Will Wilkinson - Latest Comments in The Courage to Conjoin

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

michael rowle — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 23:49:45 -0000

what the fuck are you talking about, that's not the argument. The argument is that adaptively chemicals combine in an adaptive manner for this short fucking period on earth that "humans" exist. It's determined, you have no choice. It's an illusion, yea put your finger on your nose. There it is, the proof. Humans exist for 1/infinity. Think about how small that is and how small your brain is with your smug fuckin look on your face. It's people like you in academia that drive people insane. Go get a job in a factory or work on creating a fucking engine, stop thinking about stupid things like this and incorrectly I might add.

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

Jon — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 11:52:28 -0000

Taking Ockham's Razor straight to Ramesh's jugular...OW.

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

Eric — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 14:14:35 -0000

Isn't Ponnuru making a go at a reductio here? He seems to be arguing that there is free will and thus moral responsibility (this, as Will says, seems obvious). But some of the people who accept free will and morality are physicalists. This is a problem, Ponnuru says, because physicalism (as Ponnuru understands it) entails a repudiation of the notion of free will (as Ponnuru understands it). The problem with this doesn't seem to me to be a logical one, as Will suggests, but a conceptual one (i.e., with Ponnuru's understanding of free will, causality, and the relationship between the two).

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

mk — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 17:59:20 -0000

Njorl:

Until immorality vanishes, acting as if there is free will even if we do not accept it’s existance is the preferable course.

I would put it differently. There are no uncaused decisions, which depending on your definition may mean there's no free will. One of the "causes" (or "influences") of a decision is the surrounding incentive structure. So, we should set up the incentive structure to minimize people doing bad things. As you say, punishment acts as a deterrent. It does this, in fact, because there is no free will.

We tend to see coercion as a "subversion of free will" because we clearly observe a causal mechanism influencing the decision. But in fact there is always some causal mechanism that influences the decision, it's just usually much murkier to us than coercion.

Society's role should be to embrace this (let's be happy that human actions are not uncaused) and design incentive structures to minimize bad things happening. This social engineering literally is morality, it is not that we should pine for the days when humans will never have incentive to do bad things to each other.

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

Njorl — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 17:15:51 -0000

"There is another, seemingly more fair, choice - we can not punish criminals! But that’s not really a choice, and that’s the issue."

Even if it were possible to perfectly rehabilitate wrongdoers without punishing them, and to perfectly ascertain the causitive factors that led to the wrong doing, society could still conceivably be served by punishing the wrongdoer for their actions. Punishment would still act as a deterrent. Otherwise, the anti-social man of the far future could think, "OK, I'll kill my wife, take the rehabilitation pill and marry my mistress. That's a good deal for me!"

Until immorality vanishes, acting as if there is free will even if we do not accept it's existance is the preferable course.

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

Clayton — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 14:33:24 -0000

Will,

I hate to rain on your parade because I fear doing so will feed the trolls (Sorry, but I've just called anyone who carries on to the effect that freedom, goodness, etc... requires God a troll), but there's something epistemically questionable about what you're suggesting.

Let's suppose you know we have freedom on the basis of e. You then learn that the universe is made of what it's made of. However, we're assuming this isn't a tautology b/c otherwise you knew it all along. Rather, we learn what the universe is made of. Surely what you learn, when combined with e could in principle lead to lowering the probability that you had free will even if you initially knew you had free will on the basis of e alone.

To deny this is a possibility out of hand, it seems you'd have to deny that you could have knowledge on the basis of uncertain evidence. Surely, however, we don't have certain evidence that we're free, in which case even if you denied that we could have knowledge on less than certain grounds, we'd not know we're free.

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

mk — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 14:18:42 -0000

Re: a consequentialist moral/justice system..

The scenario I posed (use science to model/predict human behavior, use this model to assess punishment to maximize expected utility) is indeed fanciful by today's standards.

But we can use the same principles to set up a consequentialist justice system, even today. If we don't know most of the causes, oh well, that means that the punishment is mostly focused on the perpetrator (that's already the case today). It would still change the game to focus explicitly on minimizing the number of crimes*, rather than on some more abstract notion of morality.

Then, as scientific capacity to accurately model human behavior ramps up, our justice system won't be faced with a "human deliberation is a result of external causes" crisis-- instead, we'll have a mechanism in place to assign blame and punishment to the external causes (the human ones, anyway).

(* "Minimizing the # crimes" is too specific. You have to take into account the reduction in utility from the penalties themselves-- otherwise simply executing all criminals might seem the best policy)

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 13:56:26 -0000

Don't anyone worry about overstaying your welcome. I love it!

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

Bill — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 13:50:39 -0000

McNeel,

All that I meant by traditional morality above was what we have traditionally thought we meant when employing terms like right, wrong, ought, etc.. To wit, we traditionally had a notion of a robustly free agent who could have done otherwise and whose action therefore merits praise or blame on a moral basis (as opposed to for its technical skill, say).

I was in no way referring to the content of the moral scheme, just to its presumptions about human freedom. My very simple point is that if human freedom to do otherwise is in fact not clear, or if freedom amounts only to the capacity to learn and the ability to respond to reasons then that is not likely (certainly not necessarily) a sufficient freedom to sustain the old meanings behind obligation, rightness, or wrongness.

Cheers.

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

GilM — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 13:08:10 -0000

It seems ironic, but it's not the following of the command; it's the deliberation about whether or not to follow it, and then acting on that decision.

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

bago — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 12:26:12 -0000

Anyone else amused that the proof of free will is to follow a command?

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

McNeel — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 09:30:42 -0000

Bill,

I get iffy around claims to represent 'traditional morality.' I don't know whether this means the peculiar institution of rules and interdicts, or whether we're talking about sets of virtues, or what. In any case, claims about what 'traditional morality' is are never more than second-order beliefs. And we are not very good at forming second-order beliefs.

My argument was intended to sketch a conception of agency which is consonant with our first-order moral/ethical beliefs and practices. And my claim was that at this level, our traditional beliefs and practices are very much independent of determinism. The truth of determinism (and I don't know if determinism is true) may shatter some second-order moral beliefs, but it does not touch moral practice and first-order moral beliefs. If this is right, then Ponnuru is wrong to say that physicalism or reductionism is incompatible with actual moral practice. (I do think eliminativism does, but that's a different kettle of fish.)

The only place I diverge greatly from traditional morality is in rejecting the revenge impulse to re-balance the moral scales downward. I prefer a compensatory view of justice which would balance the scales by leveling up as best as possible the state of the victim. But this is at best a side issue.

In any case, I think you're right about over-staying, but I would be glad to continue the discussion elsewhere. Via electronic mail, I can be reached at kyle (my last name is the handle I'm using) the mail service run by google.

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

GilM — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 01:11:27 -0000

cg,

Right, I don't believe it. I was putting on my cg hat to point out the contradiction your statement revealed.

You know that it's worse when people behave unjustly, because you expect them to choose responsibly. You know that people, unlike earthquakes and hurricanes, can think about, and choose "How to achieve the best possible outcome."

And that's what matters, right?

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

cg — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 00:27:42 -0000

Gil: Now it seems you're falling onto fatalism. Our actions are inevitable, yes, but they are still a result of our rational decisions; you seem to be saying we shouldn't even consider how to achieve the best possible outcome, and I know you don't believe that.

I think my point still stands: there is something fucked up about a world in which people are forced to suffer for things they couldn't have avoided. What's fucked up about this? It is making us agents of (what you seem to admit is, in the case of hurricanes) an unfair system: a system in which people are born, are causally lead to a certain predetermined outcome, and suffer greatly as a result of their original, unchosen conditions.

There is another, seemingly more fair, choice - we can not punish criminals! But that's not really a choice, and that's the issue.

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

Bill — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 23:54:05 -0000

mk and William Newman make similar points, worth addressing. If you're view of the universe is correct, then yes, you can posit "better and worse" outcomes for people, and if you want to call that morality then feel free. Just recognize that it's at best a shadow of the conception of morality that has generally dominated western discourse. (Again, if it's the best account, then so be it--it's just not the same account).

cg made the point well with natural disasters: people are better off as a matter of states of affairs when they are not covered in lava, but when a volcano erupts we don't say "Bad Volcano!" If it turns out that the best accounts of human agency suggest that, though suggestible and able to learn, we are more like the volcano than like the free-willed beings we have traditionally imagined ourselves to be, then we will have moved away from what Ponnuru, and most people who currently employ moral vocabularies, mean by the term "morality."

It doesn't mean that we will have lost all evaluative capacity--we can say whether a tree is healthy or not, and that a storm caused a fire that made a forest far less healthy, but we would not call the conditions that made the tree healthy morally praiseworthy, nor the storm that destroyed the forest wicked.

And with that run-on, I'm sure I have overstayed my welcome.

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

Bill — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 23:45:58 -0000

McNeel,

I think you are having trouble distinguishing arguments about what you think is the fact of the matter about the universe (a descriptive account of human agency and, if it exists, moral agency (praiseworthiness/blameworthiness)) and what Ponnuru is trying to do, which is contrast some people's vision of the way things are with traditional formulations of moral agency.

You say that his argument doesn't work because your descriptive view is correct. But your descriptive view, which may well be correct (more or less) does not save morality in the old fashioned sense. That may be no loss, and obviously one ought not to lament what reality will not abide--if we have to abandon old notions of morality then so be it.

Ponnuru does not claim that no kind of moral reasoning is possible without God, for one thing. He posits that a certain kind of strict reductionism (which you do not appear to hold) is incompatible with a certain traditional view of moral agency (which you also do not seem to share). Your answer is somehow that Ponnuru is wrong because he misunderstands that some meaningful account of some sort of morality is compatible with your not-entirely deterministic account of morality.

Everything you have written can be true and it would leave Ponnuru's argument untouched.

Meanwhile, you have done much more than Will, who seemed to think that you could prove the mutual coherence of morality and reductionist physicalism by proving that one can touch one's nose and that the universe, after all, only contains what it contains. This was enough for Matt Yglesias and Andrew Sullivan to swoon, which is disappointing enough. It's not quite as bad as Hitchens trying to prove that atheism and morality are consonant because atheists can behave morally, but it's not much better. (Mind you, atheism and morality may well be consonant, but the fact that there are moral atheists wouldn't prove it, any more than the fact that lots of scientists believe in God proves that God and science are consonant.)

Will, after all your study of philosophy, do you really think that "touch your nose" constitutes a proof of free will? Or that the claim that "the universe is whatever it is" is either equivalent to or (worse yet) a proof of reductionist materialism? (Recognize that reductionist materialism is not generally regarded as pleonastic.)

Cheers.

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

John Tabin — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 20:04:27 -0000

I'd love to see Will and Ramesh debate this stuff. (AFF event?) My head might explode, but at least my final moments would be intellectually stimulating.

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

Jon H — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 19:16:02 -0000

"causes responses in a way that’s strictly deterministic (with no actual freedom of will in the sense of non-determinism)."

My take is that at very short scales of time and distance, it's deterministic. But in the timescales on which humans operate, the mind has plenty of opportunities to weigh the various deterministic impulses that pop up, and different activation patterns will come into play to reinforce or suppress things, so that by the time something happens outside the brain it represents the volitional free-will choice of the person.

It's not like a single neurotransmitter in a single synapse that activates a neuron is all it takes to produce a behavior. There are plenty of yea and nay votes in the brain before something happens.

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

McNeel — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 17:50:42 -0000

Ok, let's start with the easy one first:

Njorl (12.14): Yes, and we call those people imprudent. Or tourists.

Bill and cg make a reasonable point about 'could have done otherwise,' but I am not convinced. Let me explain why. But first, Bill, I never said I found Ponnuru an annoying thinker. What I said was that the argument he made drives me crazy. He was not the first to make it, and he won't be the last. The argument is what concerns me. I have no opinion one way or the other of Ponnuru as a thinker, for I seldom read what he writes. Ponnuru does, however, claim that physicalism makes morality incoherent; which is a skyhook analogous to Dostoevsky's argument, but with a different hook and thus a different bogeyman.

Bill's claim, if I've read him right is:

An action is blameworthy (praiseworthy) only if the action is wrong (right) and if the agent could have done otherwise.

The first point in response is this: only agents are praise- or blameworthy. Actions can be right or wrong, good or bad, prudent or imprudent. We blame/praise agents for actions. Praise and blame attach to agents in virtue of their actions, because actions are manifestations of the agents' dispositions/character.

So your claim could now be: An agent is blameworthy only if her action is wrong and she could have done otherwise.

This seems right, provided we locate the proper sense of CDO. Surely there are cases (which cg points to) where an agent could not have done otherwise, and we exempt the agents from blame owing to extenuating circumstances or the fact that there was nothing they could have done.

Here's why I think reason-responsiveness and capacity to learn give us the right sense of CDO.

An agent's reason-responsiveness is the agent's disposition to make some fact a reason for action. Dispositions can be thought of as probabilities. So, an agent's disposition is the probability that some fact will constitute or comprise a reason for action for some agent. An agent is more or less reason-responsive depending on how high or low the probability is that she will make some fact a reason for action. Probabilities can, of course, shift according to circumstance. I am more likely to say something unkind to someone who's being an ass if I have not had sufficient sleep, or if the person has a history of being an ass (and I have had to keep my mouth shut several times before). What I end up saying may or may not be excusable, depending on the severity of the circumstances (how much of an ass, how little sleep, how unkind were my words, etc.). If the probability that I murder the ass is so easily affected, however, there is something wrong with me. I should be said to have an inferior set of dispositions, I would be a bad person.

The capacity to learn is the capacity for these probabilities to change over time depending on the information and feedback the agent receives. Treating agency, along with consciousness, as a process, we have to realize that it is a non-ergodic process. The structures of individual agency change constantly, there is no guarantee that any state will recur, and there is no clear connection between our beginning state and our present state. The non-ergodicity of the process and structures of agency negate the possibility of any sort of reductive determinism (by which I mean genetic or cultural determinism). An agent's dispositions/character/structures of agency are the product of her unique learning history (including her actions and the feedback received) as that has acted on and transformed an original, underdetermined, set of genetic predispositions.

In a sense, one's present set of dispositions is noncaused. This does not mean that there are no sufficient causes for the present state of the structures of agency. Rather, it means that there is nothing (or no set of things) we could isolate by means of subjunctive conditionals (counterfactuals) as the necessary cause(s) of one's present state. Not, that is, without jeopardizing personal identity. That is, we might say 'if only I had been born to rich parents (or, French), then I would be a much better person.' Chances are (depending on remoteness of the possible world in which the antecedent of the conditional is true) that the referent of 'I' in the consequent of the conditional could not in any sense be said to be you.

A problem arises when we ask 'are you responsible for your character/dispositions?' Trying to answer this question threatens an infinite regress which seems to threaten the very idea of responsibility. mk intimates something along these lines with the argument that responsibility has to be distributed. Now, in situations where very specific quirks of personality can be attributed to very specific past events, this might work. (Think of, say, Bradley Whitford's character in The West Wing, and the way music would send him into a panic, and how this was a result of PTSD following the attempted assassination.) Failing this, the point is rather that you are your character and dispositions, at least for the purposes of moral evaluation and navigation of the social world. What you are depends on what context we are considering (a doctor treats you as a machine that is either functioning correctly or incorrectly, and tries to figure out how to fix the machine; the government treats you as a vampire bat treats its prey, wanting nothing else than dollars and votes; etc.). And for the purposes of moral praise and blame, you are your character and dispositions and the actions that are manifestations thereof.

What has this to do with CDO? Well, it is likely that 'could he have done otherwise,' cannot mean 'was it possible, at the very moment of action, that he could have done B instead of A?' Such is impossible in a deterministic world, and in an indeterministic world this possibility leaves us with uncaused actions, which agents cannot be held accountable for. Instead, 'could he have done otherwise,' means (something like) 'in light of his dispositions, is there a nearby possible world in which he did otherwise?' Is it reasonable to believe that, had something been minutely different, the agent would have done something different.

Suppose (and now I get to cg's point), a man is driving a car down a residential street and runs over a child. The child ran into the street at the last minute. Could the man have done otherwise?

Well, let's consider some possibilities:

1. If the man had taken a different route, he would not have run over the child.
To make the antecedent true, we have to know why the man would have taken a different route. If the route was his normal one, the only reason for him not to have taken it (in the absence of, say, construction) would be that he knew he would end up running over the child. The man is not omniscient, and there is no way for him (or anyone else) to know the child would run out at that time. This scenario does not interest us.

2. If the man had a faster reaction time, say a reaction time the speed of a cockroach (1/30th of a second) instead of his slow human reaction time (1/3rd of a second), he would not have run over the child.
This clearly does not interest us. Unless, of course, the man knows he has an unusually slow reaction time, in which case it is incumbent on him to drive more slowly than would other drivers, or to avoid driving altogether, as he poses an unacceptable risk to other motorists and pedestrians. Further, there is very little anyone can do to tighten up his reaction time.

3. If the man had been driving slower, he would not have run over the child.
How responsible the man is depends, in this case, on how fast he was driving. If he was doing 50 in a 25, he is surely culpable for having run over the child. Had he been driving the speed limit, we would think him less culpable. If he was driving the speed limit and knew (as it was his normal route) that children often played in or near the street during that time of day, it may have been incumbent on him to have been driving below the speed limit. If he knows the street, it is reasonable to expect him to take precautions. Does he always speed on residential streets, thus inviting a tragedy? Or was his wife whose water had just broken in the car, and this was the only reason he was driving so fast?

4. If the man had been paying attention, he would not have run over the child.
Was the man lighting a cigarette, or fiddling with the radio, or eating, or talking on his cell phone? The less he was attending to driving, the more culpable he is. Is he the kind of person who does not pay much attention to driving, or was this a fluke owing to the fact that he had just spilled hot coffee in his lap?

The point here is that we ask about people's dispositions, wanting to know whether they are ticking time bombs or whether their actions were fluky results of extenuating circumstances. These questions are independent of determinism, and questions about what count as extenuating circumstances, thus exempting or excusing individuals to what extent from praise or blame, are political questions instead of metaphysical.

Further, if the man had been paying attention, driving (below) the speed limit, and there really was nothing he (or anyone else) could have done to prevent his running over the child, he will (as cg notes) feel guilty. The feeling of guilt does not signal some intuition about in/determinism. Rather, it signals that we acknowledge that our actions have consequences, and that our responsibility extends as far out as our causal relevance. The man feels guilt because he has, even non-intentionally, put a harm on the scales (they need not be moral scales; most scales aren't). Even Austin's man who shoots his neighbor's goat by accident knows that he owes the neighbor a new goat. Focusing on punishment and retribution (how much of a harm should we visit on the agent), rather than on compensation and restitution (how much of a benefit is the patient owed) distracts our moral attention. Both punishment and restitution are means to the end of balancing the scales, but one repays a harm with a harm ignoring the harmed, while one restores a harm with a benefit with our attention where it should be (and who really gives a damn about the harmer, unless he is so reckless that he constitutes a permanent unacceptable danger to others).

One last point about guilt is that guilt is often associated with a searching for what one could have done differently. Guilt prompts us to the examination of possible worlds I explored above. This is a good thing, for this examination can lead to learning, and can alter one's dispositions, making one less likely to, say, speed in the future, and thus reducing the possibility that any more children become road pancakes.

Will, sorry to have posted such a long thing on your blog. I'll start my own soon enough, so I don't take up your space.

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

mk — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 17:37:30 -0000

Why is it worse? Why do you think the behavior of men is different from that of earthquakes and hurricanes? Aren’t they equally inevitable?

Since human beings are not causally closed, the ultimate events that cause human actions are non-human. (Goes back to the big bang).

But, I contend that those causes are irrelevant to us because inanimate objects do not respond to incentives.

Humans do respond to incentives. Thus, even though they are not the prime causers, you can still improve society by setting up the best possible incentive system, because that will affect the likelihood of future good/bad events happening.

(There are lots of other ways to improve human society besides "set up a better incentive system", but this is one way.)

The best possible system of justice is that which minimizes the likelihood of crimes happening. (Slightly less roughly, "minimizes the aggregate loss due to crime", or something)

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

GilM — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 17:24:38 -0000

But, cg...

"You came into existence, and you suffered this profound punishment, and that was your fate.

It’s a miserable tragedy when it comes as a result of earthquakes and hurricanes; isn’t it something even worse when it comes as a result of men?"

Why is it worse? Why do you think the behavior of men is different from that of earthquakes and hurricanes? Aren't they equally inevitable? Isn't it a waste of time for you to even pretend to be thinking about this?

If not, why not?

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

Njorl — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 17:12:22 -0000

"What is it about morality, exactly, that is supposed to become impossible if free will doesn’t exist?"

Free will allows us congratulatory self-importance for our moral behaviour. If it isn't a free willed act, working hard to feed your kids makes you a chump.

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

William Newman — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 16:57:18 -0000

What is it about morality, exactly, that is supposed to become impossible if free will doesn't exist?

Consider that "social system which works well" or "economic system which works well" have some general similarities to "good moral system" in many people's minds. (Objectivists, as I understand it, profess to nearly equate them, but I don't think you need to go that far to admit that there's some resemblance.) Even in a perfectly deterministic world it's perfectly reasonable for borders between markets and command economies to end up with different outcomes on the two sides. Similarly, it seems to me, even in a deterministic world immoral actions can lead to bad consequences. Perhaps determinism confounds some people's intuitions about punishment or revenge or other aspects of justice. But I think even if one had to back off from concerns about whether revenge is emotionally satisfying or not, and could only concentrate on good or bad consequences, it wouldn't obviously doom the philosophical project of morality.

(I'm no philosopher, though.)

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

cg — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 16:44:14 -0000

What? "People are patterns of symbols within brains that make choices"? There is a remarkable level of abstraction at work here.

Imagine yourself suffering the excruciating punishments which are more or less deemed defensible by good, tolerant liberals: a lifetime in prison, say. Imagine suffering those punishments for something that, because of amazingly distant and inscrutable workings in the past (the original composition of the universe, even), had to happen. You came into existence, and you suffered this profound punishment, and that was your fate.

It's a miserable tragedy when it comes as a result of earthquakes and hurricanes; isn't it something even worse when it comes as a result of men?

mk's hyper-consequentialism is the most palatable offering yet, but it's also a fantasy.

Re: The Courage to Conjoin

GilM — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 16:25:27 -0000

cg,

No, it doesn't make me feel queasy.

We don't punish atoms, we punish people. And people are patterns of symbols within brains that make choices. They are (usually) responsible for those choices because of the patterns that they are.

It just doesn't matter whether the underlying atoms (both within the brain, and everywhere else in the universe that could affect it) could theoretically be predicted to lead to those patterns. It's the theories and reasons that we care about, and that's what causes the behavior in the only morally relevant sense. So, everything is ok. You should be satisfied.

This notion of "Couldn't have done otherwise" is a confusing irrelevance.