Thursday, July 7, 2016

Free will and moral responsibility


On Halloween night, a man in a white mask goes door-to-door killing everyone in his sight with a large kitchen knife. He is arrested and brought in to trial. On a scale from 1 to 10 (1=not at all responsible, 5=somewhat responsible, 10=fully responsible), how responsible would you consider the man to be for his actions in light of the three following scenarios:

a)      The man was possessed by evil spirits
b)      The man was psychopathic with a severe self-control deficit
c)      The man planned everything and knew that his actions were immoral

If you think that the man wasn’t responsible in (a), but near fully responsible in (c), on what basis did you come to such judgments? Common sense says that the man who planned everything is responsible because he made the decision to kill all of those people whereas the man under possession did not. We consider ourselves to be responsible for those actions under our control. We do not blame small children or non-human animals for their actions because they are lack certain mental capacities (e.g reflective reasoning) and/or knowledge (e.g. moral norms) that allow for reason-guided action. It seems then that moral responsibility depends on whether or not we can freely act or make decisions, otherwise known as free will.

A view held by many scientists (and some prominent philosophers) rejects this common sense picture. Free will skepticism (FWS) entails that 1) no one has free will and that 2) no one is responsible for anything. If we are not morally responsible for our actions, then the correct answer for (a-c) should be a (1). The man who planned everything and knew his actions were immoral was no more responsible than the man who had all of his actions manipulated by evil spirits. 

FWS has radical implications for our moral, legal, and social practices. Unlike certain abstract philosophical questions (e.g. whether numbers exist), the free will debate is of real world significance. In this post, I will assess the plausibility of free will skepticism and defend compatibilist theories of free will—which I take to preserve many of our moral, legal, social practices—from recent attacks. Before I get into the details, I’d first like to state that the free will debate is deeply interconnected with many other philosophical topics (e.g. the nature of causation, philosophy of action, the mind-body problem, and laws of nature) for which there are no easy or obvious answers. In taking a side in the free will debate, one must tacitly accept views regarding all of these other topics. Likewise, the free will debate itself comprises a number of different questions:

·         What is free will?
·         Is free will compatible with determinism?
·         Is free will required for moral responsibility? 
·         What is moral responsibility? 
·         What follows if we don’t have free will and/or moral responsibility?

Free will can be conceived of in more than one way. There is first, the libertarian conception of free will, which states that free will gives us ultimate control of our actions or the unconditional ability to do otherwise. Possession of libertarian free will entails that if we were to rewind the clock right before the moment of some action (e.g. eat cereal for breakfast)—*fixing all of the past conditions (e.g. mental states, prior events, etc.)*—we would be able to do otherwise (e.g. eat eggs for breakfast). This conception of free will often goes hand in hand with dualism—the view which states that the mind and body are independent—as well as theism (1). Under a theistic reading, free will can be thought of as a god given power, giving humans ultimate responsibility for their actions. Many scientists and philosophers doubt that we have this kind of free will. Without this kind of free will, it is thought that humans are just like billiard balls, with each action the result of a long chain reaction of past events constrained (or determined) by the laws of nature. But there is also the compatibilist conception of free will, an alternative that’s been around since Ancient Greece (2).

Compatibilism states that we can have free will even if the universe, and our actions, are the result of past events and the laws of nature. In a nutshell, compatibilism is the view that we can be morally responsible even if we lack immaterial souls or magical causal powers. Hume thought of free will as the ability to make decisions without any external constraints (e.g. having a gun up to your head) (3). Eddy Nahmias, a contemporary compatibilist, conceives of free will as a set of psychological capacities (4). Such capacities include: self-control, future planning, and rational deliberation. The extent to which an agent has free will depends on whether there are any internal (e.g. mental illness) or external (e.g. gun to head) pressures working against these capacities. On this view, free will is not an all-or-nothing feature, but rather, a matter of degree. 

Many have challenged compatibilist theories on the grounds that their proponents are changing the subject. Free will skeptics claim that most people (i.e. non-philosophers) have the libertarian conception in mind, and that therefore, it is then misleading to say that we have free will, but of a different kind. Sam Harris gives a nice way to illustrate this objection.

“Imagine that we live in a world where more or less everyone believes in the lost kingdom of Atlantis. You and your fellow compatibilists come along and offer comfort: Atlantis is real, you say. It is, in fact, the island of Sicily. You then go on to argue that Sicily answers to most of the claims people through the ages have made about Atlantis. Of course, not every popular notion survives this translation, because some beliefs about Atlantis are quite crazy, but those that really matter—or should matter, on your account—are easily mapped onto what is, in fact, the largest island in the Mediterranean. Your work is done, and now you insist that we spend the rest of our time and energy investigating the wonders of Sicily” (5).

For Harris’s analogy to work, one must assume that everyone more or less believes in the libertarian conception of free will. This is an empirical question, one that, at best, remains unsettled (6). But let’s assume for the sake of argument that most people do have the libertarian conception in mind. Does it follow that we should then conclude that free will does not exist? Another option would be to state that the folk are simply wrong about the nature of free will. We wouldn’t want to say that energy doesn’t exist simply because the folk conception of ‘energy’ is erroneous. What’s relevant is whether the concept maps onto something in the world, not how many people happen to misunderstand it. There are further, pragmatic, reasons for siding with the compatibilists. 

It would be absurd, if not impossible to give up talk of moral responsibility altogether. As human beings, we have emotional reactions to certain kinds of behavior (7). We feel indignation towards those who do us wrong and we feel gratitude towards those who help us. If no one is morally responsible, then no one deserves blame or praise. It would thus be irrational to experience such reactive emotions and we would be rationally compelled to try and eliminate them from the human experience. Unless we come to the point where drugs and genetic modification can rid us of such emotions, I think they are here to stay. 

In summary, there are roughly three positions one may take up in the free will debate. One can be a libertarian, a skeptic, or a compatibilist. I have argued that compatibilism is the most appealing option, on the grounds that it preserves our common sense intuitions about moral responsibility (which may be part of our human nature), but this is far from a knock-down case for the view. There is much more to say about all three of these views. In the future posts, I will dive much deeper into many of the questions raised here. I will focus mainly on the debate between free will skeptics and compatibilists and ultimately argue that compatibilism is the more plausible view to hold. 

Works cited:
(1)   Not all libertarian views are religiously motivated. For example, the philosopher Robert Kane defends a naturalistic theory of libertarian free will. See his 1998 book, “The significance of free will”, for an articulation and defense of his view. 
(2)   Scholars have argued that ancient Stoics, such as Chrysippus, advanced compatibilist theories. Sharples, R. W. (1983). Alexander of Aphrodisias on fate: Text, translation, and commentary. Duckworth.
(3)   http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume-freewill/
(6)   Murray, D., & Nahmias, E. (2014). Explaining away incompatibilist intuitions.Philosophy and Phenomenological Research88(2), 434-467.
(7)   The philosopher Peter Strawson has written extensively about the relevance of emotions to the free will debate. See his classic text Freedom and resentment (1963).

Further reading:

Recommended films with connections to the free will debate:

The Adjustment Bureau
Minority Report
A Clockwork Orange



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