onegoodmove

"Morality is the cultural artifact for improving the circumstances under which we have to act." ~ Daniel Dennett

Anyone out there read Crime and Punishment lately? Yes, free will is part of the human paradigm but it's been way over rated in recent centuries. True "free" will is available, I would imagine, for one raised in a bubble or on a desert island. As long as the social plays a role in our humanity (family, friends, teachers, doctors, lawyers, priests, and cops) no one is really free. There are choices for sure but always informed and influenced by circumstances no one had any choice about.

I wish gwb had been dealt a different hand. What a crock o s#!t. I grew up in a family that produced a murderer. We were all dealt the same hand. But only one of six chose to murder. Its not the hand you're dealt, but how you choose to play that hand.

To say we have free will is to say that the human mind is no longer a legitimate object of science.

Andrew I don't understand. Please explain.

Of course, if people are not really free agents, but bits of matter whose every action is caused, then what's the big deal about the death penalty? One is just moving the bits of matter from one state to another.

Moreover, if there is no free will, then those in favor of the death penalty, and those who execute it, have no culpability either.

If there is no free will, the very idea of arguing over the morality of the death penalty is specious. This free will argument is stupid.

Regardless of whether or not scientific study validates or undermines the objective existence of free will, I have to say that subjectively, personally we will all have a sense of it. Like many phenomenologically subjective things that current philosophers of the mind such as Daniel Dennett find easier to simply dismiss (and in terms of what is scientifically knowable I suppose it should be), Free will shall never exit the lexicon of human concepts. Though we may say that we theoretically do not 'believe' in it, we will still mull and agonize over our own choices as if we were acting as self-determining agents, at least those who end up changing and affecting the world will. The reason for this contradiction rests in the fact that free will works very well within the context of one system and not in another, much like Newton's Laws work perfectly within the context of large systems but unravel in sub-atomic systems. Within the context of the objective, world free will may indeed prove a perfect chimaera, but within the context of our subjective worlds, free will is constant, natural, and inescapable as the Law of Gravity.

Alan S, whether we have "free will" or not says nothing about whether there are ways we ought to behave. One might need the idea of contracausal will to motivate retributive theories of punishment, but one doesn't need it to motivate morality simpliciter.

(It should, but probably can't, go without saying that the characterization of people as "bits of matter" is a strawman. No serious person thinks humans are bits of matter.)

If it were scientifically possibly to specify the complete set of determinants for why anyone has ever done anything, then the 'no need for a "spiritual" element' argument would be a lot more persuasive. Science cannot even predict what I am going to have for dinner tonight, much less who I will ask out to the movies next week. (I am not suggesting that these are appropriate subjects for spending science research dollars).

In fact, since 'free will', and 'soul' are not scientific constructs, there is merely no place for them in scientific formulations. And why scientific formulations can never really become theories of 'everything'.

Alan S: The argument over whether free will exists or not is not a stupid one. But, you are right, to ground this argument as a discussion of morality is utterly senseless. In other words, the debate over free will itself is a perfectly valid one, but using it to argue if the death penalty is moral or immoral is not.

tyrone: No doubt we all feel present in our wills. The tiny nuances of each and everyday gives us a very real feeling of it. But this could all be an illusion--albeit a very powerful one. This is not to say something is purposedly deceiving us, but that what we feel to be a FREE, is not in fact free, but is just will. Will would be like anything else then, like our hearts beating.

anon: When I say free will excludes a legitimate science of the mind, I mean simply this: if we believe free will, then it would be in vain that we should expect like effects from like causes. Somehow, in our free will, that chain would be broken. Here's an example of what I mean.

Epicurus was a materialist philosopher in ancient Greece. He believed, like his predecessor Democritus, that all things in Nature are explicable by matter--that is, all phenomena can be reduced to the interaction of matter. Epicurus tightened the early atomist's approach to Nature. However, he realized that such an understanding of Nature necessarily precludes free human agency; and, like most philosophers, worked in a "constant" that would preserve free will (just as Einstein created a cosmological constant to avoid the natural conculsion from his equations that the Universe is expanding).

Epicurus introduced what he called "the swerve" to avoid making his philosophy deterministic. The swerve is quite simple to understand: say a molecule is falling from a tree; well, during its descent, instead of free falling--that is, falling straight down on a natural path--it will spontaneously swerve to the right or left. The cause of this swerve is utterly uncaused; not by wind, not by an object obstructing its path, not even by the natural internal movement of the molecule itself. Thus, the consquence of this is that an effect in Nature has been introduced without a cause--that there are "gaps" in Nature between one moment and the next--that somehow a molecule freed itself from all Nature, and "swerved" one way or the other.

The swerve serves as a perfect analogy for free will. Instead of the will being only the result of a bewildering host of causes--instead of it free-falling as it must--it "swerves" and somehow, for a moment, overcomes all of nature's laws, and spontenously acts. The same gap is introduced in Nature. You can imagine how many laws of nature this violates, such as the law of gravity, the conservation of energy and entropy.

Free will is the equivalent of "the swerve." Science could not legitimately study such phenomena, because there would be no rational explanation for them.

by the way: Do not confound the predictability with determinism. No sane person believes we can predict the future; but that doesnt mean its not determined. Heisenberg's Uncertanity Principle proves that we cannot predict the future. Heisenberg showed that it was in effect impossible to know both momentum and location or energy and time to the same accuracy. Whenever, we analyse the location (momentum) of a particle we are in effect, altering it enough to disturb the accuracy of readings of its momentum (position). In sum, the more accurately we measure position, the less accurately we'll know momentum. If we can't even measure the present precisely, how can we ever hope to measure the future?

Strange Doctrine: I consider myself a serious person, and I think am just a mass of bits of matter :)

Andrew, I agree with you that free will may, in objective fact, be an illusion and that in admitting it, you deny in a certain sense the ability of science to formulate the causes and effects of the world.

But, I think you make an inappropriate analogy when you compare the act of "willing" to a heart-beat. A heart-beat is automatic, self-regulating and rarely comes into the focus of our conscious attention. The act of willing, however, of determining a course of action by weighing options and considering affects, is an entirely different phenomena, you have to admit. In order to even do it, we must appear to ourselves to have a choice in the matter, otherwise it would be like we were sleep walking or watching our bodies operate as if by another force.

I'm not saying that "free will" exists in objective reality, but it must repeat must appear to exist, at least phenomenologically, in order for us to make sense of the world. I say this in the same sense that Kant asserted that causality must exist as a prerequisite for us to even perceive the external world. The question I find interesting is whether science or psychology can explain the reason for our illusions of free will even if we concede the absence of free will itself.

Okay, so what the Nazi defendants should have claimed in the Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunals was not that they "just followed orders" but rather that they "just followed a complex set of biological, familial, and social processes, and were any of us dealt exactly the same genetic and environmental hand as, for instance, Susan Smith or Gary Lee Sampson, there’s no reason to suppose we would have acted any differently."?

tyrone: After reading your reply, I concede that making the analogy of "will" to a the heart is inapporiate. My only intention was to show how Will, not free, would be like any other bodily function that acts on certain known causes. You are right though, the will is much more complex, is not automatic, and operates entirely different from the heart. My apologies for the simplification.

Your interest in this question is certainly fascinating. I think the answer will come when we as humans become increasingly conscious of consciousness itself--that is, to be as aware as possible of the succession of thoughts in our brains. I think the problem lies in the simple fact that we cannot trace all the influences on our mind and consquently our thoughts. And since it is not ethical to isolate a human, and use a human as an experimental animal, we cannot do "controlled experiments." In my opinion, the mind is the next frontier of science; the very big and the very small have seemed to reach their plateaus. We know so very little about it. But perhaps I am simplifying things too much again! Because, indeed, there are more connections in our brains than stars in the Universe!

Another interesting topic of debate would concern how we separate mind and brain, and if there is any separation at all; we say mind like it has its own entity separate from the fleshy brain...

anon, about the Nazis: I thought it was established that you cannot use the argument of free will or determinism to argue matters of morality, which includes all matters of justice.

I am familiar with arguments against libertarian free will, though I have not read Dennett's book. Still, most of these theories still try to preserve concepts such as freedom, moral responsibility and the justification of punishment. Sensible justifications for punishment are many in number, and only a few of them depend on a strict libertarian view of freedom. Some people think punishment is properly aimed at the common good, or at making bad people less bad, both of which are perfectly compatible with a determinism which tries to preserve some sense of freedom.

One wonders why Clark fixates on the death penalty, when his interpretation of 'the new science of human nature' has implications not just for the death penalty, but traffic tickets as well, indeed for law and morality in general, and not merely retributive justice. While some average people might try to refer to some "ghost in the machine", philosophic versions of the soul don't typically refer to such anymore. Chris can correct me but as I understand it most contemporary philosophers of mind believe that mind arises from the brain, and yet still treat mind as a different sort of thing than dead matter or non-conscious life. For example, the discussion that is going on on this blog and every other blog and communicative forum, has no clear analogue in non-intelligent nature. To say, 'but it's still all just molecules bumping together' grossly misses the point.

When you hear phrases such as "the burgeoning scientific research on human nature" in the context of a discussion of criminal responsibility, you should get a sinking feeling, because you are about to be bull-shitted.

My first thought after reading this article was: man, I'm really hungry.

Now as I re-read it, armed with a gigantic plate of cookies, I feel much better about myself. It's not my fault I'm fat yet still overeating. I have no choice; I'm utterly powerless in the face of overwhelming complex chemical and social interactions and I need to stuff my face. The chocolate ones with the macadamia nuts are particularly nice. Those skinny buggers with their "Mike you have no willpower" can stop looking down their emaciated noses at me! If they had been dealt my hand, they'd be as fat as me.

Hopefully on the drive home I won't encounter any poor blameless sods whose complex biological and familial interactions forced them, through no fault of their own (since such a thing apparently doesn't exist), to comsume large quantities of booze and thus "swerve" me off the road. It makes as much sense to blame a cup of vinegar and baking soda for bubbling as it does to blame a drunk for killing a family, doesn't it?

I hope they let Enron's Ken Lay off the hook. He's not in a position to harm anyone anymore, so confining won't, as the article put it, protect society from a dangerous individual. Confining him won't stop behavior society finds abhorrent. He's sane and balanced and in no need of rehabilitation, so there's no need to confine him for that. And since punishment for the sake of retribution is, as the article implied, barbaric or uncivilized or something, we ought to just let him go. After all, it's not his fault. If Norm himself were dealt Ken Lay's hand, Norm would have ripped off all those people too.

I wonder what amount of free will led to this BBC in Pictures: Shooting in Tal Afar, Or How 5 Iraqi children became orphans at dawn courtesy of their "liberators"

However, there is an interesting point made in this article by former combat soldiers in the Occupied Territoties (IDF), which reinforces the concept of free will as a phenomena that depends on our sense of consciousness to be "turned on". Like Zombies

dende: Perhaps it's a matter of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts? I am not convinced that mind is in some way fundamentally different from "dead" matter interacting. That would mean that our minds somehow constitute atoms not present on the periodic table of elements--or that somehow the atoms and molecules in our brains assume properties not consistent with themselves (a more rational explanation is that the complex molecules in our brains inherently contain the properties, if arranged as such, to form consciousness, just as 2H plus 0 inherently forms the properties of water).

Your brain is formed from the moment of conception. It grows within the womb, until it reaches maturity, then you are born. So all the stuff that makes up your brain comes, essentially, from what your mother ate, and now, what you eat. When does the mind depart from Nature and matter? And if mind is different from the brain, how does "mind" tell "brain/body" what to do? Descartes thought that the exchange occured in one of the glands of the brain--I forget which--and called it interactionism; "Occassionalism" says that when mind effects body, or body effects mind, God is the intermediary that causes this to happen; Leibiniz said there is a perfect harmony between mind (non-material) and material (body) such that both exactly correspond to each other, but never influence one another.

What is it that links mind to brain/body then? If that something exists, why isnt our head just made of that connecting stuff. Read Aristotle's "On the Soul" for the fallacy of nonmaterial-material connections.

It is imperative that we don't let "ethical consquences" interfer with this argument. Just because determinism may seem to produce undesirable deductions, these undesirables dont make valid proofs against determinism.

Mike: Your entry was very funny! Accepting determinism certainly makes for great sarcasm!

Further, how can we reconcile Evolution with the theory that mind is different from the brain? That implies a great leap (assisted by what?) in the great evolutionary chain--so much for integral calculus. To say mind is not explicable by matter, we should also be content to say that evolution is responsible for a true miracle--that of consciouness--that evolution followed all the laws of biology until us special species evolved, then Evolution waved its wand, and POOF, reasonable thought from, "X"! (by the way, Darwin was a materialist...so was Newton...so was Crick...so were most of the great scientists of the world)

And I find it incredibly peculiar that reason, which is what supposedly separates us from all other animals, is incapable of (in theory), rationalizing the mind! Very strange! The very thing that allows us to reason is made of stuff unreasonable! We exercize our reason from something that eludes reason, not as being too hard to understand, but as being fundamentally made of stuff that is transcendent to reason. "Mind=reason", yet, "mind=not to be explained rationally". This paradox is irreconcible.

So: mind as beyond the explanation of matter flies in the face of science in general, and more specifically evolution. Should we tell that judge to put the evolution sticker back on Biology text books?--maybe this time saying, "Evolution isn't so bad on second thought, it produced the miracle of consciousness, a miracle similar in degree to ones we find in the Bible, like Man created straight from Mud" :-0 Forgive me for the sarcasm...Mike, have any cookies left?--can you swerve them over here?

Deep analysis and philosophy aside, the death penalty is wrong. It diminishes me to live in a culture that approves of killing as punishment for crime. It makes me a killer. Hence I should be killed according to those rules.

If someone does something that makes me go eeeeuuuuuuww. Then they should probably be locked up for some period relative to the attenuation of the eeuuw. The more eeees and uuuus, the longer the incarceration. If they just totally gross me and a jury of their peers out then throw away the key. But don't kill the sorry creatures. The electric chair, the hangman's noose, the gas chamber, the lethal injection, the firing squad, drawing and quartering, eviscerating, pressing, drowning, suffocating, or otherwise doing away with some human life is wrong. Terribly wrong.

Right on, Frank! The issue is not the person being punished, it is the punisher. Once a person has been removed from civil society, that person's impact effectively ceases unless that person acts in a unique way (e.g., the man just released after 44 years on death row who became an award winning journalist).

Besides the irreversibility of execution, which renders exculpation moot, capital punishment for one crime opens the door for its use in other settings. Murder? OK, how about rape? OK, how about battery? OK, how about speeding? The slope is slippery and I have yet to meet the person (much less politician) I feel is qualified to navigate it!

Hmmm... I went to the article and read the whole thing, and while he makes some good points (like that we should do more to prevent the factors that breed killers, for instance), it all falls apart for me when he starts in on free will. It is true that environmental factors play into whether someone is more or less likely to end up in violent situations, but I personally don't buy the idea that they are not responsible for their actions somehow.

There is always a moment in any situation where you are faced with a choice. The choice you make may be influenced by outside events, but you still choose one thing or another. I may choose to go out and get rip-roaringly drunk. If I fall down and break my arm, it may be beyond my control at the time, but it's still my fault for drinking all those shooters. If I'm a stupid fucking moron, let's say I get into a car and end up killing someone when I drive off the road and there's no hedge to stop the car. (Sorry, cheap shot.) That would indeed by my fault as well. Mike may choose to eat cookies until he pukes. Gross. I hope he doesn't.

Animals have their own brand of consciousness. They communicate with each other and go about their simplistic lives, lacking the power of reason. (Except dolphins, who I suspect may be smarter that we are.) Lacking opposable thumbs, other mammals cannot manipulate objects the way we can. This helped us develop fine motor skills. It follows that we then developed tools, making our survival much easier and giving us leisure to develop complex language, etc., and eventually, the miracle of blogging. This is an important part of evolutionary theory. If other animals had developed our hands instead, would they be the ones destroying the planet now?

The issue of how our brains work is extremely complex, and as someone earlier mentioned, it will be a long time until we understand how it works. (We may never totally understand, though.)

I think the tie-in to the death penalty is sketchy. I get what he's trying to say... but I'm not buying. There are many better arguments against the death penalty (see above for starters!).

Oh, by the way Mike, I don't think Norm is necessarily advocating everything this guy says... rather that he posted it to provoke discussion. Though your Ken Lay thing was right on the money.

Lastly

"dende: Perhaps it's a matter of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts? I am not convinced that mind is in some way fundamentally different from "dead" matter interacting. That would mean that our minds somehow constitute atoms not present on the periodic table of elements--or that somehow the atoms and molecules in our brains assume properties not consistent with themselves [...]the complex molecules in our brains inherently contain the properties, if arranged as such, to form consciousness[...]"

"The whole is greater than the sum of parts" is actually what I am getting at. But consciousness is not just a chemical property or category like liquid or water. It's not classifible in chemical terms or physical terms at all. That doesn't mean that brain molcules are acting goofy or in a supernatural way. It just means that somehow from the material of the brain arises a way of being which is fundamentally different from dead being.

When some vulgar scientists (as opposed to most philosophers of mind, cognitive psychologists, etc.) speak about mind, they seem to imply that consciousness is a kind of illusion, or a trick that highly evolved living things can do. "You just think that you have freedom, are apprehending objects as they are, are a unifed self, etc. etc." Fair enough, but a being which has illusions is still a very different kind of being than a rock or even a cat. This is the point which Clark seems to miss, badly.

Trace: There are other mammals with opposable thumbs--apes. Many birds can also do quite a lot with their beaks. Moreover a variety of animals use tools, engage in some kind of communication. But "smarts" probably has as much to do with culture, social discipline and education as it does with how much smart genetic hard-wiring a species has in its head. High schoolers today can do math that the Greeks never dreamed of. For this reason I think it doubtful that the dolphins are smarter than human beings, though I'm open to the idea that they have sophisticated communication and perhaps even a morality.

"If Norm himself were dealt Ken Lay's hand, Norm would have ripped off all those people too." True, and probably would have stolen their cookies too. Ken Lay is not "sane and balanced", and he's definitely in need of rehabilitation and if not that restraint. I don't think locking him up will necessarily make society change its behavior but it would certainly alter Kay Lay's behavior. So the punishment would not be retribution but rather protection of society. I don't have any particular desire for Kay Lay to go to jail. I would be satisfied if he were forced to make some sort of restitution and monitored at a level that would give society reasonable assurance that he wouldn't fuck over the rest of us again. On the issue of the death penalty there are a number of good reasons why it is bad, and Frank's reason is right at the top of my list.

Sorry I didn't express myself clearly. My point wasn't that discussing free will is stupid, but its use in the argument Norm posted is stupid, as Andrew says. The argument makes itself absurd.

On the one hand, if all our acts are causally determined, then the executioner's actions are detetermined as much as the killers.

On the other hand, if the argument based on lack of free will is supposed to convice us that we should abolish capital punishment, it assumes that we are open to reason and analysis. And if we are open to reason and analysis, then so are killers.

And to equate actions brought about by argument (reason and analysis) with actions caused by say fear or hunger is a category mistake.

I want to address this idea that Clark's argument is absurd. Alan S and Andrew seem to be saying that a discussion of moral culpability relies on there being free will construed as uncaused action. From this premise they conclude that if Clark is right about there not being this sort of free will then there is no use making moral arguments against capital punishment.

A lack of free will construed as uncaused action does not imply that we cannot hold people culpable for their actions. What it does is changes the nature of that culpability. This is what Clark is arguing. He is arguing that since there is no contra-causal free will retributive justice has no place in our society. He is not arguing that we shouldn't hold murderers culpable for their actions. I shall endeavor to explain all of this.

Clark writes, "Some might suppose that dispensing with free will amounts to universal exculpation— that to understand is necessarily to excuse. But, even in the light of science, our moral standards of right and wrong remain intact; we still find murder abhorrent, and we must still protect ourselves from dangerous individuals. Likewise, we can still distinguish the sane from the insane, the immature from the mature, those who act voluntarily from those who act under duress; and so the concept of a responsible agent—an agent that it makes sense to hold responsible in order to shape moral behavior—still has footing, even though all agents are fully determined in their actions."

Hume has argued that uncaused choice (free will) in our discussion is actually inconsistent with holding people responsible. For this would mean that our choices were not caused by our desires, intentions, and beliefs. Desires, intentions, and beliefs are dependent on the actions of the brain and its interactions with the environent. How could you hold someone responsible for something that was not caused? Wouldn't be silly to say someone is responsible for something that was not caused by his desire to do it. In otherwords, this would be to hold someone responsible for something that happened out of pure chance. What determines whether someone is culpable or not depends on what caused their actions. Not whether they were caused.

What Clark is arguing is that there is no longer any justification for retribution.

"Prosecutors incite the jury’s desire for death by emphasizing the gratuitous cruelty of the crime, while disparaging any causal story that might account for the murderer’s motives and behavior. The murderer is portrayed as a self-created monster: rational, fully capable of controlling his or her behavior, but willfully malevolent—all of which heightens our tendency to focus retributive blame on the freely willing agent that could have done otherwise, but chose not to.

Oppositely, the defense tries to prove the existence of mitigating factors, which often involves demonstrating some sort of mental illness or defect or showing clearly the causal story (often, but not always, a story of abuse or neglect) behind the offender’s deeply flawed character and actions. Establishing such causes has the effect of undercutting the prosecution’s portrait of a self-created monster, therefore lessening the strength of the retributive impulse felt by jurors. So the penalty phase of a murder trial is really the playing out of these two opposing tendencies—the desire to punish and the capacity to understand. The outcome—life in prison or death—is determined by the extent to which the offender is perceived to possess a free will that trumps causal explanations of his or her behavior. But whatever the outcome, the fact remains that on a scientific view of ourselves, causal explanations always trump—and indeed entirely invalidate— contra-causal free will."

The point he is making is that we should focus our justice system on prevention and deterrence, rather than punitive punishment.

Mike, It may serve as a deterrent to confine someone like Ken Lay. Bourgeois rich white men are probably more afraid of going to prison than, say, a drug dealer who will just make new business connections.

dende: "It just means that somehow from the material of the brain arises a way of being which is fundamentally different from dead being." I completely agree with you. But the "somehow" I don't think escapes chemical or physical analysis. We can say it's "biological"--which, to us, is the very mysterious way LIFE comes from matter--and the mystery of mysteries, how consciousness comes from it. I see the term "biology" as study of the way the chemical properties of matter plus its mechanical movement form life--on the micro as well as macro level. I definitely don't agree with the vulgar scientists who says consciousness is just a kind of illusion. What it IS, we cannot even say we know! In my materialist explanations, I don't mean to discount the amazing complexity nor the majesty of the human brain. It is a fascinating organ that will awe us probably as long as we exist. I just mean to say that the mind is within the bounds of natural law.

Great discussion all!

As to what I think about the death penalty: I'm 100% against it.

Chris: Good explanation. When I said it's silly to use the argument of free will v. determinism for making moral arguments, I meant it quite literally. Say we accept determinism--and if we do, we must ABSOLUTELY--that is EVERYTHING is determined. Then the argument from this argument will follow: X was determined to commit the crime, Y was determined to prosecute, Z the jurors are determined to vote guily or not guilty, we were determined to have this debate, you were determined to have such and such ideas about it etc etc,. This is pure tautology and gets us no where. That was Alan's point. We must look at the moral argument as a sort of "middle road" between free will and determinism--we say, for the sake of argument, there is no absolute determinism, but our actions are determined. And from this premise, we make arguments about justice like you have, Chris. My premise was never that moral arguments can only come from "uncaused" actions. It's hard for me to even understand what that means. It's also hard for me to imagine a middle road between the two...

http://www.conkin.info/blog/January_2004/12.htm

Dende... dude. I was kidding about the dolphins.

What can I say this is profound shit :-).

Great site, well done. I enjoy beeing here and i´ll come back soon. You do a great job. Many greetings.