Flickers of Freedom

Timpe Interviewed at The Prosblogion

Flickerers are on a roll:  our own Kevin Timpe is interviewed at The Prosblogion.  Apparently he's moving from my own undergrad institution--Northwest Nazarene University--to take a chair at Calvin College (replacing Plantinga!).  While I'm sad that he's leaving NNU (which has produced a number of tenured profs disproportionate to its size), I'm glad he's still contributing to matters of agency related to disability studies.  Read up!

Are Compatibilists like Creationists??

Jerry Coyne says yes.  Sorry to interrupt Gregg’s great posts, but I thought people here would be interested in this claim at the widely-read blog Why Evolution is True.  And I thought it might provide a way to re-ask some questions that have come up in Gregg’s posts. 

Coyne thinks compatibilists are trying to save free will by redefining it in order to avoid making people feel bad about not having the sort of agency they feel they have and to avoid bad social consequences.  He thinks these two reasons are also the main motivations for creationists arguing against evolution.  Hence, he thinks compatibilists are like creationists.

I won’t bother disputing the claims about compatibilists’ motivations (or creationists’).*  Instead, I want to link his claims to the questions discussed this month about reference-fixing. 

 

Moral Luck and Football Greatness

Really interesting article--"Lucky and Good: How Tom Brady Became the Greatest" over at Grantland on the role of luck in making Tom Brady the greatest QB of all time (unless you prefer guys who put up huge stats in September and October and then fold when the temperature dips below 45 degrees. Or guys who played with 10 hall of famers in a pre-salary cap era.)   Some key quotes:

"Anyone who’s ever been the greatest at anything has gotten outrageously lucky...Luck is supposed to matter. A charmed existence is part of the myth behind any regular person who gets turned into a folk hero."

"This is how sports work, and it’s actually how life works. We worship greatness and all the qualities that give birth to it, but we forget how arbitrary this can be."

It reminds me a lot of Paul Russell's criminally under-discussed article (seriously, it should be a federal crime not to talk about this paper) "Free Will, Art, and Morality."

 

 

 

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.

Arguments from sociology

I'm curious about the role of sociological arguments in philosophy, and in free will in particular. I'm thinking of arguments that have something like the following structure: 

1. Population X, with awesome epistemic credentials, regards View L as awesome/lame

2. Therefore, we epistemic inferiors should also regard View L as awesome/lame

There are, of course, lots of ways to refine the basic argument. But, I take it that we all accept some version of this as a matter of ordinary belief management. (Imagine I go on to mutter words like "testimony" and "epistemic division of labor" and "doxastic economy") The most familiar case is individual. My views about the effectiveness of organic pest management is shaped by a friend of mine who does this stuff for a living. More prosaically, my sense about the plausibility of, say, Darwinism is parasitic on what biologists and philosophers of science tell me (my beliefs adapt to what they say, so to speak), and my sense about whether Toyota Siennas are better than Honda Odysseys is shaped by what my betters at Consumer Reports tell me. 

Now let's add a temporal dimension to the picture. Should we care what our future epistemic betters will think? Suppose the philosophers of the future will be even smarter and more epistemically awesome than we are. I suspect something like this is very likely to be true. They will know more stuff than we know, they will stand on the shoulders of taller giants, and they will have the benefits of whatever cognitive enhancements the tech and pharmaceutical companies of the world figure out between now and then. Plus, the Flynn Effect. 

So what? Well, I wonder whether there are interesting consequences for how we think about some current philosophical debates.

John Martin Fischer in LA Times, because he's cool like that

Our 5 Million Dollar Philosopher is profiled here. Congrats to John!

Welcome to Flickers of Freedom

Welcome to Flickers of Freedom. We decided to create this blog to fill the vacuum left by the closing of the Garden of Forking Paths.   We aim to promote the discussion of issues in the philosophy of action, concentrating on free will, moral responsibility and agency. We hope to build on the success of the Garden (and avoid the problems that led to its closing).

The Garden of Forking Paths was a success.  It lasted nearly six years and it provided a forum for high quality discussion. Some of its posts led directly to journal publications; many contributed less directly to publications. It also enabled philosophers working in different parts of the United States, and in different parts of the world, to establish friendships and a genuine community.  Many of us played a part in that success.  But we also acknowledge some responsibility for its eventual closing. We took the Garden for granted; we were less active than we should have been.  We only realized how important the forum was for us, personally and professionally, when we were faced with the prospect of losing it. We hope that the experience will jolt all of us out of our lethargy, and that Flickers of Freedom will carry on the best traditions of the Garden.

We believe that our renewed commitment to sustaining a lively agency community will help to avoid the problems that led to the closing of the Garden. Beyond this, we are taking steps to ensure that post quality is high and that postings are frequent. Taking Pea Soup, the ethics blog, as our model, we have decided at least initially to limit the pool of contributors to professionals working in the philosophy or psychology of agency.  We are also setting down a requirement that contributors contribute at least two posts a year to the blog (not including brief pointers to news items or upcoming conferences, papers, etc.). In addition, comments will be moderated. Commenting on the blog will be open to all comers; the only requirement is that comments be (reasonably) polite and on topic.

A word on the name. Flickers of Freedom is a phrase introduced into philosophical debate by John Martin Fischer, in his highly influential discussion of the Frankfurt-style cases that help motivate his semi-compatibilism.  We adopt the name for this blog not because we expect that it will be appropriate to describe it as merely a flicker of freedom, but in tribute to John Martin Fischer. Not only is his work a central reference for all us, but we also want to acknowledge the role he played in establishing and guiding the Garden. He was pivotal to its success, though he cannot be blamed for its eventual closure. We hope the lively, penetrating but always generous philosophical voice of John Fischer will be echoed here at Flickers.

These are exciting times in the philosophy of agency. In the past 12 months, at least half a dozen important books on many different aspects of the topic have been published, as well as dozens of papers in the best journals. There are new developments in the defense of the main positions (libertarianism, compatibilism, and skepticism about free will), in the science of agency, in discussions of moral responsibility, and much more. There has also been the establishment of an exciting new interdisciplinary free will project at Florida State University. We expect Flickers to benefit from, and help to foster this activity. Let’s flicker!

Best wishes,

Thomas Nadelhoffer, Neil Levy, Tamler Sommers, Dan Speak, Eddy Nahmias, Manuel Vargas, Michael McKenna, & Daniel Cohen