Flickers of Freedom

Trying

This will be my last post for the month. For reading along, for commenting, and for in places remaining graciously silent: thanks everyone. It’s been much more fun than I thought it would be.

I want to sketch some ideas about an aspect of agentive experience that gets too little attention. I don’t know how much this will engage with regular readers of this blog, and if not, my apologies. Also, some of these ideas are sketchy. Maybe that means they are better left unsaid (that’s my normal approach). But against my better judgment, I’ll sketch them anyway. 

Finally, now that I’ve written this, I notice it is far too long for a blog post. So, apologies again.

Why Think Decisions Are Intentional Actions?

Here are two things many people think about practical decisions (that is, decisions – or if you like, choices – about what to do).

1] Decisions are momentary and intentional mental actions that consist in the forming of an intention. (we might add that this mental action removes practical uncertainty about what to do)

2] Decisions are (at least typically) under the direct control of the agents who make them.

On one pretty standard story of what makes decisions *intentional* actions (Al Mele’s), decisions are intentional in virtue of the non-deviant causal work of an intention to decide what to do. When confronted with action-options, an agent is sometimes uncertain about what to do. This uncertainty prompts the acquisition of an intention to decide what to do, and the decision removes the uncertainty by settling matters.

Now, as Al and others have recognized, decisions are a bit odd. One way they are so is this: for most (every?) other intentional action, a relevant intention initiates, sustains, and GUIDES the action. I’m playing basketball with Anscombe. I get the ball in the post and Anscombe is guarding me. I intend to lay down a beautiful up-and-under – a move in which I show the ball, Anscombe goes flying in the air in an attempt to block the shot, and I step underneath her to draw the foul or get an easy shot. In this case, the content of my intention is a plan for action: turn thus-and-so, show the ball, wait for Anscombe to go flying, dip underneath, etc. So there is little question about HOW this intention should get executed.

The same is not true for decisions. The content of the intention in virtue of which the decisions is thought to be an intentional action is open-ended. It says nothing about which decision to make, about when I should end deliberation by making the decision, etc. Of course this open-ended character plausibly has something to do with the sense of freedom we have while deliberating (I just heard an interesting paper on this particular issue by Alison Fernandes). But it is difficult to understand how we can have the control we are often thought to have over our decisions, at the moment of deciding. After all, there would seem to be nothing in an agent’s intention that offers any guidance relevant to the decision.

In this connection, I like these lines from Jenann Ismael: ‘think of an attempt to follow the path in sand created by your own footsteps . . . you cannot follow a path created by your own footsteps. You have to chart your own course. There is no danger of straying from the path, but there is also nothing there to guide your footsteps.’ (this from her excellent 2012 paper ‘Decision and the open future’)

There is a lot more to say about this. Here I just want to motivate the problem. It seems a kind of cousin to worries about luck. But here I am focusing primarily on an action-theoretic issue. How can we be said to have direct control over our decisions at the moment of deciding?

P.S. something like this worry motivates some to give up on the thought that decisions are intentional actions (Brian O’Shaughnessy says some things to this effect). Wayne Wu, for example, has recently claimed that decisions are just automatic culminations of an extended action of deliberation. Maybe that’s right. What do people think? Do we need to think of decisions as intentional actions? Is the normal Melean story just fine, and we should just accept that decisions are a bit odd? Is the above control problem really a tough problem, and is it solvable?

Here Be Zombies, and Their Normative Ignorance

Regarding the connection between consciousness and FW/MR, a good many of y’all seemed pretty happy ditching phenomenal consciousness in favour of an explicitly functionalized notion. Maybe that’s because you haven’t thought about Zom. Zom is a pretty normal dude. He wears hats backwards. He tries unsuccessfully to be like Vince Vaughn. He thinks Sean Hannity is a smart person. He has a soft spot for the music of Matchbox 20. He can’t figure out if LeBron going back to Cleveland is a cold-blooded move or a heartwarming story or neither.

A few personal facts about Zom. Physically, he’s constituted just like a human agent would be. The main difference between Zom and you is twofold. First, Zom lacks phenomenal consciousness. Second, Zom has a fascination with what normal human beings call pain. Now, given the soft spot for Matchbox 20 and the judgment about Hannity, you might think Zom is not so sharp. But that’s not true: Zom is very sharp, and he has a considerable knowledge of the functional underpinnings of and social practices surrounding pain. Zom knows how pain works, he knows that people find it unpleasant, that they tend to blame the stuffing out of people who cause others pain, and many other such facts.

Gaze upon Zom (and despair): after thinking about whether he ought to do it, he kicks his friend’s dog in order to cause it pain. Is Zom morally responsible for causing the dog pain?

Well, Zom does not know what it is like to experience pain or pleasure – what it is like for an experience to be good or bad. So, arguably, Zom lacks phenomenal knowledge relevant to our case. Perhaps – and again arguably – Zom lacks more than this. Perhaps Zom lacks a certain kind of normative knowledge: knowledge of why pain is bad (for discussion of this point, see Guy Kahane’s paper here).

Here’s a plausible principle.

Excuse. One is not morally responsible for a typically wrong or blameworthy action A if one fails to understand why A is wrong or blameworthy, and one is not culpable for the failure of understanding.

Why think Excuse is plausible? It seems to underlie judgments about other cases. A four year old fails to understand why mentioning the truth about his uncle’s weight gain is typically a blameworthy thing to do (even if the four year old understands, because his father told him so, that mentioning how fat his uncle would be wrong). The four year old is therefore not responsible for hurting his uncle’s feelings (there are other cases, but this is getting long).

If you noticed a similarity with an argument Gary Watson advances regarding psychopaths, you get a good reader smiley face sticker. Watson notes that psychopaths have notorious deficits in empathy, and that it is possible that these deficits mean that psychopaths cannot but see any putatively moral norm as a merely conventional norm. Suppose psychopaths are like this: that they “cannot regard moral demands as anything more than coercive pressures” (p. 309 of this volume). According to Watson, such agents are normatively incompetent. And given their normative incompetence, it is infelicitous to blame them or to hold them accountable.

So let’s think again about Zom, after he has kicked the dog. We’ll tell him not to do that again, and we’ll shake our heads ruefully and say, “That Zom.” Should we blame Zom? For causing the dog pain? When Zom doesn’t understand why pain is bad? When pain’s badness is nothing more than a conventional norm to Zom? When Zom is blameless for his failure of understanding why pain is bad? (Here I’m channelling a bit of Gideon Rosen, who in this paper offers an argument in the vicinity.)

So perhaps it is infelicitous to hold a blamelessly morally ignorant agent responsible, where the blameless ignorance involves an inability to see the moral force of some moral consideration. Should we apply this kind of consideration to agents without phenomenal consciousness? If so, then regarding an important class of actions, namely, intentional inflictions of pain and suffering, an agent without phenomenal consciousness will be excused in virtue of blameless moral ignorance. Phenomenal consciousness will be necessary for at least this class of morally responsible actions.

Just for the record, I think there are flaws in this argument, I’ve got some counter-arguments, and indeed I am not inclined to accept the argument (on account of the counter-arguments). But I also think the argument is interesting enough to consider, and so without tainting things by discussing my own thoughts about this argument I want to open it up to readers for discussion.

Is Consciousness Important for Free Will? Why (Not)?

Don't let this post stop discussion of the new Pruss paper (in the post below this one). But since life is short I thought I'd put up a further post.

In a forthcoming x-phi paper (here) I give Reasons-Responsive and Deep Self theorists a (bit of a) hard time. Basically, I argue that my results indicate that consciousness is much more important to free will than the considerations motivating either view. But both kinds of theorist rarely say much about consciousness. Why not? I wouldn’t mind hearing from either kind of theorist on this question in the comments.

(In that paper I think aloud a bit about how a Deep Self or Reasons-Responsive theorist might proceed. I won’t go into that here.)

Another question: are there any good arguments for or against a consciousness-free will connection? I might throw out an argument for and an argument against in a later post, but maybe these arguments will come up in discussion. In any case, I want to hear from y’all on this.

A final question: what aspect or form of consciousness seems most relevant to FW/MR, and why? I’ve always assumed the relevant form was phenomenal consciousness, and that the relevant aspects involved the kinds of phenomenally conscious states and processes associated with deliberation and choice (but what, exactly, are those?). But Neil Levy has just written an excellent book on the consciousness-moral responsibility connection, and for Levy phenomenal consciousness is largely irrelevant. Is Levy right to ditch phenomenal consciousness?

So, to review, three issues I’d like to discuss: why do leading theories of moral responsibility say so little about consciousness (and - especially given that the folk seem to find consciousness very important for FW/MR - is this a mistake)? What are the arguments for or against a consciousness-free will connection? What are the relevant forms of consciousness at issue: phenomenal, various non-phenomenal notions (like self-awareness or some kind of accesssibility relation)?

At the ground floor of agency: Control or choice?

There is a short version and a long version of this post. Short version: consider the following options.

1] Control over bodily action is not fundamentally distinct from control over choice (does not require a different kind of control, nor a ‘more robust variety’ of control).

2] Control over bodily action is fundamentally distinct from control over choice (does require a different kind of control, or a ‘more robust variety’ of control).

As far as I can see, some libertarians (especially event-causalists) can endorse 1]. If so, though, I wonder whether these libertarians would concede that a focus on choice in discussions of free will does not get at anything essential to agency.

2] will of course be endorsed by some libertarians. Would any compatibilists endorse 2]? If so, I’d like to hear more about the kind of control at issue in choice.

Now consider:

3] Control of type-1] is all that is required for an understanding of agency (at most, some vague kind of ‘agency par excellence’ is left out).

4] A special kind of control over choice is required for any adequate understanding of agency (i.e., one that does not leave out something essential to agency).

I’m interested to hear what readers think about 1] vs. 2] and about 3] vs. 4]. That’s the short version: readers pressed for time can skip to the comments.

The long version involves me motivating these questions by saying a bit about why I opt for 1] and for 3].

The plan

Thanks Thomas! To all the Flickers readers, here's my tentative plan for the month:

I have a few planned posts on topics like control, free will and consciousness, x-phi, and deciding. Maybe some other stuff will come up: we'll see. I'll try to post about once a week, so feel free to post other interesting stuff in the meantime. I'll commence with the posting tomorrow (topic: control and the foundations of agency).

Passing the Torch

First, I wanted to once again thank Kristin Mickelson for doing such a great job as last month's Featured Author. She not only posted a ton of interesting ideas, but she was also a tireless discussant in the threads--which can be more time consuming than some might realize. It's amazing to me that after 15 Featured Authors, the series hasn't lost any steam! So, I am grateful not only to Kristin but to all of the folks who have made the series a success. That said, it's time to pass the torch to this month's Featured Author--Joshua Shepherd.

Joshua Shepherd is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford – more specifically at the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics. He got his Ph.D. from Florida State, where he worked with Al Mele on the nature of control over action and the place of consciousness in our understanding of control. He is interested in a wide range of topics to do with the philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and moral psychology, including the nature of agency, the nature of consciousness, the relationship between agency and consciousness, and the normative significance of consciousness. He has papers published or forthcoming on a range of topics (see here). Perhaps Flickers of Freedom readers will be most interested in his papers on the nature of control, the nature of conscious control, on links between free will and consciousness (see here and here), on intentional omission, and on conscious deciding.

Finally, here is the line up for the Featured Author series through the end of the year (with more additions to come soon for 2015):

August:                  Marcus Arvan

September:            Matt King

October:                Justin Coates

November:            Charles Hermes

December:             Peter Tse  

As always, thanks to everyone for helping to make this blog such a great online forum for discussing free will and related issues! Hopefully, everyone (inclding me) can try to find more time to participate in the discussion threads in the weeks and months ahead.  Try not to miss out on the fun. We have a rare community here at Flickers, so we shouldn't take it for granted!