoming Featured Authors--who will likely only be doing week-long stints as part of the new format--Josh will likely be posting throughout the month. As someone whose own research program was shaped and changed by Josh's early work on intentional action, it's my honor to welcome him to be this month's Featured Author at Flickers of Freedom. Please join me in welcoming him to program!

 

The rest of the upcoming schedule is below the fold:

Featured Authors on the Horizon

Needless to say, discontinuing the Featured Author series did not have the effect I had hoped--namely, encouraging contributors to post more frequently. So, I have decided it only makes sense to start up the series once again. Albeit, in order to make it more likely we can get some non-contributors to play along, I have lowered the time commitment from one month to one week. The Featured Authors will still be recognized for the entire month, but they will only be blogging for a week. I have several outstanding invitations presently in the hopper, but I have two very exciting commitments already for Fall 2016:

September 19th-26th:                               Paul Russell [who also just joined as a contributor of the blog as well]

November 28th-December 2nd:            Michael Bratman

I am also delighted to announce than Daniel Dennett has agreed to do a stint sometime in Spring 2017 (we just have to find a time that works for him)! 

Add to this the fact that Patricia Greenspan is going to be a Featured Author this summer (date to be determined), and we are already off to an outstanding start!

That said, I need the community's help.  I have already sent invitations to several other senior philosophers and psychologists and I have a list of some junior philosophers to invite in the coming weeks. But I don't want to be the only person selecting Featured Authors (since there are surely some folks doing excellent work that have escaped my attention). It would be better if readers of the blog sent me their suggestions (via email)--even if it's just to nominate themselves! Given the new format, my goal is to have roughly twelve per year. So, please let me know who you'd like to see do a stint as a Featured Author here at Flickers of Freedom during the upcoming year!

p.s. This blog was never meant to be focused just on free will.  I would like to see more philosophy of action, moral psychology, philosophy of punishment, and other areas as well. So, keep that in mind in helping me to come up with some additional folks to invite!  Thanks in advance for your time and consideration!

[email protected]

 

Passing the Torch!

As the we shift from September to October, it is once again time for a changing of the tides here at Flickers of Freedom. Last month, we were fortunate to have some interesting food for philosophical thought from Heidi Maibom. In a series of insightful posts about how we can and should conceive of actions (rightly or wrongly), Heidi provided us with the opportunity to visit some issues that are especially timely given the state of our field--e.g., sexism, sexual harassment, and discrimination. So, I wanted to thank her once again for agreeing to be a Featured Author here at Flickers--a tradition which has spanned three years and which has included 32 philosophers and scientists. During this time, these authors have provided the blog with an embarrassment of philosophical and empirical riches.  I remain eternally grateful for their collective time and effort.

That said, it is now time to pass the torch to Natalia Washington--this month's Featured Author.  Here is a brief excerpt from her bio:

 

I am a McDonnell postdoctoral scholar in the Philosophy Neuroscience and Psychology program at Washington University in St. Louis, and a member of the Moral Psychology Research Group.

Originally from Chicago’s south side, I completed my B.A. in Philosophy with honors in the major at the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 2010, and earned my PhD in philosophy at Purdue University in 2015 under the direction of Daniel Kelly. I’m interested in externalist perspectives in philosophy of mind, psychology, and cognitive science, with the over-arching goal of understanding the ways in which minds and environments interact. Sometimes I like to think about Philosophical Taoism.

My dissertation research, entitled ‘Mental Health and Human Minds: Some Theoretical Criteria for Clinical Psychiatry’, investigates the theoretic and conceptual foundations of psychiatry as a science, and how mental health can be used as a lens through which to view human psychological nature.  I have also worked on projects on implicit bias and implicit cognition.

Given my own interests in moral psychology and the philosophy of psychiatry, I am especially excited to see what Natalia comes up with this month. As we wait on her first post (which may be a few more days in the making), please take the opportunity to join the discussion thread from Heidi's last post!

p.s. Natalia is the last Featured Author I have lined up through next summer--when Patricia Greenspan will doing a stint. So, let's make a collective effort to be especially active in the discussion threads this month. We'll have plenty of time to catch up on our other work in the months ahead!

 

Some Autobiographical Notes to Start

I trace back my philosophical interest in responsibility to when I started working on psychopathy. During my postdoc at Washington University in St. Louis, I came across Shaun Nichols’ work on psychopaths and the rationalism-sentimentalism debate. It struck me that psychopaths are hardly rational; certainly not practically rational, which was the kind of rationality Kant was concerned with. When I started looking at the experimental data I found that psychopaths have a range of attention deficits that affect their ability to make good decisions. And so I wrote a paper outlining psychopaths’ decision-making deficits and explaining how they might affect their moral judgments (Moral Unreason: The Case of Psychopathy). I concluded that psychopaths speak in favor of neither sentimentalism nor rationalism in ethics. For what it’s worth, I still think that is true, and I have found more empirical evidence to support that idea. It was this work on psychopaths and the rationalism vs. sentimentalism debate that seriously got me interested in psychopathology and moral psychology. That work was also the reason Walter Sinnott-Armstrong later invited me to participate in an APA session on psychopathy and legal responsibility. After much research into the insanity defense, I concluded that psychopaths are responsible for their actions because their madness is their badness. They are indistinguishable from people who simply do not care about morality (The Mad, the Bad, and the Psychopath).

The work I did on psychopaths and their legal responsibility opened my eyes to the importance of thinking about both moral and legal responsibility. I initially focused on legal responsibility and the insanity defense, since that is a pretty well defined area, at least if you compare it to the sprawling and multi-faceted moral responsibility debate. One advantage to focusing on legal responsibility is that the law assumes that compatibilism is true, and so the responsibility of ordinary people cannot be unmoored by incompatibilist arguments. Another advantage is that real-life cases promise to give us an account of responsibility that is relevant to our world and our moral practices. We should not put too much stock in our intuitions about far-flung examples, e.g. of complete mind control, and we should be careful that such cases do not unduly influence our theories about real-world responsibility.

I have been impressed with the difficulty that some theories have holding people responsible for their actions if they have views about what is right or wrong that differ from ours. What, for instance, do we say about the person who wants to kill his daughter, who has been raped, to erase the shame on his family? (To make it simpler, lets imagine he lives in the West.) Some theories of responsibility would exonerate him because he could not help having the moral outlook that he does. Similarly, such theories claim that holding people from different historical eras responsible for their actions also makes no sense. The problem with such views, I have argued, is that they seem to suppose that we can only ever be held responsible for doing things that are wrong by our own lights. But, as Socrates once said, nobody ever knowingly does wrong. Our account of moral responsibility, then, cannot reasonably rely on people knowingly doing wrong or right. We have to allow that people can be mistaken, negligible, or wrong, in ways that are culpable.

This is where I thought an account of responsibility that relies on the notion of ‘inferential routes’ has a lot of power. If there is an inferential route from someone’s beliefs, values, etc. to knowledge that what she is doing is wrong, and it was not too onerous to follow, then we can hold her responsible. Moreover, if she does not know what she is doing is wrong and she does not possess beliefs or values from which there is an inferential route to such knowledge, but she could acquire such knowledge, beliefs, or values without too much hardship given her environment and her mental condition, she can also be held responsible. This is, I argue, the best interpretation of the epistemic condition on responsibility, at least when it comes to moral intransigence. Choosing to ignore that what one does is wrong or simply disagreeing with one’s community about what is morally right or wrong cannot excuse.

Thinking about responsibility for acting under the influence of biases or situational factors—such as racial or gender stereotypes or subject to the situational effects (such as the bystander effect)—made me realize that knowing what we are doing under a relevant description cannot be a condition on responsibility. Most would agree that people who discriminate against, say, women because they are women are culpable for doing so. However, the more we know about such cases, the more certain it seems to be that the person is unaware of thinking that the person is less qualified, say, because she is a woman. How, then, do we account for our intuition that people are culpable for such acts of discrimination? Since many of the influences that we can be culpable for acting under the influence of have little to do with our character or our identifications, accounts that rely on these features being central to responsible agency won’t work. Instead, I argue that to be responsible, agents must have the capacity to know what they do, but not necessarily, or even primarily, in a direct, private, first personal, or introspective way. There is no need for the agent to be directly aware of her action under a relevant description. Rather, it is the ability to conceive of our action from a perspective other than our own that is central to responsibility; to know what we do as from the outside.

This is it by ways of introducing myself. I’ll be back!

Passing the Torch!

The time is once again upon us when we thank one Featured Author and welcome another.  So, first, let me thank Sarah Paul for an interesting month of blogging. From the relationship between rationality and alienation and the relevance of doxastic self-control to action theory, Sarah discussed some oft neglected topics that were a nice break from some of the more common issues we discuss when it comes to free will and moral responsibility.  As is always the case when we have someone do a stint as Featured Author, I was amazed anew with how much rich and illuminating work is being done when it comes to human thought and agency! So, thanks once again to Sarah for contributing her part to making this blog an interesting place for philosophical discussion.

That said, I would now like to welcome this month's Featured Author--Professor Heidi Maibom. Heidi is a Professor of Philosophy at The University of Cincinnati's McMicken College of Arts and Sciences. She has published widely in action theory and moral psychology. Here is a description of her work in her own words:

My research focuses on folk psychology and moral psychology. Folk psychology is our practice of thinking of one another in terms of what we think, feel, want, and so on. The question is how we do this. Do we use something like a theory of psychology or do we imagine being in others' shoes? I think we do both, only when we imagine being others, we become motivated by what they want. Nevertheless, many of our social skills are probably largely the same as many other animals', even though they don't think about thoughts, feelings, etc.

 

I am also interested in what makes us moral. Does morality requires a certain level of intelligence or rationality, or perhaps an ability to feel empathy or sympathy? By looking at immorality in ordinary people and psychopaths, we can figure out what goes wrong when we fail to do what is good or right. We can then determine the moral responsibility of mentally ill people, and understand the psychological basis of morality in us all.

I've taught courses in philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology, moral psychology, and philosophy of artificial intelligence & cognitive science, but I'm also interested in ancient Greek philosophy, ethics, and philosophy of science.

She will have more to say about her previous and current research projects in her first post. I have closely followed her work on empathy, psychopathy, and moral psychology which is one of the reasons I am so excited to have her as this month's Featured Author here at Flickers of Freedom. So, please join me in welcoming her. It ought to be another fun and illuminating month!

 

 

Passing the Torch!

It's time to once again pass the torch here at Flickers of Freedom from one Featured Author to the next. But first, I wanted to thank Helen Steward for generating such an illuminating discussion last month about the nature of determinism. Over the course of the month, 57 comments were posted in response to her initial post.  It was a very helpful and sustained discussion that ranged over metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and the history of philosophy.  I personally learned an awful lot from the discussion thread. So, thanks to all those who participated. It's no small wonder the free will debate is so protracted given that we can't even agree on what "determinism" means (or what determinism is)! Luckily, there's room for progress and discussions like the one ushered in by Helen last month help move us in the right direction.

That said, it is now time to welcome this month's Featured Author--Sarah Paul (PhD Stanford). Professor Paul is  normally Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but will be Visiting Assistant Professor at M.I.T. for Fall 2015.  She is interested in all things related to intention and action explanation. She is primarily a philosopher of action, but thinks that some of the most interesting results in philosophy come out of ecumenical, holistic approaches that cross subfield divisions, and so tries to make progress on understanding agency by thinking about related questions in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, ethics, and metaethics.  She wants to know how intentions relate to beliefs; how we know of our intentions, and of our resulting actions; what rational requirements apply to our intentions and beliefs, what reasons we have to obey them, and how we manage to do so from a psychological point of view; and what implications these answers have for moral responsibility and the criminal law.  A major theme of all of these projects is that we should be wary of idealization; our psychological limitations should directly inform our understanding of rationality, and an adequate account of what we ought to do should be directly sensitive to how we are to do it.

Recent articles include "Doxastic Self-Control" (American Philosophical Quarterly), "The Transparency of Intention" (Philosophical Studies), "Diachronic Incontinence is a Problem in Moral Philosophy" (Inquiry, special issue) and "Embarking on a Crime" (Law and the Philosophy of Action, Rodopi Press).  She is also just beginning to work on a textbook on the Philosophy of Action for the Routledge Contemporary Introduction to Philosophy series.

So, please join me in welcoming Sarah to the fray here at Flickers of Freedom.  I am excited to see what she comes up during the coming weeks.  Hopefully, I will hear from you in the discussion threads!

p.s.  Here is the scheduled line up in the months ahead. I have purposely left some time open so that regular contributors can post without feeling like they are infringing upon someone else's time.

 

September:   Heidi Maibom
October:         Natalia Washington 

2016:
June/July:    Patricia Greenspan