Responsibility & Foreknowledge

Posted on May 18, 2008
Filed Under Philosophy, Religion |

3369F8B3-76A4-44B2-A34B-11A68571453B.jpgAt the SMPT Conference one thing I noticed was how many people were quite willing to abandon the idea of foreknowledge in preference to a particular conception of free will. In some ways I suppose this isn’t that surprising given the place of agency in Mormon theology - although of course agency as discussed isn’t quite the same as free will. I take a more agnostic position towards this issue. Although I think it important that alternatives be presented to the position best elucidated in Blake Ostler’s books. (I think Blake’s books have been extremely influential in promulgating this Open Theology view)

One question some have is what the strongest argument for Libertarian free will within an LDS perspective is.

To me the strongest argument is the argument from responsibility. That is we are told we are responsible and the narrative presents God as holding us responsible. Now if responsibility demands free will then this obviously entails the Libertarian view.

The question then is whether responsibility does entail the same metaphysical positions as Libertarian free will. (Hereafter LFW)

Here’s the main argument:

1. Consider some individual J who does something wrong
2. If J’s act A was wrong then he should have done something else instead
3. If J ought have done something else then he could have done something else
4. Then J could have done something else instead
5. If foreknowledge is true then J could not have done anything other than he actually did
6. If foreknowledge is true then J’s act A wasn’t wrong

Now this is usually discussed in terms of determinism rather than foreknowledge. But structurally it ends up being the same.

Usually this argument is attacked on (2) although most alternatives don’t end up being that successful.

The approach I’m most sympathetic to denies (5) since it takes a position similar to event libertarianism. That is at some point in the past the future was undetermined and open and only after that point did the universe collapse into a four-dimensional structure wherein foreknowledge was possible. Given that at some point the future was open J could have done other than he did even if at a given set of times he no longer could have done otherwise. Some add to (3) the claim that it is tensed to a particular time or narrow set of times. I’m not sure that is necessary for responsibility even if it is for free will. Of course that’s debatable and I’ll get to those criticisms in a subsequent post.

An other approach, by John Fischer, is to distinguish two kinds of control: deliberate control and access control. Most libertarians think we need deliberate control plus alternatives at the time of deliberation. I’ll deal with Fischer’s approach in my next post.

Comments

6 Responses to “Responsibility & Foreknowledge”

It will be no surprise to you that I agree with Blake’s rebuttals to your (5) as you have argued in the past. It seems to me that your (5) is essentially saying that at some point in the distant past our future was open and we made choices. But now our future is fixed and we are stuck with the consequences of those ancient choices. It is sort of a “butterfly effect” view wherein we make the butterfly responsible for the hurricane (or whatever) that occurs as some distant result of a great causal chain. None of that works well in Mormonism of course. The entire concept of “men are free to choose liberty and eternal life or captivity and death” assumes that we are free to choose now and have a capacity to understand right from wrong now.

I think you are right that responsibility is the key problem anyone clinging to exhaustive foreknowledge must deal with.

No, I’m saying “making choices” is a not fundamental.

If you think making choices should be ontologically fundamental then of course you’ll require some sort of agent libertarianism since that’s what agent libertarianism ends up being. And since what we know about the brain as it relates to deliberation traditional dualistic accounts no longer work. So that leaves only ontological emergence as possibly making agent libertarianism possible. But I think that ends up being dubious. (IMO) There’s no really good argument that I can see for ontological emergence beyond it being necessary for what people want.

I’m still agnostic since I think the arguments against other positions are strong. But the arguments for agent libertarianism are, in my view, weak.

Clark: I appreciate your kind words and assessment of my arguments. I believe that rejecting (5) doesn’t work because in addition to the requirement for alternative possibilities in terms of the acts of the will, I have argued that there is also an epistemological requirement that in the moment we are deciding we must appreciate the consequences and moral qualities of our acts. In other words, if what I choose now is a result of my a-rational bodily states when I was 2 years old, then I do not act because of the moral reasons that I now have as an adult making choices but as a result of irrational or a-rational factors over which I no longer have control.

The same flows from the view that my acts reduce to the activity of my neurons which don’t act out of rational considerations but out of a-rational causal relationships. I feel joy; but my neurons don’t feel joy. So I have a quality of conscious experience that cannot be reduced to the properties of my neurons. It requires assessing the neural activity of a conscious person. Similarly, when we assess moral blame or praise, we are not assessing the acts of a person’s micro-neural activity; rather, we assess blame to agents who act as organisms rather than as their distinct parts. Moral assessments happen at the level of an organism acting as a whole and not at the level of material causal explanation. Of course, that means that to truly assess the strength of the libertarian option, we also must have a view of the mind-body problem, and both issues are very complex.

I agree with you that emergence provides a consistent notion of libertarian agent who can act as a morally responsible person. Why isn’t panpsychism also a response to reductive materialism consistent with libertarian free will? I thought that was the view you adopted. I am of course an emergentist, but I could be talked out of that position if it were shown to be incoherent or simply untenable. In a substance metaphysic I don’t believe it works all that well, but in a process perspective it works rather well and I haven’t seen any discussion of the process notion of emergence outside of Hartshorne’s and Griffin’s writings. The issue of emergence of the mental is quite compelling in a process perspective. The fact that you are creatively writing and thinking and acting out of rational considerations is compelling evidence of the process view of emergence in my view. The fact that we are in fact moral agents is compelling evidence for emergence if that is the only view that is consistent with the fact of moral agents, don’t you think?

Blake, I don’t have time to say much. I’ll address your more detailed points hopefully tomorrow.

The reason panpsychism doesn’t work to generate an agent is that thinking and deliberation as the Libertarian requires it have to be simple. That’s just not necessarily the case with panpsychism or its variations unless you adopt a variation that ends up being radical emergence. Radical emergence works because you’ve effectively created a metaphysically simple entity out of parts. (Which sounds contradictory and is why I’m skeptical)

If you allow panpsychism to allow regular emergence then pretty well you don’t have choice or many other mental states or dispositions being fundamental. If you allow that then you effectively are saying Libertarianism isn’t true.

Clark: What I had in mind is precisely that if matter is panpsychic, then the emergence isn’t radical because the properties of mind are already inherent in matter and they are merely enhanced by organization rather than a radically new property from inert and mindless matter. In process thought, creativity is the most basic reality of every concrete actual occasion and there is a synthetic unity created at the level of the organism and not at the basic constituent level.

Are you honestly saying that you doubt that we have mental states and dispositions that are fundamental? How did you type what you did if that is the case? Are you a Cylon?

You can have a panpsychic view of matter yet still require radical emergence for a human mind. Or you can have a panpsychic view which is reductionist. My point is that panpsychism (or panexperimentalism) are too broad a category to be useful here.

And yes, I’m very skeptical of the claim we have mental states and dispositions that are ontologically fundamental. The charge that it would somehow be difficult to type what I did in such a case is quite odd - it’s kind of begging the question isn’t it? (Or a secret appeal to your intuitions as being universal)

As I’ve said many times I’ve quite agnostic on the issue. I don’t have strong feelings one way or the others. But (1) my intuitions definitely give rise to different views than yours and (2) I distrust intuitions anyway and am pretty discounting of arguments that end up depending upon them.

Anyway, if one adopts some form of panexperimentalism or panpsychism but has the elements of thought as very rudimentary then that has rather interesting implications for many of the debates. Especially vis a vis the metaphysical conditions of time.

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