In my experience, maybe 90% of the time when someone says they can prove something true with a logical syllogism, the syllogism they present is hopelessly fallacious. There seems to be a ubiquitous failure mode caused by a popular belief that syllogisms can prove things. Sure, in an extremely limited and narrow sense, they can; hence the illusion that seduces so many into thinking they always can, that this is how one proves things, which becomes the belief that they must do, which then inspires them to conjure something resembling a syllogism reinforcing their belief. They don’t stress-test the syllogism for fallacies. Often they don’t even test it for validity; but I’m here speaking even of syllogisms that at least have a valid structure.
The problem is that almost everything in the world is not a logically necessary truth but a question of empirical fact, and empirical conclusions can only be reached inductively, not deductively; yet the usual syllogisms people think to use are not inductive arguments. Deductive syllogisms can really only extract information from the premises; they cannot circularly prove the truth of those premises. Worse, as those premises often have a nonzero probability of being false, and standard deductive syllogisms aren’t designed to coherently commute these probabilities into the conclusion, you have to construct syllogisms as “if, then” statements (“if” the premises are true, “then” the conclusion is true), which only tells you that the conclusion is already inherent in the conjunction of the premises. In other words, you are just extracting the consequences of your own assumptions. You aren’t actually proving anything factual. That would require proving the premises true. And that’s a lot harder to do “with a syllogism.”
Most people don’t get how probabilistic or inductive reasoning even works. In a sense, the relative simplicity of deductive syllogisms seduces people into using them when they should be avoiding them as useless to the purpose. And so you get a lot of really terrible syllogisms, that people (even professional philosophers) believe “prove” what they purport. Some of the most common failures when doing this are equivocation fallacies (covertly switching the meaning of a key word somewhere between premise and conclusion), question-begging (assuming the conclusion true, just differently worded, in a premise), and false lemmas (claiming a list of options exhausts all possibilities, when in fact an important possibility—indeed often the one most likely to be true—has been omitted).
So anytime you see anyone claiming they can prove something with a syllogism, you are warranted in doubting it. Approach with extreme skepticism, and vet the hell out of the syllogism they present. Do the stress-test on it they probably didn’t. Verify the premises are all very likely to be true; that the meaning of words hasn’t changed from beginning to end; that a single premise isn’t simply assuming the conclusion; and that when options have been enumerated, none have been left out; and so on. Maybe you’ll find they’ve landed on a sound and valid syllogism, warranting belief in its conclusion. But usually you won’t.
Today I will use “deductive” arguments against the existence of free will as my example base. And for the following I will reference and rely on yesterday’s article where I laid out much of the groundwork, Free Will in the Real World … and Why It Matters, the gist of which is that in real world applications (whether a court of law or interpersonal relations or self-assessment), when people say “free will” they only mean “with informed consent,” not any kind of power to act uncaused.
Those who want to deny free will exists thus operate on a fundamental unspoken equivocation fallacy: that if they can prove “uncaused actions” don’t exist, they have proved “autonomy” and thus “consent” don’t exist. But autonomy and consent have nothing to do with acting uncaused. And “free will” in real world application only ever refers to the latter, not the former. This means free will deniers are like people insisting ferries don’t exist by proving faeries don’t exist. But in the real world, ferries are all we really care about, because they exist, we observe them, and we use them. Faeries have no effect on the world, and thus the concept of them has no use. Free will in the real-world sense exists—we can empirically observe when it exists or doesn’t, and we use it in countless practical applications. Free will in the ivory tower sense is even more useless and inapplicable to reality than faeries. So why is anyone still talking about the faeries? They should only be talking about the ferries.
Example 1: Jonathan Pearce
Atheist philosopher Jonathan MS Pearce has attempted his own “syllogism” to disprove the existence of free will (in A Syllogism for Determinism), and ironically, he says “the core to” his “disbelief” is “the philosophical incoherence of the idea of free will.” So he’s even an atheist because he falsely believes in the nonexistence of free will. To be fair, he has conceded that if we define free will as compatibilists do, then he agrees free will exists. So his error appears to be living in the ivory tower, and thus not noticing that in every real world application “free will” only means what the compatibilists note it means. There is therefore no use for the “ivory tower” definition. So why are we still talking about it?
Pearce might answer, “Because I need to debunk obscure, incoherent notions of God that depend on a non-existent idea of free will” (see God’s Own Free Will). But that’s not a good reason. If the problem is that someone has assigned to God an incoherent idea of free will, the solution is to point out that that idea of free will is incoherent and does not align with any practical application of the term—what is commonly called “libertarian free will,” or LFW, simply isn’t the sense of “free will” anyone is using in ordinary life, in courts of law, or any material context whatever. So the solution is not to say “free will doesn’t exist,” as that is as fallacious as saying “mammals don’t exist because faeries are mammals and faeries don’t exist.” The apologist has the wrong idea of free will, an idea completely divorced from reality, even from logic. That’s what we should be calling them out for. The dangers of doing it the other way around I already explained yesterday.
Of course, one could also take Pearce to task for an even more basic error here, which is that theism, even Christianity, in no way depends on that illogical notion of free will (as Christian apologists have already pointed out). So you actually can’t disprove it that way; all you can do with such an argument is reform its theology, leaving its purported truth otherwise intact. That’s not a sound way to end up an atheist. It’s also perplexing to see a philosopher argue “If in any meaningful sense I could not have done otherwise, then God punishing me eternally is rendered utterly incoherent.” Because “God punishing me eternally” is just as incoherent even if libertarian free will existed. So why does it even matter whether “LFW” existed? The problem is not LFW; it’s irrationally incommensurate punishments. Pearce thus seems obsessed with a complete irrelevancy.
But my concern today is with Pearce’s resort to “Argument by Syllogism,” in which Pearce says “what I really want to do is encapsulate these ideas into a robust syllogism” disproving free will, and then gives us this:
First:
(1) Every human choice or action is an event.
(2) Every event has its explanatory cause.
(3) Therefore, every human choice or action has its explanatory cause.
Building upon (3), we have our second syllogism:
(3) Every human choice or action has its explanatory cause.
(4) To have explanatory cause is not to be free.
(5) Therefore, human choice or action is not free.
Okay. So, he just declares “To have an explanatory cause is not to be free” but one of the very points at issue is whether “to have an explanatory cause is not to be free.” So he hasn’t actually proved anything; all he’s done is assert an unproven. But it gets worse: “Every event has its explanatory cause” renders his syllogism no better than a circular argument—because it simply presumes the very thing his opponent, a Christian advocate of LFW, denies. What good is that? His opponent will just say Premise (2) is false, that “some” events are uncaused, in particular human choices—and Pearce’s argument is cooked. Pearce cannot presume LFW nowhere exists in order to prove LFW nowhere exists. Pearce can’t recover from this failure with this or any syllogism. He is simply stuck having to prove there are no events in the entirely of existence that lack causes.
And that’s a tall order. It can’t be deductively done. There are serious physicists who even deny it—for example, many live options for interpreting quantum mechanics allow that some events, at some level of analysis, are uncaused. And that doesn’t even require speculating that human decisions are quantum events (though that’s logically possible, and thus not refutable by syllogism); the relevant point is that Premise (2) has never been proved true to enough certainty to maintain that there are no possible uncaused events. If the outcome of a quantum wave form collapse has no cause, what else in the universe might have no cause? Indeed, in a universe with gods and miracles in it, the odds actually go up that uncaused events might exist within it, because the possibilities for such a thing then substantially increase. If a God existed, we really could not say he is subject to our laws of neurophysics. He could be analogous to a quantum mechanism many of whose decisions are indeed uncaused.
Now, of course, I agree these things are all very unlikely. But I base that conclusion on inductive, empirical arguments—on evidence—not deductive syllogisms. What the brain does when making decisions simply does not track quantum wave form collapse, at all (except in ways unrelated to the point here). It manifestly involves classical macro-causation on fairly straightforward information processing models. People don’t just “randomly” do things. They always do things for reasons. And those reasons are always caused by other materially observable things: knowledge (information), a material personality (physical neurological thresholds and structures), skills (one’s information processing mechanisms, which all obey classical laws of computation, and are demonstrably physically manifest in their brain at far above quantum scales). So quantum free will is as fictional as faeries. Even more broadly, evidence well establishes supernatural alternatives are wildly implausible (see Naturalism Is Not an Axiom of the Sciences but a Conclusion of Them and The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism).
But you have to argue to these conclusions with evidence. You can’t “prove” them with syllogisms; and you certainly can’t simply assert them as premises. That gets you nowhere. Pearce’s syllogism would never persuade any rational Christian to agree with his conclusion; and it should never do. It simply gainsays the Christian; it does not prove them wrong. The one thing in dispute remains completely unresolved: are human decisions uncaused events? Are they an exception to the rule Pearce presumes about events generally? His syllogism cannot answer that question. It therefore accomplishes nothing. So why did he think it would? I can only guess he must have been seduced by that argument form, then failed to stress-test his own application of it.
Missing the Ferries for the Faeries
A more productive route would be to grant the Christian’s premise of LFW, and then demonstrate that that logically entails a contradiction in the Christian’s worldview: LFW entails decisions are uncaused; if decisions are uncaused, they can’t have been caused by reasons; ergo God has never had any reasons to do anything he supposedly did. That’s a much bigger problem, because the Christian can’t escape that conclusion—not by any logically sound means anyway. Their only way out is to drop this nonsense about LFW (as many Christians do), or concede God’s decisions are all just random whims—they cannot even have been caused by his “good” or “just” nature, or his “intelligence” or “wisdom” or “omniscience” either, as any of that would then be a cause, thus negating LFW. Even if God only “sometimes” acts without reasons, those decisions are still reasonless; and the others are still caused and thus not products of LFW. Arguments like this demonstrate that LFW is simply internally incoherent. It does not track logically any practical notion of free will.
Consider for example: LFW entails decisions are uncaused; if decisions are uncaused, they can’t have been caused by anyone’s knowledge or intentions; ergo no one’s decision has ever been made in consequence of their knowledge and intent; but knowledge and intent are essential elements of guilt; ergo no one can ever be guilty of anything. So much for hell making sense.
This illustrates how incoherent and ill-thought-out Christian ideas of free will are. In the real world, it is only when knowledge and intent cause a decision that we deem a person to be acting with free will; and it is the absence of such causation that negates free will. Exactly the opposite of LFW. If I have an epileptic fit and push someone into the street, “I” did not cause that. It has causes (which bypassed “me,” my conscious assent—my knowledge and intent), but needn’t, as that’s irrelevant to the conclusion of my innocence. Even if epilepsy were the supernatural condition of “uncaused decisions” to move my body, this would negate my free will, not establish it. I only have free will when my will is caused, in particular by my knowledge and intentions—information and motivation—and not someone else’s knowledge and intentions, nor by some causal process that bypasses mine.
I cover the absolute necessity of decisions being caused in order to be free in detail in my section on free will in Sense and Goodness without God. Quite simply, LFW is fatally incoherent. It destroys any basis for responsibility in a foolish attempt to establish responsibility on some other grounds than what we all know to be true. It’s just irrational handwaving. A curtain hiding Oz.
Christians don’t want to face the fact that the only logically possible alternative to “is caused” is “is random,” and it can never make any sense to punish people for random events they didn’t cause—that no part of their apparatus of informed consent allowed to happen. Christians try to weasel out of this conundrum by claiming decisions are “partly” caused by reasons, by information and desires, but not “wholly,” but that is simply describing different degrees of the same defective apparatus: if I am going to act contrary to my knowledge and intent “at random,” for no reason, I cannot be responsible for that action—even if that bizarre random event happens only 80% of the time or 20% of the time, 100% of the times it occurs, “I” (the sum of my memories, desires, character) won’t have caused it, so I won’t be responsible for it. LFW thus reduces all human decisions to just another kind of epilepsy. Which renders LFW nonsensical. It’s useless theologically. It’s useless legally. It’s useless morally.
It doesn’t even work to try and say (as some do) that we have a desire for every possible outcome, and LFW selects at random (because that is what “uncaused” means) which desire causes our decision. That’s just a different kind of “spiritual epilepsy,” where even my desires are wholly uncaused by my character, my reason, or any kind of information or proclivity you could identify as distinctly “me” so as to hold “me” responsible for it. If actions are simply the product of a “desire roulette” in our brains the outcome of which we, as persons, have no causal control over—that our tendering of consent makes no causal difference to—then we could not be held responsible for any of our actions. And this is factually true: courts of law would deem such actions as “not in our control” and thus not find us guilty. Not because the “insanity defense” holds that if a mental illness caused our action we are innocent (the insanity defense never operates that way), but because the “insanity defense” holds that if we did not tender informed consent to what we did because we physically couldn’t, we were never in control of it in the very sense everyone else is.
Tourette syndrome is an example: where it is physically impossible to control our utterances, we are not held responsible for them; which is observably different from everyone else who can control their utterances. The difference is that those who are in control consent to what they say (the ability of our conscious consent to causally impact what we do is what we mean by controlling our behavior), so what they say and what they want to say are in alignment, hence we can conclude what they said was caused by what they (as a person) wanted; whereas a victim of Tourette syndrome has no such physical capability: no matter how adamantly they don’t want to say something, they say it anyway. Their desires and their behaviors are not in alignment; so we cannot claim their desires caused their behavior, and therefore we cannot hold them responsible for it.
This failure to go look closely at what “free will” means in real world practice has thus caused the perverse reversal of reality—wherein causation is required for free will to be deemed present—into absurdity—wherein free will requires the absence of that very causation. And that renders free will nonsensical. How can we infer you knew you were committing the crime and wanted to commit it, if we must first declare no knowledge or desire can ever have caused you to have done it?
This is how the LFW advocate is destroying the practical real world concept of free will. They are in essence doing just what creationists do when they claim a “theory” is just “a guess” and therefore the theory of evolution is not a scientific fact. Christians contrive a wholly incoherent definition of free will that’s completely divorced from every practical real world application of free will, and then use that deviant monstrosity to push some other absurdity, like the desert of hell or the innocence of God. The last thing we should be doing to combat that nonsense is to agree with them that “theory” just means “a guess” or that “free will” means LFW. Both are divorced from the reality of what those words mean in any pertinent context. In reality free will means with informed consent, not “free of causation.” No court of law summons physicists to determine whether a criminal’s actions were free of causation; to the contrary, they require prosecutors to prove the suspect’s actions were caused by their knowledge and intent—because that is what free will really means.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
My closing examples come from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online, which has an entry for Arguments for Incompatibilism by Kadri Vihvelin. The principal error pervading the “syllogisms” presented there are two equivocation fallacies over what “control” and “could have done otherwise” mean—by ignoring what they mean in the real world. In the real world, to control something does not mean what the incompatibilists Vihvelin surveys present it as meaning. That point I already thoroughly covered in Free Will in the Real World … and Why It Matters, so I won’t repeat that here. But in just the same fashion, in the real world, “could have done otherwise” also means something other than what the incompatibilists Vihvelin surveys present it as meaning.
In courts of law, when it is asked whether a criminal “could have done otherwise” this always means if they had wanted to. That is in fact absolutely essential to establishing guilt in a court of law. Because the very thing one must prove to prove guilt is the presence of an informed desire to commit the crime, what is called in legal jargon mens rea, “a guilty mind” or simply “criminal intent.” It is the physical fact that the criminal could have done otherwise had they wanted to that establishes in fact they did want to commit the crime and thus are guilty of it. If it is proved in court that the accused could not have done otherwise even if they had wanted to, that would produce an acquittal—because it means the criminal act is no longer evidence of criminal intent. In other words, if the accused could not have stopped what happened—if it would have happened no matter what the accused wanted or did—then it cannot be shown they intended it to happen, much less that their intending it caused it. Other evidence could be adduced, e.g. their saying they intended the outcome, but that only goes back to proving the same point: courts only care whether a criminal could have done otherwise had they wanted to; they aren’t looking for magical wizards who can choose to do what they have no desire at all to do.
If it were the other way around, if someone “could have” not committed a crime even if they had no other desire than to commit the crime, the whole concept of requisite intent would become meaningless. Because that would entail the converse possibility, that someone who didn’t commit a crime could still have committed the crime even if they had no desire to. Which means we would be incapable of knowing if anyone was a criminal. On this model of agent physics, whether you do or don’t commit a crime (whether you “could have done otherwise” in either direction) is no longer causally connected to any intent to commit a crime. It’s just random. We could not infer from the commission of a crime that someone wanted to do that or knew they were doing it, because they “could have done otherwise” regardless of anything they wanted or knew. If such a power existed, we could rarely establish anyone’s guilt. Every accused person could just appeal to this strange physics of human behavior, that people just “do things” wholly uncaused, and therefore no one can prove anyone intends to do anything or knew they were doing it. Mens rea could never be proved. Everyone would go free. That’s the consequence of LFW.
Ironically, it is claimed this is the consequence of determinism, too—but it isn’t. Any accused person who appealed to determinism to argue they “could not have done otherwise” would have no legal argument—the law cares not whether you “could not have done otherwise” in that sense, it only cares whether you knew what you were doing and wanted to do it anyway. It is the causal role of your intent that alone makes you guilty of anything you have done. That’s precisely the very thing we are aiming to hold people accountable for. As a famous Supreme Court Justice once said to a suspect claiming he was “fated” to knowingly and intentionally commit a crime: well, he was therefore fated to go to prison for it. The justice’s logic is unassailable.
Determinism argues nothing against the logic of criminal justice or the assignment of responsibility anywhere, at any level in our society. The accused criminal claiming he “could not have done otherwise” as a defense is simply committing an equivocation fallacy: in law, the “could not have done otherwise” defense only holds when it’s proved you “could not have done otherwise even if you wanted to.” You have to prove intent had no causal role in the events, that they could not have been stopped no matter how much the accused wanted to stop them. Philosophers commit this same confusion, thus wholly failing to understand the entire reality of moral and criminal responsibility in practical fact, which is always about knowledge and intent, not “defying fate.”
This confusion pervades the incompatibilist arguments in the Stanford article. Although Vihvelin gets the point I made earlier: that syllogistic “proofs” like Pearce’s suffer from the particular flaw of presuming the conclusion in the premises. Vihvelin presents an example:
- [A manipulated victim] doesn’t act freely and, for that reason, is not morally responsible for what he does.
- If determinism is true, there is no relevant difference between [that victim] and any normal case of apparently free and morally responsible action.
- Therefore, if determinism is true no one ever acts freely or is morally responsible for what he does.
As Vihvelin concludes, “this argument works only if the second premise is true,” but that is precisely the point in contention: whether the second premise is true. So you can never “prove” the conclusion that way. This is just argument by assertion; not a proof of anything. In actual fact, there is an obvious material difference between someone who has been manipulated into committing a crime unwittingly, and someone who committed the crime knowingly and willingly. And in fact that difference is precisely the difference made by free will in every real world milieu. Free will means acting with knowledge and intent—acting with informed consent. That is precisely what the “victim” in the syllogism doesn’t get to do, so they don’t have free will in precisely the way someone who knowingly and willingly committed a crime does. Premise 2 is therefore false. And anyone who paid attention to reality would know that.
Vihvelin points out the same flaw befalls every other syllogism they find attempted in the literature. For example, the next one discussed starts with the first premise, “We act freely (in the way necessary for moral responsibility) only if we are the ultimate sources (originators, first causes) of at least some of our choices,” but that is precisely what is to be proved; you can’t therefore prove it by merely asserting it. There is actually no such principle, in law or anywhere. Responsibility is not a function of “ultimate causes,” as if only the Big Bang can be responsible for anything.
Courts of law don’t care why or how you became a criminal, for example; they only care whether you are a criminal. All they want to know is whether you knew it was wrong and chose to do it anyway. If circumstances constrained your freedom in some way—for instance you were starving and only stole food for that reason, or you were born into and raised by a family so criminal and abusive your path toward criminality was all but assured—you cannot get an acquittal (you’re still found guilty), but your punishment might be reduced to compensate you for what you suffered that drove you to your crime. Because we always deem wanton sociopaths and gratuitous violators as worse than victims of circumstance; but we still classify all criminal minds as what they are: criminal minds. You cannot ontologically erase the fact that you were proved malevolent in precisely the way those not being convicted of crimes haven’t. The social causes underlying your criminality matter, but are an issue for governments and communities, not trial juries, who are only tasked with assessing the outcome, not its deeper social causes.
This does still mean we should all be taking steps to help arrange society so as to manufacture fewer dangerous people; but at the same time it does not matter why someone is dangerous, you must protect yourself from them all the same—because they simply are dangerous. On any coherent understanding of justice, merely retributive justice is pointless, even evidentially counter-productive, and only evidence-based, outcome-measure-driven goals of segregation, deterrence, and reform have moral merit in any system of punishment. Which is also why hell is an absurdly irrational, and indeed fundamentally unjust and immoral, response to criminality—particularly for an agent with infinite wisdom and unlimited capabilities and resources. Even fallible, limited, resource-starved humans have come up with far wiser and consequentially justifiable punishment systems. Hell just isn’t compatible with any widely believed concept of God. But that would be the case even if LFW were a thing. Because there is actually no logical connection between LFW and retributive justice. Which is why no one has ever presented one. All we get is handwaving. Hence the problem there isn’t LFW. (Nor does this disprove the existence of God, BTW; it only disproves the existence of Hell.)
Vihvelin then surveys the highly convoluted syllogistic Consequence Argument of van Inwagen, which had to go through several revisions even to achieve formal validity (a common problem when you attempt convoluted and confusing syllogisms), and in the end was still caught out resting on a fallacious false premise, that “I had the ability to do something (raise my hand) such that if I had exercised my ability, [the past] would have been different” has to be identical to “I had the ability to do something (raise my hand) such that if I had exercised my ability, I would thereby have caused the [the past] to be different,” and since it isn’t (those two statements are not the same things), van Inwagen’s syllogism collapsed into a nothingburger. He was simply trying to deny “I had the ability to do something (raise my hand) such that if I had exercised my ability, [the past] would have been different” as an available ontological option; but since it plainly is an ontologically available option, you can’t prove incompatibilism—because that being an ontologically available option is compatibilism.
Indeed, that’s exactly what courts of law, for example, are saying: “you are guilty if you could have done otherwise had you wanted to,” i.e. if past facts had been different than they were, and you had lacked criminal intent, instead of possessed it, then you wouldn’t have committed the crime. Hence your possessing that criminal intent, and it causing your action, is precisely what establishes that you acted freely to commit a crime. Only if you could not have done otherwise even had you wanted to would that not be the case, and you would then be acquitted—for want of proving your intent. After all, if the crime happened no matter what you intended to do, you can hardly be proved responsible for it happening. You might be; secretly, maybe you liked that outcome and thought you were bringing it about, but that can’t be proved in court if the same thing would have happened anyway (unless, as I noted earlier, other evidence of your intent can be adduced, as can be done in Ronald Opus style scenarios, but that’s irrelevant to my point).
Conclusion
Deductive syllogisms are almost always useless, and usually only hide errors of reasoning under attractive technicalia, rather than preventing them as one would otherwise expect “logical rigor” to do. You should always be extremely suspicious of them, and extensively challenge their validity and soundness, before using them or even taking them seriously. Arguments “against free will” are just one area where this is evident. The same can be found in almost any domain where syllogisms are deployed, from theology to metaethics and beyond. Indeed, almost (and I do emphasize almost—because there are exceptions) the only use syllogisms have is as a means of exposing how your reasoning is going astray, by formalizing it into a syllogism and then finding the resulting flaw—as you can always trust it’s very likely there will be one. Which means what is most useful of all about syllogisms is that you can use them to diagram and thus evaluate your own reasoning or someone else’s—precisely to identify what one’s assumptions are, and their dependence on them.
In the present case, arguments against free will simply never use “free will” in any real world sense, but in some bizarre, incoherent sense that has never had any practical application. In the real world, having free will is about whether you consented to what you did—whether you did it knowingly and intentionally. Which actually requires causal determinism to exist. Which is the exact opposite of “LFW”, which perversely claims free will requires the complete absence of causation—that to be free we must make decisions wholly at random, bypassing every relevant cause of responsible action, including knowledge, desires, character, everything, even reasons for acting. That’s irrational. And useless. Toss it. And get back to using the only definition of free will actually employed in practice. Knowing how syllogisms work can help you discover this fact. But they won’t by themselves prove anything.
-:-
You can peruse Pearce’s replies through links provided in comments, and follow that comment’s breadcrumb for my thoughts, beyond what my article already explains or links to.
Sam Harris insists that free will is an illusion.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I think he uses the same type of “uncaused actions don’t exist” type of argument. Can you critique his argument or approach?
Correct. Sam Harris is not dealing with the real world. He is using a definition of free will that has never had any real world application. He is stuck in the ivory tower, and letting himself get snowed by Christian apologists rather than calling them out for misdefining a universally applied concept in law, psychology, and society (and indeed, misdefining it into an absurd reversal of the real thing, which Harris should not be letting them get away with).
I actually use Sam Harris’s book on Free Will as the course text every month in my online class on the science and philosophy of free will, because it’s a good representation of the position it defends, and is very readable and affordable, and yet worth examining because it gets almost everything wrong; students need to know why and where he slips up to really understand the real world concept of free will. So his book is a perfect foil for teaching.
I encourage people to take my course on this because the subject touches on almost every branch of philosophy, from epistemology to aesthetics, and makes an excellent training ground for developing one’s philosophical skills, particularly in learning how to review a book critically and productively.
Mens rea is absolutely essential to compatibilism. The problem for compatibilism is that mens rea is only superficially a coherent concept. Criminal intent includes wanting the wrong things, criminalizes desires. Even epistemologically criminal intent requires a window into men’s souls, a backward political idea notorious in tyranny through the ages.
The notion of informed consent relies implicitly on the notion that there is a knowledge of morals and the human soul that is somehow given by speculative or contemplative reason, not historically developed, much less empirically justified.
The notion of self-reprogramming autonomy, still lurking about here, is incoherent, a version of libertarian free will disguised as secular by philosophical obscurantism.
You must be trolling us. Or are deeply confused.
First: mens rea does not criminalize desires; because a crime requires an actus reus: a criminal act (this is covered in detail in the pertinent section in Sense and Goodness without God). Only the combination of actus reus and mens rea constitutes a crime; merely desiring something is not criminal. Nor is the actus reus enough. That’s why self defense is legal and murder is not. Both involve a superficially criminal act (killing a human being); the only thing that differs is the intent (to cause harm vs. to prevent harm).
And indeed, all moral and legal judgment depends on evaluating whether someone knew what they were doing and intended it; if you can’t prove either, you can never get a conviction. It’s been this way for thousands of years. And yes indeed, we use a window into the soul to do it: it’s called metacognition, a basic cognitive skill many animals evolved millions of years ago, and out of which developed what we now call “human consciousness” (wherein metacognition was turned around on itself, thus cognating “oneself” rather than just “others”).
If you don’t know how it works, just look at how intent is proved in courts of law; and at how you would convince someone something you did was an accident and not intentional even in everyday life. You know the difference matters. And you never act like you can never tell the difference; sure, you sometimes can’t, but you often can. One of my favorite lines from the Supreme Court on this point is that “even a dog knows when it has been kicked by accident or on purpose.” And our cognitive skills far exceed a dog’s.
How then you think a fundamental pillar of justice, an essential tool of social cognition, is “a backward political idea notorious in tyranny” escapes me. You seem to be completely ignorant of how the entirety of any society operates.
Indeed, the human brain evolved two moral evaluation centers long before language: one tracks consequences, the other intent. That’s how ancient and fundamental the idea is. And it’s actually tyrants who want to ditch the distinction; they would rather punish anyone for anything, intent be damned. Tyrants are the ones who don’t care whether you did something accidentally or unknowingly, or did it intentionally. As the famous Draco (whose name gave us the word “draconian”) had it, even roof tiles that randomly fall on people should be convicted of murder and destroyed. That’s whose ideas you want to replicate on a society-wide basis? I can’t fathom why.
Second, informed consent does not require souls. I have no idea why you think you need a soul to be aware of what you are doing and want to do it. That sounds like a Christian delusion to me.
Third, moral systems are actually irrelevant to the issue of knowledge and intent, and thus to free will. Moral systems govern whether we deem a deliberate act immoral or not, but do not govern whether we deem the act deliberate or not. All sane moral systems recognize the difference between a deliberate act and an accidental act. Indeed, unless you profess to be more mentally incompetent than a dog, even you must recognize the difference. But regardless, “that you knew what you were doing and wanted to do it anyway” is true or false regardless of whether “what you were doing” is deemed moral or immoral. Thus morality is not relevant to the presence or absence of free will.
Finally, there is nothing incoherent about self-programming. We already have built machines that do it. So your claim that it is incoherent is not only logically refuted, it has been empirically refuted. Daniel Dennett’s book Consciousness Explained covers the famous example of Shakey the Robot, who figured out on its own that it had legs, how they worked, and how to use them, and then taught itself to walk—without anyone programming it with any of that information, just a generic system of senses and reasoning. That’s a self-programming machine. And we are far more advanced and capable than that.
I must assume you have irrationally confused ultimate causes with autonomous causes. Shakey the Robot does not have to be the “ultimate” cause of anything to self-reprogram. Self-directing drones do not have to be the “ultimate” cause of anything to operate autonomously on a battlefield. Self-driving cars do not have to be the “ultimate” cause of anything to operate autonomously while you sleep in the driver’s seat on your commute home.
So self-reprogramming and autonomous operation empirically exist. So your denying them is akin to denying cars and drones and robots exist. The only debate left to be had is how much more self-reprogramming and autonomous a machine can be; and the existence of humans, who have been empirically proved to do far more self-reprograming and autonomous action than drones and cars and robots so far have, proves the answer is “quite a lot more indeed.”
Once you get so autonomous that you are even self-aware and thus can monitor and vet what you’ve been told to do, what you’re thinking to do, what you want or need, and grasp the consequences of all that to others who may be affected, you have become autonomous enough to have what we call in society (and in courts of law and everywhere else real applications of the idea exist) “free will.” This does not mean omnipotence; “free will” is not a synonym of “all powerful.” Free will—autonomy—still exists by degrees. There is even more of it we could have than we now do; and we will, when we transfer civilization into simulated universes, where our autonomous capacities will approach that of gods.
But one does not have to have “absolute autonomy” to “have some measure of autonomy.” I would hope you are rational enough to know that “some measure of” is not a synonym of “all of.” And free will exists upon the achievement of self-awareness; not upon the achievement of total, absolute autonomy. Because we invented the idea for real world applications; and “total, absolute autonomy” does not exist in the real world. So we need no such concept, in courts of law or everyday life. We instead have been using the concept that does exist in the real world: limited, demonstrable degrees of autonomy, which we then regulate with judgment and law to help society flourish, and along with it the semi-autonomous individuals who comprise it.
Accusations of trolling are possibly the most compelling confessions of defeat one could possibly make. But it means a lengthy reply is a waste of time.
So I must pick out, more or less at random, some of the more egregious nonsense. It’s a tough call.
The claim that all sane moral systems recognize the difference between an intentional act and an accidental? We are going to hell because Adam (though not Eve?) ate a piece of fruit? Are you suddenly redefining religion as insanity? Or do you concede that intentions are corrupted by sin? Or do you deny that being born is an accident, of a kind at any rate?
Shakey the Robot exercises self-programming? But so does any one year child learning to walk! I wasn’t convinced Dennett had solved the problem of consciousness when the book came out, though I must admit I’ve forgotten details in the years since.
The notion that Draco was a tyrant is bad Greek history. He was regarded as a sage. Pisistratus was a tyrant. The idea that tyrants are tyrannical because they focus on deeds rather than thoughts excuses them for imprisoning or torturing or killing men for not being loyal enough. The Inquisition was not necessarily focused on deeds, rather than thoughts.
It is not an accident that such howlers pop up. Your cause is bad, it is corrupt and it corrupts your arguments.
This is an atheist blog. No one here believes in that barbaric theory of justice. Certainly no compatibilists do, even believers. Indeed, few Christians or Jews do anymore. Which is why it annoys them when we point out the contradiction between this and their actual standards of justice in practice which simply don’t conform at all to the primitive savagery of the Bible. They know there is no logical connection, and thus struggle to explain that away. Or wish we’d stop bringing it up, because the resulting cognitive dissonance is very uncomfortable for them.
One of the most significant examples of social and philosophical progress is the widespread, indeed near universal, rejection of the concept of inherited guilt. It’s even explicitly outlawed in the United States Constitution (and in most other modernized nations as well). See That Christian Nation Nonsense (Gods Bless Our Pagan Nation) and Is Philosophy Stupid? The modern world has abandoned that garbage. Anyone still clinging to it is clinging to irrational savagery.
None of your other remarks are relevant to anything I said. I already refuted your false claim that mens rea (mere thoughts) are a crime anymore; that causally-determinist self-programming doesn’t exist; and the other nonsense you spouted. All modern evidence refutes you. Done and dusted.
Identifying informed consent with free will seems to imply degrees of free will, since people are informed to different degrees. Does a Christian (whom we agree is poorly informed) have less free will–ceteris paribus–than you (a well informed person) do? (Just asking for clarification.)
Note that in the article you are commenting on I say I “will reference and rely on yesterday’s article where I laid out much of the groundwork, Free Will in the Real World … and Why It Matters,” and if you read that article you’ll notice I explicitly say free will exists by degrees and even point out this proves free will exists:
But you can’t really measure aggregate free will, as whether and how much free will one has varies by specific circumstance. For instance, I and a Christian can be equally free in how we choose what meals to eat, while not equally free in respect to how we enjoy ourselves at parties, as the Christian is under social pressures and internalized manipulated guilt that I am free from; and even that might vary by situation, e.g. a Christian might be more free at parties where no one recognizes them so as to call them out to their peers. And so on.
So you’d have to give a much more specific example of a situation, that hypothetically you can swap me and a Christian out for each other, and then ask. And even then you’d have to outline exactly what kind of Christian you are talking about—a conservative married Southern Baptist whose employment depends on his church standing? An Episcopalian who frequently parties with Wiccans and works for atheists? Etc. And the scenario will then vary based on how you construct it. Free will with respect to deciding whether to cheat on taxes or murder someone? Or free will with respect to cheating at a board game or standing up for a gay friend? And so on.
Free will rarely requires vast information. So being less informed is often not relevant. The Christian does not “lack” information with respect to how to treat gay people or decide whether to cheat at something or commit murder. There may be exceptions, e.g. a Christian raised in an isolated household and kept from contact with the outside world and other people and information can be more forgivably homophobic than a Christian with ready access to the internet and continual available contact with gay people. The latter increasingly looks to be consciously mean whereas the former is only accidentally so.
One could focus instead on self-awareness, and say the homophobic Christian who legitimately ought to know better—and would, if they weren’t actually just a hateful person rationalizing their hate rather than someone genuinely misled about gay people—lacks some of the tools of freedom I have: honest self-examination, continual subjecting of my beliefs to reliable falsfication texts, a willingness to believe whatever I want rather than what my social niche compels me to lest I nuke my entire social network and possibly marriage and career, etc. In these respects, many a Christian is less free than I am; but still free enough to blame for their homophobia, because they have at that point enough information to know better—they are simply choosing to ignore that data and convince themselves of other things instead, a choice motivated by their fear and hatred (rather than causing it, as would be the case in the manipulated, isolated Christian who actually doesn’t know better).
For a good analog of how not very many degrees of freedom are needed to escape bad worldview choices, and how a good person will be freed by information in a way a bad person probably won’t be (hence their being good or bad can be inferred from how they react to information; our being able to do that is one of the greatest uses of free will as a concept), see this interview with a former Neo-Nazi leader. Examples like that can be multiplied.
There is a difference between delusions a person can get trapped in for want of skills to escape or avoid that fate, and how people choose and employ and sustain such delusions to justify underlying preexisting hatreds and other failures of virtue. Malicious people have a tendency to surround themselves in delusions that justify their malice; that is not the same thing as someone being genuinely mistakenly malicious, who upon discovering their mistake abandons that malice.
Thus it does not matter how much freedom you have in respect to assigning responsibility, because once you’ve met a certain minimal level to warrant your responsibility, you are responsible for everything your thus-adequately-free choices make. At least to the degree warranted thereby—since some people are more responsible for their malice than others, while both are still somewhat responsible for that malice, and we acknowledge this in judging some people less harshly than others.
That real-world distinction we make reflects our accounting for how misled, miseducated, etc., a person might be. What we want to know is whether a person is driven to a delusion because it comforts their villainy or through some force of incompetence or manipulation it overcame their heroism. We often have enough information to tell the difference. And it is precisely by evaluating how much or little free will they had in coming to and defending that delusion that allows us to do that.
I appreciate your thoughtful, incisive reply! It put my mind at ease on the issue.
We describe some people as “weak-willed.” We can describe degrees of that state by adding adverbs such as “very” or “slightly.” We say other people have “iron will.” Looking at the consent part of informed consent, I think those phenomena (“weak-willed”, etc.) reflect degrees of free will. Am I right?
I suspect nearly everyone has failures of willpower, even though they possess free will. How do the concepts of willpower and free will interact?
All “willpower” means is “the greatest desire one has” at any given moment. That doesn’t tell you anything about whether one’s will is free or not. It depends on how much coercion and limitation is present. Because freedom is a continuum, not a binary: one can be more or less free, not just free or not free.
What you choose is your will. Even if you choose to be lazy; that’s what you wanted. This tells you nothing about how free that choice was. Your will cannot be restrained by your will; that’s a self-contradiction. Your will is your will. Whatever you will, is what you will. Period.
Violations of the freedom to choose what you want do not directly relate to how strongly you want something or not. Those are separate things. If you don’t want to quit smoking more than you want to continue, you won’t quit. That’s simply a description of the choice you made. How free that choice is depends on completely separate factors (have you been lied to about any of this? has anyone intervened to change your choice without your consent? have you been kept from learning important information? are you being coerced against your will? etc.).
Being free is also not synonymous with being rational. And many choices that people in folk belief chalk up to a lack of “willpower” are often just irrational decisions. Irrational decisions can still be free. Likewise rational but uninformed decisions. And so on.
Nevertheless, bodily conditions can be coercive, e.g. addiction (the actual kind, not the mythical) can strong-arm you against your desire to quit; as can metabolic disorders that wrack you with hunger when you don’t need food; and so on. These would constitute barriers to, and thus violations of, your will; they are directly equivalent to being tortured against your will, and thus “coerced.”
In that context “willpower” refers to whether your desire to act a certain way is strong enough to exceed the coercive biological effects of such conditions (the coercive effects you are not choosing to be acting on you); the solution to which, ideally, would be to remove those constraints (or get help overcoming them, if such help is realistically obtainable).
People can vary in their pain tolerance thresholds, but it is generally accepted that no one is immune to coercion at some level of threat or pain. Which is why we allow coercion (acting under duress) to be a defense: your will is not considered free, when duress is coercing you to act a certain way that you otherwise wouldn’t act. We are not “free” to not have to pee or eat or breathe, for example. So we do not have free will with respect to these things (other than as to the how and when, just not the whether). Likewise with respect to coercive pain.
People can vary in all their resources (intelligence, knowledge, pain threshold, etc.), thus there are things not accessible to us (you can’t “will” yourself to be smarter, except as a resource-expensive long-term project; etc.). No one is absolutely free (that would be omnipotence). But even accounting for that, how strongly someone desires something does not, by itself, tell us whether they are free to choose what they most desire; you have to look at the other side of the equation: is there a coercive obstacle acting against their greatest desire (thus activating an understandably even greater to desire to avoid the pain of a coercive duress, for instance), and is it beyond any reasonable merit to expect one to overcome it?
Those obstacles don’t come from the will. So no measure of “willpower” can answer that question.
Thanks for so much to think about.
1. “Studies show that repeatedly resisting temptation drains your ability to withstand future enticements.”
2. “Just as muscles are strengthened by regular exercise, regularly exerting self-control may improve willpower strength over time.”
Are those seemingly conflicting sentences from the link somehow compatible?
What do you think about this 3-part response to this post by Jonathan MS Pearce himself? He wrote it after you published this post.
Part 1: https://onlysky.media/jpearce/responding-to-carrier-on-free-will-i-control/
Part 2: https://onlysky.media/jpearce/responding-to-carrier-on-free-will-ii-intention/
Part 3: https://onlysky.media/jpearce/responding-to-carrier-on-free-will-iii-syllogisms-laypeople-christians/
Very curious to hear your thoughts.
I knew of it but at a skim couldn’t discern anything in those replies worth responding to. I had planned to get around to a closer read but ended up never being able to justify the time, and thus forgot to link it in, which I’ll do now.
It would be more efficient if you asked specific questions about his replies here.
For example, quote him saying something about what I argued here, and then ask “How would you respond to that?” (All the whole making sure my article doesn’t already offer a response, i.e. pick questions to ask me that actually advance the discussion, rather than that call for simply repeating myself.)
Edit: I see now that you did that in a separate comment. Getting to that soon!
Jonathan MS Pearce himself made a 3-part response to this specific article written by you. He published it here:
Part 1: https://onlysky.media/jpearce/responding-to-carrier-on-free-will-i-control/
Part 2: https://onlysky.media/jpearce/responding-to-carrier-on-free-will-ii-intention/
Part 3: https://onlysky.media/jpearce/responding-to-carrier-on-free-will-iii-syllogisms-laypeople-christians/
I am very curious to hear your opinions on his response. I believe that the most interesting parts of it were his hypotheticals, so I am going to copy paste them too.
1) “For example, if in causal circumstance CC1, I don’t kill Harry, then what do we make of CC2 where I kill Harry due to being tired and irritable? What if this tiredness is as a result of something I previously decided to do (stay up late the night before, CC2.1)? What if it was something external to me, such that my neighbours kept me up and wound me up all night (CC2.2)? My “decision” to kill Harry in CC2.2 was, at the time of killing, not “interfered” with in Carrier’s sense (externally) such that I wasn’t forced to, but it was internally whereby, had I been completely neurotypical and regular (as per CC1), then I wouldn’t have killed him, but instead I was tired and irritable, and this was itself externally caused.”
2) “Smith is driving along the road over the speed limit. He is tired due to a heavy work schedule and a deadline which meant a lack of sleep the night before and is late for a meeting. One of his favourite songs comes on the radio and he starts singing along to it. On the pavement (sidewalk) a drunk man falls over into a bin which the Borough Council had just put in place to improve the cleanliness of the town. The bin is knocked off its stand and rolls into the road. Smith sees the bin late as his attention is distracted. He swerves, to avoid it. At the same time, a boy is trying to cross the road without looking. Smith is swerving into him and has to reverse his swerve significantly the other way, hitting a pothole in the poorly maintained road. This sends the car out of his control and onto the pavement. Jones, who had been walking by, slips on some soapy water draining from the carwash he is walking past. Whilst Jones is picking himself up, Smith’s car mounts the pavement, hits Jones, and kills him instantly. What is the cause of Jones’ death?
This is a very difficult, but standard causal question. The universe is not an isolation of one cause and one effect. It is a matrix of cause and effect with each effect being causal further down in something like the continuum. One could say that the impact of the car on Jones’ head kills him. But even then, at what nanosecond of impact, what degree of the force killed him? This is arbitrarily cutting off the causal continuum at 1, half or quarter of a second before the effect (Jones’ death). Having said that, the cause could be said to be the lack of oxygen to the brain, or the destruction of his vital organs. We could also accuse the bin, the drunk or anything else as being a cause, because without each of these, the final effect would not have taken place.
As a result, I would posit that the cause of Jones’ death is one long continuum which cannot be arbitrarily sliced up temporally. As such, it stretches back to, say, the Big Bang—the start of the causal chain. In terms of free will, we call this the causal circumstance. Because the universe is one big causal soup, I would claim that any effect would be the makeup of the universe at any one point, like a snapshot. This makeup that leads to any given effect cannot be sliced up arbitrarily but is the entire connected matrix of ‘causes and effect’ (for want of a better term) since the Big Bang.
In other words, there is only one cause. The universe at the Big Bang (or similar).”
3) “If I am picking up a cup of tea to drink from it now, then we could just look at a few seconds before this as to the cause. Perhaps it was just my intention. But how about the notion that my parents introduced me to tea, and all those instances of tea drinking which came from that that now enforce my intentions? What if tea had not evolved? What if my grandparents had not given birth to my parents, and them to me? What if humanity had not evolved? What if the Earth had not harboured life? Without all of these, I would not have picked up my cup of tea. They are all relevant (and all the bits in between, and connecting them to other parts of the matrix) to my drinking tea now.”
4) “Everybody in the French Foreign Legion outpost hates Fred, and wants him dead. During the night before Fred’s trek across the desert, Tom poisons the water in his canteen. Then, Dick, not knowing of Tom’s intervention, pours out the (poisoned) water and replaces it with sand. Finally, Harry comes along and pokes holes in the canteen, so that the “water” will slowly run out. Later, Fred awakens and sets out on his trek, provisioned with his canteen. Too late he finds his canteen is nearly empty, but besides, what remains is sand, not water, not even poisoned water. Fred dies of thirst. Who caused his death?
This thought experiment defends the thesis that causality is, at times, impossible to untangle or define. I would take this one very large step further in saying that the causality of such an effect, of any effect, is traceable back to the first cause itself: the Big Bang or whatever creation event you ascribe to.”
5) “Behaviour X is caused by brain state/neural circumstance/genotype Y. The commenter here is separating neurotypical people from non-neurotypical. This is problematic and perhaps entirely subjective anyway. Another oft stated highly problematic issue, which could be what he was stating, is that non-neurtypical behaviours are uniquely caused by certain circumstances. I.e. autism is caused by X (brains state, genes, brain dysfunction etc). But of course, we should be able to infer that since causation is happening in such abnormal situations, to claim that mental causation from physical scenarios does not take place in the neurotypical is special pleading.
In other words, because someone ends up doing something ‘normal’ does not mean they are exempt from causality. Rather that a ‘normal’ behaviour results from ‘normal’ brain states (labelling notwithstanding)….
I would say, it’s true that we can have non-disrupted cognition, from neurotypical brain states etc. This uses EXACTLY the same causality. It’s just easier to understand causality in subjects which exhibit non-typical behaviour. But the causality is equally in place for the control group.
So I would say that, with this uniform, universal causality, we have identical scenarios: brain states and physical phenomena causing mental phenomena. That some of the phenomena were in some subjective sense a-typical (tumour etc) is neither here nor there. To claim this makes the causality categorically different is nothing more than special pleading. The neurotypical person may have fully functioning rational architecture, but they have no control over choosing that architecture. The outcome is still determined by such processes.
Another way to put it, neurotypical brains don’t suddenly give the agent special ability to evade logic and philosophy and magically allow the agent the ability to do otherwise.”
6) “What Carrier is doing is focussing on control as opposed to causation. And this is absolutely fine, being pragmatically useful in certain contexts. Control, here, is perhaps a reflection of ideas of proximal causation (mentioned above) combined with an element of seemingly autonomous programming, so the thermostat controls the temperature. But does this ignore the idea that, in a sense, the programming of the thermostat is what controls the temperature? We can see this by looking at what we think when it goes wrong.
The thermostat fails to work as it should. This gives us two options:
It is the fault of the manufacturer. I look for the receipt and return it (let’s not worry about warranty times!), blaming them for poor design and/or manufacture.
There are environmental reasons why this happened (water leaked into the motherboard, there was a powercut, etc.). I “blame” these reasons and seek to rectify the environment now and/or for the future.
What we shouldn’t rationally do is blame the thermostat per se, without recourse to trying to understand why it failed to work. We shouldn’t blame the thermostat as an independent entity although we might often do that in our press for time and lack of desire to properly understand the world around us.
When it works, the thermostat appears to be the locus of control for the temperature in the room, and when it fails to work it is because it fails to control the temperature in the room. But this doesn’t help us when trying to rectify when it fails to work and what we need to do to change this. If you shift the problem back to the end-user (as opposed to the thermostat alone), then we appear to have the same issue. What caused the agent to fail to set it – was it externally environmental forgetting because of work stress, or the phone going etc.), biological (e.g. internally environmental – generally forgetful, not reading the instructions properly etc.), genetic (i.e., less changeable reasons baked into the agent)?”
Thank you. This expands on your previous comment (where some technical issue left out your questions).
First, this is all irrelevant to my article, which is not about whether Pearce’s conclusions are correct, but about his methods being completely incapable of justifying those conclusions. The article is about the method of deductive syllogism. Full stop. It is not about free will, per se. That’s just the working example. The subject of free will is treated in the preceding article, as cited, explained, and linked in this article above.
-:-
That said, let’s happily switch rails back to the preceding article’s subject, whether free will exists in the real world as a compatibilist doctrine of autonomy and consent, or as some magical causality-breaking power. To that the examples you quote supposedly relate…
1) Being “tired and irritable” is not a defense in a court of law, nor any defense we’d accept in social relations. To the contrary, that “being tired and irritable” is all it takes to cause you to kill someone makes you much scarier and more depraved, and thus more in need of punishment, isolation, or deterrence. So Pearce is not invoking any relevant distinction here. I already covered this (here and in its inspiring article).
2) The bizarre car accident has no bearing here. That causal systems are complex has nothing to do with the existence or absence of free will or moral or criminal responsibility.
The only relevant question here is whether Smith was breaking the law knowingly and willingly, and the scenario says he was: he was exceeding the speed limit. He is liable for all consequences of that choice. Because no one was forcing him to speed against his will; and if he had wanted to stay within the speed limit he would have. That’s it. There is nothing else to consider.
If one wants to go further and ask, for example, about the percentage of liability a court is likely to assign to all the parties causally connected (the drunk, the city council, the pedestrian, the victim, etc.), because courts do that (it is possible to be found only partially liable, and multiple parties can share liability without conspiracy; and in criminal cases, it is possible for multiple parties to be convicted of the same crime; etc.), then it comes down to knowledge and intent: for each party, was a death a foreseeable outcome to a reasonable observer in the same situation, did they nevertheless proceed with their decision anyway, and could they have done otherwise had they wanted to. That’s it.
3) I see no question of free will or responsibility in the tea example, so there is nothing to address.
4) “…wants him dead.” We can stop there. You have just described criminal intent. They will all be convicted in court, for either murder or attempted murder. This is a scenario I even cited and linked in this article (it’s well known now as a Ronald Opus scenario).
We are actually watching a real case unfold like this (the killing of Halyna Hutchins), where questions of intent are central. What responsibility is born by everyone involved in the complex chain of weird events that ultimately killed her will hinge, ultimately, on what duties of care the law or a “reasonable observer” would hold each participant to, and their respective “knowledge and intent” (was the outcome foreseeable, was there an identifiably criminal or tortious desire at any point to proceed anyway, etc.). But if we could slam-dunk prove that everyone involved actually wanted to kill her, and acted with that intent, there wouldn’t be a defense for any of them to attempt. They’d all be convicted, no matter how convoluted the sequence of events they participated in, and even if none of them even knew of the others’ criminal actions.
5) “Behaviour X is caused by brain state…” Already covered in my article. All that matters is knowledge and intent. It does not matter if it’s neurons or ectoplasm or ghost magic producing that knowledge and intent. That has literally nothing at all to do with free will or responsibility anywhere in the real world. Note that this suggests inadequate understanding of how the insanity defense actually works in law, and I have a whole section on that in my previous pertaining article.
6) “What Carrier is doing is focussing on control as opposed to causation.” Rather, I am focusing on knowledge and intent. Control is an outcome, but is not the deciding element. You can control an outcome but not have criminal knowledge (safely firing a weapon at a shooting range without knowing someone placed a gagged victim behind the target) or not have criminal intent (killing someone in self defense).
Note that I actually discuss the thermostat example in my book, Sense and Goodness without God (p. 106). Pearce has the analogy exactly backwards. Thermostats don’t have conscious awareness and thus cannot have knowledge or intent, and thus cannot have done otherwise “even if they wanted to” (because they have no desires, so there is no “will” to be free or constrained). When we ask instead about proximate causation, however, there is a reason we say a thermostat controls the temperature in the room, and not the temperature in the room controls the thermostat—even though in terms of causal relativity both statements are true, the deciding circuit is considered the control: but for the thermostat, the temperature would be anything, so the thermostat is what is controlling the temperature.
This is how we decide whether a human caused something: if you removed them from the system, would the outcome be different? If the answer is yes, then they caused the outcome. There will be many other causes, obviously, but the only way to excuse someone from being a cause is to rule out their causal role: removing them has to have no effect. But “responsibility” is a different question than being the cause (you can cause a bad outcome and not be responsible for it; hence knowledge and intent, not “being the cause,” decides responsibility) and “free will” is a different question than being the cause (you can cause a bad outcome and not have been able to have done otherwise regardless of your desires, e.g. if someone pushed you or forced you at gunpoint).
Out of curiosity, I’d like to try to steelman hard determinist’s arguments (I am not a hard determinist myself).
Your conception of free will (to a large degree) relies on knowledge and intent. However, isn’t this arbitrary from Pearce’s perspective? In the deterministic model, knowledge and intent also follow from the facts about the past. Why not include something like rational evaluation as well? Why not include clarity of mind? It seems their usage in the court separates knowledge and intent from other contenders, which brings me to my next point.
Pearce or most other hard determinists would ask why we should rely so heavily on the court’s decisions. After all, as you’ve said yourself, these courts operate on compatibilist conceptions of free will. So it follows that their decisions and practices would also track compatibilist free will. Hard determinists usually want to reform the judicial system anyway (sometimes this is their main reason for getting involved in free will debate), so it is plausible to think that they have independent reasons to deny the significance of the court’s conception of free will. The interesting question then becomes: why did courts adopt such a conception of free will in the first place? That is likely because compatibilist conceptions best align with ordinary beliefs and actions (not even Pearce would deny that). However, as we know, ordinary beliefs aren’t usually the most reliable.
So, my question is, what makes knowledge and intent so important to free will (other than their use in court)?
Otherwise, I pretty much agree with your reply.
First:
Note that part of my point is that it is not arbitrary from a reality perspective, and therefore it is Pearce’s perspective that is arbitrary.
In the real world (where it actually matters, as in, actual decisions are made affecting people’s lives) free will actually (as a matter of empirical fact) means what I am saying. The ivory tower definition of free will does not exist in the real world. No one making real-world decisions is using it (not courts of law, not misconduct inquests, not medical ethics boards, not even your friends, or in fact, in practice, even you).
So why are we talking about the faeries when only ferries exist and we should therefore only be talking about ferries? There needs to be a reason. Otherwise we should just drop the subject as obsolete and moot now. The only reason Pearce gives is that theistic apologists use it. But the correct response to that is to point out they are abusing the term; that free will, in the real world, does not work as they aver. Or that their redefinition of free will (which is, really, a “new hypothesis about” free will) is self-contradictory (it does not achieve anything they rhetorically claim, even if it were a real thing).
We should not be allowing ourselves to be “duped” into just believing their definition of free will tracks reality and is correct; that is allowing them to control the narrative, and accepting their false framing of the question. But we should never let an opponent trick us into adopting their false framing of an argument.
Second:
Because courts of law are the one domain where these issues get explored and argued with real stakes for thousands of years. As injustices become increasingly apparent, they are addressed with ever-more equitable adjustments of principle (lest the public revolt against them, or even just ignore them).
Compatibilist free will is already evident as a norm in ancient Roman lawbooks, which became the basis of Continental Common Law, for example, and go so far back in English Common Law, the basis of most of the rest of First World Law, as to precede the written record there.
When we look at the Asian background (from China to Japan), we find exactly the same trend yet completely independent of Western tradition, so we have two whole worlds separate from each other converging on the same conclusion after centuries of deliberate empirical testing and refinement. That is usually a sign of something correct.
Ultimately, this isn’t really a metaphysical question at all. Free will as a “power” (a metaphysical claim) is a unique product of the ivory tower (it arose only in fringe philosophies and was picked up by modern monotheistic theologies). Outside that rarefied context, it is an ethical question, not a metaphysical one. This is a common defect of ivory tower philosophizing today: to confuse what is actually a question of ethics (Who do we hold responsible for things and why?) as if it were a question of physics (What magical power generates responsibility?).
But since the latter is vacuous (no friend, peer, or court of law can examine whether you have a magical power, much less used it in some particular case; we abolished “spectral evidence” and witchcraft accusations from law for much the same reason), it acquired no functional place in the real world (particularly where evidence rather than tradition dictates common policy, e.g. secular democracies). Whereas the ethical question remained.
And that meets with queries like, “Should we execute someone for murder who was merely tricked into thinking it was self-defense?” or “Should we award prison time to someone forced to rob a bank at gunpoint?” or “Is an epileptic whose seizure causes someone else accidentally to fall really liable for that?” or “Should a schizophrenic who genuinely believed they were in their own home be punished for trespassing?” These then meet with self-reflective answers (Golden Rule / Rawlsian perspectivism), “How would I want to be treated were that me?” And thus ultimately, “What is a rational society really going to be comfortable with?”
We thus get answers like, “It makes no sense to treat a schizophrenic who genuinely believed they were in their own home as a criminal trespasser, because our entire definition and conception of the latter is as someone who knowingly violates another’s property and privacy rights, whereas there is no difference between a schizophrenic who genuinely believed they were in their own home and someone who actually is in their own home—other than that they were misled as to where they were, which is not caused by any choice of theirs, and so there is no ‘chooser’ to hold responsible for it.”
This is how the real concept of free will arose and why it has survived all critiques, tests, and challenges to become the norm in all real-world applications (from courts to peer assessment). The fake concept, meanwhile, has always been a contrivance of ideologues, who have agendas that inventing a magical power serves, just as inventing witchcraft accusations as a crime to punish people for served passions and agendas of the time, but had no real world (evidential) basis. But the actual applied concept of free will has a real world (evidential) basis. We can empirically verify knowledge and intent. We cannot even test for magical powers.
I think this argument is great. Cases of convergence between completely different cultures seem especially empirically significant. It would be unlikely that all those people just randomly decided to use compatibilist notion of free will, unless it was more correct/useful then the others.
Just a small nitpick. I think that libertarians/hard determinists would argue that we either always have free will or never have free will (which seems quite implausible on its own). Hence, according to them you wouldn’t need to test for magical powers every time. However, it seems to me that either such hard detrminist free will is either cruelly unfair (to people who are genuinely praiseworthy for their actions) or pretty redundant.
I have a few more questions about a different topic (moral realism), but I will post them under the appropriate article.
To be clear, such results are significant, but not decisive. One still has to rule out other causes of convergent cultural evolution. But that is what the role of the history of jurisprudence and moral psychology does here, by clinching the case against what philosophers would call error theory (that this convergence is nevertheless some error we are prone to, like religion).
That’s actually my point. In the real world, we are making distinctions between when someone has or does not have free will, and we’re doing it with remarkable consistency; so we are clearly keying on something that signifies the distinction. Which cannot be “magical powers” (as no one observes that nor is even trying to when they do distinguish when someone acted with autonomous consent or not). Therefore, no theory of free will that invokes “magical powers” tracks any concept of free will actually employed in the real world. So the libertarians/determinists are bickering over faeries. The rest of us are talking about ferries and are not confusing them with faeries.
To continue on the topic of intent and knowledge, consider this scenario, inspired by New and Smilansky.
John will knowingly and willingly speed tomorrow. The local officer Ben has this knowledge. He has no ability to change this fact. However, at this moment, John doesn’t intend to speed tommorow and doesn’t know that he will speed tommorow. If Ben does not issue a citation for the speeding violation today, before the offense has occurred, John will skip the country and never be fined. So Officer Ben issues John a ticket the day before the crime, which John pays. The next day he goes on to break the speed limit just as described in the citation. Is there anything wrong with what Ben does in this case?
This is a case of prepunishment. I am very interested to hear your take on it. It is argued (by Smilansky) that accepting prepunishment is very counterintuitive and therefore this works against compatibilist free will.
Most thought experiments are either terribly designed or poorly executed (see On Hosing Thought Experiments). And when it comes to free will, they are almost always moral questions disguised as metaphysical questions, just as I noted already. This is no exception. The metaphysics turn out to be irrelevant, and we’re really just asking what law a legislature should write for such occasions.
The metaphysics still have to be dealt with but only because they are poorly articulated.
Here the scenario imagines the existence of magical knowledge: actual precognitive certainty of a future crime (a theme explored, and challenged, in Dick’s tale-cum-Tom-Cruise-movie Minority Report); in fact, two crimes: somehow Ben knows both that John will commit a crime tomorrow (how does he “know” that?) and that he will flee the scene of a crime (how does he “know” that?).
This idea of magical knowledge gets used so much by police to engage in corrupt policing in the real world that we’ve even written laws against their acting on such dubious knowledge (it’s even in the Constitution). One might want to explore here why that is (hint hint). But let’s return to the immediate question:
How exactly is this magical knowledge being achieved here?
Any attempt to make it literally possible will produce logical contradictions or infinite computational loops (it’s just another version of the Grandfather Paradox), where John knows Ben knows John knows Ben knows John knows Ben knows, ad infinitum, to the point that it is literally impossible for Ben to know whether John will do it—or not do it specifically to evade Ben’s actions or prove to himself and others that he has the choice to.
So the scenario as imagined is nonsense.
Turn it into something that can happen in the real world and you get something more like this:
Ben overhears John say he will speed tomorrow. Ben is not authorized by any law against “attempted speeding” so there is nothing officially he could do about it. Though unofficially he could sabotage John’s car or set up a roadblock, or just kill John (so he actually “can” do something about it), but he has no legislated authority to do those things either. So he does what he is authorized to do: tails John or stakes out the road he said he’d speed on. Having in hand the admission of intent to commit a crime, Ben might even be able to get a warrant to secretly GPS-tag John’s car. Either way, he doesn’t need to “pre-cite” him. He can just watch him commit the crime and ticket him there.
This is how policing actually does this. When you get a tip, you can’t arrest; you have to wait and catch them doing it, otherwise there is no actus reus that allows any Constitutional deprivation of rights; some exceptions have been carved out but on the same principle, e.g. “attempted murder” is itself a crime you can arrest someone for, but not identical to “murder,” and it’s not enough to just hear someone say they are going to do it—because that could indeed just be a joke, and thus gain reasonable doubt for a jury.
(Notice how reality is always way more complicated than the thought experiments trying to escape reality are.)
So back to the scenario:
However, indeed, John was joking. He didn’t really plan on speeding tomorrow. But, as it happens, he’s a fence on the run from the FBI, and though he has a ticket out of town tomorrow, it turns out they catch up to him sooner than he thought and he has to speed to the airport to evade capture. So he ends up “speeding tomorrow” exactly as he unwarily joked he would, and indeed where he said he would.
On what legal or even moral grounds would Ben issue a pre-citation here? Even assuming the law allowed him to in the first place. For example, a provisional ticket could in principle be legislated: it would expire in the event the crime does not occur, and it could be based on licensing law, i.e. no one can get a driver’s license who does not agree to sign, when asked, provisional tickets promising not to commit a crime, etc., etc.
But even with that new strange law in place, on what grounds can Ben know John wasn’t joking or wouldn’t change his mind?
For example, Ben could just walk up to John and tell him he’s a cop, he heard what he said, and he or his colleagues will be watching so “he better not.” How would Ben know John intends to do it anyway? Not even John knows that in this scenario.
So the real problem with the thought experiment is that there is no way to get Ben to have the requisite knowledge that would stand up in court and at the same time literally be unable to do anything about it (not even warn John off or set up a sting to catch him in the act tomorrow). That makes this a moral problem, not a metaphysical one. We’re talking simply about on what amount of evidence is it kosher to authorize a police officer to prepunish a criminal. Which has nothing to do with metaphysics. It is solely a moral-political question (about what we ought to commission and allow police to do). Any metaphysical tweaking you did (like giving Ben psychic powers) simply alters the evidence available (and that then becomes, “how reliable are psychic powers; can we trust police with psychic powers to be honest” etc.). It’s still solely a moral-political question (about what we ought to commission and allow police to do).
I want to preface this comment by thanking you for having this wonderful and insightful conversation with me. You are by far the most direct and on-the-point philosopher I’ve talked to.
I found another 2 interesting arguments about free will that attempts to attack it from a different angle. It is taken from this paper by Jaap Hage (which can be found here: https://journals.openedition.org/revus/3861).
1) “Compatibilists assume that freedom of the will is not something that exists objectively in reality, something to be discovered by science, but is a status assigned by human culture to exercises of the will. The assignment of the status ‘free’ to the will goes hand in hand with two other assignments, namely the assignment of the status ‘act’ to an event, and the status ‘agent’ to a person involved in this event.
People who attribute responsibility and free will to agents also determine the grounds on which they do so. Responsibility and free will are not found in a mind-independent reality, but are the outflow of people experiencing themselves both as persons doing things and as free to decide what to do. The standards for determining whether somebody is responsible are set in a social group from such experiences. They are part of what might be called the ‘practice of agency’. This practice consists in the use of standards that determine which evens count as acts, which persons (or other entities, such as organisations) count as agents, who is responsible for which acts, which acts count as causes of which facts (including facts involving damage), and which agents are liable for which damage caused by their acts.
Because standards are not found in an objective reality, they can theoretically have any content. It is possible to hold an agent responsible for his own doings, to hold parents responsible for what their children did, teachers for what their pupils did, and to hold dog owners responsible for what their dogs did, it is also possible to hold dog breeders responsible for what dogs from their kennels did, and to hold dog breeders as a collective responsible for what any dog in the country did, and it is even possible to hold paranoid persons responsible for what they did during a psychotic episode. In short, given the ‘right’ standard, it is possible to hold anybody responsible for anything. All that is needed is the preferably collective adoption of a standard that makes relevant persons be responsible for relevant acts.
Logically speaking, there is nothing that prevents the adoption of a standard that makes people responsible for acts that they cannot influence at all or for acts that they could not help but perform because they were determined to perform them in the first place. In short, given that responsibility is the result of attribution, it is compatible with determinism. Compatibilism is obviously true, but it is also trivially true.”
2) “If the compatibilist approach is to lead to results which are different from the hard determinist approach – which does not hold anybody responsible under any circumstances – it must assume that there are times when agents violate a norm even though they have the capacity to comply with the norm. We have seen that this assumption would cut ice only if, in determining the capacities of an agent, not all facts about the agent are treated as constraints on what counts as possible. Some facts should be left out of consideration to allow the agent the ‘freedom’ to choose between norm compliance and norm violation.
The problem here is that there are no obvious criteria for determining which facts should and which facts should not be treated as constraints on what the agent could and can do. If the choice of facts to be treated as constraints is the outcome of a normative decision-making, it is no longer possible to adduce the capacities of the agent as a reason for holding the agent responsible. Doing this anyway would amount to a circular argument along the following lines: we want to hold the agent responsible for what he did and, therefore, we do not treat the facts which caused him to violate the norm as constraints that define the agent’s capacities.”
This is a false statement and suggests the author is being disingenuous and is not a reliable analyst.
Obviously knowledge and intent and consent and autonomy (and their absences) exist objectively in reality and have indeed been confirmed empirically by all the relevant sciences.
This is what many philosophers mistakenly do: confuse free will (the question of whether a choice was made freely or not, i.e. whether it was consensual or not) with responsibility (how we will evaluate that fact or its absence).
That we use free will as a metric to determine responsibility does not warrant conflating them as the same thing. That would be like conflating a sonar system with the submarine it’s looking for.
(The separate question of whether our judgments, as to what we should think about the presence or absence of consent or responsibility, are based in objective reality is a question in metaethics that is an entirely different debate. For my take on how such judgments are objectively real see The Real Basis of a Moral World. But at this point we are hella removed from the question of whether the presence or absence of consent exists in reality. Likewise if he wants to challenge mind-brain physicalism. None of this is addressing the question of whether consent exists as a thing and its presence or absence can be detected empirically.)
This is false.
Not only is it false in the sense that moral realism is true (and therefore moral facts are objective empirical facts about people and the world) but it is false even on moral antirealism (standards are still objectively constrained by the physical properties of people and the world).
For example, there is no objective fact of the matter whether cars should drive on the right (America) or left (England), but there is an objective fact of the matter that it has to be one or the other for traffic systems to minimize jams and collisions.
“But what if people want jams and collisions” is a fun party game, but doesn’t have anything to do with reality. Societies have obviously material reasons not to want jams and collisions. The whole point of a traffic system is to avoid them.
Likewise, it is hard to see how any society would just arbitrarily choose “murder is good” and stick around long enough for its weird value system to propagate; or why any society would choose that at all. The motive would not match material facts about evolved human psychology or even basic cognitive rationality.
Hence there are real, physical reasons societies have converged on common judgments about the delineation and evaluative function of consent and responsibility. They are not just randomly picked out of a hat like ice cream flavors.
As an illustration, legend had it that Draco of Athens implemented a legal system so harsh that even roof tiles that fell on and killed someone would be tried and executed for murder (hence the phrase “Draconian”). But there are material, objective, physical reasons to conclude that that is ridiculous.
That is what we observe in the real world, and hence why compatibilism is correct: as with the insanity defense, merely being insane does not acquit. One has to prove an absence of knowledge (e.g. schizoid hallucinations) or of intent (e.g. epileptic fit). Thus free will is not freedom from your own will. It is not freedom from motives or knowledge. Obviously we do not conclude that “he wanted to do it, therefore he wasn’t free to.” It’s the other way around: we need to ascertain free will was present in order that we can infer intent (and thus guilt) from what they did.
Thus free will in the real world has always been a causal theory, not a freedom from causation theory. It has always been about did they want to do that. Desire is a deterministic cause of action. But what we are measuring is not freedom from desire, but freedom to act on desire. In other words, the question is, was something else (a coercive threat, a physical force or barrier, a trick) interfering with their freedom to do what they want. The question has never been “were they free to do what they didn’t want.” That’s nonsensical.
Yes, there are. The legal system has fully worked out exactly this. That’s my point (in my originating article Free Will in the Real World … and Why It Matters). That’s why we need to look at how free will functions in the real world. Because in the real world, all this work has long since been done, and we know exactly what criteria apply and why.
This author is living in the ivory tower. They literally know nothing at all about real world applications of free will. And that is precisely why they don’t understand anything they are talking about, and literally don’t know basic things like how we constrain the conditions of consent and responsibility (much less why).
I completely agree with all points with your comment under the moral realism article and your comment about prepunishment.
This might be my last comment for quite some time (since I notice that I nod along 95% of everything I read), and I wanted to tie up some final loose ends.
Is it possible that some system we haven’t yet discovered is better than either of those 2? It may not seem plausible right now, but neither did many scientific breakthroughs at the time.
If I understand you correctly, you mean that “avoiding jams and collisions is better for human society” is an objective fact, right? I think it has to be restricted to current humans as we know them because, in principle, nothing prevents a society of aliens from somehow benefiting from jams. Sure, that may be evolutionary unlikely, but not completely inconceivable.
I have asked similar questions before, but just to tie the loose end, what justifies the legal system and legal practice is that they will inevitably converge on the most equitable and fair way to run the society, right? So in other words, they are empirically more justified than their hard determinist counterparts, correct? I am repeating this because this point is, in my opinion, THE MOST IMPORTANT. If the legal system as it exists right now (as opposed to a hypothetical hard determinist future legal system) can be shown to be reliable and correct to skeptics, who believe that it is barbarous/wrong/inefficient/built on faulty assumptions/remnants of the past ages, then the case for hard determinism is pretty much dead.
Yeah, I am very disappointed in the author (Jaap Hage is his name). Google says he is a legal professional and has extensively studied the philosophy of law and legal science, but the first half of the critique mischaracterizes the compatibilist position.
These are mostly questions in moral theory. That should not be conflated with the separate issue of what free will functionally is in social discourse and what it is used for. The question of free will remains the same no matter what one concludes about morality.
That said…
Absolutely. Sam Harris’s landscape theory is correct.
We have a recent example illustrating the point. Science can discover more. And competent governments are aware of this.
That is also true, but my actual point was that it’s also an outcome every rational observer wants (no one but criminals desire systems that increase jams and collisions). So there is nothing left to explain. Once you know what rational observers want and what will actually happen, you know what ought be done. These are both empirical questions (what a rationally informed person would want and what is known to actually happen when you take a particular action). As I’ve explained in my work on moral theory (the peer reviewed version of which is in The End of Christianity).
You needn’t even go that far. It’s also possible for nonrational human actors to want that (e.g. a corrupt official could produce a money scheme from it). This is why true imperatives follow from what a rational and informed agent would want, which follows from whatever that agent reliably knows. It is not simply just what any person wants.
Most desires are not rational or informed. The corrupt official would be causing himself problems (both directly: he has to live with more burdensome commutes and higher risk of transit injury or death; and indirectly: he risks a high probability that society will justly turn on him; and tertiarily: he already hates people who harm him that way, so on any honest evaluation of himself, he’d have to hate himself for being the very thing he hates, which he can avoid only through various mechanisms of delusion, which then impairs his entire cognitive competence to navigate the world or even find satisfaction with himself and his life). Which renders his scheme irrational. No matter how clever he thinks it is.
As worded, that’s a tautology. An “equitable and fair” system simply is a “just” system; that doesn’t answer why we should want one of those.
What properly justifies this being our goal (in the philosophical epistemological sense) is that it increases the odds of personal satisfaction (and decreases the risk of dissatisfaction) relative to alternative systems; and that it does this for all agents in the system, including the individual supporting it. I go into the details of risk theory and so on in the articles I’ve linked to.
Here, your question cannot be answered, because I do not believe there is any single or coherent objective or belief among “hard determinist counterparts.” So you’d have to pick a specific one of them, and quote them saying something about this, and then I can evaluate what that one person said, which might not apply to any other “hard determinist.”
For example, plenty of hard determinists take the apocryphal SCOTUS position: that hard determinism changes nothing about the process of justice (“if you were fated to steal, then you were fated to do time for it”). Others have different goals (like Sam Harris who wants to medicalize all crime, which isn’t even an intelligible solution, nor distinguishable from most already-existing European correctional ideals).
So, to ask what would be “better” than what a hard determinist wants or recommends (and why), requires nailing down what any given hard determinist has actually said they want or recommend. You might have a hard time getting to that, because hard determinists are often quite opaque on this point or even buried in semantics or mere arguing for argument’s sake.
This is a commonplace methodological problem with the entire field of philosophy: philosophers will acquire all sorts of skills, that they then never use (like, for example, actually checking model penal code and supreme court precedents on the interpretation and application of free will as a concept, which he clearly never did).
Would actions done on LSD be classified as unknowing, unwilling or as genuinely free willed ones? What are your thoughts?
That depends on factors like the dose and what exactly happened—and the responsibilities of the taker (for example, taking LSD while driving is no different than driving while drinking: the blameworthy act of free will is when the drug is irresponsibly taken, knowing aforethought what its effects may be).
Remember, free will is just another word for autonomous consent. Can you consent to things on LSD? You can. But it depends on what’s happening.
This has been dealt with in the law quite a lot. For background, see my article Free Will in American Law: From Accidental Thievery to Battered Woman Syndrome (and perhaps, if you haven’t already read it because it is already referenced in the article you are commenting on: Free Will in the Real World … and Why It Matters)
For example, setting aside any charges for owning and taking an illegal drug, imagine someone takes LSD in the privacy of their own home or in the presence of responsible caretakers, where there is no reasonable expectation of harm, and then their neighbor barges in unexpected, and they hallucinate that they are a lizard monster attacking them, and they kill their neighbor in self-defense—in their own home. They will be acquitted at law, because any reasonable person would do the same in those circumstances—since they could not know at the time that they were hallucinating (or even that lizard monsters don’t exist, etc.). This is a straightforward insanity defense. Their free will to choose to defend themselves was not negated, but their free will to choose to reliably know what was going on was negated by the drug’s effects; and though it was not negated when they chose to take the drug, at that time they made a responsible choice (safe conditions, etc.).
But if, same scenario, neighbor barges in and the drug-taker kills them because, on LSD, they hallucinated that they were black and the drug-taker is a violent white supremacist who takes the opportunity to try and get away with killing a black person under cover of self-defense, they will not be acquitted, because the hallucination doesn’t matter—even given the hallucinated conditions, the act is still wrong and they still knew it was wrong. Actus reus attaches; as does mens rea. So they acted not only with free will to commit murder but also with relevantly correct knowledge. Yes, their free will was negated with respect to reliably knowing what was going on, but even in their mistaken belief that their neighbor was black they still had the freedom to not murder them.
Now change the scenario entirely: someone drops LSD in the same circumstances but trips out completely, just lying on the floor, and for this reason are oblivious to an electrical fire started by a houseguest that burns the houseguest, a houseguest who knew the host was tripping on LSD at the time. All liability attaches to the houseguest here—assuming no statutory liability attaches to choosing to take the drug in the first place, but at that time they are not on LSD so the condition doesn’t matter for your question. Otherwise, the taker of LSD had their free will negated by being essentially paralyzed and insensate. They therefore could have no knowledge (even inaccurate) of what happened nor consent or object to it in any meaningful way.
Another example: medical consent. A patient tripping on LSD comes into the ER needing medical care that involves choices being made by the patient (such as choosing between two options with different risks and benefits): can they consent to a medical procedure or freely make a medical decision? Or must the medical staff declare them incompetent, disregard their commands, and follow the corresponding protocol of care? This will be answered by the medical staff with a series of questions testing the patient’s awareness of the matter at issue (so, anything else they are hallucinating is irrelevant, as long as they are correctly apprehending the specific emergency situation and decision facing them), their ability to reason (so, sometimes someone on LSD can reason coherently; sometimes they can’t; which state is this patient in at that moment?), and so on.
It all comes down to knowledge and intent, which requires competence to understand both, and to reason from them coherently to a conclusion about what to do. Take that away (or bypass them), and you take away free will. This means free will can be taken away in degrees (it’s not a binary). And it means LSD does not automatically do this (it all depends on what exactly it has caused to happen at exactly that time in that particular agent).
Hello Richard! Very interested in hearing your thoughts about this case. If a person is acting under the influence of LSD would you say that he is acting unknowingly, unwillingly or with genuine free will?
P.S. I am getting the same error, so if you are reading this, you could’ve received a very similar comment between 1-3 times.
Please let me know what error you were getting so I can diagnose what happened. Your original comment went into the queue fine (and I approved it and replied). But if the site is telling you differently, I need to see to that!
I really apologize, I didn’t screenshot it. I definitely remember seeing the word error. If this happens again, I will be sure to screenshot it.
Please do. That would be helpful.
Hello, Richard! I found another interesting thought experiment by Kadri Vihvelin (also a compatibilist, but believes that requirements for free will are different). She uses a thought experiment from 1984 novel to demonstrate that you need the ability to will otherwise in order to maintain your free will. Interested in hearing your thoughts.
P.S. I hope that I don’t spoil a great book. I assume that you have already read it due to its popularity. Vihvelin’s thought experiment starts on the next line.
“In room 101, Winston is strapped tightly in a chair, so he can move
nothing, not even his head. A cage with two rats is brought into the room
and placed on a table near Winston. O’Brien explains:
For everyone there is something unendurable – something that can-
not be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved ….
If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your
lungs with air. It is merely an instinct that cannot be disobeyed. It is
the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a
form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wish to. You
will do what is required of you.
O’Brien does not say what it is that he requires Winston to do. Instead,
he brings the cage closer to Winston, explaining exactly what will happen
when the rats are released. Winston goes into a state of blind, screaming
panic and almost loses consciousness. But he fights the panic, knowing
that “to think was the only hope” (286). His first idea is that the only
way to save himself is to interpose the body of another human being between himself and the rats. When the rats are so close that he can see their
whiskers and teeth, he understands who that human being is. Without any
further thought, without a moment’s hesitation, he shouts frantically, over
and over: “Do it to Julia!”
This isn’t like the confessions to absurd, impossible crimes during torture. As he and Julia admit, during their chance encounter, after release:
At the time when it happens, you do mean it. You think there is no other
way of saving yourself, and you’re quite ready to save yourself that way.
You want it to happen to the other person. You don’t give a damn what
they suffer. All you care about is yourself
Winston’s “Do it to Julia” was an action—a speech act intended to
communicate to O’Brien that he wanted Julia to suffer the rats rather than
him. It wasn’t an accident; he meant what he said. He wanted—really
wanted—Julia to suffer in his place. It was a willed action; the uttered
words were the causal product of something it seems right to call Win-
ston’s will—his choosing or trying to say the words that he did say.
But Winston wasn’t able, with the rats just inches away, to choose si-
lence. His words were compelled, but so was his will; he had no ability to
choose (or intend, try, or otherwise will) otherwise. During the time that
he was in room 101—from the moment that he became aware of the rats
and O’Brien’s intentions with regard to them—he lost all ability to do oth-
erwise. As O’Brien points out, it isn’t just that Winston’s fear of the rats
is like an “instinct that cannot be disobeyed,” the rats are something that
Winston cannot even contemplate.26 During the time between Winston’s
awareness of his situation and his “Do it to Julia!”, Winston wasn’t even
able to consider the possibility of refusing to do “what is required of you.”
He remained able to think and to act on the basis of his thinking. But his
thinking wasn’t the thinking of a person with free will; it was the thinking
of an animal caught in a trap. It was directed toward one end: the end of
figuring out the solution to the practical problem that O’Brien had set for
him. And this wasn’t just an accident of his situation; being in room 101
caused Winston to lose the ability—a least temporarily27—to do any other
kind of thinking. And when he finally did figure out what O’Brien wanted
from him, he not only did not, but could not stop to consider whether he
should do what O’Brien required.
The difference between Winston and Jones is that Jones made a decision
about what to do—he decided to vote Guilty rather than not Guilty—and
therefore had a certain kind of ability (the kind of ability that grounds
his responsibility) to make each of the decisions he was considering. But
Winston made no decision in Room 101. To decide one must first identify
options (or what one, perhaps mistakenly, thinks are one’s options) and
then deliberate for the purpose of deciding between them. Jones does this:
he deliberates between voting Guilty and voting not Guilty. Winston never
does this. His practical problem isn’t: “Should I do A or should I do B?”
It is: “What can I do?” And he sees, correctly, that this is a problem with
only one solution.
Some philosophers argue that agency is a “two-way ability”; to exer-
cise agency by, for instance, choosing, is, necessarily to be able to choose
otherwise. The case of Winston shows that this is not so. Winston chose to betray Julia. But in that situation, with the rats only inches away, he had
no ability to choose otherwise.
Winston’s situation is unusual. Ordinarily, a person who chooses is
someone who either actually decides (they consciously deliberate between
options) or who has the ability to decide (they act spontaneously, but they
have the ability to stop and think about what to do). That’s why it is
ordinarily true that someone who chooses to do something is morally re-
sponsible for what they do. Ordinarily, to make a choice is to also have a
choice. Ordinarily, someone who chooses to do one thing is also able to
choose something else instead.
We blame Jones and are entitled to blame Jones because Black didn’t
make any difference to his free will and his ability to make a different
choice. We don’t blame Winston because O’Brien succeeded in doing what
he set out to do: he put Winston in a situation where Winston was forced
to make the choice O’Brien wanted him to make—the only choice that
Winston was able to make.
Incompatibilists think that if determinism is true, we are always in this
situation. Our actual choices are our only choices; we choose, but we are
never able to choose otherwise. Frankfurt tried to show that the debate
between incompatibilists and compatibilists can be sidestepped, at least so
far as moral responsibility, is concerned because the principle that he called
“the Principle of Alternate Possibilities” and I called “Common Ground,”
is false. I have argued that his argument against Common Ground fails.
Black might make it the case that Jones isn’t able to avoid voting Guilty,
but Jones remains responsible because he remains able to decide whether
to vote Guilty or not Guilty and, therefore, remains able, in the relevant
responsibility-grounding sense, to decide to vote not Guilty. I offer Win-
ston as a case that supports Common Ground. Winston is not morally
responsible for betraying Julia because his pathological fear of rats causes
him to lose his ability to make any decision about what to do, and because
of this, he has lost the ability to decide not to betray Julia. He and Julia
were mistaken. They can get inside you”
I don’t understand what the point here is.
There is no pertinent analogy between Winston and Jones. One is under coercion, the other isn’t. Free will can exist only in the latter case, by definition. The causal necessity of reason and desire is not coercion. They are context.