Flickers of Freedom

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. 

Retribution, Courage, and Self-Respect

(This is my last post: Big thanks to Thomas and all the Flickerers who joined into these discussions.  It's been an interesting and challenging month.   Don't forget to listen to the Very Bad Wizards Podcast! On to the post...)

Defenders of the standard retributive model often talk as if the punishment of wrongdoers by itself restores the self-respect of victims.   Retributive punishment, they say, sends a message to the offender and society that the victim is a person, that he or she has rights that cannot be violated.  This may be true in some imagined world of Kantian idealists, but it has no basis in real life.  As the psychologist Dale Miller has argued, the way we respond to insults affects our self-image and our image in the eyes of others.  The failure to respond can further diminish victims, it can mark them as cowards in their own eyes and the eyes of others.   

Moore's Method: Does it Mean What He Thinks it Means?

In the first two posts of this series I sketched out Moore's methodology and why he thinks the retributive emotions are virtuous.  (See the end of this post for a quick summary.)   I haven't given my own position on all this yet--that's what this post is for.   I like Moore's methodology (without his unnecessary metaethical assumptions) but I do not think it means what he thinks it means.   I'm going to argue that Moore's approach leads to principles of punishment that bear more resemblance to restorative or corrective theories punishment than the standard retributivist model that Moore favors. 

Are the Retributive Emotions Virtuous?

(This is part two of a three or four part series.)

In the comments for the previous post, a couple of you questioned whether the retributive emotions are virtuous.  Moore considers this question at some length in his book.  He takes Nietzsche to be the best critic of the retributive emotions and tries to respond.  Here's Moore:  

If Nietzsche is right, [these emotions] are truly a witches brew: resentment, fear, anger, cowardice, hostility, aggression, cruelty, sadism, envy jealousy, guilty, self-loathing, hypocrisy, and self-deception—those ‘reactive affects’ that Nietzsche sometimes lumped under the French term ressentiment.  All this, Nietzsche believed, lies behind our judgments of retributive justice.  (p. 120, all page numbers come from Placing Blame)

Moore concedes that our retributive judgments can at times driven by the non-virtuous emotion of envy.  Since our weakness prevents direct us from retaliating directly, “our perceived helplessness transforms the anger into the brooding resentment of those who lack power.” (121)  Moore agrees that this form of resentment is ugly and harmful, and that it poisons the soul.  He also concedes that the retributive emotions can be linked with cruelty, sadistic pleasure at the suffering of others, saying "surely, one of the uglier spectacles of our times are the parties by fraternity boys outside the gates of prisons where an execution is taking place…"

Moore's Way of Justifying Retributivism

The challenge for retributivists is to explain why offenders deserve to suffer when the punishment has no benefit to overall well-being.  Rationalist justifications for retributive punishment haven't met with much success.  What Michael Moore says about utilitarian justifications—“bad reasons for what we believe on instinct anyway” is even more true of the rationalist accounts of Kant, Hegel, and more recently Herbert Morris.  Moore has developed a more promising non-rationalist and non-foundationalist justification of retributivist principles. Moore’s basic approach is to argue that the retributivist principle--the principle that offenders ought to suffer for wrongdoing--offers the best explanation for our particular judgments about cases of wrongdoing.  Unlike his rationalist counterparts, Moore is happy to allow emotions to play a central role in his justification for retributivism.  Emotions, according to Moore, are a fallible but crucial indication of the truth of our moral judgments. 

We can sketch out his argument like this:   

Bernard Williams May Have Beaten Me To the Punch

Justin Coates sent me this great quote from Williams' "Morality, The Peculiar Institution" that expresses my worry from this post.

""There are, equally, various negative reactions to [vicious persons], from hatred and horror in the most extreme cases, to anger, regret, correction, blame.  When we are not within the formal circumstances of the state's law, there is the further dimension of who is reactive: not everyone can or should sustain every complaint.  It is another consequence of the fiction of the moral law that this truth does not occur to us.  It is as if every member of the notional republic were empowered to make a citizen's arrest."

I love that italicized part.  Thanks Bernard!

Are We Just a Bunch of Busybodies? (A Dialogue)

Busybody [biz-ee-bod-ee] noun: a person who pries into or meddles in the affairs of others.   

In the last two posts I described some cases that are hard for most existing theories of moral responsibility to handle.  What I want to suggest in this post is that any attempt to develop a systematic condition-based theory of responsibility is both philosophically and morally problematic.   Why morally?  Because it turns philosophers into meddlesome busybodies who stick their noses in the private affairs of others and don't know when to mind their own business.  

So here's the set-up:  Sarah is at a party and has a few too many glasses of wine on a relatively empty stomach.  She overhears her colleague Emma talking about her in another conversation.  She’s drunk and she misinterprets the meaning of Emma’s remarks and gets angry.  Without thinking, Sarah confronts Emma and lets off some biting insults about her performance at work.  Emma is bewildered and humiliated in front of her friends and co-workers.  Soon, the initial misunderstanding is cleared up and Sarah, mortified, realizes she was way out of line. She offers a bunch of drunken apologies, but the damage is done.  Emma is furious and resentful and Sarah feels terrible overwhelming guilt what happened. 

(Note: quick shout-out to the two students at Mississippi State where I gave a talk with this dialogue--they gave the definitive performances in the roles of Sarah and Emma.  They were like Brando in Streetcar, their performances can never be equaled.)

How would philosophers and their theories of moral responsibility handle this kind of incident?   Here's the dialogue.

Blame and Perspective

Quick follow-up post because Neal and Dan's comments reminded me of an issue that I've been wanting to discuss on this blog for a while.   Way back in Very Bad Wizards episode 13 (we just recorded #35!), Fiery Cushman joined us and raised a fascinating possibility.  The case is exactly the same as the one Dan mentioned in his comment for the previous post.   I accidentally back over my neighbor's dog.  I did not do it through negligence, there was no reasonable way for me to know that the dog was behind my car.  Fiery suggested that in this case, I should hold myself responsible (and blame myself) but the neighbor shouldn't blame/hold me responsible.  

As I understand the idea, there's no fact of the matter about whether I am responsible/blameworthy for this act.  It depends on which perspective you inhabit.      Even more so than the Orestes case, this seems (a) plausible and (b) not able to be captured in virtually all theories of moral responsibility that I'm aware.   But I haven't thought deeply about (b)--maybe some theories are able to capture this kind of case.    I also wonder how far this phenomenon extends even to more straightforward-seeming cases of wrongdoing.

Unjust Just-Deserts?

The Greek myths and dramas are a tremendous source for puzzles about responsibility, agency, and fate.  One of my favorites is the story of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and there three children.   Agamemnon is a king with a family history that is far more twisted and violent than anything Tarantino could dream up.   (You can read a decent summary of the history here.)   The story I'm concerned with starts when Agamemnon is about to lead the Greek Army to Troy to fight the Trojan War and get back Helen for his brother.   Unfortunately, because of a personal grudge, Artemis (a god) has stilled the winds preventing them from sailing.   But they have to sail, it’s fate, Zeus has decreed that they will defeat the Trojans.  The only way for to Agamemnon appease Artemis is to sacrifice the thing most precious to him: his daughter Iphigenia.  And so he does.