I take it that the folk are incompatibilists about determinism and both free will and moral responsibility (that is, they believe both free will and moral responsibility to be incompatible with determinism). But recent work in experimental philosophy suggests that I’m wrong about this. In this post, I want to take some initial steps toward a response to this recent experimental work by raising a concern or two about how it’s being carried out.
The method for probing the folk’s intuitions about the compatibility of determinism and either free will or moral responsibility (or both) has generally been the same across the board: Give the folk an imaginary scenario in which some agent is determined to perform some action and then ask them questions like (a) do you think the agent performed the action of her own free will? and (b) would it be fair to hold the agent responsible for performing the action? And as fate would have it (get it?), a majority of the folk answer that such determined agents do act of their own free will and that it would be fair to hold them responsible.
Here’s an example from a paper entitled “Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?” by Eddy Nahmias, Stephen Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer, and Jason Turner. Consider the case of Jill:
Imagine there is a universe that is re-created over and over again, starting from the exact same initial conditions and with all the same laws of nature. In this universe the same conditions and the same laws of nature produce the exact same outcomes, so that every single time the universe is re-created, everything must happen the exact same way. For instance, in this universe a person named Jill decides to steal a necklace at a particular time, and every time the universe is re-created, Jill decides to steal the necklace at that time. (2006: 38)
Participants were asked both (a) “whether Jill decided to steal the necklace of her own free will” and (b) “whether ‘it would be fair to hold her morally responsible (that is, blame her) for her decision to steal the necklace.’” Of those asked, 66% answered that she acted freely and 77% answered that it would be fair to blame her for her action.
Here’s one worry of mine. In the paper mentioned above, Nahmias et al explain why they prefer not to actually use the word “determined” (or “determinism”) when describing the agents in their imaginary scenarios. The worry, they say, is that many people seem to have internalized the assumption that “determined” just means “having no free will.” And so, the very word “determined” might inappropriately prompt readers to answer that the agents did not act of their own free will.
Fair enough. But might there be other words that have this biasing power? I think so. As an incompatibilist myself, when I first read the case of Jill, I was thrown off a bit when I read that Jill “decides” to steal the necklace. And here’s why: Decision-making is a deliberative process, and it seems strange to me to suppose that determined agents can genuinely deliberate. Peter van Inwagen once wrote (and so it must be true),
In my view, if someone deliberates about whether to do A or to do B, it follows that his behavior manifests a belief that it is possible for him to do A — that he can do A, that he has it within his power to do A — and a belief that it is possible to do B. (1983: 155)
Tomis Kapitan echoes van Inwagen when he writes, “Integral to it [deliberation] is the agent’s sense of alternative possibilities, that is, of two or more courses of action he presumes are open for him to undertake or not” (1986: 230). But of course, if determinism is true, then the agent is mistaken in believing that there are alternative possibilities open for him to undertake or not.
If I were to tell you that Tom is a skydiver deliberating about whether or not to fall to the earth, you’d naturally assume that Tom must still be in the plane. Because again, we ordinarily understand “deliberating about whether or not to A” to mean that both A and not-A are actually on the deliberative table. That is, we naturally assume that in order for someone to be genuinely deliberating, there must (at least) be a “Door #2.” But if determinism is true, Tom might as well have already jumped out of the plane. But if Tom’s already falling to the earth (and cannot fly), then Tom might be doing something that feels to him like deliberation, but it’s not the same sort of thing that we ordinarily call deliberation — because again, Tom can do nothing but fall to the earth, so whatever it is that’s going on in his head bears only a superficial relation to his actual behavior. Similarly, Jill might have done something that felt to her like “deciding to steal a necklace,” but the option to do anything else was no more open for Jill as it is open for Tom to stop falling to the earth once he’s jumped.
Just like Nahmias et al (are probably right to) think that the word “determined” might inappropriately influence readers to judge that the agent being described is not acting of her own free will because of the readers’ (contestable) background assumptions about what it means to be “determined,” words like “decides” and “deliberation” might inappropriately influence readers to judge that the agent being described is acting of her own free will because of their background assumptions about what it means to “decide” or to “deliberate.” My hunch is that the folk are under the impression that anyone who is capable of decision-making must be acting freely, since the folk can only make sense of decision-making on the assumption that the agent is deciding between open alternatives. And so, it might be the case that no matter how determined-to-steal you make Jill sound, if you describe her action as the product of a genuinely deliberative process, the folk will have no problem calling her free (just like it might be the case that no matter how free you describe an agent, if you also use the word “determined,” the folk will have no problem denying that she’s free).
So I’m thinking about running some experiments in which these sorts of words — e.g., “decides,” “deliberates,” etc. — are removed and replaced with language that makes it all-the-more explicit that the agent’s action is determined (without, of course, using the word “determined”). If the results swing the other way, i.e., toward an incompatibilist interpretation of folk intuitions, then I think enough will have been done to cast some doubt on this recent experimental work that suggests we’ve been wrong about the folk all along. Or, at the very least, I think it will show that more armchair philosophizing needs to be done (for instance, about whether or not it’s fair to describe determined agents as “deciding to A”) before we go out and probe the folk.
REFERENCES
Tomis Kapitan, “Deliberation and the Presumption of Open Alternatives,” The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 143, Special Issue: Mind, Causation, and Action (April 1986): 230-251.
Eddy Nahmias et al, “Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 73, Issue 1 (July 2006): 28-53.
Peter van Inwagen, An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
You should check out “Deliberation and Metaphysical Freedom” by EJ Coffman and Fritz Warfield in the 2005 Midwest Studies. As far as I can tell, it’s the best explication of that really difficult to interpret passage from An Essay on Free Will (at least from my perspective). Coffman and Warfield argue that deliberation requires a belief in metaphysical freedom (which requires AP), but following van Inwagen, they believe compatibilism, if true allows for alternative possibilities as required for metaphysical freedom (this characterization is fast and loose). So assuming the truth of determinism and compatibilism, Coffman and Warfield (and van Inwagen) would agree that genuine deliberation could take place.
From my perspective it seems illicit to just assume that determinism rules out genuine deliberation. Historically the free will debate hasn’t be about whether or not determinism rules out our agency but whether it rules out our free agency. But that being said, I think that your experiments sound fairly interesting.
Justin,
I don’t want to confuse two very different issues here (and part of the confusion probably has a lot to do with my poorly-worded post). On the one hand, there’s the issue of whether or not “determinism rules out genuine deliberation.” I think this is a really interesting question, and while I’m actually inclined to agree with you that it doesn’t, I have this yet-unshaken worry that determinism takes something very significant away from the relationship that we ordinarily assume exists between deliberation and action. I’m interested to read that Coffman/Warfield paper.
On the other hand, there’s the issue of whether or not the folk conceive of determinism as ruling out genuine deliberation. This is the question I’m more interested in addressing (for now, at least), since the whole focus of this recent experimental stuff is on what the folk think. If it turns out that the folk do not conceive of determined agents as capable of genuine deliberation, then the tension that I highlight in my post arises.
If an experiment were run in which the folk were given the Jill case, but the word “decides” was removed from both the story and the questions, and the number of affirmative responses (i.e., those suggesting that she does steal the necklace freely) drops significantly, then I think (at the very least) a step will have been taken toward showing that the original experiment was biased (if even slightly) in the way I suggest in my post.
Then, if another experiment were run in which the folk were given the Jill case, but this time both (a) the word “decides” was removed from both the story and the questions and (b) something like the following sentence was added to the end of the story . . .
. . . and the number of “she acted freely” responses takes an even more significant dip, then I think one will have gone a long way toward challenging the conclusions of Eddy et al, since participants’ unwillingness to call Jill free would be tracking the extent to which it is made obvious to them that she is determined (and lacks alternative possibilities in the incompatibilist sense).
Anyway, that’s what I’m thinking. Let me know what you think when you get the chance.
So are you a PAC 10 football fan yet? You don’t have a poster of Pete Carroll hanging in your home, do you?
Is anything compatible with the notion of “free will” (i.e., the notion that a being/system is in control of its own decisions)? If the components comprising a system behave causally/deterministically, the system is not in control. Its decisions result from the causal interactions of its components. If the components comprising a system behave acausally/randomly, the system is also not in control. Acausal events, by definition, are not necessitated by antecedent events; i.e., they “just happen” in the manner they do for literally no reason. Any decision arising out of such events would likewise not be one of which the system as a whole could be said to be in control. So, causality and acausality are really non-issues with respect to whether a being/system controls its decisions. Any system behavior (e.g., making a decision) is derived from the actions of the components of that system. The system doesn’t decide anything; its parts, through their causal or acausal actions, result in system-level behaviors such as “decisions.” What is the magical third mode of action by which a system’s parts could operate so as to render that system in control of itself? Free will (of the type I’ve defined here) is bunk.
Hi Dinesh.
I really want to be careful to stay away (for now) from substantive debates about freedom and determinism as philosophical issues. The debate with which I’m interacting here actually has very little to do with the concerns you raise; rather, we’re just trying to get our hands on the intuitions of ordinary Joe’s and Jane’s about the (in)compatibility of freedom and determinism. Incompatibilists often begin defenses of their position by pointing out how intuitive it is (and/or how counter-intuitive compatibilism is). (To be sure, some compatibilists even concede that the default intuitive position is that freedom and determinism are incompatible). So a number of philosophers have taken to polling the folk in order to actually see if incompatibilism is as “intuitive” as so many assume. Their results indicate that it isn’t; I’m just trying to challenge these results. So to be clear, I’m not challenging compatibilism as a philosophical thesis; nor am I defending incompatibilism as a philosophical thesis.
However, as the beginning of a response to your concerns, I suppose I’d ask: why suppose that the lines are to be drawn the way you’ve drawn them, even if just initially? You seem to just assume that if a system is not completely determined, then it must be completely random. Sure, fleshing out what libertarian free will actually looks like may indeed be an awkward and difficult task, but to begin by simply stipulating that the denial of determinism just is randomness seems to really stack the deck unfairly against the libertarian.
Anyway, this is the sort of discussion that I probably ought to reserve for a different post.