#10639 - Free Will And Moral Responsibility - Ethics

Freedom & Responsibility

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding – Hume

• “Beyond the constant conjunction of similar objects, and the consequent inference from one to the other, we have no notion of any necessity or connexion.”

• Hume is a compatibilist wrt liberty and necessity.

• “The only proper object of hatred or vengeance is a person or creature, endowed with thought and consciousness; and when any criminal or injurious actions excite that passion, it is only by their relation to the person, or connexion with him.”

Free Will – Gary Watson

• The consequence argument (incompatibilist):

  • If determinism is true, everything, including human actions, is causally necessitated by the prior state of the universe in accordance with the laws of nature.

  • If human actions are causally necessitated by the past together with the laws of nature, then we cannot ever do otherwise than what we do, unless we can falsify the laws of nature or the description of the past.

  • We cannot falsify the laws of nature or the description of the past.

  • If we cannot act otherwise than we do, then we lack free will.

  • Hence, if determinism is true, we lack free will.

• Often extended with:

  • If we lack free will, we cannot appropriately hold one another responsible.

  • Hence, if determinism is true, we cannot appropriately hold one another responsible.

• Wiggins: “even if action and choice are not reducible to material processes, determinism still rules out virtually every significant human option. For determinism implies that your body cannot move in any different way from the way it in fact moves.”

• The compatibilist claim that ability to act otherwise is not inconsistent with causal necessity (‘would have done otherwise if had decided/chosen to’) is weak because the antecedent of the ‘if-then’ statement is never true.

• More sophisticated compatibilism: an agent is free when her behaviour depends on her unimpaired capacity for rational choice.

• “Incompatibilists complain that the conditional interpretation preserves alternative possibilities only by arbitrarily abstracting from the agent’s causal environment.”

• Responses to Harry Frankfurt’s cases:

  • Even if his examples succeed in refuting PAP (the Principle of Alternate Possibilities), “the denial of PAP does not establish compatibilism about responsibility” since “determinism may undermine responsibility for different reasons.”

  • “Frankfurt’s essay teaches us that what matters for responsibility is the actual explanation of our behaviour.”

  • F’s conclusion is that “acting and willing freely does not require being free to act or will otherwise.”

  • Widerker: “PAP is not impugned by Frankfurt’s examples because the cases either beg the question against the libertarian conception of responsibility or leave the individual’s freedom to choose otherwise intact.”

    • “[E]ven if the presence of the counterfactual intervener does not itself rob A of responsibility, C’s power depends on a knowledge of conditions that do, namely the deterministic processes that C is monitoring.”

    • Or, “if the relation between [e.g.] the twitch and the decision is not deterministic, then there is no reason to concede that A could not have done otherwise.”

• Fischer’s semi-compatibilism: determinism is incompatible with the freedom to will/choose/do otherwise, but not with responsibility.

• “The assumption that determinism is false is not enough to vouchsafe free agency.”

  • People as loci at which the forces of nature (deterministic or not) play out, rather than as authors or originators of their behaviour.

• J.J.C. Smart: our choices are either determined or a matter of chance – these options are logically exhaustive, but the libertarian (incompatibilism + indeterminism) doesn’t want to accept either.

  • Might be seen as question-begging, since it is precisely the libertarian thesis that there is a non-deterministic form of explanation distinctive of free agency.

  • Chisholm says the options are not logically exhaustive: it is false that all causal explanation appeals to event-causation.

    • But this commits us to a very strange view of the self.

    • “If free and responsible actions were not lawfully related to the states and processes of individuals, including their beliefs, values, and critical reasoning, then exercises of agent-causation would seem to be divorced from psycho-physical reality, the rationally inexplicable outbursts of a structureless substance.”

‘Freedom and Resentment’ – P. Strawson

• On compulsion, insanity, etc.: some people will say, “the general reason why condemnation or punishment are inappropriate when these factors or conditions are present is held to be that the practices in question will be generally efficacious means of regulating behaviour in desirable ways only in cases where these factors are not present.”

• The objective attitude “cannot include the range of reactive feelings and attitudes which belong to involvement or participation with others in inter-personal human relationships; it cannot include resentment, gratitude, forgiveness, anger, or the sort of love which two adults can sometimes be said to feel reciprocally, for each other.”

• How would and/or should the truth of the doctrine of determinism affect our reactive attitudes (resentment, gratitude, forgiveness, anger…)?

• “[I]f there is a coherent thesis of determinism, then there must be a sense of ‘determined’ such that, if that thesis is true, then all behaviour whatever is determined in that sense.”

  • We don’t need to fill in all the details in order to argue about it.

• “The human commitment to participation in ordinary inter-personal relationships is…too thoroughgoing and deeply rooted for us to take seriously the thought that a general theoretical conviction might so change our world that, in it, there were no longer any such things as inter-personal relationships as we normally understand them.”

• “A sustained objectivity of inter-personal attitude, and the human isolation which that would entail, does not seem to be something of which human beings would be capable, even if some general truth were a theoretical ground for it.”

  • “Neither in the case of the normal, then, nor in the case of the abnormal is it true that, when we adopt an objective attitude, we do so because we hold such a belief.”

• “[O]ne who experiences the vicarious analogue of resentment is said to be indignant or disapproving, or morally indignant or disapproving.”

• “What is wrong is to forget that these practices, and their reception, the reactions to them, really are expressions of our moral attitudes and not merely devices we calculatingly employ for regulative purposes. Our practices do not merely exploit our natures, they express them.”

‘The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility’ – G. Strawson

• The Basic Argument:

1. Nothing can be causa sui – the cause of itself.

2. In order to be truly morally responsible for one’s actions one would have to be causa sui, at least in certain crucial mental respects.

3. Therefore, nothing can be truly morally responsible.

• [See Christopher Shields’ argument that a being cannot create/bring about its own intentionality?]

• “[I]t is absurd to suppose that indeterministic or random factors, for which one is ex hypothesi in no way responsible, can in themselves contribute in any way to one’s being truly morally responsible for how one is.”

• “As I understand it, true moral responsibility is responsibility of such a kind that, if we have it, then it makes sense, at least, to suppose that it could be just to punish some of us with (eternal) torment in hell and reward others with (eternal) bliss in heaven.”

• “[I]f one takes the notion of justice that is central to our intellectual and cultural tradition seriously, then the evident consequence of the Basic Argument is that there is a fundamental sense in which no punishment or reward is ever ultimately just.”

  • Surely it isn’t unjust either?

• Compatibilism fails to sustain moral responsibility in the sense that we are all familiar with.

• “In the end, whatever we do, we do it either as a result of random influences for which we are not responsible, or as a result of influences for which we are proximally responsible but not ultimately responsible.”

• “If one accepts the view [that moral responsibility depends on indeterminism], one will have to grant that it is impossible to know whether any human being is ever morally responsible” – because determinism is unfalsifiable.

‘Free Will and Moral Responsibility’ – J.M. Fischer

• “As long as I do not know what I will in fact choose, it seems that there is a perfectly reasonable point to deliberation; after all, I still need to figure out what I have sufficient reason to do and to seek in accordance with this judgment.”

  • “Note that it may still be true, even in a causally deterministic world, that in a particular context I would choose a course of action if and only if I were to judge it best.”

  • But surely there being a ‘point’ to deliberation implies it is a valid choice (to deliberate), when in fact it’s not a choice at all.

• “I certainly do not think that it should be accepted as uncontroversial that it follows from my choice’s being causally determined that I am not the author of it or that I am merely passive with respect to it.”

  • Maybe incompatibilist determinists have an inconsistent conception of the self.

• In Frankfurt’s counterexamples, Black’s presence is not perfectly analogous to determinism (it would be only if Black has already intervened in Jones’ neurological state before he made his initial choice).

• Raises the claim that if determinism isn’t...