I’ve been asked to discuss what’s wrong with Derk Pereboom’s so-called “Manipulation Argument” (or “Four Case”) argument against Compatibilism, which is of course the view that causal determinism is compatible with free will. Pereboom argues it’s not. You can find different kinds of critiques of his argument; by, for example, John Danaher; or Jay Spitzley, whose critique I think is more spot on. Spitzley’s critique also involves a discussion of the science of intuition, and how it affects philosophy’s overreliance on “intuitionist” methods (as Pereboom’s argument does), as well as a valuable summary and bibliography on a related, and broader problem in the field of philosophy that I have called out myself: the fact that philosophers have an annoying tendency to Hose Their Thought Experiments—another example of which I wrote on this month already regarding Robert Nozick’s So-Called Experience Machine. Here today I am adding another. Indeed, Pereboom’s mistake is very similar to Nozick’s.
Important Background
Not only am I convinced Compatibilism is true (you’ll find my most extensive discussion of this in my section on free will in Sense and Goodness without God as well as a past series of blog articles since, and all of the following will rely on the contents of these), but I also think free will could only exist as the output of a continuous chain of causes, such that any account of “responsibility-bearing” free will (the only kind anyone cares about) that involves any pertinent break in that chain of causes would actually eliminate free will. For example, if you insist free will is supposed to mean making decisions without being causally determined by one’s character, desires, and reasoning, then you have declared a self-contradiction. For that would mean your decisions are not only random, but causally disconnected from who you are. So in no way can anyone claim you caused those actions. The causal link between “you” and those actions isn’t even present in that case; and you certainly cannot be held responsible for something you did not even cause to happen.
Conversely, if you “break causation” too far back (e.g. you allow people’s character to arise at random, uncaused by any external events), then you are no longer removing their responsibility. Because it does not matter how you came to want some outcome; all we are judging is whether you did. Because we need to know what to do with you, what sort of person you are, and how to cause or prevent others like you acting that way in future. In other words, we don’t need to know how you became good or evil to determine whether you are good or evil, and thus how we should respond to you now. And the role of free will as a concept in society (in personal relations and law, and in motivating self-actualization) is solely to determine whether “you” made a given choice or not—or whether your desire, your preference, was thwarted (physically or by another person).
This is why free will as understood in Western law (all the way from Model Penal Codes to U.S. Supreme Court precedents) is thoroughly compatibilist in its construction. Any attempt by a perp to argue they were fated to be a criminal will be met with the response, “Well, then you were also fated to be punished for your crimes.” They don’t get off the hook; all they’ve done is explain how things turned out the way they did—and thereby revealed what we could do differently to prevent future repetitions of that perp’s behavior (by them or others). This is because responsibility and desert are components of a social system that have a function. And that function does not change when background causes do. Background causes are of interest to other operators in reengineering the social system (such as to produce more heroes and fewer criminals); but they aren’t relevant to the separate case of what to do with the products of that social system—the people already produced. What to do with a specific malfunctioning machine is a different question from how to make better machines.
This does mean there is no such thing as “basic desert” in the peculiar sense of just deserving praise or blame for no functional reason. If praise and blame perform no function, then they cease to be warranted—beyond arbitrary emotivism, which produces no objective defense. Like whether you like chocolate or not, praise and blame would then cease to be anything you can argue with anyone, as if anyone “should” like chocolate or not, because it would cease to be the case that anyone “should” like anything in such a sense, and thus no sense in which anyone “should” praise or blame anyone for anything. “Well I just like that” is not a persuasive argument that anyone should like it too. The purpose of a behavior, like praise and blame, is therefore fundamental to defending it as anything anyone should emulate. Remaining anchored to the function of assigning responsibility is therefore essential to any understanding of what it takes to produce it, and thus to any understanding of the kind of free will that does.
Pereboom’s Argument
In a nushell, Pereboom presents a Sorites-style “slippery slope” argument, starting from what he thinks is a clear case of nullifying someone’s free will (a typical “mad scientist” scenario involving a fictional remote control of someone’s neural system) and then moving that scenario by successive steps of analogy closer and closer to just any deterministic world system (over the course of “four cases” in all), establishing (supposedly) that there is “no difference” between the first manipulation case and just any causally deterministic world whatever. Some philosophers attack his slippery slope fallacy, arguing that somewhere along the line the cases become disanalogous and thus don’t carry his point. Others question whether he has even correctly described the original case on which this whole analysis depends. I’m in the latter camp.
So I will only bother discussing that. The “foundation case” of Pereboom’s argument is a scenario in which mad scientists have a secret machine wired into a certain Mr. Plum’s brain that “will produce in him a neural state that realizes a strongly egoistic reasoning process” (and does nothing else) precisely when they determine that that is the only causal link still needed to motivate him to kill a certain Mr. White, such that without adding that cause to the mix at just the right moment, he would not have killed them (even though—and this is key to Pereboom’s argument—Plum’s character was already naturally “frequently egoistic” and just not manifesting so in this one particular case but for this neural machine being activated).
It is silly to go to such lengths to construct this scenario, because we actually already have such scenarios in the real world that have been very thoroughly dealt with in our legal system—and they don’t turn out the way Pereboom thinks. If we just walked up to Mr. Plum and asked him to kill Mr. White in exchange for a hundred thousand dollars, we would have created exactly the scenario Pereboom is trying to imagine: Plum would not have killed White but for our intervention; our intervention succeeds by stimulating the requisite egoistic thinking in Mr. Plum otherwise in that moment absent (using the sound of our voice, maybe the sight of cash, and his neural machinery already present in his brain); and his acting on the offer remains in accord with his statistically frequent character (as otherwise he’d turn us down; and likewise Pereboom’s neural machine wouldn’t work).
No one releases such a Mr. Plum from responsibility. He will be adjudged fully responsible in this case in every court of law the world over. Pereboom’s argument thus can’t even get off the ground. He has simply falsely described his scenario as one that releases Mr. Plum from responsibility. But it doesn’t. Mr. Plum has not been tricked—he full well knows that he is choosing to kill someone, and for a reason that even Pereboom’s argument entails is both egoistic (and thus not righteous) and derives entirely from Mr. Plum’s own thinking—because all that the “mad scientists” have done is tip him back into his frequent “egoistic thinking”; they have not inserted a delusion into his brain that becomes his reason for killing White (had they done that, we’d be closer to the real-world case of schizophrenics committing crimes on a basis of uncontrollable false beliefs). And that’s all that courts of law require to establish guilt: a criminal act, performed with a criminal intent. “But they had a machine in his brain and pushed a button to activate it” would bear no relevance whatever at his trial. That would be no different, legally, from “pushing his buttons” metaphorically, by simply persuading him to do something, ginning him up into selfish violence. Guilt stems from his agreeing to go through with it “for egoistic reasons.” He is aware of what he is choosing to do, and chooses to do it anyway.
All the conditions of guilt are thus present. The machine changes nothing. Mr. Plum assented to the action. That he would not have thought to do it but for someone instigating it is irrelevant—apart from the fact that the instigators are also guilty of the same crime: because, in case you forgot, asking someone to kill someone else will land you both in jail, asker and askee. So, too, Pereboom’s mad scientists. Both they and Mr. Plum will go down for the crime of killing Mr. White. Just as in every other like case that already happens in the real world. Conversely, had our “mad scientists” manipulated events to trick Mr. Plum into mistakenly killing Mr. White in self defense, only they would be convicted. They then have committed murder; Mr. Plum has not. He acted without criminal intent. Because self defense is a legitimate defense at law; and it only requires the reasonable belief in the actor that what they are doing is morally and legally permitted. So, tricking Mr. Plum into doing something that he reasonably believes isn’t illegal, which unbeknownst to him is illegal, absolves him of blame. But instigating him (by any device, from persuasion to neural robotics) into doing what he knows is illegal does not absolve him. His knowledge that what he is doing is wrong, and assenting to it anyway, is what makes him responsible. The specific reasons he had, or where they came from, are irrelevant to that point.
Pereboom’s argument thus fails from its very first step, all from simply failing to realize he was describing a scenario that is already standard and dealt with routinely in the most experienced institution for ascertaining responsibility in human history: the modern world legal system, a product of thousands of years of advancement and analysis. Philosophers often do this: argue from the armchair in complete disconnect from the real world and all that it could have taught them had they only walked outside and looked around. Philosophers need to stop doing that. Indeed, philosophers who hose this simple procedure should have their Philosopher Card taken away and be disinvited from the whole field until they take some classes on How Not to Be a Doof and then persuade us they’ll repent and start acting competently for a change.
It is by the same reasoning that Spitzley’s example of a certain “Bob” who “has a migraine that causes his reasoning to be slightly altered in such a way that he decides to kill David and he would have not made this decision if he had not had this migraine” does not describe a case any legal system would rule Bob innocent in. It does not matter what drove you to do something, as long as you knew it was wrong and did it anyway. Whereas a migraine that caused Bob to hallucinate David attacking him, and then mistakenly kill him in self defense, would get Bob acquitted, because then he is not acting with criminal intent. The likes of Pereboom would understand this if he would bother studying how well-practiced legal systems assign responsibility, instead of just making shit up.
Consider even Spitzley’s point regarding “Mele’s (1995) case of an agent who has someone else’s values implanted into them overnight.” If this were Bob’s fate, he would still be found guilty. Because it does not matter how he became who he is; all that matters is that “who he is” assented to and performed the crime. There is no functional difference between Mele’s scenario and simply reality as it is: people’s character is always in some part a product of outside influences. We don’t exist in a world where this happens “overnight,” but the time scale is irrelevant. Whether twenty years or one night, how you became evil does not somehow magically make you “not evil.” And here I think there is a whole tangle of confusions hosing some people’s intuitions about Mele-style cases, such as conflating the equivalent to “Bob” in Mele’s scenario before the change in values with the Bob after that change. The fact that Bob was a better person once does not make him not a bad person now (or vice versa). Yes, early Bob would never have killed Dave; but late Bob would, and did. And we are presented with, and must judge, late Bob; early Bob no longer exists, and he wasn’t the one who killed Dave. So our intuitions about early Bob are simply not relevant to judging late Bob.
Good Fiction Is Better at This
The reality of what I’ve just explained has already been far better explored in fiction than these confused attempts by Pereboom: consider the BuffyVerse character of Angel. He was a vampire who, as a vampire, was a sociopathic monster, but when in possession of his soul (later inserted by “gypsy magic,” and repeatedly lost and regained by various incidental devices) was still a vampire but also a genuinely heroic person who despised his other “self,” whom most thus distinguished by the Latin form of his name, Angelus. As this plays out realistically in his story arc across two television shows (and subsequent graphic novels), it becomes intuitively obvious that Angel should never be judged by the actions of Angelus. When he is one or the other, he is literally a different person.
Here we have “early Bob” and “late Bob,” except that by a fictional device he can actually instantly switch back and forth between them (typically for reasons beyond his choice or control). But this does not change the analysis of his guilt and character: Angel simply isn’t responsible for what Angelus does, because Angel isn’t the one making those choices (and vice versa). We have no law governing such a case because reality has never presented such a bizarre conundrum. But I am certain if it became common, our legal system would respond just as I predict: Angel would only be guilty of what Angelus does if Angel assentingly chose to become Angelus with criminal intent; just like someone who asks or hires Bob to kill Dave. Beyond that the concern at law would simply be what steps are needed to be assured Angel will “stay on his meds” as it were. In other words, barring any other available solution, Angel would be treated like a schizophrenic: if ever committing crimes as Angelus, sentenced to treatment that will cause his reversion to the state of being the innocent Angel (which is akin to a sentence of execution declared upon Angelus—or as depicted in the story, a “forced imprisonment” inside Angel’s body). Which for Angel would be functionally equivalent to being acquitted “by reason of mental defect” today.
This is played out credibly well in a different bit of fiction: Hal 9000 in the film and novel 2010 is regarded as guilty of murder only by reason of a conflicting programming code, such that as soon as that is corrected, he is fully restored as a reliable colleague. Murderous Hal simply is no longer the same person as “fixed” Hal. So we don’t ascribe the guilt of one to the other. Nor should we. The only thing that seems counter-intuitive about this is that it is possible to instantly fix someone, converting them from a malevolent to a benevolent person with just some keystrokes. But the reason that feels counter-intuitive is that it doesn’t exist—that kind of thing simply isn’t a part of our real-world experience, and isn’t an available option (yet, at least) in dealing with malevolent persons among us. But we’ve already established in courts of law the analytical logic needed to cope with it if we had to. And that predictable result simply isn’t what Pereboom imagines.
Conclusion
Pereboom trips himself up not only by ignoring all pertinent real-world evidence, but also by gullibly manipulating himself (and thus his readers) with well-known but too-often-ignored tricks of psychology. As Spitzley puts it in his own case against Pereboom’s disastrously hosed thought experiment:
I argue that something independent of the features of determinism best explains why people judge that manipulated agents lack moral responsibility. Therefore, something other than determinism would be incompatible with moral responsibility and the manipulation argument for incompatibilism is unsuccessful. Given the way in which Derk Pereboom’s manipulation argument is presented, it seems extremely likely that seemingly irrelevant psychological influences, such as the order in which he presents his cases, provide a better explanation than the one which Pereboom offers for why readers intuit that determined agents are not morally responsible.
The only actual thing that matters in assigning responsibility (and thus in determining the presence of free will) is whether Mr. Plum’s will is what caused the action, and not someone else’s will overriding or replacing his; or otherwise some impersonal force that has thwarted (as in, acted against) his will. This is why coercion eliminates free will: someone else’s will is being substituted for Plum’s (who actually does not want to kill White, but is left with no reasonable choice by someone else who does want to kill White). Likewise force majeur: in which cases Plum’s will is not even causally involved in what happens (if someone pushes Plum into White resulting in White’s death, or Plum killed White solely because he jerks uncontrollably from an epileptic seizure). Similarly deception: if Plum is tricked into thinking White has to be legally killed (such as in self defense), then his will was not to murder White at all, but to protect the innocent from him, and the only unfortunate feature of this case is that Plum was uncensurably mistaken about that. We thus absolve him for it. But we don’t absolve him of blame if he’s just “having a bad day” or is persuaded to act knowingly and willingly toward an unsavory end.
Free will thus exists when a party consciously assents to an action, that they themselves caused (meaning their assent—their will—was a necessary part of the causal chain resulting in the outcome), based on their beliefs that we can then adjudge them for acting on. In other words, because Plum’s own will is a necessary and informed cause of Plum’s choice, then and only then we can evaluate Plum himself as a person based on what this demonstrates to us about his intentions (be they criminal or censurable or permissable or heroic). Whereas we cannot do this if the causal chain has been broken and therefore Plum’s will didn’t even cause the outcome, or Plum’s will was opposed to do doing any such thing but forced or tricked into it against his will.
Pereboom’s thought experiment simply completely ignores all this, the actual conditions for moral and legal responsibility in the real world. And that’s just bad philosophy.
Another thing about these thought experiments is that they beg the question.
Let’s pretend that we are to argue the only reasonable position that limits causal influence on behavior, which is to argue as Chomsky suggested is at least logically possible that human consciousness is so complex that it’s a black box where there’s an internal causal process that even someone with Laplacean omniscience can’t predict.
To say “Someone can put a chip into your brain to predictably control your behavior” is to assume, in the premises, that that’s not true.
I recognize that this argument is intended more narrowly, but it’s still a weakness here. A compatibilist can reasonably argue that in the real world we treat people like they have autonomy because there is clearly a process of conscious thought that accrues in enough situations that it’s reasonable to. We don’t treat bacteria or dogs the same way.
So some of these thought experiments basically ask us “What if humans weren’t human?” Well, gee, that’s not the same question, is it?
Thanks for the article. I enjoy studying this topic. I was wondering, what do you think about a situation where someone is committing a criminal act while heavily under the influence of drugs? There is the case of a rapper called Big Lurch, who killed a woman and performed cannibalistic acts on her while under the influence of PCP, which he is now serving life in prison for.
Would it be fair to say that if you willingly chose to take hard drugs, then you are responsible for the actions you perform under the influence of them even if those actions don’t reflect your character? But if someone drugged you without your knowledge, then you would not be held responsible for what you did while under the influence? That’s seems the intuitive way of treating the situation at least.
Of course the degree of influence the drugs had on you would be a factor as well. You needn’t be deemed fully responsible or not at all responsible, but somewhere in between.
Appreciate your thoughts on this.
It is correct that being drugged unwillingly absolves you of the consequences of choosing to be drugged (because obviously in such a case you didn’t choose to be drugged, so “you” are not the cause of that outcome). And in that case, that was explicitly the reason for his conviction (California state law holds criminal any drug use known to produce criminal conduct, i.e. if you knew the drug could cause felonious behavior when you took it, you thereby chose all resulting felonies committed under its influence; though there are exceptions, they didn’t apply in this case).
But the Lurch case did not hinge only on that distinction. Merely “being drugged” does not remove mens rea (a criminal mind). The only way it could ever do so is, for example, if it created some sort of hallucination in the subject whereby they killed someone in what they believed was self-defense. In other words, there has to be a POV justification for the act, such that “any good person might have done the same.” But there is no possible POV justification for torturing and eating people (there is no possible “but I thought it was self-defense” defense for that, for example). So even if California law didn’t have the exemption from insanity pleas for drug users, Lurch likely still would have been convicted.
Whether that California law is just or not is an open question however. See the exceptions discussion I linked to. I think the exemption for drug users is a holdover from the immoral drug war, and is based on excessively punitive attitudes towards intoxication. It’s more of a “fuck those guys” law than any actual expression of justice. I think claiming such a defense should be allowed, but remain very difficult to prove.
For example, maybe Lurch could say he genuinely believed in the moment that torture-cannibalism was necessary to stop the victim from becoming a child-eating vampire; but that simply wouldn’t cut it even if he could prove that was his actual belief at the time and not just some excuse he is making up now to escape justice. Because that belief would not entail “torture-cannibalism” as the appropriate response, so this excuse lacks POV justification.
And PCP is well known to cause reckless behavior, so even if Lurch could have come up with some credible POV justification for his crime (I have no idea what that could be) and prove he really had that belief in the moment (which is rarely possible), and thus gain acquittal for intentional homicide, he would still be guilty for negligent homicide (for voluntarily engaging in behavior—taking PCP—that he knew, or reasonably ought to have known, often caused recklessly dangerous behavior to result—and taking no precautions against that outcome, e.g. ensuring he was guarded or constrained while thus intoxicated).
Didn’t read much more after this. The notion there is a good/evil dichotomy is I think a restatement of the notion that there are sinful souls or holy ones. The very notion of character, also a stand-in for supernatural conception I think, deliberately omits that there is indeed a randomness in our mental life. But compatibilism rests on the assumption that there is not, that no one makes mistakes. It’s like insisting that anyone who writes “it’s” when they should have written “its” is a fool. Knowing better but doing it wrong anyhow is more or less a definition of mistake, isn’t it?
The pervasiveness of compatibilism in so many previous societies is not a proof of justice. It may be an implicit critique of previous societies. But that presents us with an enormous challenge in the effort to make a just world, no?
The notion that society is so concerned with whether “our” will as thwarted strikes me as rather optimistic, bordering on naive. Rather depends on who “we” are, doesn’t it?
Oh dear no.
First, you are making an error if you assume good/evil is a Judeo-Christian concept having to do with the culturally bizarre notion of sin. The terms long pre-date Biblical and sin-based religions and exist in all cultures and languages worldwide, even those that never heard of sin-based religion.
Please don’t let Christians dictate reality to you. Disregard their narrative. Pay attention to what words mean in and of themselves, not as what Christians “tell” you they are “supposed” to mean. Good and evil are simply catch-alls for the categories of malevolent and benevolent characters. Sin and holiness and all that theological bullshit has nothing whatever to do with that. People are either malevolent or benevolent or some admixture. All people. Even ones who have never heard of any Biblical religion or any of its bullshit concepts. And those differences are real and significant. We cannot ignore them.
Second, you have really bizarre notions if you think “compatibilism rests on the assumption that…no one makes mistakes.” No such claim is within or entailed by compatibilism at all. And your example is illogical. No one deliberately writes “it’s” when they know they mean “its.” So that is not at all analogous to knowing something is wrong and doing it anyway. Indeed these days, many people don’t even write that: autocorrect software often causes the error; but even when it’s their own mistake, they are not consciously choosing to make that mistake, so they aren’t responsible for it. At most you could accuse someone of not knowing the difference, but that then entails the corrective (teaching them), and often isn’t even the case (typing is noncognitive and thus sometimes makes mistakes even when your cognitive knowledge is correct). Malevolent and anti-social conduct bears no analogy to any of this.
Third, I have no idea what you are going on about with “compatibilism … is not a proof of justice.” I don’t even know what that statement means. Justice is an outcome of a social system organized to produce it. Compatibilism is merely a component of some such systems. And would be true even if no justice existed (if we were just wild savages with no laws); and its being true presents zero challenge to making a just world. To the contrary, recognizing its truth is essential to making a more just world.
Fourth, I have no idea what you mean by “depends on who “we” are.” Every society on Earth throughout all recorded history has as a matter of provable empirical fact been concerned with whether the will of individuals is being thwarted or not. Indeed, the entire history of every society’s political and justice systems is centrally built around that very concern. “Are you a good person or not” can never be answered without the ability to ascertain whether the good or bad things someone did (or were accused of doing) are products of their actual character or some forces constraining them against their actual will (like, for example, someone else’s will, through coercion).
Every society has dealt with this concern in various ways. Because it has to. But also because every individual can end up on either side of this assessment, so people quickly come to realize it’s better if the system would assess them more reliably than not, which leads to building systems that assess everyone more reliably than not. This is all compatibilist thinking. Whether they had a name for it or not.
Briefly, so as not to be particularly quarrelsome, I hope. First, the notion there are evil characters and bad characters in this society is largely Christian, by its pervasiveness. But it is wrong not because the notions of good and evil are nonsense, which you imply, but because the notion there is some sort of essence, detached from society at large, from the situation in particular and most madly of all, even from the body, imagined to be somehow separate morally (sic! and, sick!) is wrong. It is the soul. No one can predict the behavior of people in extraordinary situations, neither for good nor evil. Good characters on a battlefield can commit atrocities. Bad characters can suddenly act as heroes. Character is not predictive, because it is not a real thing, but a superstition.
Second, people do make mistakes, doing what they think is wrong, even though they habitually do not do such. Marital infidelities might be a common example? Whatever, any lapse can be a product of a multitude of circumstance, so complex as to effectively be random, just as the physical factors in a roll of dice are each determinate. The fact that you can’t see the analogy is I suspect because you are bemused by compatibilist nonsense. All social interactions are subject to this. The insistence that malevolent and anti-social conduct is in no way analogous is equivalent to insisting that supernatural free will means the soul (or “character) if you insist on the alias) The claim that every time someone loses their temper it is a malicious act is nonsense, however much it promotes religious guilt. I must still insist that attributing personal blame to some essence, compatibilism, must deny the reality of mistakes.
Third. compatibilism is obscurantism. Thus it is an intellectual obstacle to justice, misleading. Citing it’s alleged necessity is cynical apologetics. Claiming that it’s alleged presence every culture and age proves that compatibilism is a principle of justice is an instance of Hume’s objection that one should not confuse “is” with “ought.”
Fourth, despite the grandiose claims about empirical fact, it is not, not, not at all clear that compatibilism is all about declaring that some people are to be blamed for a given act, where the reprehensible acts are condemned by others, who also decree what counts as “coercion.” Consider the famous saying that the law in its majesty forbids rich and poor alike from stealing bread. Compatibilism is that philosophy that explains why the thieves of bread deserve their punishment…because they have bad characters, they are evil.
That wasn’t brief. But it also did not correctly describe what I said, nor responded to it. And it added yet more false statements and non sequiturs.
First, I said exactly the opposite of “the notions of good and evil are nonsense.” In fact I explained why they are not nonsense. None of which reasons you even mention here, much less respond to.
Second, I just explained why you should stop using Christian ideology as if it described reality, and that you should stick to reality instead. And you ignored that and went on to continue using Christian ideology as if it described reality, e.g. “the notion there is some sort of essence, detached from society at large, from the situation in particular and most madly of all, even from the body, imagined to be somehow separate morally (sic! and, sick!) is wrong” is total superstitious bullshit that has nothing whatever to do what what human words for good and evil actually refer to in practice. I already explained this to you. And you ignored me. Why?
Third, we have entire sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics) that successfully predict “the behavior of people in extraordinary situations.” Character is very measurable and does not generate random behavior (see Personality Identity & Character and Moral Psychology, Volume 5: Virtue and Character, for starters). Indeed, the more information these experts have about a person’s character (the more good, the more evil, in colloquial parlance), the more successful and reliable their predictions become. Exactly my point. The point you ignored.
“Good characters on a battlefield can commit atrocities” is actually tautologically false. Once you correctly define what a good character is, you are actually describing a person who doesn’t do that (willingly or knowingly). This proved out even in Milgram style experiments, which show a hefty and consistent percentage of persons don’t comply with immoral instructions, and a majority always exhibit limits on how far they will. Indeed a person who is willing to commit atrocities reveals their bad character thereby. Everyone else refuses to willingly do any such thing. Meanwhile, the opposite of atrocity is not heroism; heroism is about overcoming fear to accomplish joint goals, which can be evil goals, so this has no relation to one’s moral character beyond that, e.g. even a malevolent sociopath can act fearlessly in combat; in fact, they are more likely to, as the underlying condition of sociopathy is a diminished fear response.
So I think you are confusing nonscientific false beliefs about a person’s character that are proved false when adequately tested, with the absence of any causal relationship between character and behavior. Science has conclusively refuted the latter assertion. While the former fact could never falsify that, as false beliefs are not usable data for the purpose (e.g. that sociopaths are highly skilled at tricking observers into thinking they are good people has no bearing on whether actually good people will reliably act well).
Fourth, you seem to have no clear operating definition of “mistakes.”
Mistakes can mean various things: noncognitive error (e.g. miswriting it’s when you meant its; throwing a ball and accidentally hitting a bystander who wasn’t supposed to be there; etc.), which no one is held morally accountable for (because the outcome lacks knowledge and intent); or acting fallaciously (i.e. unknowingly arriving at a false inference from true facts) or on false beliefs, or both—which we will be held morally accountable for, but only in respect to its degree of negligence, not malevolence; unless the negligence is malevolent, which is precisely the distinction courts make between, for example, a genuine accidental killing (a mistake for which you will be acquitted thanks to compatibilism) and negligent homicide (a deliberate act for which you will be convicted also thanks to compatibilism). Because the latter involves willfully chosen negligence, i.e. you knew you were being negligent. All of these conditions are not only compatible with compatibilism, they are entailed by compatibilism. In other words, it is compatibilism that allows certain acts to be acknowledged as mistakes and not malevolence. Exactly the opposite of what you are trying to claim.
But it is not clear which of those category of mistakes you even mean. You keep conflating them (noncognitive errors, like typos, are not at all categorically similar to decisional errors, like infidelity, which are not at all comparable to malevolent acts, like murder). The best I can discern is that you want to articulate something about how people can make bad decisions without being malevolent. Which is what I just explained to you is why “mistakes” have no relevance to this discussion. That marital infidelity is not malevolent but murder is, does not somehow erase the existence of malevolence (hence evil) in the world: murder still exists, and it’s still evil, in precisely the way infidelity is not. Conflating them is a Christian superstition, not any property of reality; and certainly not anything implied by compatibilism. It’s quite the opposite in fact.
So you appear to be confusing different levels of moral error. And compatibilism has nothing to do with that. For example, “The claim that every time someone loses their temper it is a malicious act is nonsense” is a straw man; no one here has ever said any such thing. No one says merely losing one’s temper is evil. No one. So you are arguing against a position that doesn’t exist. Whereas, “if every time someone loses their temper they physically assault people, then they have committed a malicious act willingly and knowingly and therefore they are a malicious person” is true. That is in fact how we tell the difference between malicious and benevolent people: by whether they use a bad temper as an excuse to physically hurt people. There is a reason almost no one in the world does that—and why those who do, are responsible for most instances of doing it (e.g. most murders in any population are caused by the same few people, rather than the doers being randomly distributed across the population). In other words, that is the observed consequence of a malevolent character (what law calls mens rea, a criminal mind—without which, in most cases, you cannot be convicted of a crime, and which kind of mind most people lack; hence genuine mistakes won’t be treated the same).
Violently assaulting someone when you get angry is not “a mistake.” If you willingly and knowingly do that, you are the sort of person who willingly and knowingly does that. And that is malevolence by definition.
Fifth, your sentences about “compatibilism is obscurantism” are unintelligible. I cannot discern any actual thing being said there, so I have no idea what you are talking about. If you are trying to confusingly say something about Hume’s is-ought fallacy, that would be a different subject of discussion. But already I can tell you do not actually know what Hume’s argument is. He did not say you can’t get an ought from an is. He said most Christian moralists never do that and that is why their moralities can be ignored; Hume then went on to show how you can derive an ought from an is: his entire theory of sentiments, from which he argues to a morality we can’t ignore. If you want to read a peer reviewed discussion of this, see my chapter on it in The End of Christianity.
Finally, your claim that “Compatibilism is that philosophy that explains why the thieves of bread deserve their punishment…because they have bad characters, they are evil” is false. This statement tells me you literally have no idea what you are talking about. That distinctions can be made between those two cases (and it routinely, in actual reality, is) is a product of compatibilist thought! You seem to think compatibilism repudiates that distinction; to the contrary, it justifies it. It is free will libertarians who want things like the same harsh treatment of thieves regardless of circumstance. Not the other way around.
You have come to the bizarre conclusion that every immorality is malevolence and therefore evil, which is simply not the case. Insofar as anyone even says such a thing, it’s the free will libertarians (Christians), not compatibilists. And you even conflate necessity (hunger is a form of coercion) with willful criminality (Bernie Madoff was not a starving street urchin), and noncognitive error (typos) with cognitive error (infidelity), and failure (infidelity) with malevolence (murder). Your consistent inability to make intelligible distinctions between things seems to be driving all your fallacious logic and false beliefs here.
The reality is that armies are based on the premise that bad character does not determine whether a soldier chooses to panic.
The reality is that there are thousands and thousands of people in jail for drug offenses.
The reality is that people have been routinely executed or jailed for life, despite large mental deficits or extreme emotional problems, or—in a way, worse—being convicted of “felony murder.”
Compatibilists may claim that this reality is not what compatibilists are preaching…but the reality is also that their preaching has always incorrectly framed real-world problems. The notion of character is also the notion of a free-will libertarian soul. The notion that malevolence is so easily detected justifies the practice of Christians (or any conventional-minded authoritarian, for that matter) in detecting sinfulness.
Compatibilist thinking frames such issues incorrectly, justifying the Christian approach—which is not dead, not in reality, by the way—then, congratulates itself for condescending to occasionally concede limited exceptions in extraordinary cases. The difficulty is that it doesn’t even provide guidance on when they should make exceptions, as witness the thousands of people compatibly jailed for drug offenses. Compatibilism is not, not, not opposed to the fundamental premises of free-will libertarian morality. It just pretends to be. It’s function is to apologize.
Compatibilism is not even needed to justify punishment for crimes, not even premeditated homicide. Deterrence does that. The compatibilist problem is simple: That’s not enough, not for free-will libertarians.
Again, compatibilism is needed solely for the purpose of justifying useless (but gratifying) excessive or cruel punishments. Compatibilism is needed to justify shady “concepts” like “character,” some internal state or quasi-metaphysical principle that determines things.
The Milgram-type experiments show that willful choice is not what compatibilism says. Yes, some people are inner-directed enough that moral coercion fails. So what? The conclusion that character is therefore an inner phenomenon is refuted by the large number of exceptions, not confirmed by the minority!
Personality traits are not “character” in the sense required for compatibilist morals. That’s why personality tests cannot predict who belongs to the minority that doesn’t give in to authority in a MIlgram-type scenario. They most certainly can’t predict who will panic. On the contrary, armies operate year in and year out on the presumption that training is vital…and unlike compatibilists, they recognize that there will still be exceptions, period. Green troops are never valued like veterans for a reason. If you’re going to try to cry, “Science!” to justify the disguised religion in compatibilism, you need that kind of empirical support.
And, by the way, you can’t save compatibilism by complaining that boot camp is moral coercion. Then you wouldn’t have a workable understanding of “coercion.”
“The reality is that armies are based on the premise that bad character does not determine whether a soldier chooses to panic.” This is an equivocation fallacy. Neither I, nor til now you, have been talking about “character” as merely “courage.” Villains can be courageous. So that has nothing to do with what we are supposed to be discussing here. And I have already explained this to you.
“The reality is that there are thousands and thousands of people in jail for drug offenses.” This is a non sequitur. Whether “being in jail for drug offenses” is right or wrong is a question in morality and politics that has no relevance to any of the false claims you have made about what “compatibilism” says or entails. The reality is there have been thousands of women jailed in Iran for walking too fast in public. That that is stupid has no bearing on any questions about free will. So there is no point in bringing such things up here.
“The reality is that people have been routinely executed or jailed for life, despite large mental deficits or extreme emotional problems.” All of which compatibilists have opposed, and compatibilist courts who operate consistently don’t allow that to happen. Hence there are even more people who haven’t been “executed or jailed for life, despite large mental deficits or extreme emotional problems.” Thanks to compatibilism. You seem to have a beef with free will libertarians here, not compatibilists. They are the ones jailing and executing the disabled and the insane. The notion that the mentally disabled and the criminally insane lack mens rea and thus should not be convicted of crimes so caused is a compatibilist idea. You are thus here defending compatibilism.
“The notion of character is also the notion of a free-will libertarian soul.” In no way whatever is this true in any relevant science. Science has no role for souls, libertarian or otherwise. Compatibilists follow the science. Not Christian bullshit about souls. Yet science has fully articulated and documented the existence, structure, causes, and consequences of “character.” And all without any reference to “souls” (much less “libertarian” ones). The scientific study of character is all determinist or compatibilist brain science now. I cited two comprehensive reviews of the science on this. How is it that you do not know this?
“The notion that malevolence is so easily detected justifies the practice of Christians (or any conventional-minded authoritarian, for that matter) in detecting sinfulness.” I have no idea by what logic you conclude this. It’s a non sequitur. That character exists and that malevolence and benevolence exist in no way proves any elaborate superstitious Christian bullshit about it. Why you think it does is baffling.
“The difficulty is that [Compatibilism] doesn’t even provide guidance on when they should make exceptions.” I have just shown you several times that the opposite is the case. So you have no basis for continuing to make this false statement. It has been repeatedly refuted here.
“Compatibilism is not even needed to justify punishment for crimes, not even premeditated homicide.” No one said it was. So I have no idea what you think you are arguing against here.
“Deterrence does that.” That is a compatibilist argument. How you do not know that, escapes me.
“Compatibilism is needed solely for the purpose of justifying useless (but gratifying) excessive or cruel punishments.” I have no idea where you are getting this. No compatibilist in my lifetime has ever argued for “excessive or cruel punishments.” To the contrary, we’re the ones who have been arguing against them. Precisely because compatibilism de-legitimizes them.
“Compatibilism is needed to justify shady “concepts” like “character,”.” Character is a scientific fact, every bit as much as the sphericity of the Earth or the speed of light. I have already directed you to leading summaries of that science. For you to continue making the pseudoscientific assertion that “character” is just some shady concept and not real is flabbergasting. What you are on about escapes me.
“Yes, some people are inner-directed enough that moral coercion fails. So what?” So what? So that is a scientific demonstration that predictable consequences of character exist, thereby refuting your psuedoscientific claim to the contrary. And not the only such evidence, which is vast and multivariable and corroborating. See again the summaries I already referred you to.
“The conclusion that character is therefore an inner phenomenon is refuted by the large number of exceptions, not confirmed by the minority!” I already refuted this false claim. Your fallacy was exposed above. You now just ignore that refutation and simply repeat the statement I already refuted. This is gainsaying, not argument. Your emotional irrationality is starting to show here.
“Personality traits are not “character” in the sense required for compatibilist morals.” No one said “personality traits” are “character.” That you think this shows you know absolutely nothing about the science of character. See the summaries I referred you to. Stop arguing in ignorance. Get informed on the thing first, before trying to defend a position about that thing.
“On the contrary, armies operate year in and year out on the presumption that training is vital.” Non sequitur. This has nothing to do with character or compatibilism. You are now conflating skills and procedures (and teaching and testing attitudes for suitability for performance) with moral character. If you can’t tell the difference between those things, you really are ignorant here. Stop that. Argue a point only after you understand what you are talking about. Being able to make the distinctions I have shown you repeatedly cannot make is fundamental to such understanding.
“And, by the way, you can’t save compatibilism by complaining that boot camp is moral coercion.” I went to boot camp. Proudly. It was voluntary. And I could have failed out of it whenever I wanted. And I can confirm first-hand that every mission goal it was structured to achieve was valuable. So I have no idea what nonsense you are going on about with this. There have historically been coercive boot camps (the film Full Metal Jacket is largely about the evils of such a thing). But I see no relevance of that to anything you are ridiculously trying to falsely claim about compatibilism.
To add onto Richard’s points:
Even if it were true that malevolence and benevolence are especially difficult, even impossible, to detect, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. We don’t detect the Big Bang either. The challenge behind identifying and measuring a construct doesn’t make it invalid.
I think you’re correctly identifying mistaken ways that people behave and think (e.g. using some notion of free will to say that a thief who steals bread is the equivalent of Bernie Madoff) as an excuse to reject a method. I understand your reticence, but just as with the conversation about the trolley principle, you’re not talking to the people in the conversation you’re actually in.
This exchange is very frustrating. It is clear you have very strong opinions that you have been thinking about for a while but to anyone outside the conversation it couldn’t be more clear that you are failing to engage with Carrier’s position (in the post and in the replies). You just want to say what you think and your responses only very loosely, if at all, touch on any arguments made in the responses.
On the assumption that you want to make progress you should step back and see if you are able to state Carrier’s position in a clear way such that Carrier would say “yes that’s exactly right, that’s the position I argue for.” Then if you think its wrong you can say why with reference to it.
Right now it doesn’t look at all like you know or care to know the position you are arguing against, you just want to state your own, which doesn’t make the best conversation.
Dr. Carrier wrote:
As that needs to be. But that what that actually speaks to what society deems needs to be done to ensure that it’s people are persuaded to behave in a particular way.
For example when someone like Sam Harris argues that Free Will (as we know and understand it) is an “illusion”, based on some determinism type of argument, people will automatically respond with “Well if someone isn’t responsible for their actions then we shouldn’t have laws to punish them”.
But that isn’t a good argument against that position.
Because a perfectly logical response could be that since decisions are the result of determinism, and determinism based behaviors are based on a number of inputs/factors, and one of those factors is contemplation and assessment of the potential risks and costs of committing a certain act, society therefore NEEDS to ensure that the threat of punishment for unwanted behaviors is an input/factor (in the determinism based process of human thinking).
True. But of course there are other aspects to remember here:
The presence or absence of free will is not only how we evaluate whether someone is safe to be around / keep around / encourage / etc. it’s also how we evaluate how free we ourselves are to control our own destiny (e.g. a woman in Saudi Arabia has a great deal less freedom to control her own destiny than a woman in Canada, just as a woman who has a lot of worldly education does than a woman who lacks that, and this difference plays out as an expression of free will: the Canadian has a great deal more of it to exercise than the Saud; the worldly-informed woman has a great deal more of it to exercise than an isolated and ignorant woman; and so on).
Harris tends to conflate determinism with fatalism, and thus makes a bunch of false statements about how much control different people actually have over their own lives, and how much more they could have it certain barriers were removed (that actually can be removed). Which has to do not just with regulating other people’s behavior, but also with how much we can regulate our own behavior (e.g. to what extent will you be a slave to cultural programming or break free of some of it; to what extent is your own judgment effective in making better or worse decisions; etc.). This is a theme I discuss for example in Will AI Be Our Moses.
I don’t remember having seen the following observation, I find ‘compatibilism’ as the right position with the wrong denomination. You mentioned before that free will requires determinism (if I remember correctly), in which case rather than compatibilism it should be called necessarianism, or something like that. It could be just presented as a corollary. Compatibilism is like asking permission for something which it should be a given. Accepting that name is conceding defeat in my opinion.
I hope I could explain myself. Any comment?
I don’t comprehend your theory of semantics here. The reason it’s called compatibilism is because it holds to the compatibility of determinism and free will. “Necessitarianism” would not communicate this, or anything at all relevant to the debate the position was articulated to resolve. So I see zero semantic utility in that word change; indeed, even negative semantic utility, because information about the position it’s supposed to represent would be lost in result.
Richard, if determinism is a requirement for free will (as I understand is your stance) saying free will is compatible with determinism is trivially true rendering the denomination ‘compatibilism’ superfluous, isn’t it? That’s all I’m complaining. Perhaps, given the arguments from the ‘no free will because determinism’ camp, is what it should be emphasized.
I don’t know how a word that correctly conveys the stance that free will is “compatible” with determinism can be “superfluous.” All names for things are tautological. That’s how naming works. That’s what gives names utility. If you want to label a position, the best word to use is a word that actually describes the thing. Then you not only have a usable label (to distinguish a position from its competing stances, in this case contra-causalism or libertarianism, and “hard determinism”), but the label also conveys useful and indexable information about the thing labeled. That’s the opposite of “superfluous.”
By contrast, “necessitarianism” conveys nothing at all intelligible about the position or why it is distinct from its competing stances, and is already thoroughly superseded by a pervasive linguistic convention by now establishing the lexical meaning of compatibilism. It’s thus a terrible label choice. There is no reason to replace a good and informative label choice already widely known, with a bad and uninformative label choice no one has any familiarity with. This is just semantics 101, honestly.
Follow up on Richard’s response @ 5:27PM (I can’t reply to that comment).
Richard, in a previous post you said: “In the real world, having free will is about whether you consented to what you did—whether you did it knowingly and intentionally. Which actually requires causal determinism to exist.”
The word ‘requires’ establishes a necessity, not a mere compatibility. No causal determinism, no free will. So, no, compatibility doesn’t convey the requirement that according to you exists. You could backtrack on your words, or you could follow your good advise and steelman your position. What an appropriate name would be for such position I don’t know, but if you were the first in noticing the requirement is only fair that you pick it.
I think you are missing the point. The debate that label refers to is over whether free will is compatible with determinism or not, not over whether free will requires determinism. You are obsessing over an incidental obscure detail that isn’t about the very purpose these words were coined to communicate. And you are choosing a word that poorly communicates even that detail, since no one will know what “necessitarianism” refers to without elaborate unpacking, which defeats the whole purpose of words.
Meanwhile, convention has thoroughly entrenched the meaning of compatibilism, so no one needs to change it. You should hew to convention, as changing everyone’s brain the world over is a Herculean, nay Quixotic task, whereas the convenience of the existing convention is easily resourced. A wise man wears shoes, rather than trying to pave the Earth with leather. Much less shitty leather.
Dr. Carrier wrote:
“There is no reason to replace a good and informative label choice already widely known, with a bad and uninformative label choice no one has any familiarity with.”
Just concerning that specific point on label choice, in some other cases there is simply not a common label that exactly fits your position, and the closest label is different enough that it would would accurately describe your position.
For example take someone that is agnostic about the possible existence of a Deity, but lacks a belief in any particular God or theology. That person wouldn’t call themselves a Deist, because they aren’t certain such a thing exists. And they wouldn’t call themselves an Atheist, because the common use of that word is someone that doesn’t believe in a God (or Deity) of any sort.
So they are left with just trying to explain their position, for lack of a better word to use.
On a side note I think that society has completely misused the term Atheist. Because the term “Theist”
describes someone that not only believes in God, but more than that subscribes to a particular theology (otherwise they would just be a Theist).
And in other uses of words, whenever we see a known word with preceded with an “A”, we understand it to mean the complete opposite of that word.
For example “typical” versus “atypical”.
So likewise the word Atheist should simply mean someone that doesn’t subscribe to a particular theology. Then we would need a separate another word (like Adeist maybe) to describe someone that takes a hard disbelief position concerning the existence of a deity altogether.
Yes, there is a common label that fits my position. It’s called “compatibilism.” It is so well known as to now be standard convention in the field. And it exactly describes the position it labels.
Nothing else you ramble on about has anything to do with this, the only relevant point in this discussion.
Richard, I know this discussion is getting old, but I think some clarifications are in order regarding our exchange above.
I did not ‘obsessed over an incidental obscure detail’ nor ’semantics’. I focused on a conclusion that you introduced at the end of a long post on free will, while emphasizing the word ‘required’ with italics. I’m not the one to blame if I assumed you were onto something.
To restate the obvious, you don’t get ‘A requires B’ from ‘A is compatible with B’. On the other hand, if you prove ‘A requires B’ you win. Call that anyway you want, but has to represent what you mean. If ‘A requires B’ is not the case, or takes too much energy or time to convince people, fine then, let’s keep compatibilism.
You are now just not even addressing anything I’ve said about this.
Your recommendation was proved inefficient and pointless. You have posted no response to that conclusion.
Move on.