Of course when you stop and think about it this gets at the idea of positive and negative freedoms quite well. One reason I’m not a libertarian.

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Incompatibilists do not simply assert that the truth of their conclusion.  They develop (often ingenious) ways of revealing the threat of determinism to free will and MR.  In doing so, they certainly appeal to intuitions, but to intuitions about cases and narrower principles (the principle of alternate possibilities or the ‘transfer of non-responsibility principle’ or Rule B etc.), never on the compatibility question itself.

It’s a good point I’d never quite thought of before.

The problem is that this focus doesn’t necessarily get at what regular people think is significant about the free will debate.  Rather they focus on what philosophers think are important and then see how intuitions deal with those foundational principles.

Related posts:

1. Folk Intuitions and Free Will
2. Intuitions of Free Will
3. Ethics and an Other Book

It’s amazing how much my son is like Calvin. The only difference is no imaginary friends or stuffed animals. Other than that he’s a dead ringer…

Back when I was young and read Calvin and Hobbes it never occurred to me just how accurate it was. Now that I have a 5 year old starting school next week…

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Put an other way I think our instincts and language are tied to a vague understanding of the world such that one shouldn’t read too many philosophical commitments into them. Much of philosophy since the linguistic turn is doing just that. Now in one sense that makes complete sense. After all our philosophical questions are made within language. If those questions have ontological aspects we have to make sense of them in terms of the language. Yet if the language is simply indeterminate on ontology then there’s inherently a problem. In effect we’ve created a revisionist account of the terms by creating a new extension they don’t have in common vernacular.

Of course the easy and obvious way out of this is to accept we have a revisionist account based upon what armchair philosophers mean by the terms and then proceed as normal. The other alternative is to do what the Experimental Philosophers are doing and ask various poll questions to try and figure out how average people (or at least college students) would apply the terms in various thought experiments. Those thought experiments may have ontological or related commitments.

My complaint with both these approaches is that while they establish something it isn’t entirely clear what they establish. For instance the problem with the armchair philosopher is that they may have a particular vernacular but then one has to be very careful moving from the philosophical jargon to the common speech even when the words are the same. That is we have to recognize that it is jargon. I’m not sure this is always done. The problem with the EP approach isn’t quite a pronounced but is a worry as one can always ask why a lay person picks out the use they do. That is does that use actually say anything terribly profound about philosophy? In other words is it really giving us any insight into the philosophical problems? Or is it just an other (perhaps inconsistent) way of creating a new jargon? After all the thought experiments designed to elicit philosophical meaning are odd enough that they don’t reflect normal use. (One could argue that they are just testing what normal use in unusual circumstances is: but I think that this is undefined and that we’re merely creating new usage)

I bring all this up relative to Jason Zarri’s post because it seems clear that ontological options and alternative possibilities aren’t the same. Options deal merely with what seems physically open in a weak sense. Alternative possibilities includes what is physically open in a strong sense and what is ontologically open. That is alternative possibilities (AP) demand an answer to the questions of determinism, to the question of a block universe, and so forth. I distinguish between the physically weak sense and physically strong sense in terms of whether the environment allows the options to occur without considering the physical state of the agent. I then additionally add in the question of whether the agent is functioning normally. (Itself a vague notion, but one that I think is clear enough and is designed to deal with mental illness and the like but take no position on whether the brain is practically deterministic)

Given those distinctions and the language distinctions I made earlier we have the following. First in terms of many philosophical questions it is alternative possibilities that the are of concern. Yet in terms of normal language use it is options that is of concern. To switch between the two is to make a mistake of language. That is to assume that the philosophical question tells us something about regular language. That’s simply because the language in common use is more vague than the narrower philosophical uses.

Note that this is not to say that discoveries in philosophical use can’t impact regular language use. It may be, for instance, that some term has the same extension in both philosophical and common vernaculars. So it may turn out that questions of responsibility in philosophy affect questions of responsibility in common usage. (I’m not yet convinced it is, but I certainly think there’s pima facie reason to think that is an example)

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1. Language, Philosophy, and Terms
2. Does Heidegger Reify Language?
3. Responsibility, God and Alternative Possibilities

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That in mind here’s a brief attempt to clarify the issues from my perspective. Hopefully those who disagree can correct any mischaracterizations on my part so we can at least better understand where the disagreements remain.

Revisionism and Foundations for Terms

Much of the debate is, I believe, fundamentally over what language to use. Further the ultimate debate is what ideal language should be used. My post on revisionism attempted to highlight this by noting two ways we can analyze any term: in terms of the structures of denotation (roughly what we point at in the world with the term) and connotation (roughly what people think of in a given society when they encounter the term). The two sometimes are the same but often aren’t. Which you focus in on depends upon the kind of question you are asking.

Now my focus in these series of posts is on the terms “freedom” and “responsibility.” I think most recognize that responsibility can be broken down into two separate meanings: the notion of desert or what someone deserves and the notion of attribution. The two aren’t the same.

Blake, as I understand it, grounds the meaning of both freedom and responsibility in terms of what we believe ourselves to be doing as we do it. That is in turn grounded on what Blake calls pragmatism. (Not to be confused with the philosophical movement) I believe by this he means that this way of thinking works, allows us to explain our behaviors, and results in fruitful future action.

To me this only works if our intuitions can be trusted by default. By intuitions I mean beliefs we arrive at but can’t give justification for. This may be some intuitive capacity to know via non-empirical means. (Say the way Plato felt about knowing geometry or some ‘supernatural’ capacity) It might also be instinct given by our biology or society.

Now one claim I make is that it is impossible from the individual’s perspective (i.e. via non-scientific means) to tell what underlying processes produce any particular intuition.

I’d suggest that given this we can see that intuitions are trustworthy only to the degree we remain within the kinds of experiences in which they were judged trustworthy. Thus if we take our “pragmatic beliefs” about what constitutes responsibility or freedom and move them to an other realm (say the ontological) then we have no reason to trust our justifications.

So to me the question of freedom and responsibility can be answered only vaguely and only in certain arenas of experience. i.e. the kinds of encounters we as humans typically have. So we can say someone in jail isn’t free. We probably should be careful with science fiction scenarios (like Frankfurt) since they are outside our common experiences and thus our intuitions aren’t trustworthy. (While one move is to go away from intuitions and towards something conceivably being true I don’t think this ultimately resolves the issue) Moving to ontological questions about the nature of time is completely inappropriate. We may make arguments for this via non-intuitive means but we can’t simply appeal to human belief on the matter.

The second issue is the issue of good and evil. To the degree that one argues responsibility demands the ability to rationalize on good and evil we must logically have propositions (sentences) stating what is a good act and what is a bad act. A person is responsible (granting for argument this is an requirement) only if they can reason and reason requires being able to produce arguments and arguments require premises that can be argued with.

If our intuitions of good and evil are mere vague imperatives it is debatable whether we know good and evil sufficient to be judged accountable.

Related posts:

1. Intuitional Differences
2. Experimental Philosophy and Free Will Needs a Makeover
3. Consciousness and Responsibility

I want to consider physics though. What makes physics so interesting is that intuitions and language are so wrong. I fully admit that it is my experience in physics that makes me so skeptical about appeals to language and intuition.

Consider the separation between time and space. How separate are they? If we appeal to General Relativity we get one answer. If we appeal to our language and common sense intuitions we get an other. What about mass and energy? Are they different or the same? What about waves and particles? If you even ask the typical person to draw the curve of a falling object they get it wrong.

Consider recent moves in philosophy to appeal to empiricism. (See for example the blog Experimental Philosophy) These usually involve simple cases which then poll respondents to see what their answers are. (Say some test case which asks if a person is free or not) But if one were to do the same in physics would we trust the results? No. Why? Because the answers would typically be wrong.

What does this mean though?

Well what the physicist would say is that our intuitions don’t reflect reality. We can test what our intuitions are but we should expect our language to reflect what structures are innate in the universe. As physics has progressed over the centuries what we find is that the language and intuitions in society start to reflect the science. Thus the intuitions of people in say the 17th century are different from today. And even today the language of a person trained in physics typically is different from a lay person.

Now most people don’t get upset if a physicist suggests we ought be revisionist about our intuitions or words. Further I think we’d all agree that if we were to present various thought experiments trying to get out what people believe about energy or mass that it isn’t too informative.

All that revisionist accounts of responsibility do is the same thing. They suggest that there is something called “responsibility” but say that perhaps our folk theories about what it is are wrong. They need revision. They don’t want to say it’s improper to talk about responsibility. They just say that some of the ideas we have about responsibility need a little changing.

Now the big problem is that intuitions about ‘stuff’ in the world seems different from intuitions about certain terms. We want to say that stuff like electricity, magnetism, mass, particles and so forth are real. That is our thoughts about them are ultimately irrelevant. Some would say that for some thoughts and ideas our thinking about them is very important. That is our thoughts might pick out real objects but that what is important is less the objects than our thoughts. We often say that the concepts are anti-realist since they depend essentially on what some finite community says. In that case what we are interested in is that community and not what they are referring to.

Now if we are interested in the community then revisionism makes no sense as we’re not looking to change what the community believes but discover what they believe.

Thus some will say that things like free will, responsibility and related concepts are really about our community and beliefs and not what is “out there.”

I raise this simply because people will disagree on this matter and how one decides what the focus is will determine how one views revisionist accounts.

Related posts:

1. Folk Intuitions and Free Will
2. Intuitional Differences
3. Moral Intuitions and the Metaphysical Epoch

1. Moral responsibility requires free will. (Typical Libertarian assumption)

2. Free will requires indeterminism (of the right sort). (Ditto)

3. So, we are not morally responsible if indeterminism (of just the right sort) does not occur in us. (from 1 & 2)

4. We do not have good evidence that such indeterminism occurs in us.

5. So, we do not have good evidence that we actually are morally responsible. (from 3 & 4)

6. To treat someone as morally responsible (in a retributivist sense) without good evidence that they are morally responsible is unjust. (To me the more controversial premise – but perhaps defensible in terms of burden of proof)

7. In order to avoid being unjust, we should not treat people as morally responsible (in a retributivist sense).

Now I wanted to discuss this in an LDS setting. It seems to me that the obvious approach of most Libertarians will be that since God does attribute responsibility we can generally attribute it. That is the burden of proof shifts to proof that a particular person isn’t responsible. Further it’s the reverse of this argument that provides the strongest reason to accept free will. That is since (7) is false one of the premises must be false and the chosen one is (4).

I don’t want to argue against that since I think it follows fairly obviously once you accept (1) and (2). Some, such as Fischer, reject (1) but I don’t want to get into that either.

What I do want to do is move the argument down one step and, ignoring for the moment the purported direct intuition of causal connections Blake may ascribe to God, ask what would happen if God didn’t have that ability. That is if God at a fundamental level comes to knowledge the same way you or I do (i.e. is merely an ideal knower) what should his behavior be? My argument the past couple of weeks is that if justification for knowledge is mediated then (4) is false. It would then seem to logically follow that God shouldn’t hold people responsible in a retributivist sense. (He might of course adopt the approach of a medical treatment of people engaged in immoral acts). The problem would then be reconciling this with scriptural views.

If it can’t be reconciled then this would be stronger argument for Blake’s position.

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1. Responsibility, God and Alternative Possibilities
2. Responsibility & Foreknowledge
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