As promised, a new post on a different topic. Again, this is going to be driven by thoughts about cognitive science. I may be giving those of you who don’t know my work a rather distorted picture. Don’t be put off reading Hard Luck because you’re skeptical or uninterested in this kind of work. Hard Luck is philosophy, and science plays no significant role in its arguments. Hopefully, this post connects more closely to philosophical issues that the last couple.
In particular, I want to talk about manipulation cases. These cases seem more central to the compatibilism debate today than previously (though they’ve been kicking around playing this kind of role for a good three decades). In a manipulation case, one agent manipulates another agent into performing a wrongful act without constraining or coercing her into performing the action. The manipulation might be proximate, as in cases 1 and 2 of the four case argument, or distal, as in Mele’s zygote argument.
These cases have been important in recent debates because it is pretty clear that agents in some of these cases – like the zygote case – can satisfy any compatibilist conditions on free will you like. They act without coercion from the manipulator, they assess reasons rationally, they are sane, and so on. But many philosophers who have thought about these cases have the response that the manipulated agent isn’t responsible. So incompatibilists conclude that compatibilism isn’t adequate. Because the agent acts some kind of control incompatible with determinism, they aren’t responsible.
My question concerns what explains the intuition that the agent isn’t responsible? Chandra has done some great work on this topic already. Like him, I think some kind of proper data is needed to answer questions like this, because it is very hard to know what factors our intuitions are responsive to. Chandra did some structural equation modeling to show what factors mediate judgments in these cases. I want to do some experimental work, which I hope will identify other factors.
As I noted in the last couple of posts, it seems that mental states and actual harm make independent contributions to blame judgments. Judgments concerning punishment are additive: mental states make a contribution and actual harm makes an independent contribution.
But when the harm occurs via some independent causal route, harm has the opposite effect, reducing the amount of blame subjects attribute to the agent who intended the harm.
The evidence comes from work by Fiery Cushman (2008; experiments 3 and 4). In the most interesting experiment, Cushman used the following vignette (here presented in a shortened version).
Smith knows that Brown is likely to win the big race if he competes in it. So he decides to poison him. At a dinner previous to the race, Smith sprinkles Brown’s salad with poppy seeds, because he believes that Brown is fatally allergic to poppy seeds. Brown eats the salad.
There were two variants of the vignette. In both of them, Brown is in fact allergic to hazelnuts and not poppy seeds. In the first version, Brown eats the salad and, because it contains poppy seeds and not hazelnuts, he is not harmed. In the second version, the salad happens to have hazelnuts in it, so while Brown is not harmed by the poppy seeds, he dies anyway.
Subjects were asked how much prison Smith deserves. Here’s the striking finding: subjects were twice as likely to think that Smith deserves no time in prison at all when Brown dies then when he is not harmed at all. In all categories, the fact that Brown was harmed tended to decrease the amount of blame subjects attributed to Smith. Actual harm, and the availability of another agent who was responsible for it, seemed to block the effect of Smith’s mental states in assigning blame.
Now let’s return to manipulation cases. My suggestion is that the causal link between the manipulator and the consequent harm tends to block the typical effects of the manipulated agent’s mental states in attributions of blame. If that’s right, then it might not be the manipulation per se that generates the intuition that the manipulated agent is not responsible. Rather, it is the availability of another salient and potentially responsible agent, with the right causal connection between that agent and the subsequent harm. The way to test this is to break the link between the manipulator and the harm, so that the proximate agent is still manipulated but the manipulator is not salient or not responsible. If judgments shift under these conditions, and people are significantly more willing to blame the proximate agent, that would be evidence that it isn’t because the agent lacks some kind of control incompatible with causal determinism that they are thought to be responsible.
That’s the suggestion. Now I want your help with suggestions about how to break the link. Unfortunately it is far from clear what factors actually do the work in Cushman’s cases, so it is unclear what factors to manipulate. I hope to get some pilot data soon. One thing worth trying is a case in which the manipulator is clearly not a morally responsible agent (perhaps he is insane or a child – an alien child). Perhaps only when the manipulator is morally responsible for the harm is the link the right kind. If, on the other hand, a causal link is sufficient for the effect, other manipulations might be needed. Perhaps some kind of deviant causal chain might do the trick (perhaps we can have dueling evil neuroscientists, with one attempting to block the manipulation and a second blocking the blocking attempt: problem is, this kind of case is hard for subjects to process. Any suggestions?
As promised, a response to some of the comments made to my last post. I am going to make some general comments. Because this is so damn long, I am posting it as a new post. I will not make the responses explicit: instead I will use the comments section of the new post to respond. Very soom - in the next day or two - I will put up a new post on a different topic.
First, let me try to make more explicit what I am trying to achieve and what I take the dialectical situation to be. I assume the following state of affairs: when we consider wrongdoers, we feel torn. This is nicely brought out by Gary Watson’s essay on Robert Harris: depending on what details of the case we focus on – his awful actions or his horrible upbringing – we are torn between a retributive impulse and pity. When we feel conflict like this, there three ways we can respond: we can go with intuition 1, with intuition 2, or we can go with both (alternatively, of course, we can decide that both are misguided: I am going to ignore that possibility). Each of the first two options has the virtue of simplicity. The last has the overlooked virtue of complexity (we get to congratulate ourselves that we rise above the simplistic worldviews of those who cannot grasp the complexities of the world).
I think the last response has been the dominant one. And so long as we use the tools of moral philosophy exclusively, I think it is the rational response. If what we are seeking to do is to capture folk concepts, or to systematize our intuitions, then we must accept that we feel both sets of intuitions and an account of moral responsibility must be sensitive to both. There is no insurmountable inconsistency, after all. We can temper justice with mercy. Alternatively, we can argue that punishment is the recognition of humanity, autonomy and dignity we owe to the wrongdoer. My aim here is to see whether we get a different result when we move beyond the resources of moral philosophy and incorporate those of the cognitive sciences. I am concerned with what is the case in the actual world, for the purposes of what follows, and not with the nature of our concepts.
My claim is that we are disposed to make retributive judgments, but analyzing the structure of the judgments we make, plus some consideration of evolutionary theory, makes it plausible that these judgments have a purpose – a function, in the adaptive sense of that term – and that they don’t play that function very well. Of course, they must have played it well enough that they were selected for, or the claim that that was their function would be implausible. But something can be selected for function x without being an efficient way of achieving. It might cheaper than more efficient ways, or it must just happen to be available. First, some evidence for what that function is; second, some reasons to think it doesn’t play it very well.
We can identify the function of retributive emotions by doing philosophy or by doing psychology (ideally both). By doing philosophy, we can look at what are attributions of moral responsibility are sensitive to. I follow Michael McKenna in thinking that excuses, exemptions and justifications track the quality of will with which agents act (if any of these are successful, we see that the agent did not have the quality of will we thought they had). The psychological literature on blame converges on something close to this. Actually, it seems to show that there are three independent and additive features that predict blame (or punishment; there is little difference which is used). They are belief that the harm will result, a desire that the harm results and the actual occurrence of harm.
I just said that the actual occurrence of harm is an independent contributor to judgments of responsibility. So it is not the case that judgments track mental states alone. To explain what’s going on, we need to pay attention to two things: the structure of our cognitive capacities and the evolutionary account of the function of norm enforcement. First the latter. We know that altruistic behavior (roughly, behavior that costs the animal something but benefits another) occurs in the animal world, including among quite simple animals. So we know that this kind of behavior occurs because it is adaptive. Modeling reveals the conditions under which it is adaptive. On these models, punishment is required to prevent invasion by free riders (if that is allowed, the models show that free riding becomes universal and altruism dies out).
But the models also predict something else, and thereby explain a puzzle. I claimed that our attributions of blame track agents’ mental state. But I also said that psychological work shows that we are independently sensitive to actual consequences. What gives? The modeling shows that punishment needs to be quite inflexible to prevent invasion. Further, because of the environment in which punishment developed are informationally opaque – in other words, actors try to hide their intentions from one another – and because of asymmetries in costs (false positives are less costly than false negatives) – retributive sentiments can be expected to pick up on cues other than mental states.
So all this explains why our retributive sentiments are sensitive to things other than just mental states. Now why think that they not only should be sensitive to mental states alone, but also in a forward-looking way? The adaptive function of norm enforcement is to produce prosociality: it is forward-looking in nature. Its backward looking elements are predictable outcomes of oversensitive mechanisms: because the modeling shows that punishment responses should be relatively inflexible, it is not surprising that even once we have factored in deterrence and incapacitation, there is an intuitive residue.
But there is more. The modeling also shows that punishment helps to produce prosocial behavior, it also show that withdrawing aid is even better at the same end. Simply excluding free riders from the interaction, temporarily, is more effective than so-called altruistic punishment (in fact, punishment can quickly devolve in tit for tat exchanges). In game theoretical language, forgiving strategies outperform unforgiving (there is developmental evidence that forgiving strategies – getting children to have empathy for those they harmed – actually outperform punishment at producing moral behavior in children). So why do we use unforgiving strategies? Fiery Cushman has argued that facts about the learning mechanisms of our ancestors probably play a role. It is hard to teach a non-human animal to behave prosocially by withdrawing aid, because omissions are not salient and the temporal interval between antisocial act and the next opportunity for aid may be too distant for the learning mechanisms of most animals. But we humans do not employ only the kind of learning mechanisms available to non-human animals: we can understand the kind of expression of disapproval that Derk wants to substitute for blame, and understand what it entails and what it is a response to. So we can fully explain our intuition that we ought to punish as a the result of an overly inflexible and overly sensitive mechanism responsive to harms which have the adaptive function of producing better behavior, and we can produce better behavior by ignoring the retributive residue and instead using non-punitive means.
I said I wasn’t going to talk skepticism anymore, and here I am, talking about skepticism again. Further evidence that lack of belief in free will predicts anti-social behavior! I want to follow up on a debate that has been occurring in comments on my previous post. I apologize in advance for two things. First, these remarks are not properly thought through. I’m trying out a line of response I think is interesting: isn’t that what a blog is for? Second, I’m going to assume a thoroughly naturalistic picture in what follows. I know some of you will reject the picture. I don’t pretend I can give you an argument that should convince you that you ought to accept the picture. I beg your indulgence in what follows.
In his comments, John noted how despicable it would seem to say to the families of victims of the Boston bombing that the perpetrators were not responsible. When we attend to what they did, and especially when we think of the suffering they caused their victims, and the grief of the victims’ families, it is “beyond obvious” (to quote Robert) that they deserve blame, at the very least. This response is, surely, widely shared. Eddy notes that he shares John’s intuition here. The question is, what should we make of this response?
Alan says that these responses are data for him. I agree: in various places, I have argued that is appropriate for philosophers to treat intuitions as data. But not all intuitions are equally reliable as data.
Why do we have the intuition that agents who perform wrongful acts and who lack excuses or justifications of various uncontroversial kinds deserve blame and perhaps suffering? Here’s a plausible story. Intuitions like this are the product of evolution. Like many other affective responses, they have the job of motivating agents to perform actions that a cool cost/benefit calculation might warn against. It is often unwise, from a strictly self-interested point of view, to attempt to punish a wrongdoer. They have just demonstrated, after all, a willingness to overlook moral norms: perhaps they will respond by beating you to a pulp. Even if you are bigger than they are, you take a risk in attempting to punish them. But evolution does not always select for behavior that is narrowly self-interested; it selects for behavior that increases inclusive fitness (roughly, the propensity to get copies of one’s genes into the next generation). Sometimes doing things that are in one’s narrow self-interest increases one’s inclusive fitness (that’s one reason why we have a disposition to help close kin, even at a cost to ourselves). And sometimes it is one’s narrow self-interest to credibly commit to performing an action that it is not in one’s narrow self-interest actually to perform. I think punishment falls into the latter class. If I can convince you that I will retaliate massively if you pinch my stuff, I may convince you not to pinch my stuff, even if the risk that I would take in retaliating really isn’t worth it.
So we get instincts toward revenge and retaliation. I don’t think this is anything like a full explanation of our moral responsibility intuitions, however. The reason is, this explanation does not explain the way we feel indignant about wrongs which are not plausibly regarded as targeting us, or our kin. Evolutionary modeling provides us with a fuller explanation. There are good reasons to think, on the basis of the modeling, that punishment is required for the evolution of cooperation. We need punishment for social norms to be stable. In fact, we seem to need second-order punishment: punishment of those who don’t punish. Now we have a fuller explanation of why we have the intuitions that John reports.
The interesting question is whether this explains or explains away. There is a lively debate right now about evolutionary explanations of morality more generally, with some philosophers arguing that because we would have the moral intuitions we have whether or not they tracked the truth, we have no justification for our moral claims. I am a moral constructivist: I don’t think that our moral intuitions track an independent moral truth, but I don’t think the evolutionary explanation explains them away because our morality just is the appropriate systemization of these intuitions. So we need to know whether the best systematization includes moral responsibility intuitions.
One way to answer this question is to look at the content of our excuses and justifications. In offering an excuse or a justification, I attempt to show something about my regard for moral considerations. If I am excused or justified, then we can’t infer from my actions that I don’t have the right regard for morality, and therefore we can’t infer that I am likely to reoffend. So it seems that our practices allow us to hone in on two properties of agents: their regard for morality and the moral worth of others, and their likelihood of reoffending. If you believe, as I do, that we ought to distinguish blameworthiness from badness, there is no special worries about the first condition. It is quite in order to probe people’s motives and mental states to discover whether they are morally good or bad. As for the second, I think we should recognize that the whole rationale is simply anachronistic. We can predict propensity to reoffend better without asking about moral character (note that we dissociate the two conditions already, for instance in some cases of mental illness). And we can stabilize social norms more effectively without requiring blame and punishment. These responses evolved in an environment in which there was no state to enforce such norms; now the state must play that role because social groups are simply too large for norm enforcement to work effectively at the individual level (individual norm enforcement is probably counterproductive today).
The point of our moral responses in general is to promote human flourishing. They continue to play that role and their doing so vindicates them. The point of our reactive attitudes is to stabilize social norms and promote cooperation. These attitudes no longer play that role: if anything, they are counterproductive. So we should not see in the evolutionary explanation of our morality generally a debunking explanation, but we should think that the evolutionary account explains away what Bruce calls the moral responsibility system.
So, I am still working on the ever-evolving line up for the Featured Author series and I thought it would be nice to feature the work of some graduate students, recently minted PhDs, and post-docs who are working on action theory broadly construed. So, if you know of any junior philosophers (or psychologists) who are working on agency-related issues and who might be interested in doing a stint here on the blog as a Featured Author, please let me know. While it has been great having more established senior philosophers contributing to the series thus far, I think it is important that researchers who are just getting into the field get some additional exposure as well. So, thanks in advance for your suggestions.
p.s. Don't be modest! If you fit the description above and you're interested in doing a stint as a Featured Author, send me an email and copy of your CV!
I am delighted to announce that Dr. Hanna Pickard has accepted my invitation to be a Featured Author here at Flickers of Freedom during January (2014). Dr. Pickard is a Wellcome Trust Biomedical Ethics Clinical Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy and a Fellow of All Souls College at the University of Oxford. She is also a therapist at the Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust Complex Needs Service, which is a therapeutic community for patients with personality disorders and related problems. She specializes in the philosophy of psychiatry and clinical ethics, investigating philosophical issues that arise out of clinical practice and related science. Her central, current project involves articulating the nature of the concepts of responsibility and blame that are used within effective clinical treatments of personality disorder, and exploring their application within the criminal justice system and prisons. She also works on the nature of addiction, self-harm, violence, emotions, and psychosis.
Given my own interests in punishment theory and the philosophy of psychiatry, I am very much looking forward to Dr. Pickard's contributions. I have a few other invitations in the works as well. Hopefully, I will have some additional announcements soon.
One reason the free will/moral responsibility debate is interesting is that it is multifaceted: different people approach these topics from quite different perspectives, with different sets of questions in mind and different kinds of tools. Some are primarily concerned with the metaphysics of agency, others with questions in moral philosophy (which themselves subdivide in various ways), still others are motivated by concerns in the philosophy of religion and yet others are motivated by questions to do with mind and cognition (which may be more or less empirically motivated).
The factors that make this set of issues exciting and vibrant might also sometimes cause confusion, though. I suspect that there is a great deal of talking past one another in the debate, and if we could clear up some differences of terminology, we might find that some opponents agree more than they thought. I will return to this suggestion in a moment.
We’ve just had a really interesting and exciting discussion of moral responsibility skepticism, its justification and its possible implications. I can’t top it and I don’t intend to try: I will move the conversation to the kinds of topics that are currently preoccupying me starting with the next post. But I do want to start by following up on one central issue that has arisen out of Bruce’s discussion.
Thank to Michael McKenna, and his hard line reply to Derk’s four case argument, we are now familiar with responses to arguments for skepticism that work by running the original argument backwards. In his original four case argument, Derk asks us to consider, first, a case in which a human being is subject to moment-to-moment manipulation. Having elicited the intuition that the agent is not morally responsible in case 1, he alters the case, gradually moving from the massively manipulated agent to one who is subject to less direct manipulation and finally to an agent who is not manipulated at all but is situated in a deterministic world. Derk argues that case 4 is relevantly like case 1, and because we were confident that the agent in case 1 was not morally responsible, we ought to conclude that the agent in case 4 is not morally responsible. Michael’s strategy is to begin with an ordinary agent who is not subject to manipulation. Because we have the intuition that the ordinary agent is morally responsible, we ought to think that – if indeed there are no relevant differences between the manipulated agent and the determined agent – the manipulated agent is also responsible.
I’m not going to comment on the dispute between Michael and Derk now. What interests me at the moment is the invocation of similar moves against Bruce’s moral responsibility skepticism, here. Eddy was most explicit in making this move. He was prompted to do so by Mark, who also wanted to highlight the fact that moral responsibility is (in his words) not “only for criminals”. Both Eddy and Mark want to bring us down to earth, to the everyday contexts in which we hold one another morally responsible. Mark seems to suggest that skepticism is an understandable response to the pathologies of contemporary criminal justice, especially in the United States. Mark thinks we have overreacted to a genuine problem: seeing that contemporary criminal justice is pathological, we have decided that we need to jettison the notion of moral responsibility. Obviously, though, a far more just criminal justice system is attainable (again, the US is really an outlier here, compared to every other advanced democracy, so there are plenty of existence proofs). Baby and bathwater, Mark might be saying. If we think about it clearly, Mark suggests we will see that we "don't really want to eliminate moral responsibility. What you want is a system of responsibility that's *more* *moral*”.
It’s here that I return to the worry that there might be some equivocation on the phrase “moral responsibility”. It may be that Mark is right, with regard to some concept of moral responsibility and Bruce is right with regard to another (I certainly accept that I am not skeptical about some concepts of moral responsibility: if, as Arpaly has said, thinking that someone is morally responsible is appraising them as morally flawed agents, then I hold people morally responsible). I doubt we can usefully settle on the correct concept of moral responsibility – folk commitments are imprecise - so I want to try to make progress simply by stipulating what I mean, claiming that the stipulated concept is an important one though not the only one.
In Hard Luck, I defined “moral responsibility” roughly as follows: to say that an agent is morally responsible for an action is to say that it is permissible for their interests to count for less (or for more) when it comes to distributing benefits and burdens just because they have committed that action. Now, in the light of Eddy’s remarks, I want to slightly revise what I said. Eddy begins his version of the hard line reply to the skeptic with this everyday case:
There's no way Sam (8 year old) doesn't deserve some blame for taunting his little sister for no good reason.
Now my first response to Eddy’s case when I read it was to think it is just obvious that we don’t respond to kids like Sam for backwards looking reasons – ie, just because they have committed some action. Rather, we respond the way we do for essentially forwards-looking reasons, because we want to socialize them into accepting moral norms (for their own sake as well as for others). But I also want to suggest an alternative reply, one that requires me to modify slightly what I said in Hard Luck.
Suppose we accept that just because Sam has taunted his sister, his interests count for less when it comes to the distribution of benefits and burdens. In that case, he is (Hard Luck) responsible for his actions. But is he (Hard Luck – R) responsible?. Roughly
Hard Luck - R moral responsibility: An agent is HL-R responsible for an action just in case it is permissible to count his essential interests for less (or more) when it comes to the distribution of benefits and burdens.
By "essential interests", I mean something like this: our interests in acquring and maintaining a set of basic capabilities or Rawlsian primary goods: the kind of things we need to pursue any course of life we might choose. The basic idea should be clear enough: though we may well think it is appropriate to deprive Sam of candy or a trip to the cinema because of what he has done, we don’t think that its appropriate to set him back in anything that is going to affect his future capacity to shape his life as he wishes (where these capacities are psychological, cultural and physical). So we can block the hard line reply at the very start.
This has gone on far too long already. Let me end with two questions. First, what is the prospects of this reply? In particular, does it leave too substantive a notion of moral responsibility untouched, so that it doesn’t really identify a skepticism worth the name? Second, what do you think of Mark’s charge (if I read him correctly) that skepticism is an overreaction to a particularly egregious criminal justice system? More broadly, what explains the fact (as it seems to me) that there has been a sudden increase in the number of skeptics recently (as well as Bruce, Derk, Galen and me, Michael Zimmerman has clearly identified himself as a skeptic in his recent book).
Greetings from the future! I write from Melbourne, Australia, where my principal employer, the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, is located. We here are 14 hours ahead of New York and 17 hours ahead of California. I am often asked “what it’s like in the future?” Well, with the benefit of hindsight, which as you know is always 20/20, we can see that the long obsession with the compatibility of free will and causal determinism was a mistake, obscuring lots of other interesting issues to do with agency and responsibility. I’m going to try to talk about some of those issues this month, with an emphasis on cognitive science (at least that’s the current plan: we shall see). My next book, which has just been accepted by OUP, is on these kinds of issues (it is tentatively entitled Consciousness and Moral Responsibility*). I don’t plan to talk – much – about skepticism (the new book is agnostic on the topic and the science I focus on in it doesn’t support skepticism in any kind of direct way).
I want to start by thanking Thomas for the opportunity. It is a real honor to be included in the same company as Michael McKenna, Bruce Waller, Derk Perebook and Dana Nelkin (just to mention the most recent authors). Now on we go!
* I am currently thinking of a still from Nosferatu as a cover image. Suggestions for other options welcome! In case it helps to focus your mind, the book defends a particular account of consciousness, the global workspace account, and on that basis develops a theory of the functional role that consciousness of facts plays in responding to their content: it argues that this account entails that agents in pathologies of consciousness, like those suffering absence seizures, and ordinary agents whojust happen not to be conscious of the facts that give their action their moral significance, can't be directly morally responsible for those actions.
It's that time of the month once again when I must pass the torch from one Featured Author at Flickers of Freedom to the next. So, first, let me thank Bruce Waller for doing an outstanding job during the month of May. I hope everyone enjoyed his provocative posts as much as I did. As a fellow skeptic, it was especially rewarding to me to see what Bruce has been thinking about these days! Hopefully, I will be able to cajole him into doing another stint down the road. For now, I would now like to welcome June's Featured Author: Professor Neil Levy. Neil is a Research Associate at the Oxford University Institute for Science and Ethics who specializes in free will and moral responsibility, and empirical approaches to ethics. He has published widely on many topics in philosophy, including bioethics, applied philosophy, continental philosophy and free will. His most recent books include Neuroethics (2007) and Hard Luck: How Luck Undermines Free Will and Responsibility (2011). Please join me in welcoming Neil to the Featured Author series here at Flickers of Freedom. As is always the case, I look forward to seeing everyone in the discussion threads!
The upcoming schdule for the series can be found below the fold:
July:
Eddy Nahmias is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department and the Neuroscience Institute at Georgia State University. He specializes in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, free will, moral psychology, and experimental philosophy. He is currently working on a book, Rediscovering Free Will: Autonomy and Responsibility in the Age of the Mind Sciences (OUP forthcoming). He also recently co-edited Moral Psychology: Classical and Contemporary Readings (Wiley-Blackwell 2011) with Thomas Nadelhoffer and Shaun Nichols.
August (2013):
Carolina Sartorio is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. She received her PhD from MIT in 2003 and taught previously at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She has published articles on causation, moral responsibility, agency, and free will, and is currently working on a book manuscript, entitledCausation and Free Will, where she develops a compatibilist, actual-sequence view that emphasizes the connection between causation and freedom.
September (2013):
Gunnar Björnsson is a Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Umeå University and a Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science at the University of Gothenburg. He is also the Principal investigator of Responsibility in Complex Systems, a project financed by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, and Moral Motivation: Evidence and Relevance, a project funded by the Swedish Research Council with participants from the universities in Gothenburg, Umeå and Lund. His research focuses on naturalized accounts of moral, conditional, counterfactual, and causal thinking and associated issues in the philosophy of language. Two of his recent publications on moral responsibility are "The Explanatory Component of Moral Responsibility" and “A Unified Empirical Account of Responsibility Judgments."
October (2013):
Manuel Vargas is Professor of Philosophy and Law at the University of San Francisco, where he has taught courses in philosophy, psychology, Latin American Studies, the Honors Program in the Humanities, the St. Ignatius Institute, and the School of Law. Vargas is the author of Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (OUP 2013). With John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, and Derk Pereboom, he co-authored Four Views on Free Will (Blackwell 2007). With Gideon Yaffe, he is co-editor of Rational and Social Agency: Essays on the Philosophy of Michael Bratman (OUP forthcoming). Vargas' main philosophical interests include the nature of moral agency, thephilosophy of law, Latin American philosophy (especially historical work on race and identity), and questions of philosophical methodology.
November (2013):
Tamler Sommers is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston. His research focuses primarily on ethics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of law (with an emphasis on issues relating to free will, moral responsibility, punishment, and revenge). Sommers has recently published two books: A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain (McSweeney’s Press 2009) and Relative Justice: Cultural Diversity, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility (PUP 2011).
December (2013):
Joseph Keim Campbell is Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs at Washington State University. His research interests include metaphysics, epistemology, history of modern philosophy, and philosophy of science. Professor Campbell recently publishedFree Will (polity 2011) and he has also co-edited several collections for MIT Press.
January (2014):
Hanna Pickard is a Wellcome Trust Biomedical Ethics Clinical Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy and a Fellow of All Souls College at the University of Oxford. She is also a therapist at the Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust Complex Needs Service, which is a therapeutic community for patients with personality disorders and related problems. She specializes in the philosophy of psychiatry and clinical ethics, investigating philosophical issues that arise out of clinical practice and related science. Her central, current project involves articulating the nature of the concepts of responsibility and blame that are used within effective clinical treatments of personality disorder, and exploring their application within the criminal justice system and prisons. She also works on the nature of addiction, self-harm, violence, emotions, and psychosis.
February (2014):
Randolph Clarke is Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. His research focuses primarily on human agency, particularly intentional action, free will, and moral responsibility. He has also written on practical reason, mental causation, and dispositions. In addition to publishing Libertarian Accounts of Free Will (OUP 2003), Professor Clarke is presently working on a book about omissions—which he explores from the standpoints of agency, metaphysics, and ethics.
*I have a few other folks lined up as well. So, stay tuned for details!
I don’t want to cut off discussion of the previous post, particularly given the important questions recently raised by David, Eddy, Josh, and Neil; but there are only a few days remaining in May, and there is a question that particularly troubles me, and I should deeply appreciate having the insights of my Flickers friends.
For the reasons ably set out by Derk, Neil, and Galen, I believe we cannot justify moral responsibility, and that blaming, punishing, and rewarding in accordance with “just deserts” is fundamentally unfair. I gather that there are a few Flickers Folk who do not share that view; but that’s another issue. One of the most troubling challenges for those who reject moral responsibility is this: What do we do about punishment? Of course the ideal answer is easy: eliminate it, by concentrating on better early social and educational programs that provide genuine opportunities and prevent people from becoming violent criminals. In addition, there are some justice programs that seem to move in a positive direction (such as restorative justice programs). Still, no one believes that we can totally eliminate punishment, at least in the foreseeable future (though we might well dramatically reduce it from the insane current U.S. levels). As Dennett points out, even the restorative justice programs rely on a threat of punishment (if you don’t participate, you’ll be turned over to the standard program and probably imprisoned). Further, Dennett makes a very strong case that there is a deep unfairness in any form of imprisonment if one denies moral responsibility, and that the moral responsibility system is “the best game in town” until someone comes up with an alternative. Dennett’s essay, in which he further develops many of the important themes of his work and expands on them with great force and clarity, can be found at Tom Clark’s naturalism.org site (a rich resource indeed); together with Tom’s insightful response, Dennett’s response to Tom, and finally my inadequate response: if my response had been adequate, I wouldn’t still be worrying about this problem, would I?
Our society contains some violent and dangerous people, and some must be isolated/imprisoned for the protection of society. But on my view, no one – not even Robert Harris – justly deserves to be punished/imprisoned. Saul Smilansky (in “Hard Determinism and Punishment,” 2011, Law and Philosophy) poses this problem as a reductio of hard determinism: in very inadequate summary form, Smilansky’s rich argument is that given the denial of moral responsibility, no one justly deserves punishment/imprisonment; thus those who deny MR would be obligated to replace punishment with “funishment,” making “prisons” as pleasant as possible (indeed, they would have to make prisons the equivalent of five-star hotels); but that would not only be inordinately expensive, it would also destroy any deterrent effect and might even encourage some people to commit crimes in order to enjoy the funishment facilities; so crime would increase, costs would be impossible, and the result would be something not even hard determinists would want; thus following the demands of denying MR results in a situation that those who deny MR would reject.
From my perspective, recognizing the fundamental unfairness of the moral responsibility system is the best way forward to developing a system in which we minimize punishment, provide genuine opportunity, and find better ways to shape people who are more thoughtful, have a stronger sense of positive self-efficacy, and are less inclined to violence; in short, denying MR promotes examination of the detailed causes of human behavior and of how to shape positive behavior. But even if we eliminated moral responsibility, we would still have the problem – maybe forever, at least for the foreseeable future – of what to do with those persons who pose a genuine threat to others. So my question is this: If we reject moral responsibility, and agree that no one justly deserves imprisonment, but we also recognize that we cannot do without some form of imprisonment for the protection of society, what would that imply? Would it involve the denial of MR in a fatal contradiction, or lead to Smilansky’s reductio of impossible “institutions of funishment”? Suppose one who denies moral responsibility says: Yes, we must imprison some people, even though they do not deserve it; and that’s a terrible thing; but I never suggested that denying MR would make the world perfect, only that it would make it better. Denying MR will not eliminate all the injustice in our world; some people will still have to be imprisoned for the protection of society, and we cannot turn prisons into institutions of “funishment,” because that is not economically possible and it might well be counterproductive; but it is better for us to recognize that in imprisoning a dangerous offender we are doing something that is unavoidable but still unjust, rather than pretending that we are dealing out justly deserved punishment. Recognizing that we are doing something unjust will motivate us to find better ways of shaping behavioral alternatives, and it will prevent us from making prison any more unpleasant than necessary (we will be more likely to imprison in places like Norway’s Bastoy Island rather than U.S. Supermax hell holes), and it will prevent us from imprisoning more people than absolutely necessary. If punishment cannot be eliminated, that is not a special problem for those who want to eliminate moral responsibility; rather, the problem is that the world is not just, and not all injustice can be eliminated from our world. No one justly deserves to be imprisoned, but we will not be able to eliminate prisons for the foreseeable future. Those who deny moral responsibility recognize that as a moral problem; but it is not a problem that is caused by denial of moral responsibility, and it is not a problem that opponents of moral responsibility should be obliged to solve before they argue that moral responsibility is morally wrong. Rejecting moral responsibility is a positive step toward reducing injustice, not a source of injustice.
Thanks again to Thomas for this wonderful site, and for this special opportunity; and to all who have made these discussions – certainly for me – very helpful. I’m looking forward to Neil’s postings; and in anticipation of that, here is a passage from Ecclesiastes: it is clear that when Solomon wrote it, he was inspired by Neil’s Hard Luck.
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.