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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Gene-machine Darwinism and Responsibility

Many folk complain that an 'ultra-Darwinist', or 'gene-machine' Darwinist, view of the world renders us incapable of assigning blame to individuals. The implication is that we are creatures at the mercy of our genes, mere puppets, so cannot be blamed or praised for our behaviour. Is this true?

The view sometimes assigned to sociobiologists, or evolutionary psychologists, that we must follow our genetic blueprints, gains traction from the analogies drawn to illustrate their ideas, such as Dawkins’s ‘lumbering robots’. This inference is unfair, since they do accept cultural influence on behaviour, but, relevant to this question, they would expect the sexes to have evolved differently (even competitively) because of their differing physical characteristics. Women have larger sex cells than men, and carry the foetus for nine months. Because men can afford more reproductions in a lifetime, sociobiology would suggest that emotions would evolve differently to motivate men to spend more than women; i.e., have more promiscuous tendencies. Does this mean that some of the more rabid accusations aimed at evolutionary psychology are true? If we consider this statement, typical of the sort of thing:

If gene-machine Darwinism is true, then we cannot blame a man for sexual infidelity, nor praise a woman for being faithful.

To tease out the implications of this conditional statement, we can consider it the outline of an argument, with the antecedent as the premise and the consequent as the conclusion:

Premise	Men’s genes give them a tendency to sexual infidelity
Conclusion	Men cannot be blamed for sexual infidelity

This is invalid; there is a hidden premise or two. We could complete it like this:

Premise 1	Men’s genes give them a tendency to sexual infidelity
Premise 2	Men cannot be blamed for their tendencies
Conclusion	Men cannot be blamed for sexual infidelity

This looks valid, although there is a slight equivocation on the word ‘men’. Not all men will have a tendency equally, so we cannot conclude that all men are blameless for sexual infidelity. But we’ll pass on this and assume ‘men’ refers to the average man.

The implication of P2 is that our tendencies are overwhelming in their force. This doesn’t seem to be true at all. We are all aware of temptations and understand we can resist them. In such circumstances, other inclinations and reasoning help us to resist. Sociobiology claims we are a basket of competing traits and tools evolved for dealing with the world, and it’s too simplistic to say we blindly follow our tendencies. And to say we blindly follow one tendency, such as a sexual imperative, is even more so. The law recognises in cases of diminished responsibility that in some circumstances, including natural aberrations, we cannot be held wholly responsible for our actions. But this principle acknowledges that the average person is responsible for their actions, and it’s the average person we’re considering.

The ‘gene-machine’ charge might be levelled by a 'blank-paperist' (a believer in the social science model that holds that a large part of our nature derives from the cultural environment), in which case we can ask if their counter position can be justified. This would have to look something like this:

P1	People’s behaviour is determined by their culture
P2	People determine their culture
P3	People can be blamed for what they determine
Conclusion	People can be blamed for their behaviour

Some say that people do determine their cultural environment. In a sense, that’s true about their current situation. But the development of traits that occur pre-adulthood is inaccessible to us as adults. Many traits form in the years before 16, so there may be an opportunity for the blank-paperist to determine them in childhood that is not available to the gene-machinist. That may be relevant to the wider community, but no individual, contra P2, can determine their own culture in their formative years. And there is no reason to believe that how these traits are formed makes them more or less mutable in adulthood.

So, once determined, however that may be, the problem of blame presents itself. To determine one’s own traits, one would have to exist prior to one’s own conception – a logical impossibility. So determinism seems to be the enemy of blame, not genetic determinism.

Looking at P3, we do blame people for what they do, often ignoring prior causes. This arises from a sense of localised or ordinary responsibility because, perhaps, it’s more important to understand immediate causes. Consider a house underneath a cliff that suffers from rock-falls. If the rock-falls are due to an unstable rock face, the instability can be addressed. If they’re due to someone pushing rocks down, then they should be held responsible and prevented from re-offending. Observing that, ultimately, both the unstable rock face and the vandal are simply following causes deterministically as part of one long chain of causality from the Big Bang doesn’t help us to decide a future course of action.

Consequentialists and deontologists would take different approaches to the vandal; the consequentialist would see little value in blame unless it resulted in greater benefits than other responses. Deontologists would lay blame because of the inherent wrongness of the act. But neither would blame, morally, the unstable rock face for falling on the house, because it lacks agency. If agency is a temporary phenomenon, it would not be appropriate to say that someone is, or is not, ultimately to blame, but to say that they are locally to blame is pragmatic. We recognise prior agencies as mitigating factors; if the miscreant has been unduly influenced by another, for example. But the further back from the current moment we move the less responsibility we assign. So the passage of time is relevant to the level of responsibility, in conjunction with agency, and neither rests on the truth of gene-machine Darwinism.

The charge from immaterialists, typically theists, is that determinism follows from materialism (immateriality is redundant in gene-machine Darwinism). Science suggests that materialism may not entail determinism, but we’ll allow this assumption for the sake of argument. Immaterialists suggest that morality is meaningless without ‘free’ choice; if our actions follow unavoidably from prior events, blame cannot be laid:

P1	Materialism entails determinism
P2	Determinism dictates that every cause has a prior cause
P3	Responsibility rests where the causal chain stops; at a cause without a prior cause
Conclusion	Materialism precludes responsibility

We blame the person responsible, but if the causal chain doesn’t stop, neither does the responsibility. The argument looks valid; P1 we are allowing, P2 is just determinism defined, but P3 looks suspect. As discussed above, a local responsibility is understandable, even with a chain of events extending back into the past to other ultimate causes. In fact, to rest the responsibility where there are no prior causes can prevent us laying blame. Consider the following scenario: a woman sees a man advancing toward a baby with his arms outstretched. She hits him with her handbag, knocking him out. Among the reasons for her actions could be:

a)       She knew the man meant to harm the baby.

b)       She’s a lunatic out to hit the first man she sees.

c)       She made the decision to hit the man, or acted to hit the man, with no prior cause.

The first two explanations allow us to draw on further evidence and perhaps assign praise (a) or blame (b, with diminished responsibility). But (c) leaves us helpless, because intentions are a major factor in moral judgements. Indeterministic acts happen for no reason. Further, it’s hard to see why someone could do something without prior cause; how would they know what to do without the knowledge of the situation? Perhaps knowledge of the situation exists, but does not count as a prior cause? But the woman is hitting the man because he’s there, else she’d be flailing at nothing. It is a necessary precursor to the act, so must be a component of some prior cause. So indeterminism stops us placing blame, and gene-machine Darwinism is not to blame for that!

The expanded argument for the second part of the conditional we're considering shares the same problems:

P1	Women’s genes give them a tendency to sexual constancy
P2	People cannot be praised for their tendencies
Conclusion	Women cannot be blamed for sexual constancy

The implication is we have no choice but to follow our tendencies. To expand further:

P1	Women’s genes give them a tendency to sexual constancy
P2	People have no choice but to follow their tendencies
P3	People should only be praised for choosing to act well
P4	Sexual constancy is acting well
Conclusion	Women cannot be praised for sexual constancy

P2 is false per gene-machinists, but P3 is troublesome too. Comedian Richard Herring cracks the joke “I was very moral as a teenager; I was a virgin by choice, but also because no-one would have sex with me.” We recognise a difference between acting well by choice rather than by circumstance (imagine if Herring's setup was that he was trying to be promiscuous, but failing). But the charge against gene-machine Darwinism is a little deeper than this; it’s the suggestion that we have no choice because of our nature and cannot choose to act well, so never act well. But we hear stories of people acting ‘heroically’ and afterwards saying ‘I had no time to think’ or ‘It all happened so quick’. Heroes often act instinctively, not through choice, but we think they are praiseworthy still. We praise them because of the nature that compelled them; the hero could have done otherwise in a way that the rock from the previous example could not, but didn’t, and wouldn’t. The idea that they might do something else in the same circumstances would just make their actions arbitrary, and them unreliable, which would hardly attract plaudits. Natural compulsion, then, doesn’t preclude praise, and gene-machine Darwinism’s supposed denial of choice is not fatal to praise-giving, either.

Whether we can praise or blame, then, may still be an issue, but the fact of it does not turn on the truth of so-called gene-machine Darwinism. The arguments to support the conditional could be constructed differently, so we have not exhausted all possible justifications. Nevertheless, based on the arguments considered above, it's clear that the implications often ascribed to ultra Darwinism are quite unwarranted. Ultimately, all that it argues for is the origin of personality traits, not their strength or immutability. As Dawkins says in The Extended Phenotype, when he complains about the unjustified reputation that genes have acquired as 'sinister' and 'juggernaut-like':

Educational, or other cultural influences may, in some circumstances, be just as unmodifiable and irreversible as genes and ‘stars’ are popularly thought to be.

Quite.

Bibliography:

Radcliffe-Richards, J. (2000) Human Nature After Darwin (A211 Book 4), Milton Keynes, The Open University

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