Flickers of Freedom

Exemptions and Patient Competence

When evaluating a patient in a clinical context, two central principles of modern medical ethics come to the fore, what are known as the beneficence and autonomy principles. The beneficence principle deals with patients’ good. Doctors must act in ways that are good for the patients in their charge. The autonomy principle, on the other hand, deals with patients’ rights. According to it, doctors must respect the right of every individual of autonomy over their own person—that is, they must respect patients' decisions about their medical care. 

Of course, these two principles can, and often do, come into conflict, especially in cases of anosognosia, or lack of awareness that one is mentally ill. The right thing to do in these cases is both complex, and highly contextualized, though the consensus in the literature seems to be that paternalist action—acting for the sake of a patient’s good regardless of their will—is pro tanto wrong, even if all things considered justified. In these cases, I argue, the burden of proof falls on the clinician (or philosopher) to provide such justification when dealing with competent patients.

This raises the question, what does it mean to be a ‘competent’ patient? Is there anything about mental illness generally, or anosognosia in particular that causes people to fail to meet such criteria? One obvious place to begin thinking about this is with Strawson’s work on our common practices of treating others as responsible agents. As is well known, Strawson presents us with two kinds of cases in which we do not commonly treat others as responsible agents. First, there are those who we recognize as agents, who may not have the right kind of knowledge about or control over the situation in question. These people are excused. Second, there are the much less discussed and perhaps less well understood individuals who simply fail to be appropriate targets for our reactive attitudes. These people are exempt.

Interestingly enough, Strawson's characterization of those toward whom we take this stance are, roughly, children and those with mental illness (we need not follow him in calling this second group 'warped', 'deranged', or 'neurotic'!). Despite its intuitive appeal, however, it's not clear to me that mental illness universally absolves one of responsible agency, or that it exempts one from patient competence and the respect of clinicians. A so-called kleptomaniac, for example, may not be reasons-responsive when it comes to taking things she does not own, but nonetheless perfectly capable of being a collaborative partner as regards her medical care.

I think that the right way to go about this is actually to drop the notion of exemption, and instead opt for a more complicated picture. Different mental disorders present different challenges to reasons responsiveness in different domains, and not all of those may be relevant to determining an individual patient's competency. Moreover, we must be careful about the danger of construing denials that one is mentally ill as mental illness, as in the recent case of Kamilah Brock.

(Perhaps, as extra fuel for this philosophical and ethical fire, we may consider this recent case, of a man whose rights and wishes are being respected.)

Sources of skepticism 2

In the last post I talked a bit the importance of nailing down what we are talking about when we talk about moral judgment - do we mean to be asking after the nature of 'entities' or 'units' like utterances and beliefs, or about some kind of mental process or mental action? I said this was one dimension of what I called the under-articulation problem that attaches to the vast majority of work in empirically informed moral psychology. Today, I'll try to say something about the other two dimensions I mentioned last week - viz., 

(2) Models pay insufficient or the wrong kind of attention to the developmental etiology of the target explananda, and 

(3) Models are anchored in considerations that were not designed for thinking about the psychology or cognitive science of moral judgment.

About (3), first. Greene et al.'s 2001 paper that I cited last week deployed standard trolley problem cases. And hundreds of subjects around the world have now been asked to considered all manner of scenarios that build on basic trolley-logy.

What has largely gone un-noticed, however, is that these kinds of scenarios (indeed, Philippa Foot's and Judith Jarvis Thomson's initial exchange about runaway trolleys) were not designed to test hypotheses about moral psychology. They were used in the service of testing the plausibility and import of a distinction between killing and letting die. When some undergraduates are confronted for the first time with the basic runaway trolley case and are asked whether it is morally permissible for the driver (or bystander) to redirect the trolley from 'the five' to 'the one', they change the subject if they answer in terms of what they would do, or in terms of what someone might feel if they did or did not redirect the trolley. So far as I know, the considerable pre-2001 philosophical literature deploying trolley-logy was in the service of moral epistemology. (The last part of Nagel's "War and Massacre", however, starts to hint at what our judgments about killing and letting die might reveal about human psychology.) [Foot, P. Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect. Oxford Review, 1967; Thomson, J.J. Killing, Letting Die and the Trolley Problem. The Monist 59 (1976): 204-217; Nagel, T. War and Massacre. Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1972): 123-144.]

Now, people are at liberty to appropriate trolley-logy scenarios in their empirical work. With that I have no beef. My concern is that two very crude (philosophical) distinctions were imported along the methodology. Right from the beginning, subjects' responses to trolley cases were described in terms of the distinction between "deontology" and "utilitarianism", or in terms of the relative contributions to moral judgment of "reason" and "emotion". Once fMRI images of subjects' brains, showing that different parts of the brain "light up" when subjects give the utilitarian response to a scenario rather than the deontological response, those crude philosophical distinctions were unfortunately reified into some sort of psychological facts. And this status has been strengthened by the deployment of so-called Dual Process Theory, according to which there are two (!) types of mental processing. System 1 processing is fast, unconscious or implicit, and automatic; System 2 processing is slow, conscious or explicit, and effortful. (All sorts of questions about DP Theory, but I will resist the tangent.)

We've been delivered the following picture of human moral judgment (here, I think, referring to a process):

Probe: Is it permissible to turn the trolley? 

Subject’s response	YES	NO
Crude philosophical descriptor	Utilitarian response	Deontological response
fMRI data	Areas A, B & C light up 'Emotion areas'	Areas X, Y & Z light up 'Reason areas'
Dual Processing View	System 2	System 1

Tastes differ, I know, but where some people see the chart above as revealing converging lines of evidence for an explanation of moral judgment, I see converging re-descriptions. 

About (2). It is striking (and puzzling), when you think about it, that philosophers have paid so little attention to the fact that epistemic and moral agents were once children. We (adults) were not always the epistemic and moral agents we are now, and it would be surprising if our current adult capacities were not constrained in some ways by the ways in which those capacities develop. The point is related to Owen Flanagan's "principle of minimal psychological realism", which he argued ought to constrain normative theory. Very roughly, while a moral theory is normative (setting out regulative ideals about how live), it isn't worth its salt if it is something that creatures like (with our psychological capacities) are unable to implement. Similarly, if we are genuinely interested in human moral judgment, we need to think about how the capacities to (a) take a moral interest in the world, and (b) make moral evaluation of aspects of that world develop. [Flanagan, O. Varieties of Moral Personality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.]

Now, of course, a entire sub-field in psychology is devoted to moral development, and the "Big Daddy" of this sub-field, Lawrence Kohlberg (influenced by Piaget) certainly had quite a bit to say about moral maturity and immaturity. But Kohlberg rigged the game from the start by assuming the truth of some kind of Kantianism. Morally mature individuals, Kohlberg's view, made moral judgments in light of considering universal and impartial moral principles, which they endorsed independently of social pressures to conform, and reasoning their way to a conclusion about what actions are morally permissible. This picture, by the way, is what most social psychologists have in mind as the referent of "moral rationalism". Qua philosopher, I prefer to reserve "rationalism" to refer to a view about the nature of mind -- roughly, having to do with the degree to which the operations and contents of the mind are innately constrained. More on this in the next post.

Other extant views about moral development (within psychology, at least) typically are not premised on a particular normative theory. Rather they assume that the moral norms and rules of a society are whatever they are and that children come to "internalize" those norms. The discussion turns, then, not surprisingly, to talk about the mediating roles of parenting, explicit instruction, punishment and reward strategies, peer influence in the process of internalization.  I have looked and looked and have not yet found a substantive account of what it is to "internalize" anything. Does it mean 'come to believe', 'remember', 'understand and endorse'? This is not a pedantic quibble. My point is that talk of internalizing moral rules and norms offers us a re-description of the phenomena for which we seek explanations. How do children develop into moral judgers? It is no answer to this question that they internalize moral rules and norms, if one does not flesh out what psychological/cognitive process internalization is.

Now, Kohlberg is Haidt's target in that 1991 paper I cited last week. And while it was certainly nice to see the beginnings of an alternate view moral judgment, Haidt loses completely Kohlberg's concern with how the capacity to make moral judgments develops.

Concerns (2) and (3) are related. 

Haidt's paper was quite reactionary. It is too easy to establish -- and surely most of us knew this already -- that human beings rarely explicitly reason their way to a moral judgment by articulating a precisely-worded moral principle (or two)  along with an accurate description of the event or action to be evaluated. Hence, the mere 'discovery' of moral dumbfounding -- the (apparent) inability of individuals to reconstruct the 'reasons' for their moral judgments -- does not, by itself, show that moral judgments are nothing more than 'gut reactions', or 'instincts'. But Haidt's "findings" played right into the framework represented by the table above. Just as Kohlberg rigged his view about the developmental psychology of moral judgment by presupposing a (crudely) Kantian picture of what how moral judgment is arrive "correctly", the vast majority of contemporary empirical investigation into the nature of moral judgment bears the marks of being hobbled at the outset by several problematic assumptions.

 

 

 

Sources of Skepticism 1

A little intellectual autobiography

My interest in moral psychology – particularly, in the idea that the study of moral judgment might be usefully pursued by borrowing some ideas from linguistics –was an opportunistic development. As a grad student at MIT, one could not help but notice the parallel between being asked for native speaker acceptability judgments by Linguistics grad students and being asked for permissibility judgments about trolley problem cases by Judy Thomson. My dissertation was about tacit knowledge of language, but my first job had me teaching quite a bit of moral philosophy – using, by the way, John Fischer and Mark Ravizza’s wonderful 1992 text. So, quite naturally, I was led to think more about what moral judgment is, what makes it possible, about whether linguistic diversity might be a model for moral diversity, and so on.

Coming across Elliot Turiel’s work in the early nineties prompted me to consider whether the typical child’s (moral) environment is impoverished relative to the moral abilities she acquires, in other words, whether a poverty-of-the-moral-stimulus argument was at all motivated. Mark Baker's work got me thinking that it might be worth investigating the idea that moral differences might be explicable in terms of something akin to linguistic parameters. And, more recently, John Collins’ superb papers in the philosophy of linguistics proved immensely helpful in thinking about the relation between native-judgers’ moral judgments and moral theory. (See esp., Faculty Disputes. Mind & Language 17 (2004): 300-333, and Linguistic Competence Without Knowledge. Philosophy Compass 2/6 (2007): 880-895.)

I always believed that empirical findings could be brought to bear on some of the claims about moral judgment I was entertaining: for example, that moral judgment is made possible by the operation of a domain–specific faculty of the mind; that the intractability of some moral disagreements might be understood in terms of constraints (parameters) that emerge early in ontogenetic development as interaction effects of the child’s innate endowment and certain features of her environment. But I was not trained as an experimentalist and at least my version of the so-called linguistic analogy model (cf. Mikhail’s version 2011) remained insufficiently articulated to hand off to friends in social psychology or anthropology to design the relevant experiments and field studies.

The explosion in the empirical investigation of moral cognition or moral judgment was not triggered by proponents of the linguistic analogy, but rather (it seems to me) received its impetus from two papers published in 2001: Josh Greene et al.’s fMRI study of subjects considering trolley problem cases and Jon Haidt’s paper attempting to rattle the Kohlbergian hegemony in developmental moral psychology. (Greene, J.D. et al. An fMRI study of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science, 293 (2001): 2105-2108; Haidt, Jonathan.The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review 108.4(2001): 814-834.)

In my first post, I advertised that I’d try to explain my skepticism about this experimental work on moral judgment. That skepticism has two sources: (1) the models of moral judgment that are tested or challenged in a good deal of extant work are, like my own view, under-articulated; and (2) the majority of experimental moral psychology either assumes an empiricist conception of the human mind and/or falls prey to the “seduction of reduction”. (1) and (2) are not completely independent, but I’ll treat them as such for ease of exposition.

Today, then, a start on the under-articulation problem.

As I see it, there three dimensions to this problem. (Since I intend only to raise questions and not to attack particular individuals, I am not going directly to cite many specific studies, unless they happen to be usefully illustrative.)  

1. Target explananda are not precisely identified; in particular, across and sometimes even within studies, there is equivocation about a central expression, viz., “moral judgment”.

2. Models pay insufficient or the wrong kind of attention to the developmental etiology of the target explananda.

3. Models are anchored in considerations that were not designed for thinking about the psychology or cognitive science of judgment.

I’ll start with #1.

To say that one studies moral judgment, period, is to leave it unclear whether one is interested in (A) a particular kind of product or (B) a particular kind of process. I’ll use the lower case moral judgment to refer to products, and upper case Moral Judgment to refer processes.

Construed as products, moral judgments might be any or all of the following:

a. utterances

b. beliefs

c. attitudes

d. speech acts

e. intuitions

f. propositions

If your concern is meta-ethical, and you’re worried about whether moral judgments are truth evaluable or intrinsically motivating, then you’ll be careful to disambiguate. But that kind of care is absent in the vast majority of empirical work in moral psychology – even when investigators manage not to equivocate between “judgment”, “reasoning”, and “decision-making”.

But what comes out of people’s mouths may bear only a tenuous relation to their attitudes or beliefs. And I know of no clear account of how, empirically, to distinguish intuitions from beliefs.

Construed as a process, Moral Judgment is variously described as something that

a. generates moral judgments

b. drives moral judgment

c. plays a role in forming moral judgments

d. produces moral judgments,

 or, as

 e. the process of reasoning to moral judgments

 or, in some sense,

 f. responsible for an individual coming to have or finding herself with a moral judgment.

These lists are no doubt only partial, but the potential for question-begging and for confusion of other kinds should be obvious.

Of course, I get it that if you’re running a study about “moral judgment”, you’ll need to operationalize the notion. But even here, investigators have employed quite different methods: subjects have been asked to enter rating on a Likert scale about whether an imagined action is permissible or forbidden; they've been asked how wrong an action is; they’ve been asked how severely an agent ought to be punished for performing an action; they’ve been asked whether an action is ‘okay’. We should be cautious in drawing conclusions about the nature of moral judgment from ‘converging’ bodies of evidence when that ‘evidence’ has been arrived at on the basis of quite different assumptions. Indeed, it is challenging even to try to compare various studies.

Still, it is not as if philosophers don’t get into the same sort of pickles. “Moral judgments require backing by reasons. . . . One must have reasons of else one is not making a moral judgment at all (Rachels, 1993; see also Kennett & Fine, 2009)”; moral judgments are intrinsically motivating (Smith, 1994); moral judgments have a distinctive phenomenology (Horgan & Timmons 2007; Glasgow, 2013); moral judgments are performatives (Gibbard 1990).

This is stipulation of a quite different kind. And I understand why people engaged in the empirical investigation of moral ‘judgment’ – heavens, I've made it difficult to use the term myself – would be impatient with the (sometimes too quick) dismissal of their work by philosophers who are sure about the necessary conditions for any judgment being a genuine moral judgment.

In any event, notice two other matters that require some kind of resolution before we can articulate a model of moral judgment (and of Moral Judgment) that could be used to test how Moral Judgment works in human beings. First, there is the question of what it is to make a judgment or engage in judgment. And second is the question is what (if anything) makes a judgment or an event of judging moral (as opposed to non-moral).

On the former, I encourage readers to take a look at the essays in Mental Actions, edited by Lucy O'Brien and Matthew Soteriou (Oxford: OUP, 2009). I may have some more to say about this anon.

On the latter, I don't pretend that it's news that there is no definitive account of how to individuate a distinctly moral domain, and that might have serious implications for how to think seriously about and empirically investigate moral judgment and moral cognition. See Josh Greene's recent notes on this. Something else on which I might comment anon. (The Rise of Moral Cognition. Cognition 135 (2015): 39-42.

But the long and short of it is that there is very little agreement about what, precisely, is being studied under the general rubric of 'moral judgment'.

How to address this:

People are at liberty of course to stipulate what they shall mean by the expression “moral judgment”. And it would be a step towards clarity if they would do just that.

But there is an wide open invitation here for philosophers to revisit the question of what a judgment is, whether judgment is a mental action. This is all for now fully consistent with the idea that there is no domain specific thing moral cognition.

We should never lose sight of the fact that how adult abilities bear the marks of their development. So the children are important, as are other populations. But what we want to know is not how could this phenomenon exist, but why does this exist rather than something else. More on that issue next week when I take on the views about the mind and reduction.

What are we studying – object of inquiry and development (always a plus of the LA for me)

How to find a way to talk about the conflation of psychology and philosophy?

 

Where are the Foxes?

I don't want to distract from Gregg's excellent posts this month but I have one of those 'state of the field' questions.  During my comments on Michael Mckenna's new paper last week, I divided the literature into two categories: fox papers and hedgehog papers.  I stole the metaphor from Isaiah Berlin (I'm also going to start inserting random 'i's into my first name) who famously divided authors into hedgehogs and foxes.  “The fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing really well.” 

For my purposes, hedgehog papers are papers that take a theory-driven approach, sometimes proposing necessary and/or sufficient conditions for free and responsible behavior.  Papers that develop counterexamples to other condition-based theories are also hedgehogs.  Fox papers are more impressionistic. They try to shed light on particular aspects of our responsibility-related attitudes and practices.  But they don't try to fit them into one big system of justification, their own or anybody else’s.

So for example, Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment" is a paradigmatic fox paper.  Watson’s Robert Harris paper and Williams’ (and maybe Nagel’s) “Moral Luck” are also foxes, or at least foxy. Both of Frankfurt’s early papers are hedgehogs, along with Watson’s “Free Agency” and a host of others. 

Obviously there’s value in both approaches, but it seems like our field is dominated by hedgehog books and articles.  Foxes are few and far between.  I tried to think of a fox book, and no clear cases come to mind off the top of my head.  (Shame and Necessity maybe?)  The balance doesn’t seem to be so lopsided in other areas of ethics, although it probably is at least as lopsided in metaphysics. (I wouldn’t know.)   So anyway, two questions: first, why is the field so hedgehog-oriented?  (Or is it?) And second, do you have any foxy papers and books that you can recommend?  

 

Mental Illness and Moral Responsibility

Mental illness affects how we perceive the actions of others and with good reason. Consider two scenarios. In scenario 1 a person crashes into you because they had a non-epileptic seizure while driving. The seizure was due to an undiagnosed anxiety disorder (the person never had a seizure prior to this one). In scenario 2 a person  crashes into you because they want to harm you, they do not have a mental illness of any kind (let's assume). Surely, almost everyone would agree that we are more likely to deem the agent in scenario 2 as morally responsible for crashing into you but not the agent in scenario 1 (MR skeptics aside). I would cite the anxiety order as the exculpating factor in this scenario. The illness left the agent without control over their actions. Now, this is not to say that I think anxiety disorders exculpate in every scenario, far from it! But rather than get bogged down with the details of any one disorder I'd like to speak in more general terms to get the conversation going (though I'd be happy to discuss such details when explaining why we think some disorders exculpate and others do not). 

In the last post I focused on psychopathy. My claim was that psychopaths are morally responsible because their disorder does not leave them without requisite control or with an inability to meet one's favored epistemic condition. In my previous line of work I worked with many that were afflicted with addiction, PTSD, depression, various mood disorders, anxiety disorders, psychosis, schizophrenia, ADHD, and others. Many of these disorders are on a spectrum and some are more dehabilitaing than others. Now, I ask you all: which disorders are exculpating and why? For me, disorders that have as part of their diagnosis hallucinations seem to be excupating in many scenarios (but not all). But the fact that a person has any particular disorder is not exculpating in itself (or is it?), and I think this is an important point. Consider scenario 1 again. This time, let's build into the case that the agent has had 3 such episodes in the last few weeks (call this scenario 1B). Let's further stipulate that the agent can sense when a seizure is coming on and that such seizures can be prevented by taking medication and that the doctor recommended that the agent not drive until the agent had a month without seizures (just to be safe and to make sure the medication was working). Now, it seems that if the agent wasn't taking their meds (because they simply did not want to) and they were feeling as if a seizure was on the verge of coming on but decided to drive anyway, then this agent is morally responsible. Thus, the disorder in and of itself is not doing the work here, at least it doesn't seem to be. Notice that the same thing occurred in scenario 1 and 1B, an agent crashed into an innocent person due to a cognitive disorder that the person was not culpable for (the agent did not ask to have this disorder). In other words, that the agent has this disorder is not *their fault* in either case. What is the agent's fault in scenario 1B, at least at first glance, was a failure to adhere to doctor's orders and for risking driving when the agent felt the seizure coming on. Do folks think that the anxiety disorder exculpates in scenario 1B? These sorts of questions can be generated with any mental illness/disorder and I find it fruitful to use such scenarios to get a grip on what it is about any one disorder that exculpates. I also think that this gets us to deeper questions about the nature of morally responsible agency as well.

Please feel free to discuss variants of the case I mention with other disorders. I find that the thought experiment is helpful to get clear on the disorder in question as well as getting clear on what we find salient in the moral responsibility literature more generally. 

Before concluding I'll ask some further questions (just in case the previous one's were not interesting to you all): (1) Do disorders determine how we will perceive things? Or, do they limit or constrain our salient choices? (2) What is it about an illness that exculpates the person with the disorder?

PS: My stint as FA is coming to a close. However, I do plan on posting a couple more times before handing over the reigns. I'm thinking something on Helen Steward's work re: Agency Incompatibilism, and, a sketch of an epistemic argument against FW skepticism that I'm still working out and would love some feedback on. 

Cheers to a productive work week folks!

On a Freedom Requirement for Forgiveness

We have all forgiven someone before.  In fact, forgiveness can often serve as a key ingredient in our most cherished interpersonal relationships. Many of us who work on free will related topics have thought long and hard about questions concerning blame. Questions like: When is it appropriate to blame? Who should we blame? And, how much overt blame would be justified in any given scenario (among others)? What many have rarely analyzed are questions that arise after we move on from the blame game. For instance, when should we give up the attitudes that constitute blame (resentment, anger, etc.) for more favorable sentiments toward those who have wronged us? When should we forgive?

Forgiveness is confusing. How are we to understand the nature of forgiveness and how do we distinguish it from other related concepts? Peter Strawson once said, referring to forgiveness, that it was “a rather unfashionable subject in moral philosophy at present” (1962/2003 pp. 75). Whether or not this statement was true at that time is unclear. However, the statement, if written today would be false. Over the past 10 or 15 years the literature on the subject has been expanding. A quick glance at the bibliography of the SEP entry on forgiveness suggests that it is a topic at the head of much philosophical debate[1]. Given that there is so much controversy surrounding what the nature of forgiveness is I’ll try not to make sweeping claims about all understandings of the concept.  In this post I’d like to talk a bit about what forgiveness is and what many accounts seem to assume. My goal in discussing forgiveness here is to think about how we can differentiate it from similar concepts without invoking some sort of free will requirement. This may be harder than you think, but first a bit of background.

I started thinking about forgiveness a few years back while attending a ‘Social Psychology Research Group’ at the University of Calgary (2012). One of the graduate students in the Psych dept. was discussing her research about 3^rd party forgiveness. 3^rd party forgiveness comes about when someone wrongs someone you care about. So, let’s say your best friend is in a monogamous relationship and he gets cheated on by his spouse. 3^rd party forgiveness in this case would be when *you* cease to hold the transgression of your friends spouse against them. 2nd person forgiveness would be when your friend forgives his spouse for the cheating, and first person forgiveness is when your friend’s spouse forgives themselves for their wrongdoing. Notice though that just discussing forgiveness in this way already assumes a lot. First, consider how I describe 3^rd party forgiveness: “3^rd party forgiveness in this case would be when you cease to hold the transgression of your friends spouse against them”.  This is very contentious! Why? Well, if I was to simply forget about the cheating, then I would cease to hold the transgression against my friend’s spouse.  But forgetting is not proper forgiving . Forgiveness seems to require more than just forgetting. So, to distinguish forgetting from forgiving is crucial and this has been recognized in the literature.[2]  

So let’s think about some of the  best attempts to separate forgetting from forgiving and see if there is an underlying freedom requirement  that appropriates forgiveness(in one form or another).  Hopefully some of you will see the relevance to your own work on blame and moral responsibility. Let me summarize a couple of views and show how they may connect to free will. I’ll be following Nelkin here in her summary of some general positions.

Forgiveness seems to come about when a person thinks that another has done them wrong[3]. This seems to be a good starting place. So, if one fails to do what they should have, like stay faithful, it seems that we have a negative reaction to the wrongdoing.  Now that the wrong has been done we are left to figure out when we should forgive if ever. Here are 3 ways of thinking about it.

1.  The Overcoming of Resentment on Moral Grounds (see Bishop Butler and Jeffrie Murphy)

After we acknowledge the wrong that was done to us this account suggests that you appropriately forgive when you do so for moral reasons. Jeffry Murphy has suggested a couple: (i) When the offender has apologized; (ii) when the offender has suffered enough for their transgression;. So, and as Dana Nelkin has noted, the essential feature for this account boils down to “forgiveness is the forswearing of resentment for moral reasons”. Notice that a moral reason to forgive would help us distinguish it from simply forgetting. One of the ideas behind this view is to separate the act the agent performed from the current state of agent. Thus, if the agent sincerely apologizes for what they did it may be appropriate to forgive. I can think of a bunch of counterexamples to this view but I don’t want to focus on problems with these different views. Remember, my goal is to analyze these conceptions of forgiveness to see if there as underlying freedom requirement.

 

2. Nelkin’s Debt-Release Model

On this very intriguing model, Nelkin says “forgiveness is constituted (at least in part) by a special kind of release from a special kind obligation the offender has to the victim.  In typical cases, the obligation might be fulfilled by apology, sincere remorse, penance or related phenomena.  In forgiving, one ceases to hold the offense against the offender, and this in turn means releasing them from a special kind of personal obligation incurred as the result of committing the wrong against one.” (2013; pg. 175)

3. Hieronymi’s Uncompromising Model

Pamela Hieronymi has forwarded a rich account of forgiveness (2001). First, like Murphy, Hieronymi claims that resentment must fade away. And, like Murphy, this fading must be due to a change in judgment due to reasons stemming from an understanding of the forgiver. Thus, forgiveness is the overcoming of resentment. Second, unlike Murphy, Hieronymi claims that the forgiveness must be “uncompromising” in acknowledging that one should not be treated in the way one was. She posits this condition  Hieronymi’s view is different in that  she understands resentment as “a protest against a past action that persists as a present threat” (ibid, p. 546). For Hieronymi, the past action poses a  present threat if forgiven without this uncompromising feature because a past action that wronged you in a significant way that has not been atoned for, apologized for, or repudiated in some way makes a continuing claim that you can be treated in this way again and/or that such treatment is acceptable. This is why Hieronymi understands resentment as such. But, when a genuine apology has been given and one forgives the transgressor then and only then can the forgiveness be uncompromising. Now, she admits that there are cases where one who has not repent can be forgiven but such cases are not the norm. Thus, a genuine apology by the transgressor seems central to Hieronymi’s view.


Freedom and Forgivness

Admittedly, I have gone very, very fast here, but I assume this is okay in a blog format. So, let’s discuss why I think these accounts require freedom. I’ll discuss two separate but related worries:

First,  on Nelkin’s account, obligations play a key role. But, if we were to understand these obligations as agent-specific or related to OIC then we already have a worry (see here for the worry re: OIC). If one believes that OIC and also that determinism is true it seems that skeptics would have a hard time adopting this account. Tying forgiveness to obligations to others seems to implicitly tie forgiveness to a species of control that might be rejected by FW skeptics. Put differently, people are forgiven only if they either have done wrong, or, have done something that one thinks is wrong. But as I have suggested in earlier posts, there would be no basic-desert blameworthiness nor could there be wrongdoing (in the relevant sense) in a world void of free will. It would follow then that forgiveness would also be imperiled since forgiveness presupposes basic-desert blameworthiness and wrongdoing. That point aside, a related point arises concerning apologies, a central notion in accounts 1 and 3.  

Even if forgiveness proper must go there may be features of forgiveness that remain, for instance a genuine apology (Pereboom mentions this as well, see his 2014). If  we believed that the agent who wronged us^[4] couldn’t refrain from wronging us, then it would be hard to take his apology seriously, the apology could not be authentic. An apology consists in recognizing what one *should have done* but if one was determined to do the act, then it will not be true that one should not have done it. So, a genuine apology, an apology that results from the recognition of what one morally ought to have done, would not be tenable in a deterministic universe. Now, we could suppose that one might still see an act as bad regardless of the control that one had.And, one could apologize for this. However, it is not clear that such an apology would have the same meaning as a genuine apology, an apology that stems from the recognition that one should have done something else and one believed that one was capable of doing that other thing. This is so because the meaning behind a genuine apology is derived from the relation between the two parties involved. However, if one is forced to adopt the objective stance, then this reciprocal relationship might not be sustained.^[5] Also, from the point of view of the person forgiving, since all that remains would be these non-genuine or generic apologies, it would follow that such an apology would lose its force to hold relationships together. Consider what it would mean to receive a generic apology when compared to a genuine apology. It seems reasonable to understand an apology as entailing a belief or acknowledgement by the transgressor that oneshould not have done what one did, then we would have no reason to accept the apology. If one believes in hard incompatibilism and one is rational, then one cannot also have a true belief that what one did was wrong, or that one was obligated to refrain from performing the action. I don’t see how generic apologies could influence one to hold onto a relationship. ANyway, I pick on the fw skeptic only to show that they might not be able to accept certain understanding of forgivness because of their views re: control. This suggests that there is a control requirement for forgivness.

So there are 2 important questions to consider: 1^st,  what is forgivness? And, 2^nd when is it appropriate to forgive? The free will requirement might be implied in either question so thinking about forgiveness and it’s connection to freedom is complicated. A further wrinkle: are there different kinds of forgiveness? In a post a few years back (see here) I suggested two distinct kinds of forgiveness. Maybe one kind requires some implicit freedom requirement and the other does not?

Anyway, I’d like to hear what you all think.

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[1] For an excellent (!) resource I suggest Brandon Warmke’s chronological bibliography on forgiveness. Here.

[2] In “Freedom and Forgiveness” (2013) Dana Nelkin points out a few flaws with some well-respected views on forgiveness, she also puts begins to lay the groundwork for her own view as well. She also discusses the importance of distinguishing forgetting from forgiving. Anyone interested in forgiveness should give her essay a read. Disclaimer: this piece is in the volume I edited in late 2013.

[3] It’s worth mentioning here that those of us who think that one cannot do morally wrong (or have a moral obligation given OIC) in a determined world (as I suggested that in the post and comment thread here) the concept of forgiveness already seems doomed.

[4] Again, I’m not sure we could hold this initial belief in the first place since we could not take ourselves to be “wronged” as this evaluation could not be true given hard incompatibilism.

[5] A discussion of Stephen Darwall’s second-personal reasons and how they are given up when the objective stance is adopted would be beneficial to help my case here (Darwall 2003).

Automatizing Mid-level Decision-making

Now for the way a Psychologist/Neuroscientist views self-formation. Here I will lay out in broad strokes the empirical view of what is known, and where we need to go from here to nail down the  existence of a human capacity to change human character, and to determine how it might work in the brain. Since the majority of self-forming resolutions that people will start trying to live up to in a few days involve improving self-control and becoming more virtuous, I will focus here on self-control and how it may be learned.

A corporation, government, military, or even an ant colony will express hierarchy, decision-making modularity, and levels of mid-level control. It would be debilitatingly slow and inefficient if a soldier had to continually ask the president where he should shoot his bullets. Rather, higher levels can play a role in training up mid- and lower-level ‘managers,’ place constraints on their permissible decision-making, then allow them to decide appropriately, since they, after all, know local conditions best. Because of the need for efficiency and speed, information processing systems tend to evolve automatized middle levels of control. The mind is likely no exception.

Yet, psychological accounts of mental control emphasize, at one extreme, automatic sensorimotor control, and on the other, effortful attentional control (e.g. Norman & Shallice 1986; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervisory_attentional_system). Modern accounts of self-control focus primarily on the role of the effortful exertion of will (when thought of as a verb) or willpower (when thought of as a noun, or limited resource) in exercising self-control (see, e.g. Baumeister et al. 1998). Relatively few researchers have focused on mid-levels of control or the automatization of self-control (but see Fitzsimons and Bargh (2004), Fujita (2011), Palfai (2006), Shah (2005), Suhler & Churchland 2009).

In contrast, Aristotle emphasized that virtue emerges over time as good habits or automaticities of thought and action develop through the practice of effortful self-control. Can the brain sciences evaluate whether Aristotle's program is possible given how the brain learns?

Volitional, executive control is closely linked with endogenous attentional selection and maintenance on an object of interest, while ignoring distractions, with associated capacities of error detection, task planning/prioritization, and task switching (Chan, Shum, Toulopoulou, & Chen 2008). Executive control takes place in a mental workspace where operations manipulate and maintain operands (Schlegel et al. 2013), and is particularly associated with two dominant frontal control networks, a cingulo-opercular network centrally involved in task maintenance, and a lateral prefrontal-posterior parietal network for executing the operations of a voluntary task. The former network has also been implicated in willpower and error-detection, whereas the latter has also been implicated in voluntary attentional processing, mental imagery and working memory (Dosenbach et al., 2006; Miyake et al. 2000; Miller & Cohen, 2001).

If ‘executive control’ is the volitional governing of one’s mental operations, self-control is the subclass of executive control specifically involved in resisting first-order impulses and desires. ‘Self-control’ refers to the capacity to govern one’s thoughts and actions, particularly toward maximizing the fulfillment of one’s long-term goals, principles and second-order Frankfurtian desires. Thus, self-control is often associated with resisting temptations and impulsive behaviors. But it is also involved in making oneself persist in doing tasks (such as filling out taxes) that one might not (first-order) want to do, and governing the emotions (Tangney, Baumeister, & Boone 2004). A subset of frontal lobe regions appears to govern self-control abilities (Casey et al. 2011), and compromised function in these frontal areas can result in increased impulsivity (Chen et al. 2007; Crews & Boettiger 2009; Spinella 2004) such as difficulty suppressing habitual responses (Perret 1974) or difficulty suppressing the distracting effects of external stimuli in order to stay on task (Lhermitte 1986).

There are substantial individual differences in self-control. Given that self-control is centrally concerned with governing impulsivity, low self-control and impulsivity are regarded by some researchers as essentially equivalent constructs (Duckworth & Kern 2011; Evenden 1999; Kalenscher et al. 2006). However, measures of self-control and impulsivity are not perfectly anti-correlated (Friese & Hofmann 2009; Nebioglu, Konuk, Akbaba, & Eroglu 2012).  High scores on self-control and low scores on impulsivity questionnaires correlate weakly but significantly with performance on many tasks that load on executive function (Duckworth & Kern 2011). In the famous marshmallow test, participants can either opt for a small reward immediately or a larger reward later (Mischel, Shoda, & Rodriguez 1989). The capacity to defer gratification on this test, and self-control scores from questionnaires (Tangney et al. 2004; Schwarzer, Diehl, & Schmitz 1999), predict success in many domains later in life, including school, income, health, well-being, and relationship quality (Moffitt et al. 2011; Tangney et al. 2004; Crescioni et al. 2011). People low in self-control are typically high on impulsivity (Evenden 1999). High impulsivity is generally associated with negative life outcomes, such as higher substance abuse, lower wealth, poorer health and relationships, and greater levels of aggression and recklessness (Dahlen et al. 2005; Hair and Hampson 2006; Stanford et al. 1996).Factor analysis reveals three main classes of impulsivity (Patton, Stanford, and Barratt 1995): motor impulsivity, associated with acting in the absence of playing out the likely consequences of one’s actions; attentional impulsivity, associated with high distractability and intrusive thoughts; and non-planning impulsivity, which is associated with a relative disregard for the future, being focused on the present, poor planning, and a preference not to be mentally challenged. Less commonly appreciated are potentially positive aspects of impulsivity such as spontaneity and speeded decision-making (Dickman 1990; Gullo & Dawe 2008).

There has been a great deal of work on the automatization of motor sequences (Doyon, 2008; Doyon etal., 2009; Puttemans, Wenderoth & Swinnen, 2005; Winstein, Merians & Sullivan, 1999) and on perceptual learning that effectively automatizes the detection of perceptual features (e.g. Watanabe & Sasaki, 2014) and conjunctions of features (Frank, Reavis, Tse, & Greenlee 2014). There has been much less work on the automatization of cognitive decision-making operations, though it is clear that practice can lead to reduced attentional load in a dual task (Ruthruff, et al., 1993, 2006). The automatization of decision-making may draw more upon medial prefrontal areas and less upon lateral prefrontal areas (Limb & Braun 2008). The automatization of task maintenance may place less load on the anterior cingulate cortical circuits (see Macdonald et al. 2000) known to be very active in tasks like the Stroop task that involve active task maintenance and error detection.

Initially, executive control and self-control in some new domain is likely to prove attentionally demanding, but as these processes become automatized, they likely become less so. As they become automatized to a point that they require virtually no voluntary attention they may begin to seem effortless to a person, at which point we might consider such decision-making and self-control now a veritable part of that person’s character. This may offer a neuroscientific understanding of the cultivation of Aristotelian good habits, particularly those associated with executive and self-control.

Of particular interest are the implications for free will and ethics of automatized mid-level decision-making agents. For example, if a soldier who would never voluntarily choose to kill his comrades at the level of fully voluntary executive decisions, has voluntarily practiced war games that have led to the wiring up of automatic decision-making agents that then decide to fire on enemy-like targets, in what sense is he responsible for, say, a friendly fire incident that resulted in his accidentally killing his comrades? Conversely, could degrees of self-control on such mid-level agentic decisions themselves be automatized with appropriate training?

I believe that if it can be shown that previously voluntary, attentionally demanding and effortful self-control and decision-making operations can be automatized, we can legitimately talk about the mechanisms of character reformation demanded by a type 2 LFW. This might not be the only way of reforming our nervous systems to become the kind of choosers we intend to become. But it is sufficient to prove the existence of one way to show that intentions and programs of training can reform character.

Very Bad Wizards 59: Tumors All The Way Down (With Sam Harris)

We just had Sam Harris on for a very long podcast on the costs and benefits of religion, free will, the self, moral responsibility, blame, vengeance, guilt, and all that other good stuff. Much of the second half features the new me arguing vehemently with the old me, although Sam does add a couple of  twists on the skeptical position in addition to his Pereboom-style argument.  In the end we reach a dialectal stalemate--with John duly acknowledged on that--but there's some good stuff along the way.  If you want to skip around, here are some rough time markers.

0:00-47:00 Intro and costs and benefits of religion

47:00-77:30 Drugs, the self, free will

77:30-- Blame, guilt, vengeance, moral responsibility, desert.

Very Bad Wizards 57: "Free Willie"

Hi all,

Just letting you know that latest episode of VBW breaks down that Ent and Baumeister study widely reported as "Your Belief in Free Will Depends On Whether You Need to Pee."  We also talk more generally about the Free Will and Determinism scale that's used to measure beliefs in free will, something that Thomas and others have discussed ont his blog. 

The (Lower) Limit of Moral Responsibility

Consider the following two cases of apparently altruistic helping behavior:

Broken Glass

Rob’s thirsty, and he sees a glass across the room.  Since she’s closer to it than he is, Rob asks Pearl to hand him the glass so that he can pour himself some water.  Pearl notices that the glass is broken, so she gets up and gets another glass that isn’t broken and takes the unbroken one to Rob instead. Having a functional glass into which he can now pour water, Rob is genuinely grateful to Pearl and expresses his gratitude by telling her that he appreciates her help.

Crying Child

In a daycare filled with crying children, Julie sees Maggie crying and inconsolable.  She takes Maggie her favorite toy and sits with her, gently touching her and waiting with her until she feels better.  Cynthia sees this, and she is very appreciative that Julie took care of Maggie, since she’s got two other crying children to deal with.  Later, when she gets a free moment, Cynthia makes sure to thank Julie.

In these cases, it appears that it is appropriate for Rob and Cynthia to feel and express gratitude towards Pearl and Julie respectively.  No doubt, there is some instrumental reason for this: by expressing their gratitude, Rob and Cynthia make it more likely that they are helped in the future.  But I don’t think this fully explains why gratitude is the fitting response in this case; for independently of whether Rob and Cynthia stand to benefit from Pearl’s and Julie’s respective help in the future, there seems to be a weighty reason to feel gratitude in these situations that isn't grounded in consequentialist considerations.  One might even say that it seems that Pearl and Julie deserve Rob’s and Cynthia’s gratitude.

This assessment, I think, is quite plausible given the fact that Pearl and Julie both seemed to recognize and respond to reasons for action and in so doing, revealed the laudable quality of their wills.  (It might take some work to do so, but I think this point can be filled in quite plausibly along the lines suggested by either Nomy Arpaly (2003) or Julia Markovits (2010).)

Now, because Pearl and Julie each seem to deserve Rob’s and Cynthia’s respective gratitude, it seems possible to conclude that they are each morally responsible for their respective action.  After all, praiseworthiness seems to entail responsibility since only morally responsible agents can genuinely deserve praising attitudes like gratitude, appreciation, and esteem.  So with no obvious excusing conditions present, barring something that (putatively) undercuts moral responsibility for all agents (e.g., causal determinism--at least according to incompatibilists), who could doubt that Pearl and Julie are morally responsible for their action? [1]