Sam's Argument

Sam Harris has written a piece on American gun law called The Riddle of the Gun. He starts off promisingly:

Unlike most Americans, I stand on both sides of this debate. I understand the apprehension that many people feel toward “gun culture,” and I share their outrage over the political influence of the National Rifle Association. How is it that we live in a society in which one of the most compelling interests is gun ownership? Where is the science lobby? The safe food lobby? Where is the get-the-Chinese-lead-paint-out-of-our-kids’-toys lobby? When viewed from any other civilized society on earth, the primacy of guns in American life seems to be a symptom of collective psychosis.

Quite so. But it soon becomes plain that he may be a victim of that collective psychosis, when he says:

I am surrounded by otherwise intelligent people who imagine that the ability to dial 911 is all the protection against violence a sane person ever needs.

Is he really? I doubt anyone intelligent thinks that. Nevertheless, Sam is one of the clearest thinkers on any subject, even if he is occasionally wrong, so I think it should be fruitful to look at any argument he presents, since it is likely to be among the best the pro-gun lobby can offer. His counters to the 'liberal' position are unconvincing, to say the least, so what does he say positively in favour of guns?

He presents an argument here:

Given the level of violence in our society, the ubiquity of guns, and the fact that our penitentiaries function like graduate schools for violent criminals, I think sane, law-abiding people should have access to guns. In that respect, I support the rights of gun owners.

It's pretty splintered, but I think his argument goes something like this:

P1 We live in a society with a high level of violence.
P2 There are guns everywhere.
P3 Our prisons manufacture violent criminals.
P4 Everyone should be responsible for their own defence.
P5 The only way to defend oneself from a violent criminal in a violent society where guns are everywhere is with a gun.

C Everyone sane and law-abiding should have access to guns.

Well, I don't think this is even valid, and maybe it can be tidied up some more, but it will do for starters.

P1 he undermines himself by defending the levels of violence in US society when defending gun ownership:

Fifty-five million kids went to school on the day that 20 were massacred at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. Even in the United States, therefore, the chances of a child’s dying in a school shooting are remote. 

He is well aware of the dangers associated with our perception of risk:

As my friend Steven Pinker demonstrates in his monumental study of human violence, The Better Angels of Our Nature, our perception of danger is easily distorted by rare events.

Now it may be that he has good reason to own a gun and to train to use it correctly, but his situation should not be used to justify a position for the rest of the population. The statistics show that Americans are unlikely to be injured by a gun, as he knows, which militates against P1. The statistic we're trying to explain and remedy, as he also knows, is the discrepancy with the rest of the developed world. It seems very plausible to me that this gap could be reduced by making it more difficult for people in the US to own guns. So the 'ubiquity of guns' is the very thing that could be addressed, not used as P2 in his argument in favour of their ubiquity.

P3 may well be true, but is hardly different to other countries.

P4, it strikes me, is obviously wrong, in a civilised society. Not everyone is capable of defending themselves so are we supposed to let the young, the old, women, the ill, the underprivileged and the just plain incompetent gun users, get shot up by violent criminals? Now, maybe I'm being unfair, and he would say the premise is more like: everyone should have the right to defend themselves. The problem is that it's obviously a universal right he's arguing for, so this will still leave a large constituency vulnerable to the mass of armed members of society.

P5 I also think is obviously wrong, and betrays a rather simplistic and shocking vision of the way a civilised society should function. Self-defence does not simply mean shooting someone before they shoot you. As he himself also points out, being armed with a gun won't necessarily act as a deterrent, but can act as an incendiary:

But, emotions being what they are, [a weapon] often doesn’t [preempt further violence] —and the owner of the weapon can find himself resorting to deadly force in a circumstance that would not otherwise have called for it. 

Yes, as a soldier in a war-zone I would think it better that I had a gun. As a civilian in the midst of violent civil unrest, I might think it better that I had a gun. In a society that had broken down a bit, I might think it better that I had a gun. But I don't think any of our societies, including the US, come close to the sort of state that requires that sort of thinking.

So I don't think Sam's argument works at all.

Some more thoughts from Sean Faircloth here, and some cautionary words from Russell Blackford here.

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The Point of Free Will

I've been enjoying (or is it suffering?) another round of free will posts. Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne state the obvious, that contra-causal free will does not exist, and so conclude, contra compatibilists like Daniel Dennett, that free will does not exist. This is not entirely unreasonable, since free will is commonly considered to mean contra-causal free will. And maybe they're right, that it should be held to that definition; for philosophers to amend free will to some other thing allows theologians the get-out of pointing to many respected philos who believe in a free will that has nothing to do with their bankrupt theological concept of free will.

But I'm really not that fussed about the use of the term. I've previously discussed how contra causal free will makes little sense whether determinism is true or false. But rather than rescuing free will, I do think it's worth rescuing the point of free will; or why responsibility is worth laying.

In another piece Coyne says this:

I still see myself as a meat robot, and I don’t accept free will as meaning “I could have done something different had circumstances been different.” For in that sense computers and nearly all living organisms also have “free will”.

This strikes me as a slightly strange thing to say; the first part seems to contradict the second, since if he's a 'meat robot' then obviously robots too can have free will, and we surely treat many living organisms as if they too have free will. I treat my cats as if they have causal influence over their own behaviour, for example. And there's a sense in which Coyne is suggesting some kind of human exceptionalism; if we allow free will then I see no reason to deny it to computers and living organisms a priori. 

I suppose he means something more, that any computer or any living organism would have free will under the definition offered - it's too liberal. But I think this gives a clue to the point of free will; if a computer or living organism is sufficiently complex that it can change its behaviour because it has an internal guiding mechanism that responds in a certain way to external prompts, then we have a reason to talk about the machine having something like 'free will'. We aren't puppeteers in these circumstances, but nudge button operators.

What difference does this make? If we want to affect our futures, and I assume we all do, we need to differentiate between objects that can be remonstrated with and those that can't. Now, although I do remonstrate with my computer, I understand it's pointless: I could change how it operates, but it could not reflect on its actions. However, a more complicated computer, like Marvin, might be worth remonstrating with, if it has an internal guidance and reflection system open to external prompts and information. Similarly, experience shows that my cat is worth remonstrating with too, even if it's less effective than with fellow humans; she doesn't have all the tools or understanding available to most humans. But notice, there are humans who also can't be remonstrated with, so membership of homo sapiens does not determine who is in this group.

In another Coyne piece, in response to some issues that Russell Blackford raises, he says this:

When Russell says “I could, indeed, have chosen to do otherwise,” he seems to mean only, “had I been somebody other than Russell Blackford at that moment, I might have done otherwise.” And in what sense is that free will? It’s one thing for people to chastise somebody for making a “bad choice” (an emotion that feels natural but is at bottom irrational), but it’s a different thing to think that somebody actually can act in different ways at a single time.

To me, this highlights the very point of free will; to identify the nature of particular agencies, so we can take an appropriate course of action in the light of that nature. I don't think Russell, or anyone, would have behaved differently under the same circumstances (that would just make us randomly-acting beings) - but the difference between how Russell behaves and how another person behaves under the same circumstances reflects a freedom to act differently which is open to all agencies. So we can then apply a 'blame' in proportion to the 'culpability' of each agency going back in the causal chain. I use scare quotes to recognise that the agencies weren't 'free' from their own causal determinism, but we can now usefully employ this information to address any problems caused, or reward any benefits resulting, in the knowledge that the responsibility reflects an agency's ability to self-regulate. We wouldn't allocate moral responsibility to the snow in deadly avalanches, but we might to folk who detonate charges setting off deadly avalanches, because the former has no agency that would respond to remonstration, but the latter has. And such allocation would actually require determinism, or, at least, if there are any indeterminate events, these would be irrelevant to any such moral calculation.

So, in summary, I'm happy to jettison free will; I'm just not so happy to jettison the point of free will, if this is what it is. It does appear that Sam Harris, at least, agrees:

...I argue that people are mistaken in believing that they are free in the usual sense. I claim that this realization has consequences—good ones, for the most part—and for that reason we should not gloss over it by revising our definition of “free will” too quickly. Dan believes that his adjustment of the concept has allowed him to provide a description of human agency and moral responsibility that preserves many of our intuitions about ourselves and still fits the facts. I agree, for the most part, but I think that other problems need to be solved.

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