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)!

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.)

The Holmes Trial: Some Concluding Remarks

So the curtain is drawn on the James Holmes theater massacre trial, and the final call on punishment is life without parole.  With the death penalty off the table, appeals won't be in the offing, so there can be no higher court ruling on the death penalty as applied to someone mentally ill, and I bet lawyers on both sides of the aisle (and the probably 4-5er Supreme Court on this) are relieved.

Let's recall how we got here.

 

Free Will Zombies

Here're the first couple pages of a paper I presented at Manuel Vargas' excellent USF-hosted conference a year and a half ago; the rest may be found here.  But this is enough with a little exposition to make my case.

Back to Basics 1--Freedom and Free will

Does freedom exist at all? (Note:  I will not address questions of responsibility.)   I think it would be near impossible to answer anything other than yes.  Circumstances of people possessing  what seem to be prima facie huge differences of political freedom, economic freedom, social freedom, and physical freedom (among others) attest to some basis for placing the semantic onus of the differential claims about these things on the overt common term "freedom" rather than some disguised alternative.  This result is metaphysically significant if true, for it says that the term "freedom" might underwrite some type of conceptual play with disparate personalities crowding the one metaphysical stage.  (I certainly stand to be corrected on that bold claim; maybe I'm naive and need more a more subtle account such as Ruth Millikan's "unicept".) This post will try to establish what entity freedom might be thus understood as a type of existing thing.

Since about 1990 I have subjected my intro students to an extended thought experiment whereby freedoms are stripped or diminished one-by-one, and which is re-run with different parameters  to expose what factors are involved in the destruction of  a particular type of freedom.  I will only sketch a backbone of the narrative to indicate how it works to support my overall metaphysical thesis.

You are a US college student walking to your car you are kidnapped by a helicopter which takes you on an extended trip.  In the copter you are of course trapped, and your freedoms (if any) are restricted only to movements inside its belly, and so your freedom (if any) is automatically reduced to a small physical freedom of movement within what free will you may have to determine that.  Any other potential freedoms are suspended until you are out of that situation.

Finally you are unceremoniously dumped out into Tiananmen Square.  Reflectively you realize that your political freedoms are nullified.  You are here illegally, and have neither a legitimate relationship to the Chinese government nor your own, since you have been placed here illegally and thus lack any effective status for citizenship with respect to any country.   Your law-determined relationship to any government has been severed, and so you are a person without a country and subject to the whims of treatment of any country you have been cast into.  And this is the People's Republic, with minimal regard for illegals.

 

Back to the Basics--Except for the Zombies

My deep gratitude to Thomas for his gracious invitation to blog for a month on Flickers.  I'm something of an oddity here--a senior but reputationally obscure philosopher whose free will publications are minor and few: one in Analysis back in 1990 and two in the presently dormant (though in its heyday in many ways ahead of its times) e-journal Sorites.  My most recent free will-related stuff is a series of reviews, most recently of Manuel Vargas's Building Better Beings and the late David Hodgson's Consciousness + Rationality = Free Will.  Much of my published work has been in the philosophy of time, and tends toward the empirical side of that issue.  (The forthcoming issue of Erkenntnis has one on special relativity and presentism, to blow what few horns are at my disposal.)

On the other hand I have many publications/presentations in pedagogy that refer to the free will debate.  That is because since the late 80s I have developed an introduction to philosophy that is entirely based on that issue.  That's right--an intro that starts on the first day about free will, and on the last day is still about free will.  My strategy as an intro is that introductory students need not just exposure to some hodgepodge of philosophical content, but real sustained work in the patient analysis of concepts that interconnect in grasping a very complex problem area, and all in an attempt to challenge their thinking skills.  I suppose lots of problems might be suitable for this approach, but free will had its hooks in me from the first time I tried it.  (I used identity in the first experimental iterations of the class; too dry for me and the students too.)

 

Farewell and Thanks!

I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who commented and asked questions over the course of my stint as FA in January. It was an honor and your comments and questions have helped me very much. I had planned on posting a couple more times to close out the month but it was just wishful thinking on my part. I do plan on posting in the near future over at Aphilosopherstake.com (a blog I moderate) on related topics so feel free to chime on over there if you're interested.

Also, one last thanks to Thomas for the opportunity. Last month was very helpful for me, especially my first few posts.

For those questions that I have not yet answered, I plan on getting to those this week. Thanks for your patience! Oh, and for those attending the central APA I hope to see you there.

Best,

Justin

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!

Psychopaths and Moral Responsibility: The State of the Debate

In the last post I suggested that moral responsibility may not come in degrees and based on the discussion that ensued it seems that we are pretty torn on whether or not it does. In this post I would like to focus on a different question: are psychopaths morally responsible for their behavior? This debate is dear to me as it is the first debate I weighed in on as a PhD student. In response to Haji 2010, I argued that if we are morally responsible, then psychopaths are morally responsible as well. There is no morally salient difference between *our abilities* (non psychopaths) and those of the psychopath (I'll speak to this a bit more in a second). If one admits that we are sometimes morally responsible for at least some of what we do, then one should conclude the same re: psychopaths. So, where do we all stand on this issue? Morally responsible or not? I'm thinking that like the last question I raised that we will be pretty torn on this front as well. I should note that the philosophical literature seems to weigh in favor of exculpating the psychopath or so it seems,( see Haji 1998;2010; Levy 2007 and 2014; Shoemaker 2011 for a few approaches to why this is so)  whereas  a commonly held view by non-philosophers seems to be that psychopaths are morally responsible for what they do. Having worked with young adults being treated for an array of psychopathic traits in the past (for 5 years at a residential program), it is also worth noting that many of them hold themselves morally responsible for what they do as well. So, to get the discussion going I'll offer an overly brief summary of the debate and mention why they might not be morally responsible and offer some reasons for thinking they might be. I'll be quick and fast because I know most of you are pretty versed in the literature. In the end, I'd like to hear why folks think they are morally responsible (or not). What condition do they fail to meet? I particularly like this debate because of the interdisciplinary feature of the research, but I digress.

The question of whether the psychopath is morally responsible for his actions has received much attention within psychological, legal, and philosophical circles over the past 20 years. There is debate within each tradition as to whether we should treat the psychopath differently than we do other criminals (assuming the psychopath commits a crime). The psychological debate has focused on the psychopath’s ability to utilize cognitive faculties when theorizing about how one ought to act. The legal debate has focused on the punishment of these individuals and how the insanity plea can be applied to them. Because they seem irrational at times, the term ‘moral insanity’ has been used to describe them (Benn 1999, Levy 2007). This causes friction for the judge and/or jurors trying to justly sentence the psychopath because the insanity plea suggests a different approach to their treatment. The philosophical debate has taken a few different approaches to the problem (though I should note that the aforemetnioned approaches have not been restricted to any one discipline, I am grossly summarizing here). 

The first approach tried to assess which kinds of moral knowledge the psychopath could possess (Fields 1996, Glannon 1997, Haji 1998, Levy 2007a). But, this debate seems to be at a stalemate . As Neil Levy notes; “…given that both the truth and the best interpretation of MI (motivational internalism) is extremely controversial, this argument did not serve to advance the debate.” The debate was rooted in discussion about which relevant moral beliefs the psychopath was capable of having given that the psychopath was motivated differently and seemingly without the appropriate motivations .

The second approach focused on the psychopath’s failure to grasp the moral/conventional distinction (Levy 2007a, Levy 2007b, Nichols &Vargas 2007a, Showmaker 2011). The argument there goes something like this; since the psychopath lacks the relevant moral knowledge to be deemed morally responsible the psychopath is unable to control their actions in light of moral reasons because those reasons can only map on to a conventional distinction and not a purely moral one (Levy 2007a). Advocates of holding the psychopath culpable say they may have sufficient knowledge to act morally . Without proof of a lacking of other sorts of knowledge that may be at play when morally theorizing we shouldn’t be quick to revise our intuitions regarding the culpability of the psychopath. I do not think that these two debates are much different from one another. With that said, it doesn’t seem that we have heard sufficient evidence on either side to declare one side wrong, conclusively (even though I find the arguments by Vargas and Nichols a bit more persuasive). This brings us to the third approach and the most current literature within the debate surrounding the responsibility of psychopaths. This approach focuses on three main elements; emotional sensitivity, ethical perception, and a tracing condition centered on an agent’s responsibility of his current dispositional attitudes. This last approach, put forth by IshHaji (Haji 2010), has not yet received much attention. 

In “Psychopathy, Ethical Perception, and Moral Culpability”(2010) Haji claims that psychopaths will either 1) not be morally culpable for their actions, or, 2) their degree of moral culpability will be diminished, perhaps considerably so, in light of their lack of emotional sensitivity (recall the relevance of our last discussion on degrees of moral responsibility). Haji offers support for these claims by appealing to a multitude of recent and widely accepted psychological research. The above mentioned two-fold conclusion rests on the conclusions of 3 separate but closely related arguments which he justifies by use of this research. Suffice to say that because psychopaths lack empathy (emotional sensitivity) this has a decided influence on their ethical perception. And, because ethical perception impacts our understanding of moral reasons to act or refrain from acting it follows that psychopaths might not be able to acquire moral knowledge. Assuming that the psychopath is not morally responsible for their emotional insensitivity it follows that the psychopath might not be morally responsible for their actions/behavior.

To see why the fact that  psychopaths lack emotional sensitivity (empathy) is relevant consider a case by Gilbert Harman (1977): You round a corner and see a group of young hoodlums pouring gasoline on a cat and igniting it. As Harman remarks, and Haji suggests; “you do not need to conclude that what…(the hoodlums) are doing is wrong; you do not need to figure anything out. You can see that it is wrong” (Harman 1977, Haji 2010). Here, you can see the work that ethical perception is doing. It seems to be informing our moral intuitions or reactions to the igniting of the cat . Anyone “properly morally trained” should recognize through ethical perception, which has as its central feature emotional sensitivity, that the igniting of the cat is wrong. How could we expect a psychopath to see this as wrong if they are lacking the central feature of ethical perception, emotional sensitivity, that allows them to see it as such?  

For those who might find this line of argument persuasive, how we perceive the situation has priority over what we decide-- this make sense. However, why think that empathy is the only emotion or faculty bearing on our ethical perception, or that empathy is*necessary* in order to perceive a scenario as moral or not? (once we ask this question we seem to fall back into the debate between Levy and Nichols and Vargas) Further, it might be the case that in passive cases, often ommissions (like Harman's example) empathy is central to our ethical perception, but, in the more interesting cases, the active cases (where there is deliberation involved on the part of the psychopath), it seems that much deliberation is needed to act successfully and it’s not clear to me that an empathetic emotion is *needed* to conclude that one ought not perform an action on moral grounds(Paul Bloom has recently done some work on empathy  that favors  this line of thinking). This seems to fetishize empathy and I'm not convinced that we need a high-level of it to properly assess a situation as moral or not. I'm much more confident that such an emotion is an important feature that helps us sustain deep interpersonal relationships, but that's a different conversation.

A sports analogy may be apt here; does the budding basketball player need to have a great jump shot to be a good player? I don’t think that she does. She could be good in other facets of the game (recognizing other relevant moral features) and lack a good jump shot (altogether) and still be considered a valuable contributor to the team (or a moral agentmoral community) She may have a hard time playing against teams that allow one to shoot but defend the drive rigorously—but overall, she could still be considered a good player and even in those cases can . Similarly, it seems that the psychopath could be lacking in empathy which could affect her ability to ethically perceive correctly in many passive cases, however, in active cases it seems he could get by just fine. And, in such cases, it would seem appropraite to hold them morally responsible.

Well, I'd be interested to see how others see the state of the debate; are psychopaths morally responsible for at least some of what they do? 

Does Moral Responsibility Come in Degrees?

Many have assumed either implicitly or explicitly that moral responsibility comes in degrees, but why? For me, it seems quite natural to say that I am either morally responsible or I am not. I either meet the conditions of one's particular view, or I do not. Oddly, this has been assumed often times with little explanation as to why moral responsibility is a degree concept and not a binary concept (by binary I simply refer to an either/or concept). Consider this quote from a paper by Al Mele:

Moral responsibility is very commonly and very plausibly regarded as a matter of degree. If young children and adults are morally responsible for some of what they do, it is plausible, on grounds of the sort I mentioned, that young children are not as nearly *as responsible* (my emphasis) for any of their deeds as some adults are for some of their adult deeds. (2008, p. 274)

He states further:

Normal parents eventually come to view their children as having some degree of moral responsibility for what they do. The word degree is important here. Normal four-year-olds are not as well equipped for impulse control as normal eight-year-olds, and they have less developed capacity for anticipating and understanding the effects of their actions (2008, pg. 271-272)

I think Mele is right to say that moral responsibility is commonly regarded as a matter of degree, but I’m not so sure that such an assumption is warranted. And, if the assumption is warranted, I think it’s worthwhile to get clear on why this is so.  Investigating this so-called degree feature might help to shed light on the nature of moral responsibility itself. Further, if one holds that moral responsibility does come in degrees it might limit what one can say about the nature of moral responsibility and this conclusion could be fruitful as well for those trying to uncover the the root of the differences between competing views.

The only published paper that I have come across that has tried to make sense of this degree talk in depth is a recent paper by Coates and Swenson (2013, Phil. Studies) though I have read a few unpublished manuscripts that have focused on this assumed feature of moral responsibility in depth (by Manual Vargas, Brandon Warmke, and Gwen Bradford). So, feel free to suggest further work on this topic that I may have missed. 

So, the purpose of posting on this topic is simply to get a sense of how can we make sense of moral resposnibility as coming in degrees. Must we assume that blameworthiness and moral responsibility is the same thing to make sense of this? And, what does it even mean to say that moral responsibility comes in degrees? 

At last year's Pacific APA I had the opportunity to comment on Gwen Bradford's very nice paper "Difficulty and Degrees of Praise and Blame". In that paper, she argued that one of the most natural ways to make sense of degree talk is to posit what she calls the Blame-Mitigating Thesis (BMT): the difficulty of a morally required action can mitigate the blameworthiness for failing to perform it. She ultimately rejects (BMT) claiming that difficulty can't do the work on it's own (she also discusses a similar thesis with regards to praise). I agreed with her on this point but I took this point to be a knock against the degree feature altogether, a line she did not explore in her paper. If difficulty can't do the work to make sense of when someone is *more or less* morally responsible for doing A then what can? Buildng off Fischer and Ravizza's account of reasons responsiveness Coates and Swenson suggest that to make sense of the degree feature of moral responsibility we could appeal to the degree in which an agent can respond to reasons. But, for those who do not hold a reasons-responsive view how are they to make sense of degree talk? Further, should they try? I'd be curious to see how you all think about moral responsibility. Does it come in degrees? Overt blame surely does but does moral responsibility proper? I'm not sure why I find this degree talk puzzling, but I do nonetheless. I suggest that we can understand moral responsibility instead as a binary concept; we are either morally responsible for some act A or we are not. Am I wrong to think of MR in this way? If so, what would be a downfall for thinking of it in this way? Further, is such a project worthwhile?

So, I ask those that are compelled by this degree talk:  what is moral responsibility such that it*could* come in degrees, and further, what is lost if we give up such talk? Notice that in the quoted passage from Mele he says “The word degree is important here”. Should we think that degree talk is important and what would change if we gave it up?

Anyway, I raised lots of questions in this post. Feel freeto answer them all or none at all. I'm hoping to get at least one more post up this week and a handful more before the month is over.