Tyler Cowen recently linked to an excellent post by Agnes Callard, on progress in philosophy. At one point she makes this offhand remark:
In philosophy proper–which is to say, that by reference to which the progress of philosophy ought to be judged–there is nothing “we” think. Some of us believe there are true contradictions. Some of us believe that possible worlds are real. Some of us believe that, because we can’t create our characters, and our characters determine how we act, we can’t ever be morally responsible for anything we do. We are a motley crew.
I find the claim about moral responsibility to be odd, and (not being a philosopher) I’d be interested in what I am missing. First of all, it’s pretty clear that our actions are determined by at least two factors (character and environment) and possibly three if free will exists. But let’s say free will doesn’t exist, and let’s say that individuals have no control over their environment. It still seems to me that people should be held morally responsible for their actions; indeed I can’t even imagine how anyone would think otherwise.
Through the use of environmental factors such as public shaming and prisons, we discourage people from doing bad things. It’s very clear that these sanctions are at least somewhat effective, as people behave differently in settings where they are held morally responsible than in settings where they are not held morally responsible. Compare Germany in 1943 and 2018.
Conrad once wrote a novella about a man that was not held morally responsible for his actions. Here the narrator Marlow talks about the importance of environment, as a way of making his listeners better understand the actions of Kurtz in the Belgian Congo:
You can’t understand. How could you? – with solid pavement under your feet, surrounded by kind neighbours ready to cheer you or to fall on you, stepping delicately between the butcher and the policeman, in the holy terror of scandal and gallows and lunatic asylums – how can you imagine what particular region of the first ages a man’s untrammelled feet may take him into by the way of solitude – utter solitude without a policeman – by the way of silence – utter silence, where no warning voice of a kind neighbour can be heard whispering of public opinion? These little things make all the great difference. When they are gone you must fall back upon your own innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness…
I behave better after people tell me, “Shame on you.”
So what am I missing? Why don’t all philosophers accept the need for moral responsibility?
PS. To be clear, the claims I discussed are not those of Agnes Callard, but rather views that she indicates are held by some philosophers.
READER COMMENTS
Zubon
May 27 2018 at 6:13pm
The argument about moral responsibility is about as simple as laid out in that quote. If you are morally responsible only for what you freely choose; and you cannot freely choose anything because you had no say in the nature or nurture that produced you, nor the circumstances in which your choices arise; then you are not morally responsible for your actions. That “let’s say free will doesn’t exist” does a lot of the heavy lifting. Without it, your actions are as deterministic as a falling apple. You are not really choosing anything, so much as watching the actions your brain selects and rationalizing it to yourself.
This is the sort of philosophical question that can dissolve into asking if there is really a “you” choosing, and then lots of adding “really” to the front of things. “But are your choices really free, really, when you get right down to it?” Or you can take Hume’s approach and more or less dismiss it.
There is a separate argument to be made about whether it is practically necessary to treat people as though they are morally responsible for their actions. After all, that is part of the environment that is determining “your” “choices.”
(This is also the sort of philosophical question that can dissolve into scare quotes.)
Artir
May 27 2018 at 7:13pm
It is one thing to behave as if moral responsibility were a thing and another is to actually think it is a thing. A consequentialist defence of it, like yours, can do no better than the former.
The issue is, assuming that religion had good social benefits (which I, contra Hanson, doubt), you could equally be saying ‘How can not atheists see the need for religion? Even if there were no God, it would still be better to be religious’. So you are subordinating what you believe to the ethics you follow, and to most people one ought not do that.
Weir
May 27 2018 at 7:46pm
You’re watching and rationalizing, sometimes to others and sometimes to yourself. You speak to someone to persuade them, and you talk to yourself and you do the same thing. It’s not as if speaking out loud is completely different from silently thinking, or that your inner monologue is a simple list of objective facts. If you can make a case for something to other people you can make the same arguments silently.
Daniel
May 27 2018 at 7:52pm
I imagine many of the philosophers she has in mind would be fine with consequentialist justifications for punishment/shaming. As I understand it at least, the debate over “robust” moral responsibility, of the sort often thought to require free will, is closely connected to whether non-consequentialist justifications for punishment (eg retribution) are ever warranted.
Tom
May 27 2018 at 8:17pm
Here are two different questions:
1. Does moral responsibility exist?
2. Is a society generally better when most people believe in moral responsibility?
Callard notes that some philosophers question (1). But (2) is partly a question for social scientists. Still, if the answer to (2) is ‘yes,’ then that provides what we call a pragmatic or instrumental or prudential reason to believe in moral responsibility. But it doesn’t provide what we call an ‘epistemic’ reason: a reason based on good evidence.
In my experience, many philosophers suspect that the answer to (2) is ‘generally, yes.’
Some philosophers believe, of some theories, that even if those theories are true, there are moral reasons not to publicize those theories’ truth.
Russ Abbott
May 27 2018 at 9:30pm
Assume we are all computers — no free will. But we are also programmable: Inputs of various sorts will change how we behave.
Given those assumptions, public shaming, as a form of input, can change our behavior — in particular improve it.
So public shaming improves society and is worthwhile even if no one is responsible for their actions.
hhoyt
May 27 2018 at 11:18pm
If everything you do is determined by outside forces, then the outside forces are at fault for the behavior, not the individual.
Being HELD morally responsible is much different than actual BEING morally responsibly. So, under this view that was stated, whatever I did is exactly what I SHOULD have done–there was no way around it, after all. But someone can come in and influence me to change what I do in the future for their benefit.
Philo
May 28 2018 at 12:48am
I think the philosophers in question, while they might agree with you about the efficacy of public (or even private) shaming and of prisons (and punishments generally), would say that philosophically enlightened people could only pretend to be doing these things—they could only simulate shaming and punishing—because really to do these things requires belief in the free will of the person being shamed or punished. Furthermore, the efficacy of shaming, in particular, probably depends on a similar belief on the part of the person being shamed: anyone who understood that there is no free will would never feel ashamed. So attempts to employ shaming on people who disbelieve in free will must fail. (The threat of punishment would still work, but there is probably a shaming element in real punishment, and that would be absent.)
(I don’t think these philosophers are correct, though I admit that society would have to function somewhat differently if everyone were philosophically sophisticated.)
Robert EV
May 28 2018 at 2:05am
In terms of moral culpability, “Free will” isn’t about the choices one makes in the present, but how what happens in the past and present influences one’s future decisions through ones current reactions to past and present events.
In the moment we’re reactive and have no agency, as our agency took place in the past when we evaluated and otherwise made the decisions which created our current character (in combination with the past character that we were born with and our environment).
Thus:
But what Zubon wrote as to the question you asked.
John Hawkins
May 28 2018 at 2:17am
You’re failing to distinguish between the philosophers question of who can be truly held responsible for what (the sense in which “the cut work forgives the plow”), and the economists question of what are society’s needs and how do we set up incentive structures to cater to those needs.
Scott Sumner
May 28 2018 at 2:37am
hhoyt, You said:
“Being HELD morally responsible is much different than actual BEING morally responsibly.”
No, it isn’t. Moral responsibility is a human construct. It’s as if you’re saying “Being pretty is different from being regarded as pretty.” Actually, it isn’t.
Philo, You said:
“anyone who understood that there is no free will would never feel ashamed.”
I understand that there is no free will and I sometimes feel ashamed. So you are clearly wrong.
Everyone, I find all these responses interesting, although completely unconvincing. Several of you talk as if “moral responsibility” is a useful fiction. It’s not a fiction, it’s an important part of our culture.
People have an obligation not to harm others for no good reason. Even if free will does not exist, people have the power to behave well, otherwise the threat of punishment would not deter. Free will is a red herring—we know that the threat of prison deters (free will or not), which is all that matters. Thus we should require that people be morally responsible. Don’t overthink the issue.
Brandon Berg
May 28 2018 at 3:01am
It seems to me that this is just quibbling over semantics. If humans don’t have free will, then there’s a sense in which nobody can ever be considered responsible for anything. If there’s no free will, we are automata whose actions are 100% attributable to genes and environment. Under these assumptions, a person who fires a gun at another person is no more morally responsible than the gun. Given his genes and the sum of the environmental stimuli encountered up to that point, he could not have possibly done otherwise.
This is what philosophers mean when they say that we can’t possibly be morally responsible for what we do. You may disagree that this is what “morally responsible” should mean or does mean, but whatever you want to call it, that’s the idea being referred to.
As you note, this is entirely separate from the question of whether we should hold people legally accountable for their additions or penalize certain types of behavior in order to discourage them. Even automata respond to incentives.
jc
May 28 2018 at 7:33am
Yes, as others have pointed out, there is a difference between what is better for society, enforcing responsibility, and judging someone morally. These may overlap, but once we move past semantic differences and get on the same page w/ respect to what each term means, these constructs may be distinct.
If a shark or tiger kills my hunters and fishermen and children while they swim or play, I will kill the animal or at least figure out a way to put a barrier between it and us. If a different animal can somehow be trained to not kill us, or even tamed, then perhaps I’ll go that route.
But I will do something to prevent it from harming us…whether I judge it morally or not, whether I hate it or not, whether I think it has free will or is simply following its programming.
Greg G
May 28 2018 at 8:36am
Determinism requires that past, present and future could only ever turn out one way.
If this is true (and it might well be) then it renders our conventional notions of cause and effect entirely arbitrary. In such a world, saying that one thing causes another is like taking one piece out of a jigsaw puzzle and saying that piece is the cause of the all other pieces being where they are. There is a sense that it’s true but you could say the same thing about every other piece.
Philo
May 28 2018 at 8:42am
You wrote: “I understand that there is no free will and I sometimes feel ashamed. So you are clearly wrong.” Well, I was trying to present the views of philosophers with whom I disagree. But in presenting those views I should have written that “anyone who understood that there is no free will would never feel ashamed if he were rational.” These philosophers would regard you as irrational.
Robert EV
May 28 2018 at 12:13pm
@Scott Sumner
Do you believe in “will”?
In all the talk of “free will”, I wonder if many of us are overlooking “will” itself, whether free or constrained.
I would argue that computers, even statistical AIs such as Deep Blue, lack will of any kind at the moment. I would also argue that life with sufficient neurology does have will. Once active the AIs can’t choose to stop, but life can, and does, thanks to our emotions and mood states.
Robert Schadler
May 28 2018 at 12:24pm
Making character and environment distinct and expanding the role of reason (common for economists and libertarians) are at the core of this issue.
IF character is derivative of a subset of “environment” (i.e. parents, teachers, classmates, some authors, etc.) that distinction fades and it’s environment.
The concepts of accident and “unintended consequences” reduce moral responsibility to only a subset of actions that are judged moral. Not always a complete absence of moral responsibility, but partial. I could have anticipated some aspects of an accident (e.g. driving more slowly; or expected someone to react to a comment I made). Both Christian culture and Enlightenment posit a universality to human nature (with some kind of moral sense or intuition) but in today’s world, anthropology finds very little empirically that is truly present in all cultures. Exceptions even to a mother’s love of her child or a desire to copulate in private rather than public.
Leads many to reject any universal norms.
Scott Sumner
May 28 2018 at 2:49pm
Robert, Yes, I believe in will. But I think it’s determined by various factors, and hence is not free.
James
May 28 2018 at 4:00pm
Scott wrote:
“Moral responsibility is a human construct.”
How do you know this to be true?
PS. If you actually believe this, then you are not so far from the philosophical position you find so incredible. If morality is a human construct rather than, say, a set of facts, then it might be a fictional construct in which case moral responsibility is no more real than the characters in some work of fiction.
artifex
May 29 2018 at 12:35am
Whether moral responsibility requires free will depends on the definition you are working with. One way to define free will, used by compatibilists, is as the ability to deliberate, select a choice, then fix your desire according to the result of your deliberation. This is a meaningful idea; you do not have free will in this sense when you perceive no uncertainty about your decisions (this is from Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics):
A second way to define free will is in being the ultimate source of your will. This is the definition used by incompatibilists. Libertarians think that we have free will in this sense and therefore determinism is false, but they are confused because it is impossible to have this kind of free will regardless of whether the laws of physics are deterministic. This is understandable because time and causality are confusing ideas to work with.
These two definitions are roughly equivalent to the two mentioned in the article on free will in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
The first definition is the one that moral responsibility requires. It is also the definition useful for legal purposes. In his recent book, Judea Pearl points out that it is also the definition that is closest to the reasons evolution might have had to give us a sensation of free will and that it could be useful for creating strong AI:
Clay
May 29 2018 at 8:52pm
Scott
This is copy of my review of “The Measure Of Man’’ by Joseph Wood Krutch. This work won the national book award in 1954.
I think he addresses some of the questions you present.
I really enjoyed his presentation.
“Time was when the scientist, the poet, and the philosopher walked hand in hand. But the world of modern science is one in which the intellect alone can perceive.’’ (12)
This work analyses the overwhelming impact of this change on modernity. These questions arise . . .
“1) Do educated people continue to believe that science has exposed as delusions those convictions and standards upon which western civilization was founded?
2) Is the ultimate cause of the catastrophe with which that civilization is threatened this loss of faith in humanity itself?
3) Is it really true, as I once believed, that there is no escaping the scientific demonstration that religion, morality and the human being’s power to make free choices are all merely figments of the imagination?’’
Krutch penned these questions in 1956, in the preface for a rerelease of this 1929 work. How does he answer after 25 years of meditation?
“To the first two of these questions the answer still seems to be ‘Yes.’ Despite the so-called revival of popular religion which amounts to little more than the acceptance of the church as a social institution. . , the most prevalent educated opinion is still that men are animals and that animals are machines.’’
Wow! Really? Well, what happened?
“A larger group turns optimistically toward experimental psychology, the technique for sociological conditioning, and the methods of indoctrination developed by the manipulators of the media of mass communication and hopes from them for the creation of a Robot Utopia whose well adjusted citizens will have comfortably forgotten that their forefathers believed themselves to be Men.’’
In 1956! How did he know? Is that all?
“But neither rejects the assumption that Western men, traditionally endowed with reason, will, and a valid sense of value, is an exploded myth. And because this conviction still prevails amount educated men I still believe it true that it poses the most serious of all threats to our civilization and is, indeed, the ultimate source of our specific dilemmas.’’
Science can destroy confidence. It cannot – has not produced any. What does Krutch now believe?
“Exactly twenty-five years after ‘The Modern Temper’ appeared I returned to the general subject in a book called ‘The Measure Of Man.’ In it I attempted to set forth my reasons for no longer believing that the mechanistic, materialistic, and deterministic conclusions of science have to be accepted as fact.”
Free will is making a comeback. About time.
This, however, does not overshadow his insights in this work.
Fascinating!
1 The genesis of a Mood
2 The paradox of humanism
3 The disillusion with the laboratory
4 Love – or the Life and Death of a Value
5 The tragic fallacy
6 Life, Art, and Peace
7 The phantom of Certitude
The chapter on ‘Love’ captured my attention. . .
“But when the consequences of Love were made less momentous, then love itself became less momentous too, and we have discovered that the now-lifted veil of mystery was that which made it potentially important as well as potentially terrible. Sex, we learned, was not so awesome as once we had thought; God does not care so much as we had formerly been led to suppose; but neither, as a result, do we. Love is becoming gradually so accessible, so unmysterious, and so free that it’s value is trivial.’’ (69)
Another chapter with keen insights – ‘The Disillusion with the Laboratory’. . .
“Doubtless this disillusion is due in part to a clearer and clearer penetration of the ancient fallacy which consists in basing an estimate of our welfare upon the extent to which our material surroundings have been elaborated. This fallacy, born at the same moment with scientific method itself, runs all through the ‘New Atlantis’ of Bacon, where it leads him to accept without question that we shall be wise and happy in proportion to the ingenuity of the machinery which surrounds us.” (42)
Who can doubt this is real ‘faith’?
No photographs. No footnotes. No index. No bibliography.
(See also: “The Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior’’ by George M. Kren. Outstanding development of similar theme!)
Gene Callahan
May 30 2018 at 2:06am
Ahem… if there is no free will, then there is no decision to make about whether to shame or punish people! We either will or we won’t, but it’s not up to us!
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