Pascal's Wager at the social level

There is a discussion among political theorists on whether religious liberty should be taken as special, or just another aspect of some standard liberty like personal autonomy.

Here’s an interesting line of thought. If God exists, then religious liberty is extremely objectively important, indeed infinitely important. Now maybe a secular state should not presuppose that God exists. There are strong philosophical arguments on both sides, and while I think the ones on the side of theism are conclusive, that is a controversial claim. However, on the basis of the arguments, it seems that even a secular state should think that it is a very serious possibility that God exists, with a probability around 1/2. But if there is a probability around 1/2 that religious liberty is infinitely important, then the religious liberty is special.

Let's not exaggerate the centrality of virtue to ethics

Virtues are important. They are useful: they internalize the moral law and allow us to make the right decision quickly, which we often need to do. They aren’t just time-savers: they shine light on the issues we deliberate over. And the development of virtue allows our freedom to include the two valuable poles that are otherwise in tension: (a) self-origination (via alternate possibilities available when we are developing virtue) and (b) reliable rightness of action. This in turn allows our development of virtue reflect the self-origination and perfect reliability in divine freedom.

But while virtues are important, they are not essential to ethics. We can imagine beings that only ever make a single, but truly momentous, decision. They come into existence with a clear understanding of the issues involved, and they make their decision, without any habituation before or after. That decision could be a moral one, with a wrong option, a merely permissible option, and a supererogatory option. They would be somewhat like Aquinas’ angels.

We could even imagine beings that make frequent moral choices, like we do, but whose nature does not lead them too habituate in the direction of virtue or vice. Perhaps throughout his life whenever Bill decides whether to keep an onerous promise or not, there is a 90% chance that he will freely decide rightly and a 10% chance that he will freely decide wrongly, a chance he is born and dies with. A society of such beings would be rather alien in many practices. For instance, members of that society could not be held responsible for their character, but only for their choices. Punishment could still be retributive and motivational (for the chance of wrong action might go down when there are extrinsic reasons against wrongdoing). I think such beings would tend to have lower culpability for wrongdoing than we do. For typically when I do wrong as a middle-aged adult, I am doubly guilty for the wrong: (a) I am guilty for the particular wrong choice that I made, and (b) I am guilty for not having yet transformed my character to the point where that choice was not an option. (There are two reasons we hold children less responsible: first, their understanding is less developed, and, second, they haven’t had much time to grow in virtue.)

Nonetheless, while such virtue-less beings woould be less responsible, and we wouldn’t want to be them or live among them, they would still have some responsibility, and moral concepts could apply to them.

Marriage and the state

There is a presumption against the state imposing or enforcing restrictions on people's behavior. That's why, for instance, the state does not enforce private promises where money doesn't change hands. Now, marriage has two primary normative effects:

1. Make sexual union permissible;
2. Impose a rich tapestry of duties that the spouses owe to one another.

Most Western jurisdictions do not have a legal prohibition of fornication, however, which makes the first of the two primary normative effects moot with respect to the state (though of course marriage still is needed for sexual union to be morally permissible, as I argue in One Body). In those jurisdictions that do not legally prohibit fornication, the primary legal effect of marriage is entirely restrictive. Hence, in those jurisdictions, there is a presumption against the state's recognition of any marriages at all. (One might argue that the state needs to license marriages in order to render sex morally permissible; but marriage in the moral sense does not require state involvement.)

In those jurisdictions where fornication is not a crime, I think it is helpful to start debate about things like same-sex marriage or polygamy with a presumption against state involvement in any marriages whatsoever, and then ask in what cases, if any, that default negative judgment can be overcome.

(For the record, I do think the presumption can be overcome in opposite-sex cases, because of the connection with procreation. But I am not arguing for this here.)

Freedom and theodicy

Invoking free will has always been a major part of theodicy. If God has good reason to give us the possibility to act badly, that provides us with at least a defense against the problem of evil. But to make this defense into something more like a theodicy is hard. After all, God can give us such pure characters that even though we can act badly, we are unlikely to do so.

I want to propose that we go beyond the mere alternate-possibilities part of free will in giving theodicies. The main advantage of this is that the theodicy may be capable of accomplishing more. But there is also a very nice bonus: our theodicy may then be able to appeal to compatibilists, who are (sadly, I think) a large majority of philosophers.

I think we should reflect on the ways in which one can limit a person's freedom through manipulation of the perfectly ordinary sort. Suppose Jane is much more attractive, powerful, knowledgeable and intelligent than Bob, but Jane wants Bob to freely do something. She may even want this for Bob's own sake. Nonetheless, in order not to limit Bob's freedom too much, she needs to limit the resources she uses. Even if she leaves Bob the possibility of acting otherwise, there is the ever-present danger that she is manipulating him in a way that limits his freedom.

I think the issue of manipulation is particularly pressing if what Jane wants Bob to do is to love her back. To make use of vastly greater attractiveness, power, knowledge and intelligence in order to secure the reciprocation of love is to risk being a super-stalker, someone who uses her knowledge of the secret springs of Bob's motivations in order to subtly manipulate him to love her back. Jane needs to limit what she does. She may need to make herself less attractive to Bob in order not to swamp his freedom. She may need to give him a lot of time away from herself. She might have reason not to make it be clear to him that she is doing so much for him that he cannot but love her back. These limitations are particularly plausible in the case where the love Jane seeks to have reciprocated is something like friendship or, especially, romantic love. And Scripture also presents God's love for his people as akin to marital love, in addition to being akin to parental love (presumably, God's love has no perfect analogue among human loves).

So if God wants the best kind of reciprocation of his love, perhaps he can be subtle, but not too subtle. He can make use of his knowledge of our motivations and beliefs, but not too much such knowledge. He can give us gifts, but not overload us with gifts. He may need to hide himself from us for a time. Yes, the Holy Spirit can work in the heart all the time, but the work needs to be done in a way that builds on nature if God is to achieve the best kind of reciprocation of his love.

I think there are elements of theodicy here. And a nice bonus is that they don't rely on incompatibilism.

The Incarnation is also an important element here—I am remembering Kierkegaard...

Two kinds of desire strength

Suppose I am designing a simple vacuuming robot not unlike a Roomba, but a little more intelligent. I might set up the robot to have multiple drives or "desires" including the drive to maintain well-charged batteries and to maintain a clean floor. The robot, then, will use its external and internal sensors to obtain some relevant pieces of information: how much dirt remains on the floor, how low its battery charge is and how far away from its charging station it is. I now imagine the processor uses the dirt-remaining value to calculate how much it "wants" to continue vacuuming and the battery charge sensor and the distance from the charging station to calculate how much it "wants" to recharge. These two want-values, together with any others, then go to a decision subroutine, whose specifications are as follows:

1. When one want-value is much greater than the sum of all the others, go for that one.
2. When (1) is false, choose randomly between the want-values with choice probabilities proportioned to the want-values.

(Why not simply go for the strongest desire? Maybe because some randomization might prevent systematic errors, like areas distant from the charger that never get cleaned.)

Suppose now that the robot suffers from a hardware or software failure that in high temperature conditions makes the decision subroutine count the floor-cleaning want at double weight. Thus the robot cleans the floors more when it's hot in the house, even when it is short of battery charge.

Suppose it's a hot day, and the robot's sensor calculations give respective values 2.2 and 4.0 to the floor-cleaning and battery-recharge wants. Then in one perfectly intelligible sense the battery-recharge want is almost twice as strong as the floor-cleaning want. But most of the time in this state, the robot will continue to clean the floor, and in that sense the floor-cleaning want is somewhat stronger than the battery-recharge want.

We can and should distinguish between the nominal desire strengths, which are 2.2 and 4.0, and the effective desire strengths, which are 4.4 and 4.0, due to the buggy way the decision procedure handles the cleaning want when the temperature is high. We might also, in a more theory-laden way, call the desire strengths as they feed into the decision subroutine the "content strengths" and the desire strengths as they drive the decision the "motivational strengths."

In fact, what I said about nominal and effective strengths can be generalized to nominal and effective desires full stop. After all, we can imagine a bug where in the decision procedure under some conditions the memory location holding the cleaning-want value is overwritten with the memory location holding the present temperature. In positive temperature situations, this can result in the creation of an effective desire to clean the floors in the complete absence of a nominal desire for that, and in negative temperature situations, it can create an effective desire not to clean the floors, even though there is a nominal desire to clean them.

Surely our own decisions are subject to a similar distinction. Even if in fact the nominal and effective strengths of our desires are always equal—a very implausible hypothesis, especially in light of the apparent ubiquity of akrasia—the two could come apart.

By definition, one does tend to act on the effective desires and the effective desire strengths. But surely it is nominal desires and nominal desire strengths that more affect how one should act by one's own lights. When a discrepancy happens, it is a malfunction, a failure of rationality.

If one wants to connect this post with this one, the distinction I am making here is a distinction between two kinds of degrees of preference on the content side. So if that post is correct, we really have a three-fold distinction: the conscious intensity, the content (or nominal) strength and the motivational (or effective) strength.

I suspect that when we think through this, some Humean theses about action and morality become much less plausible.

Freedom and consciousness

The following seems a logically possible story about how some contingent agent chooses. The agent consciously deliberates between reasons in favor of action A and reasons in favor of action B. The agent then forms a free decision for A—an act of will in favor of A. This free decision then causes two things: it causes the agent to do A and it causes the agent to be aware of having decided in favor of A.

Not only does the above story seem logically possible, but it seems likely to be true in at least some, and perhaps even all, cases of our free choices.
But if the above story is true, then it will also be possible for the causal link between the agent's decision and the agent's awareness of the decision to be severed, say because someone hit the agent on the head right after making the decision and right before the agent was aware of the decision, or because God miraculously suspended the causal linkage. In such a case, however, the agent will still have decided for A, and would have done so freely, but would not have been aware of so deciding.

Thus it is possible to freely decide for A without being aware that one has freely decided for A. This no doubt goes against common intuitions.

I think the main point to challenge in my story is the claim that it is possible that the decision causes the awareness of the decision. Maybe a decision for A has to be the kind of mental state that has awareness of its own nature built right in, so the awareness is simultaneous with and constituted by the decision. I think this is phenomenologically implausible. It seems to me that many times I am only aware of having decided to perform an action when I am already doing the physical movements partly constituting the action. But presumably the movements (at least typically) come after I've made up my mind, after my decision.

It would be a strange thing to have decided but not to have been aware of how one has decided. Perhaps we can imaginatively wrap our minds around this by thinking about cases where an agent remembers deliberating but doesn't remember what decision she came to. Surely that happens to all of us. Of course, in typical such cases, the agent was at some point aware of the outcome of the deliberation. So this isn't going to get our minds around the story completely. But it may help a little.

In the above, I want to distinguish awareness of choice from prediction of choice. It may be that even before one has made a decision, one has a very solid prediction of how one's choice will go. That prediction is not what I am talking about.

Randomness and freedom

Consider cases where your decision is counterfactually dependent on some factor X that is not a part of your reasons and is outside of your (present or past) rational control. The kind of dependence that interests me is this:

• In the presence of X, you decided on A, but had X been absent, you would have decided on B on the basis of the same set of reasons.

It's important here that X isn't just an enabler of your making a decision, nor is it one of the reasons—your reasons are the same whether X is present or not—but is an extrarational difference-maker for your action.

As far as rationality is concerned, these are cases of randomness. It doesn't matter whether X's influence is deterministic or not: the cases are random vis-à-vis reason.

In these cases, the best contrastive explanation of your decision is in terms of your reasons and X. And the counterfactual dependence on X, which is outside of your control, puts your freedom into question.

I think many cases of conflicted decisions have the following property:

1. If determinism is true, then the case involves such counterfactual dependence on a factor outside of one's reasons and rational control.

But I also think that:

2. Some of these cases are also cases of responsibility.

It follows that:

3. Responsibility is compatible with such counterfactual dependence

or:

4. Determinism is false.

If (3) is true, then a fortiori the kind of causal undeterdetermination that is posited by event-causal libertarians does not challenge freedom.

I think the right conclusion to draw is (4). I think the counterfactual dependence here does indeed remove freedom. But I do not think the mere absence of a determiner like X is enough for freedom. Something needs to be put in the place of X. What? The agent! The problem with X is that it usurps the place of the agent. Thus I am inclined to think that freedom requires agent causation. I didn't see this until now.

Kant and Lewis on our freedom

Kant (on one reading) holds that the initial conditions of the universe and the laws of nature depend on us (noumenally speaking). This reconciles determinism with freedom: sure, our actions are determined by the laws and initial conditions, but the laws and initial conditions are up to us. Kant also thinks that a further merit of this view is that one can blame people whose misdeeds come from a bad upbringing, because noumenally speaking they were responsible for their own upbringing.

Lewis holds that freedom is compatible with determinism, and in a deterministic world had one acted otherwise, the laws would have been different.

Everybody agrees that the view I ascribe to Kant is crazy (though not everybody agrees that the ascription is correct). But Lewis's view is supposed to be much saner than Kant's.

How? The obvious suggestion is that Lewis only makes the laws depend counterfactually on our actions (assuming determinism) while Kant makes the laws depend explanatorily on our actions. But that suggestion doesn't work, since Lewis's best-systems account of laws makes the laws depend on the law-governed events, and so it makes the laws depend not just counterfactually on our actions but also explanatorily: the laws' being as they are is grounded in part in our actions. So both accounts make the laws explanatorily depend on us.

Admittedly, Kant also makes the past, not just the laws, depend on our actions. But that's also true for Lewis, albeit to a smaller degree, because of his doctrine of small miracles...

The ability to do otherwise and brainwashing

Consider cases where an agent is brainwashed into having to choose A by having a set of desires implanted that are sufficiently strong to motivate her to choose A. Here's a rather rough argument:

1. In these brainwashing cases, there is no ability to do otherwise.
2. The relevant difference between these brainwashing cases and cases of agents in deterministic worlds is the history by which the agent came to have those desires.
3. The ability to do otherwise is independent of history.
4. So the relevant difference between brainwashing cases and cases of agents in deterministic worlds does not make a difference for the ability to do otherwise.
5. So agents in deterministic worlds are unable to do otherwise.

Of coure, if we replace "ability to do otherwise" by "freedom", the compatibilist, and many an incompatibilist as well, will dispute (3). But surely your ability to do otherwise depends only on how the world is now, not on how it used to be.

Basically, the point is that while compatibilists can perhaps get out of manipulation arguments by insisting that history makes a difference between cases of brainwashing and cases of determinism, since history makes no difference for the ability to do otherwise, manipulation arguments succeed for the ability to do otherwise, even if they fail for freedom.

There have been two kinds of compatibilists. The Humean compatibilist, well represented by Lewis, have held that determinism is compatible with the ability to do otherwise. The Frankfurtian compatibilist instead insisted that freedom does not require the ability to do otherwise. If my simple argument succeeds, compatibilists must be of the Frankfurtian sort.

Merely justifying reasons

A lot of philosophers think that there are "merely justifying reasons", reasons that do not require action but can justify it. The defining feature of a merely justifying reason is that if one has a merely justifying reason to A, one can rationally refrain from Aing without needing any reason to do so. On the other hand, if one has a requiring reason to even a pro tanto one, to rationally refrain from Aing one needs a contrary reason.

I will argue against this based mainly on five plausible theses:

1. One only acts rationally when one acts for reasons.
2. When one has to do what one does not have rationally compelling reason to do, one is in bondage.
3. One does not come to act in bondage simply by not having reasons to act otherwise.
4. Rationally compelling reasons are not merely justifying reasons.
5. The status of a reason R as merely justifying does not depend on what other options are rationally available.

For my view of action, (1) is rock bottom. Claims (2) and (3) concern a concept of "bondage" that I don't have a very good characterization of. It is the opposite of the kind of freedom that Augustine and Leibniz talk about (Leibniz defines freedom as doing the best thing for the best reasons). Brainwashing produces bondage. There is bondage whenever a reason's action-causing force significantly exceeds its rational force. On the other hand, being compelled by one's virtue to do the right thing is not a case of bondage, even though a libertarian might worry that it's not a case of freedom (or only derivatively a case of freedom). Bondage is not necessarily opposed to responsibility. For our own freely chosen vicious activities can cause us to be in bondage. A compatibilist may think lack of bondage is necessary and sufficient for freedom. The libertarian is apt to think that it's necessary but not sufficient. Claim (4) seems very plausible. Now, maybe (5) can be disputed. One might think that whether a reason to A is merely justifying will depend on what reasons one has for other options. But that seems mistaken: the reason to A may become more or less opposed by the presence or absence of other options, but that shouldn't affect the status of the reason.

Now, imagine that I am the sort of being that can only act rationally (probably the notion I have in mind is something like minimal rationality). This surely does not make me be in bondage. Suppose that I rationally and freely choose to A for a reason R over some option B for which I have some other reason S. And consider a similar world W where I do not in fact have any reason to choose otherwise than to A. In that world, S doesn't support my choosing B. For instance, maybe in this world I choose to watch a movie for fun (and "for fun" seems to be a paradigm case of a merely justifying reason, if there are merely justifying reasons) over going to bed early to rest up more. But in W, going to bed early is known by me not to be restful. By (3), I don't come to be in bondage just by losing reasons, so in W my choice to A is still a choice not made in bondage. But in W, I have only one choice available supported by reasons, namely to A, and hence only one rational choice by (1). So if I can only act rationally, I have only one possibility available: to A. Since I am not in bondage, by (2) it follows that my reason R to A is rationally compelling. But a rationally compelling reason is not merely justifying, by (4). So, my reason R to A is not merely justifying in W. Hence, it is not merely justifying in the actual world. Thus, one does not rationally choose to A on the basis of a merely justifying reason.

Responsibility and desires

Consider four cases. In each case, you know that Jones, an innocent person, is drowning and will survive if and only if you throw her a life preserver in the next two minutes. But in each of the four cases there are further facts that you know:

1. The life preserver is locked down with a mind-reading device that will open if and only if you have a desire to eat a tarantula. You lack that desire and your character is such that you are unable to form that desire in two minutes.
2. The life preserver is locked down with a mind-reading device that will open if and only if you have a desire to eat a tarantula. You lack that desire, as well as lacking a desire to rescue Jones, and your character is such that you are unable to form either desire in two minutes.
3. Same as 2, but the the mind-reading device will open if and only if you have a desire to rescue Jones. You lack that desire and your character is such that you are unable to form that desire in two minutes.
4. The life preserver is not tied down, but your character is such that you can only rescue Jones if you desire to rescue Jones. You lack that desire and your character is such that you are unable to form that desire in two minutes.

In case (1) you are not being directly responsible for failing to rescue Jones. You might, of course, be derivatively responsible, if, say, you had foreseen that the case would arise sufficiently early in the game you had foreseen that the case would come up and failed to make reasonable efforts to self-induce a desire to eat a tarantula. Such efforts could have involved reflection on the bragging rights one would gain from eating a tarantula, but it would take more than two minutes to succeed—it's too late now, anyway. With such a back story, you would be derivatively responsible for faiing to rescue Jones on the basis of your responsibility for being unable to have a desire to eat a tarantula. The case is no different from the life preserver being locked down with an ordinary lock that you have no key for and are unable to smash or pick. You have no direct responsibility, though you might have derivative responsibility if you were responsible for locking down the life preserver.

Now, in case (2), we will want to blame you. You wouldn't have rescued Jones even if you could. But while that does imply a defect of character, it is not a case of direct responsibility for failing to rescue Jones. Again, you may have derivative responsibility if you are responsible for having failed to get started earlier at self-inducing a desire to eat a tarantula. But if you're not responsible for your inability to have a desire to eat a tarantula over the next two minutes, you're not responsible for failing to rescue Jones. Though you might be responsible for failing to want to rescue Jones.

Case (3) isn't significantly different from case (2). If the mind-reading device requires you to have a desire that you are unable to form over the next two minutes, you're not directly responsible for failing to rescue, though again you may be derivatively responsible if you are responsible for your inability to have that desire.

But now consider case (4). Again, this is a case where you are unable to rescue Jones unless you form a certain desire to rescue her in two minutes, and you are unable to form that desire. The same thing as above should be true: you are at most derivatively responsible for failing to rescue Jones. And derivative responsibility requires that you be antecedently responsible for something else, in this case your inability to have over the next two minutes a desire to rescue Jones.

We need one more reflection. If you are not directly responsible in case (4) when you know the facts about your character that are given in (4), you are also not directly responsible in case (4) when he is ignorant of these facts. (You might be responsible for failing to try to induce a desire, but not for failing to induce it or for failing to rescue.[note 1])

There is a lesson here. If you are unable to do something because you're unable to have a mental state, then you're at most going to be derivatively responsible for failing to do it. Moreover this principle should not be limited to failure but needs to be applied to positive action as well: if refraining from an action would take a mental state that you are unable to gain in the time required, you're at most going to be derivatively responsible. But derivative responsibility must ultimately come from direct, non-derivative responsibility. However, if compatibilism is true, then all the things we are responsible for are determined by our motivational states. In no case like that, though, can we have non-derivative responsibility. That was the lesson of the above cases. So if compatibilism is true, there is no non-derivative responsibility, and hence there is no responsibility.

Dominating reasons

Some things just aren't reasons for a choice. For instance, the fact that a portion of ice cream has an odd number of carbon atoms is by itself not a reason at all for eating the ice cream, and the fact that I find hot chocolate unpleasant is by itself not a reason to choose the hot chocolate. (The "by itself" qualifier is needed. I might have some instrumental reason for consuming an odd number of carbon atoms, and I might be ascetically training myself to consume what is unpleasant.)

Sometimes, however, something can be a reason for A without being a reason for A rather than B. For instance, that I enjoy hot chocolate to degree 100 is a reason to have hot chocolate. But if I enjoy ice cream to degree 150 on the very same scale, then my enjoying hot chocolate to degree 100 is not by itself a reason to have hot chocolate rather than ice cream. In the absence of other reasons, it would then make no rational sense to choose hot chocolate over ice cream, since my reason for hot chocolate is strictly dominated by my reason for ice cream.

At least roughly speaking:

• Reason R (not necessarily strictly) dominates reason S if and only if S is not at all a reason for choosing an action supported by S over an action supported by R.
• Reason R strictly dominates reason S if and only if R dominates S and S does not dominate R.

And of course reasons can be replaced by sets of reasons here. Then, Buridan's Ass cases are ones where the reasons for each action non-strictly dominate the reasons for the other.

Rational choice between A and B occurs only when one has reason to choose A over B and reason to choose B over A. Thus, rational choice between A and B occurs only when the reasons for neither option dominate the reasons for the other.

Definition: Reasons R and S are incommensurable if and only if neither dominates the other.

Thus, rational choice is possible only given sets of reasons that are incommensurable.

Divine Creative Freedom paper posted

I just posted my "Divine Creative Freedom" paper, where I discuss incommensurability and God's decision which world to create.

A simple account of agential moral responsibility

Distinguish between properly agential responsibility and effect responsibility. If I force you to do B, I am agentially responsible for forcing you, but only effect responsible for your doing B. If I deliberately take a drug that forces me to do B, I am agentially repsonsible for taking the drug, but only effect responsible for my doing B. One can put the distinction by distinguishing between responsibility for an action an responsibility for a state of affairs. If I take a drug that forces me to do B, then I am agentially responsible for taking the drug, but only effect responsible for the state of affairs of my doing B.

Simplify slightly by considering actions where there is only one alternative.

1. x is agentially morally responsible for an action A if and only if there is an alternative B and subjective reason sets R for A and S for B such that x is agentially morally responsible for doing A for R rather than B for S.
2. x is agentially morally responsible for doing A for R rather than B for S if and only if x did A out of a choice of A for R over B for S that x is agentially morally responsible for.
3. x is agentially morally responsible for choosing A for R over B for S if and only if (a) x chose A for R over B for S and (b) the moral considerations in R and S are not exactly balanced.

Proattitudes, freedom and determinism

On a familiar compatibilistic picture of what things might be like, all our free actions are determined by our proattitudes and beliefs. The proattitudes provide the drive and ends for the action and the beliefs tell us about what does and does not conduce to those ends. On the most traditional version of the story, the proattitudes are noncognitive. I think Warren Quinn's arguments against such a view of proattitudes are sound: noncognitive proattitudes just do not render action rational. I would say they are too much like mere dispositions to act, and dispositions to act, every bit as much as the actions that flow from the dispositions are in need of being made rational. Thus, the proattitudes must have a cognitive component: something like a seeing of an end as good or a judgment of an end as good.

Now consider this dilemma. We either do or do not always act in accordance with the rationally superior attitude. I.e., we either do or do not ever act in accordance with what the attitude presents to us as the rationally called for or the better course of action. If we always do, then we are never blameworthy. For while the judgments embodied in our proattitudes may be wrong, we are not blameworthy for these wrong judgments if we came to them always acting by our better lights.

Blameworthiness requires that at some point we have been responsible for acting against our better lights.

Now, proattitudes are either entirely cognitive or have a cognitive aspect and a conative drive/motativation aspect. If they are entirely cognitive, then when we act against our better lights, then something other then proattitude must be determining our action in cases where we go against the better judgment embodied in these entirely cognitive proattitudes. But on the compatibilist picture, it is being sourced in our proattitudes that makes an action be truly ours. And in the relevant respect, the respect that determines us on the wrong (by our lights) rather than right course of action, the action is not sourced in our proattitudes.[note 1] That makes it very hard to see how we can be responsible.

Next, suppose that the proattitudes have both a cognitive and a conative component. On this picture, the cognitive component is what makes actions rational and the conative is what causally explains the action. On this view, when we act against our better lights, it is because proattitudes with a rationally weaker cognitive component can nonetheless have a causally stronger conative component. But how can we be responsible if that's the ultimate explanation of our wrongdoing? For it is the cognitive component that makes for rational action, for action that is distinctively personal, the sort of thing that is subject to moral evaluation. Imagine taking a brute animal and adding a cognitive component to its noncognitive proattitudes, but keeping the root of the deterministic causal explanation of action on the noncognitive side. That would not make the brute responsible. It would just create a monster.

When one is determined to act in accordance with the rationally weaker but conatively stronger proattitude, one is in the grip of a disorder, a kind of disease of the will (we call it "akrasia" or "weakness of the will"), which causes one to choose the rationally weaker rather than the rationally stronger course of action. But one is not blameworthy for such diseased action unless one is blameworthy for the disease. However, since the story applies all the way back, there is no room for blame left.

This line of thought does not refute the compatibility between responsibility and determinism. For it says nothing against the compatibility between praiseworthiness and determinism. But I think it gives one reason to think that determinism rules out blameworthiness.

A regress of reasons

Suppose I vote to admit Artur to our program because Artur is Polish. A colleague then criticizes me, not for my voting to admit Artur, who is indisputably an excellent candidate, but for my voting to admit Artur for the reason I did. The colleague says that I should have voted to admit Artur because of his qualifications, not his ethnicity. And of course the colleague would be right in the criticism.

It is a familiar phenomenon that when we make a decision, we can be morally criticized (by others or by ourselves) for acting on the reasons we did. Sometimes it is not up to us which reasons we act on—we might, after all, not be free at all, but be compelled to act on the reasons we act on. Such cases could lead to a paralysis: I know what I ought to do, and I know the reason I ought to do it for, but I am unable to do the action for the right reason.

I suspect that when we conscientiously realize that we are in a position where we are moved to do what we know is the correct action, but we know we are moved by reasons we should not be moved by, typically we are not helpless. We can in fact get ourselves to act for the right reasons. It would be too paradoxical if it were typical in such cases that the only way we had to avoid acting for the wrong reasons was to avoid the correct action.

But this means that we should be able to exercise some power of choice over the reasons for which we choose. To choose an action A for reason R is itself an action, and it is possible to have reasons for and against this action, since choice requires reasons. This threatens a regress of reasons.

One way to arrest the regress is to say that, in practice, our freedom eventually runs out. Eventually, we have no freedom to choose our reasons, but only freedom to choose the action. That may be the case sometimes. But I think a more interesting case would be where we can choose to act on a reason for that very reason, thereby arresting the regress. My love for my children, perhaps, not only provides me with reason to spend time with my children, but reason to do things out of love for my children.

Responsibility and reasons

It is not unusual to say that responsibility for an action requires that the action be done for a reason. Compatibilists particularly insist on this. Now, I think there are no actions without reasons, but I don't know that responsibility has that much to do with this.
Consider the psychopath who acts at the expense of others. To evaluate her responsibility, we do not look at the reasons she had for her action as much as at the reasons she had against it. If she was entirely unaware of the moral reasons against her action, we are apt to count her as not culpable, regardless of whether she had reasons for doing as she did. If she was aware of the moral reasons but unmoved by them--or, better, incapable of being moved by them--we are unsure about her culpability. But the reasons for doing the action don't matter, as long as we are sure of the negative fact that she didn't have good reasons.
Suppose, perhaps per impossibile (perhaps action without reasons is impossible--I think that), that someone acted for no reason at all (on a whim? or are whims reasons?) in a way that went against the conclusive moral reasons she had. As long as she was aware of and sufficiently moved by these reasons against her action, we surely would count her culpable for her action. Again, what counts are the reasons she had against her action, not so much as the ones for her action.
It is different for praiseworthy actions than for culpable ones, though. For an action to be praiseworthy, the action may be done for the right reasons, while for it to be culpable it must be done against the right reasons. Nonetheless, even for praiseworthy actions the reasons against that action matter. Suppose I have such an excess of money that I barely feel any reason to hold on to a thousand dollars. Then my thousand dollar donation is barely praiseworthy (though I may be praiseworthy for my ungreedy feelings). The widow, though, who had great reason to hold on to her mite is very much praiseworthy.

Acting otherwise and choosing otherwise

The traditional Humean compatibilist position, prior to Frankfurt's examples, is that a deterministic agent who is free could still have acted otherwise because

1. had she wanted to, she would have acted otherwise.

But the question relevant for determination of responsibility isn't whether one could have acted otherwise (uncontroversial Frankfurt cases, where Black acts only after the choice has been made, show that), but whether one could have chosen otherwise.

I wonder if a similar conditional-type of story can be told about the ability to choose otherwise? The obvious analogue to (1) is to say that

2. had she wanted to, she would have chosen otherwise.

But actually this condition is often false despite the agent being free. For it often, perhaps even always, happens in the situation of a free choice that the agent both wants to choose A and wants to choose B, but because she cannot go for both, she must choose between them. Suppose the agent chooses A. It is surely false that had she wanted to, she would have chosen B. For she did want to choose B, and did not—what better refutation is there of the subjunctive conditional than that the antecedent is true but the consequent is false?

But presumably in this case the agent didn't on balance want to choose B. So perhaps our compatibilist-friendly alternate possibilities condition is:

3. had she on balance wanted to, she would have chosen otherwise.

That may be true, but it is obviously a very weak condition. Perhaps even a trivial one. Indeed, we might reasonably say that what is constitutive of the agent's on balance wanting to choose A is precisely that she is such that given the choice she will choose A. If so, then (3) is trivially true in every case. And even if it's not trivially true in every case, it's going to be true in too many cases of freedom-canceling brainwashing to capture the alternate possibilities intuition.

It may be wiser, then, for the compatibilist to simply retreat from affirming any kind of alternate possibilities condition on freedom. But there is a cost to that.

(I am omitting consideration of the usual finkish objections (of which Frankfurt cases are one of the earliest examples) to conditional analyses. Maybe there is some way around those.)

Why does brainwashing take away responsibility?

Everybody agrees that brainwashing can remove responsibility for the resulting actions. But how does it do that?

In some cases, brainwashing removes decisions--you just act an automaton without making any decisions. Bracket those cases of brainwashing as not to my purpose. The cases of interest are ones where decisions are still made, but they are made inevitable by the complex of beliefs, desires, habits, values, etc.--the character, for short--implanted by the brainwasher. Of these cases, some will still be not useful for my purposes, namely those where the implanted character is so distorted that decisions coming from the character are not responsible simply by reason of insanity.

The interesting case, for discussion of compatibilism, is where the character is the sort of character that could also result from an ordinary life, and if it resulted from that ordinary life, decisions flowing from that character would be ones that the agent is responsible for.

So now our question is: Why is it that when this character results from the brainwasher's activity, the agent is not responsible for the decisions flowing from it, even though if the character were to have developed naturally, the agent would have been responsible?

I want to propose a simple explanation: In the paradigmatic case when the character (or, more precisely, its relevant features) results from the brainwasher's activity, the agent is not responsible for the character (that this is true is uncontroversial; but my point is not just that this is true, but that it is the answer to the question). Decisions that inevitably flow from a character that one is not responsible for, in external circumstances that we may also suppose one is not responsible for, are decisions that one is not responsible for. When the character results from an ordinary life, one is responsible for the character. But when the character results from brainwashing, typically one is not (the case where one freely volunteered to be brainwashed in this way is a nice test case--in that case, one does have at least some responsibility).

But now we see, just as in yesterday's post, that incompatibilism follows. For what makes us responsible for a character or circumstances are decisions that we are responsible for and that lead in an appropriate way to having that character. If we are only responsible for a decision that inevitably flows from a character in some external circumstances when we are responsible for the character or at least for the external circumstances, then the first responsible decision we make cannot be one that is made inevitable by character and external circumstance.

The way to challenge this argument is to offer alternate explanations of why it is that when character comes from brainwashing one is not responsible for actions that inevitably flow from that character given the external circumstances. My proposal was that the answer is that one's isn't responsible for the character in that case. An alternate proposal is that it is the inevitability that takes away responsibility. This alternative certainly cannot be accepted by the compatibilist.

Laws violating religious freedom and conscience

This post is an oblique response to one of the lines of thought in a petition against Notre Dame University's lawsuit against the HHS contraception mandate.

If your religion or conscience (and on my view of conscience, the former is a special case of the latter if you sincerely accept the religious teachings) forbids you to obey a law, then the law violates your religious freedom or your freedom of conscience. (There is also a further question whether this violation is justified, and I won't address that question.) But the converse is not true. A law can violate your religious freedom, and maybe your freedom of conscience (that's a harder question), even if obedience is not forbidden by your religion or your conscience.

This is easiest shown by example. A paradigm example of a law violating religious freedom is a law prohibiting Christians from meeting to worship on Sunday under pain of death. But obedience to such a law need not go against the requirements of Christianity. Christianity does not require public Sunday worship when such worship seriously endangers innocent life, including one's own. Thus, there is no duty to get to Sunday worship if there is a hurricane, and to get to church one would have to leave the hurricane shelter one is in. Thus, a law that prohibited Christians from Sunday worship on pain of death would violate religious freedom without Christianity holding it to be wrong to obey the law. In case it's not clear that this law violates religious freedom, one can run this a fortiori argument. A law forbidding Sunday worship with a five dollar fine as a penalty would be wrong to obey according to Christianity, unless one is quite poor, and hence violates religious freedom. But if forbidding Sunday worship under pain of a five dollar fine violates religious freedom, a fortiori so does forbidding Sunday worship under pain of death.

For another example, consider a law explicitly prohibiting Jews from meeting to pray together on the Sabbath. It is my understanding that while rabbinical Judaism encourages meeting to pray together on the Sabbath, it does not require this (if I am wrong, just make it a hypothetical example). Thus, this would be a law that it is not wrong to obey, but it surely violates religious freedom.

In fact, one might even have a law that violates freedom of religion without requiring or forbidding the practitioners to do anything. For instance, consider a law requiring doctors who are not themselves Jehovah's Witnesses to forcibly administer blood transfusions to Jehovah's Witnesses when this is medically indicated, even when the Witness does not consent. Such a law violates the patient's freedom of religion, even though the patient is not being required or forbidden to do anything by the law. (The law may also violate the doctor's freedom of conscience.)

It is harder to see whether a law obedience to which does not violate conscience can violate freedom of conscience. There is a prima facie case for a negative answer: How can freedom of conscience be violated by something that doesn't require one to go against conscience?

But I think a case can be made that it is possible to violate freedom of conscience without requiring something contrary to conscience. The cases parallel the above two.

The case of Christian Sunday worship was one where something is required unless there are serious reasons to the contrary. Now, typical vegetarians do not think it is always wrong to eat meat. They would not, for instance, think that an Inuit child whose parents only make meat available to her in winter is morally required to refuse to eat it and thus starve to death. But now imagine a law put in place by the pork lobby that requires everyone to eat six ounces of pork daily, under penalty of death. If it is permissible to eat meat to preserve one's life, it would be permissible for the vegetarian to eat the pork. But surely there is something very much like violation of the vegetarian's freedom of conscience here.

The common thread between the Sunday worship and vegetarian cases is that these are situations where there is a strong duty to go against what the law says, but it is the law's penalty that provides a defeater for the law.

To parallel the case of rabbinical Jewish attitudes to Sabbath worship, consider a Kantian. Now, Kantians believe that there is an imperfect duty to help others, i.e., a duty where it is not specified to what degree and in what way one should help others. Imagine, then, a law that prohibited one from helping others except between 4:30 pm and 5:00 pm on Tuesdays. Such a law might not be such that Kantianism forbids one to obey it. But it is a law that surely in some important sense violates the Kantian's freedom of conscience, by forbidding that which her conscience very strongly encourages her to do, namely help people at other times, even if it does not specifically require it.