Flickers of Freedom

Free Will as a Case of "Crazy Ethics"

This will be the final post. It was fun blogging with you for a month, and I am grateful to Thomas for the invitation, and to everyone who joined in. As many of you know, in addition to the free will problem I have been working for some years now on moral paradoxes and various other weird stuff in normative and applied ethics. My book 10 Moral Paradoxes was the first result, and some more recent papers have followed. If someone wants to get a picture of my recent doings, "Why Moral Paradoxes Matter: Teflon Immorality and the Perversity of Life" Philosophical Studies (online preview), would be a good place to start. As a result of all this wading in weirdness I have recently begun to develop a concept that I call "Crazy Ethics" (or CE), and here I'll say a little bit about it, and then indicate why I think that it is very much relevant to the way we should view the free will problem.

WHAT IS CRAZY ETHICS?

I do not use the term “crazy” pejoratively for ethical views I disagree with (as when one says "that view is just crazy"), nor am I referring to views that everyone should think are crazy, such as genocidal Nazi views. Rather, I use “crazy ethics” (or CE) as a semi-descriptive term for some views that we ourselves hold, or that we think might be true. I claim that some true ethical views are, in this sense, crazy. To say that the free will problem is "crazy" in this sense is to say that we have good reasons to believe that plausible views on the free will debate strongly exhibit the characteristics of crazy ethics.

Parfit on Desert, Punishment and Fairness

Back to hard determinism. I thought it would be interesting to do something a bit different. So here's a link to a draft of a short (fewer than 3400 words) paper of mine for those who want the full Monty, and below it a half-sized summary. I apologize for the length of the post/summary, but in order to be fair to Parfit I need to quote him quite a bit. Any thoughts that can help me to see if I am
missing something (Parfit is so incredibly smart that that must be the default position) would be most welcome and, more importantly, I thought that this would be a nice way of further probing HD, and ideas of fairness and justice if (or to the extent that) we follow HD.

 http://philo.haifa.ac.il/staff/smilansky/Parfit-Punishment%20PDF.pdf

In his recent monumental book ON WHAT MATTERS (OUP 2011), Derek Parfit argues for a hard determinist view that rejects free will-based desert. In Appendix E of his book, however, Parfit claims that it is possible to mete out fair punishment: “When people knowingly commit some crime, or break some other rule or regulation, it may be fair to impose some penalties on these people, which may be either imprisonment or fines” (vol. II, p. 649). Parfit's position on punishment here seems to be inconsistent with his hard determinism. Matters are in fact much grimmer with respect to punishment than his views seem to presume.

Compatibilism, the Individuation of Responsibility, and The Trap

In this post I will turn my critical focus from hard determinism to compatibilism. I will present a shortened version of some philosophical moves I recently made in the Journal of Ethics ("The Trap, the Appreciation of Agency, and the Bubble"). I take up the issue of the individuation of responsibility (namely, WHO is responsible and hence potentially blameworthy for whatever happens), and present an argument that, for me, best captures the hard determinist case, and the weakness of compatibilism. This argument, "The Trap", is meant to show why, even under ideal compatibilist conditions, compatibilist justice will typically be deeply unjust. Put differently, we see why the absence of libertarian free will matters greatly, and hence, given that we will continue to punish people (and engage in similar practices which harm people), broadly following compatibilist lines, and perhaps even should continue to do so, then life will be inherently unjust, and indeed tragic. [I apologize for the length of this post.]

Assume a deterministic world. In this world, millions of children are born every year. Let's focus on a modern, advanced liberal democracy, say, the US. Let us then increase the resolution, and focus on one guy, let us call him Zed. We pick up Zed's story when he is in prison, serving a lengthy sentence, which will effectively ruin his life. All compatibilist conditions have been fully satisfied; he is a model of the deserving wrongdoer, according to compatibilism. Given determinism, we can in principle go back in time and track his path in life, from the cradle to the prison. This path, as compatibilists will admit, is not in a garden of forking paths (although it probably seemed so to Zed), but actually resembles a railroad track, leading right to the prison gates.

Is It About Time?

Thank you for the responses to my first post, on compatibility-dualism. I trust that more people now have a better idea of how such a position on the compatibility question can make sense, and some of the things that make it attractive, as compared to a monistic compatibilism or hard determinism. And I hope that some people will try to work out for themselves positions that combine the two, not necessarily in the way I do so but simply because they now recognize the philosophical freedom to transcend the monisms. I will now turn to some more speculative posts; about questions that seem open to me and that I have not written on much before. The first is about time.

In one way, time seems to matter a great deal in the free will context. In the present, as an active agent engaged in choice, it is very difficult to take a hard determinist perspective, and deny all freedom and responsibility. Typically, I cannot see myself as determined when acting. I can say that I believe that, whatever I will end up doing, it will have been determined that I will do it, and if determinism is the case, that will be true. But when choosing and acting, I cannot (in a normal case) view myself as being carried away by the forces determining me, so that I can honestly abdicate my responsibility as a choosing agent. It seems to me that even hard determinists cannot say that, at the moment of acting, they need any further abilities or capacities beyond those they undeniably have, in order to do what they want, follow the good and the right, or the like. I hasten to add that I am interested in a typical action or choice, not in extreme situations where overbearing compulsions perhaps prevent a person from doing what he wants to do, or in another form limit his freedom in a way that even compatibilists will accept as severe limitations. Let us concentrate on those actions that are free, if any are.

Still A Compatibility-Monist, After All These Years?

Thank you Thomas for the invitation, I am grateful; I am honored to have been asked (and particularly to be appearing right after John "immortality" Fischer). I thought that I would post on a number of distinct things, but focus more on stuff related to my weird views on the compatibility question, rather than on my super-weird views on Illusionism (although since at the end of the day illusion is the solution to everything, it won't be completely absent). In order to simplify, I will assume in my discussions that there is no libertarian free will, and will focus on asking what the implications of this absence are. But this only applies to my posts, and of course libertarians, i.e. incompatibilists who think that there is free will and moral responsibility, are welcome to join in. This first post will be a bit on the longish side, but I promise less wordhishness later on.

My first post will be mostly a call for CLARIFICATION and INFORMATION. I genuinely do not know how many people are not simply compatibilists OR incompatibilists, but rather what I call compatibility-dualists. I suspect that not many. And I am perplexed by what seems to be the rarity of this sort of position. This "dualistic" option is open to libertarians as well, but it will be most salient (or rather, should be most salient) to compatibilists and hard determinists. We can take compatibility-dualism to be the idea that the truth on the compatibility question is a complex mix: neither compatibilists nor hard determinists are completely correct, on the compatibility question. Rather, we need to try and integrate the insights of both sides.

Featured Author: Saul Smilansky

Last month's inaugeral Featured Author series with Professor John Martin Fischer was a great success.  So, thanks again to everyone for playing along.  I think the entire month of October highlighted just how interesting and illuminating philosophical blogging can be. And I am delighted to have many more months of engaging philosophical blogging to come as our all-star line-up of upcoming Featured Authors continues to provoke the readers of Flickers of Freedom to think about the multitude of interesting issues that arise in the context of free will and responsibility.

That said, please join me in welcoming the next Featured Author at Flickers of Freedom--Professor Saul Smilansky of the University of Haifa.   Professor Smilasnky's main research interests are the free will problem; normative ethics (with special emphasis on moral paradoxes, meta-normative theory, and the notion of contribution); and the role of illusion and self-deception in our lives. He is presently working on some new paradoxes, and thinking on what all this paradoxicality might mean. He has also begun to work on a bigger project, which concerns the idea of what he calls "crazy ethics," whereby our true (or at least most plausible) moral beliefs might in some ways be "crazy." This project incorporates much of his previous work on free will, moral paradoxes, and illusion. He is the author of Free Will and Illusion (2000) and 10 Moral Paradoxes (2007).

So, please check back in the upcoming days for Professor Smilansky's first post. Hopefully, everyone will read the posts as eagerly as I will and participate actively in the ensuing discussion.   I expect the comment threads to contain some first rate philosophy!  So, happy flickering everyone!