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A Note on Free Will

Richard Posner

One of yesterday’s comments asked me whether I believed in free will. I think of free will as being epiphenomenal. When we engage in deliberation, we are examining the pros and cons of alternative courses of action. When we complete our deliberation, either the pros or the cons will be weightier, and we go with the weightier side of the balance.

This is not to deny that people are morally and legally responsible for their deliberate actions. But I take the function of the concept of "responsibility" to be to add a thumb to the balance described in the previous paragraph. The question for the law is not whether a defendant’s crime was the product of an exercise of free will, but whether attaching a penalty to the kind of conduct in which he engaged is likely to reduce the incidence of that conduct by making it more costly. If so, we say that his decision to engage in the conduct was culpable, was "his fault." We say he "could have chosen" not to engage in the conduct. But probably, if we knew everything about his psychology, we would realize that his choice was foreordained. What we mean when we say that he "had a choice" is that the penalty would have deterred most people from engaging in such behavior.

As Willard Quine put it, a choice is "free" if the individual’s "motives and drives" are part of the causal chain that produces the "chosen" act, even if those motives and drives are themselves rigidly determined, perhaps as a result of a heavy threat of punishment or a powerful financial incentive. If the individual because of youth, insanity, or retardation is incapable of deliberation, his behavior is excused or his responsibility mitigated.

The upshot is that ascriptions of responsibility are based on social need (for example to deter crime) rather than on metaphysics, philosophy of mind, theology, or moral philosophy.

For a fuller discussion, see the index references to "free will" in my book The Problems of Jurisprudence (1990).

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33 responses to “A Note on Free Will”

  1. Spinoza

    "When we engage in deliberation, we are examining the pros and cons of alternative courses of action."

    I suppose a further question then arises: How often are we engaging in deliberation rather than reacting to physical stimuli (if there is a difference, that is)?

    Reply
  2. Martin Bento

    Judge Posner

    It seems to me the interesting question regarding free will and the law is not the existence of criminal responsibility, but the existence of liberty or "freedom" in the sense of noncoercion. If there is no free will, then human decisions are just outcomes of the operation of impersonal physical laws like all other phenomena. Why then should human decisions have moral weight that other phenomena do not? If we see a net benefit to damming a stream, we dam it; we lose no sleep over constraining the "freedom" of the stream (well, most of us don't). But if there is no free will, how fundamentally is the stream of elections in the brain of a different order than that of water in the creekbed? Should we have a law that bans the smoking of tobacco, period? It would be pretty easy to argue for an empirical benefit. The biggest objection that I and many others would raise is that such a law is too great a violation of freedom. But if the smokers have no free will, how does it make sense to ascribe freedom to them in any case? As with the moral responsibility of criminals, it seems the argument will simply reduce to whether the net effects of such a ban are good or bad according to some calculus that does not include "restriction of liberty" as a negative effect. It seems to me this would be a particularly vital concerrn to libertarians.

    I have seen this addressed, obliquely, on the liberal side of the isle. In Taking Rights Seriously, Ronald Dworkin argues that there is no right to liberty as such, and that the rights we tend to ascribe to liberty are either equality in drag or else nonsense. In part he justifies this as enabling us to avoid "spooky" assumptions, though I don't know why he doesn't just come out and say metaphysical free will (very difficult to resolve with science; easy with mysticism or religion). He's coy for some reason. I don't agree with him on this, but I don't know what a Libertarian rejoinder would be.

    Reply
  3. oliver

    Is there really any way to show that youths can't "deliberate", rather than that their deliberations more often result in their indulging their "motives and drives"?

    Reply
  4. IsaacStewart

    "The upshot is that ascriptions of responsibility are based on social need (for example to deter crime) rather than on metaphysics, philosophy of mind, theology, or moral philosophy."

    Judge Posner,
    If this post, and the sentence above, is not itself an exercise of "moral philosophy," then, in your view, what is?

    Reply
  5. an undergraduate

    I am a little alarmed by what you describe as epiphenomenalism. The abridged nature of the comment lends itself to misinterpretation so I will respond in general terms only:

    (1) Cartesian Hangovers

    Quine's behaviorism and empiricism aren't necessarily compatible. There is a pre empirical tendency in behaviorism to collapse materialism into third person stimuli and response. Brains and nervous systems and bodies are organized bits of matter that are to some degree causally effective therefore the categorical statement is defective. Responsibility doesn't require gods.

    (2) Ceteris Paribus

    All other things being the same, aspects of our psychology are permeable to causes that obliterate folk agency. Social Psychology documents the effects of stereotype, frames, random and not so random configurations of events, short term effect of mood on memory activation and memory on mood, habit, automaticity and various degrees of control, etc. Things conspiring to cause behavior that an individual may regret, and others to censure or punish. Consider something like puberty and its effect on decision making. Isn't that considered a mitigating factor in the law because of diminished control?

    There is a point where the infinitely extending causal chain becomes irrelevant because we are interested in causes that make a relevant difference. It isn't in itself a compelling reason to conclude that "ownership" is lacking, independent of how the social need hypothesis figures in ascriptions of responsibility in law and every day life.

    Reply
  6. TroyP

    In summary, its seems you are saying we punish the criminals (whose behaviour isn't very much changed by punishment) to keep the non-criminals (who do respond to incentives) from committing crimes.

    Reply
  7. JR

    "The question for the law is not whether a defendant's crime was the product of an exercise of free will, but whether attaching a penalty to the kind of conduct in which he engaged is likely to reduce the incidence of that conduct by making it more costly."

    Your focus is on deterrence. In your view, what roles do the other theories of criminal punishment (rehabilitation, retributivism, and denunciation) play?

    Reply
  8. Paul Gelb

    You stated in response to prior comments on this blog that "natural law is primarily a national rather than an international body of thought." This sounds a lot like your position in your recent NYT Op-Ed piece, with which I entirely agree.

    As well, I think that "free choice" is a concept that exists primarily within local communities. The "carrots" and "sticks" of LOCAL communities most strongly impact individual psychology and decision making.

    Free choice exists in the extent one chooses to integrate and adopt the pro-social norms of those local communities — long before the moment of the "crime" arrives. On this basis, individuals sometimes manage to overcome strong compulsion towards anti-social behavior, which, in a legal context, is what we must mean by "free choice."

    Reply
  9. Bruce

    As Willard Quine put it, a choice is "free" if the individual's "motives and drives" are part of the causal chain that produces the "chosen" act, even if those motives and drives are themselves rigidly determined, perhaps as a result of a heavy threat of punishment or a powerful financial incentive.

    I think this definition faces a problem when it comes to judging the free will of people with serious mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia. Their "motives and desires" are always part of the causal chain, it's just that some of their motives and desires, or perhaps all of their motives and desires at certain times or under certain conditions, are malformed. Furthermore, they are malformed in ways we do not hold them responsible for, whereas the person who merely had mean parents and as a result has grown up mean *is* still responsible for their actions. (I am assuming a close identity between free will and moral responsibility, but even if that fails, I think we still want to say the latter person generally acts freely.) It is not merely presence of motives and desires in the causal chain that makes an action free, but motives and desires that are susceptible to the societal pressure of responsibility. That is starting to get circular (you are responsible only if you could have acted differently if you had had the knowledge you would be held responsible), and there are all sorts of further problems (is someone who is particularly hard-hearted thereby "not susceptible"? What separates the person who was seriously abused as a child from the schizophrenic?) but I think it's a step further down the right path.

    Putting that problem aside, I basically agree with your statements above as a philosophical position on "free will." What is interesting is that philosophy and law part ways on what it means to act "freely." For example, from a philosophical standpoint (at least, under Quine's definition — the area is rife with disputes), I freely give my money over to a mugger rather than risk being shot. But criminal law does not treat that as a gift — rather, the conclusion is that I did not freely give my money to the robber, who is as a result guilty of armed robbery. Civil law is even more loose with free will. One can fail to act freely in entering a contract due, not merely to the presence of weapons, but also because of mere economic circumstances, if they rise to the level of duress. As a result, the contract can be voided because it was not freely entered into on one side.

    Reply
  10. Martin Bento

    Interesting that no one wants to engage the question of whether "liberty" is a meaningful concept in the absence of free will. Well, let's look at some of the things people have engaged:

    an undergraduate wrote:

    "Brains and nervous systems and bodies are organized bits of matter that are to some degree causally effective therefore the categorical statement is defective. Responsibility doesn't require gods."
    But any organized bit of matter (which to some degree includes all matter in the terrestrial environment) that is part of a causal chain is to some degree "causally effective" if, by that phrase, you mean that the outcome would not have occurred in the absence or alternate state of that entity (if that is not what you mean, please explain what you do mean). For example, suppose a terrorist sets off a bomb. Both the brain of the terrorist and the bomb are necessary parts of the chain of causation of the explosion – both are “causes that make a relevant difference” to the event under consideration – and both are organized bits of matter. Why does the brain have moral responsibility and the bomb itself not? I think Posner is right on this: under the hypothesis of strict physical determinism, free will is epiphenomenal. The question for me is how can someone who accepts this premise assign a moral value to an entity called “liberty”. In what sense does that entity exist?

    Reply
  11. Ray Midge

    Mr. Bento:

    You ask: "..how can someone who accepts this premise [strict physical determinism]assign a moral value to an entity called 'liberty'". A good question, one with which I struggle.

    I am wired in such a way that I will be 'angry' with the man who clubs my infant child with a tree limb, but less so with a tree whose bough breaks and falls on my infant. Evolutionary psychology can speak a little as to why those different sensations arise in me when the end result is the same, but the point is – even if I accept that both the human assailant and the tree limb are physical systems and that it is illogical to view one with scorn and the other without – the sensation arises in me nonetheless.

    Liberty exists as a good in that it 'feels' good when I 'feel' I am acting under my own free will. I may thoroughly enjoy spending two days in Hawaii when that was my choice, but should my government compel me to go there for whatever reason, I will feel pretty angry about it even though the vacation is exactly the same. Illogical – but then our mental sensations are not subject to logic, they just are.

    In this world, a determinist libertarian would exist, but only as someone who draws pleasure from other people feeling as though their actions are chosen by themselves.

    Sure, the moral talk dissolves away, put doesn't everything anyway when we realise all that exists is the physical? [The hard question remains: Why and how do some physical arrangements give rise to individual conscious senstions such as 'the feeling of having willed an action, lust, anger, F sharp, hot, "justice", green-blue, triangles, cool ranch Doritos…]

    Morality, at least in the sense it is derived by reason, no longer exists. Moral sensations still exist.

    This is what I found interesting about J. Posner's post of the 27th. Because we live in the age of reason, and intellect is the highest good, modern man feels he must test his every moral intuition for intellectual consistency, or run them through some logic-gate obtacle course. Enough. Maybe representative democracy IS simply a numbers game of voting for those who share our intutitions without our having to justify those moral intuitions to our "intellectual betters".

    Reply
  12. Paul Deignan

    I am afraid that the author is at a disadvantage in answering the question of free will. Most realize the existence of free will as an assertion of ego (which the author has avoided), personal experience, or brute analysis.

    On the basis of personal experience, our realization of choice is most acute when we are separated from our past and placed in a situation where the question is clear. To be placed in such a position, where causality is certain but its path unclear is to be in a very risky position indeed. Such a predicament is rarely known to those who live lives of clear determination. This is not the personality trait of the typical judge.

    Lacking such personal experience, the author might rely on a systemic analysis of the aggregate effect of his proposition. Case in point: What is new and meaningful in his article if not the product of free will? Then who would consciously write something about nothing for all to see? Ah, there is an ego at work here — suppressed, but its existence is proven.

    Untie the tangled web of false denial and the answer to the original question is clear. Yes, you do have free will — you chose to lie about its implications. A lie is a demonstration of free will.

    Reply
  13. Ray Midge

    Mr. Deignan:

    You appeal to personal experience in supporting free will. This is, in the end, unhelpful. An epiphenominalist like J. Posner doesn't deny the 'experience'of willing an action, but questions whether that experience is the cause of that action or merely just frequently precedes some actions. Those actions that the experience precedes we think of freely willed, those that do not we think of as reflex (or quite often deny that we are the cause of).

    Prof. Daniel Wegner in his "The Illusion of Conscious Will" takes pain to separate out that the conscious sensation of having freely willed an action preceding that action is not the same as that conscious sensation having been the actual cause of that action.

    As an example, he lays out an anecdote of walking into a store and, to kill time while his wife shopped, began playing on a video game system there on display. In short order, he found himself quite skilled, maneuvering his avatar over the various hurdles and shooting the bad guys quite efficiently. To his surpise though, the screen changed and he realized that he hadn't been controlling the avatar, it had simply been a demo of the game playing on a loop as it were. His joystick could have been unplugged and it wouldn't have made any difference. Nonetheless he had the conscious sensation of 'being the cause' of the avatar's jumping and ducking.

    Epiphenomenalists recognize the "sensation" of being the cause, the "sensation" of freely willing an action, but that sensation is not necessarily the cause of the action. As I stated in a comment above, the hard question of how a physical system can give rise to consciousness – to conscious sensations – remains. But the fact we consciously experience the sensation of being the cause of an action – the sensation of freely willing our leg to kick out – does not mean that it is the cause of that action. Indeeed science is replete with examples where we are mistaken.

    J. Posner need not, and doesn't as far as I know, deny that he "feels like" he is making a free choice prior to many of his actions. Personal experience is unreliable here

    Furthermore, the argument of 'why bother to argue or write against or about free will unless it exists in you' begs the question. A determinist may recognize himself as the source of such arguments or writings but that doesn't mean therefore he had a choice not to do so. In short, we do what we do and sometimes the things we do feel like they were preceded by a choice and caused by such – but that don't make it so.

    Reply
  14. Patrick

    It makes me sad that incompatibilism is simply being assumed. There are some, and some of them very smart like Leibniz, who have thought that strict physical determinism is not incompatible with free will. Anyway, perhaps this is a matter of word choice only.

    It seems to me that an important issue is being ignored here. I agree with Judge Posner that when it comes to making our own decisions the question of whether we have free will isn't really that relevant or compelling. The interest in the question of free will, at least for me, comes from judging others morally. I would like it to be the case that there is some reason behind holding some people responsible for what they do and not others. I would like there to be reasons to regard people as moral agents and not thinking the same of sticks. I am one who thinks you don't need any supernatural entities to give these reasons, but I hardly think that the notion of free will is epiphenomenal. After all if it turned out there was no good reason for the distinctions we make in moral judgment, then I would suppose I would probably support treating the insane and the mentally retarded the same as the sane and the fully mentally functioning when it comes to sentencing. I think it is unfair to do so now, but that is because I believe certain things about freedom and responsibility.

    Some have been saying things about how freedom and responsibility needn't be that closely related. I have always taken it that any definition of freedom wich severed this conceptual connection was prima facie a bad definition. I realize that proposed senses of each term abound, but I cannot think of a better test of their adequacy than that.

    Reply
  15. Paul Deignan

    Ray,

    Thanks for your thoughtful post. I was immediately aware of the argument that you and Posner make – it is well known, but naïve.

    To clarify, I do not believe that personal experience is essential to determining the existence of free will as a capability of the individual. It is helpful, however, to have the benefit of a particular experience. Here is how I conceptualize the issue:

    Our actions in time are that of a dynamical system in some dimensionality. We trace out a trajectory as we live our lives. Should we travel a path that leads us to a point that is nearly singular in our deterministic dimensions, at that point what motive force will see us through? If we make the decision ourselves to proceed, what is the cause of our decision? Do we act chaotically under such circumstances as influenced in only the deterministic dimensions or is there a consistent extradimensional force that will see us through a nearly continuous path? At such points as these where we come close to separating ourselves from our history, we appreciate most acutely the threads of continuity running through our decision making.

    However, the common man lives a life that is so deterministic that he is unlikely to ever appreciate extradimensional forces. Any influence of free will is easily subsumed in the aggregated baggage of external forces and dismissed as noise or measurement inaccuracies. We may be inclined to use our personal experience to question the existence of some dimensionality that we have not experienced. Of course, this is a faulty argument (arguing a negative from a positive that is incomplete). However, in the case of those with the proper experience, we may argue a positive from a positive. The problem here is that it is unlikely to be persuasive to the general public of deterministic trajectories. So I agree that appealing to personal experience in the argument is a bad approach — I actually prefer the brute force analysis. This is the argument that I used in my post.

    My argument is actually information-theoretic. I hope that on second reading that you will appreciate it. The accusation of lying was meant to be provocative – but logically to the point. The last point of your post that you cite is to a reduction to absurdity argument. The basis of the proof relies on the fact that there is an ego (self-motive force) at work and does assume realization on Posner's part of the intricacies of the argument that he is presenting. (In a deterministic system, lying has no utility since the utility of the lie is a function of the fact that it is believed, but in the deterministic world there is no reason then for anyone not to lie and the utility of the lie evaporates as everyone suspects a lie and relies only on observable fact). Furthermore, our method of punishing criminals would be an absurdity in such a system (if Posner was right, a Clockwork Orange approach would be much more efficient. Group punishment would also be OK).

    Here is the problem for Posner. He is aware of the possibility of free will. This extradimensional possibility would spoil his system of reward and punishment, yet he does not address it except to dismiss it as irrelevant. However, if it exists, it is extremely relevant to his entire profession. His treatment of the issue is thus negligent. I doubt that Posner intends to be negligent so in light of this awareness, I attribute a false argument (arguing a negative from an incomplete positive) i.e. a lie which then proves my case since Posner asserts by his action that he is self motive (capable of adding information to our system or in reducing its entropy – efficiently encoding prior knowledge which again requires original information while at the same time being aware of the absurdity of such an endeavor if his premise were true). You see the topic of Posner’s effort lies outside the space of his ability to encode in a deterministic world. Free will is by definition extradimensional. The best a deterministic individual could contribute to the discussion honestly is to say, “I see no evidence to support such a proposition, but that does not negate its possibility”.

    Reply
  16. Ray Midge

    Mr. Deignan:

    Good stuff. With regard to personal experience, I think we agree. I wouldn't argue with the non-common people who have recognized their personal and mystic experiences of free will, but it does seeem fair to ask how they can be sure they weren't merely hallucinating or otherwise the cause of their own personal experience with free will?

    With regard to your information theory argument in support of Free Will (or critique of J. Posner), I found it a bit more difficult to follow not being familiar with the field, but I think we agree Judge Posner, an epiphenominalist, lays out a criminal justice/punishment system on the rational of deterrence for other wrong doers and on preventative grounds as to the wrong doer himself. You seem to make the following claims to show that J. Posner cannot make such claims in a deterministic universe:

    1. He doesn't recognize the possibilty free will exists.
    2. His criminal justice/punishment theory is thus incomplete.
    3. He wouldn't want to put forward an incomplete criminal justice theory.
    4. Therefore he is telling a lie.
    5. Telling a lie is incompatible with a deterministic (non free will universe) universe because in such a universe "lying has no utility, since the utility of a lie is a function of the fact that it is believed, but in a deterministic world there is no reason for anyone not to lie and the utility of the lie evaporates as everyone suspects a lie and relies only upon observable fact."

    Two things. One is that I don't think J. Posner is telling a lie, he has simply put forward a justification for a criminal justice/punishment system in a deterministic universe. To say that it is incomplete because such a system is inadequte to deal with the possiblity of a "free will universe' is true, but misses the fact he was assuming a deterministic world. I'm sure he has another theory of crim. just./punishment for a "free will" universe. In any event, even if incomplete, the incompleteness here doesn't rise to the level of a "lie" at least as the word is regularly used.

    Second is the premise of #5 above. Is there no utilty in lying in a deterministic world? Certainly the utility of lying depends on the readiness with which the lie is believed and this in turn depends on the reputation for truthfulness of the liar. Certainly if we want our whopper to be believed it is best beforehand to have acquired a reputation for truthfulness, which is, in turn, gained by saying many truthful things beforehand, or at least as many as necessary to get others accustomed to relying on our statements as opposed to observable fact alone. Is there something about how you use the phrase "deterministic world" that I am missing here?

    In any event, I enjoyed your post and recognize that the errors I list above are quite possibly the result of my misunderstanding your points in the first place.

    Reply
  17. Paul Deignan

    Hi Ray,

    The nice thing about Posner's approach is that it is utilitarian. The bad thing is that it is utilitarian.

    Unlike the calculations involved in war, a justice system based on the idea that there is no such thing as free will reduces people to cogs. We have seen the results of such systems of thought enough in this past century that I thought it was worthwhile weighing in on this post at this point.

    I'll do a bit of clarifying.

    1. Posner recognizes the possibility of free will, but he dismisses the implications of the possibility. This is like engineers dismissing the possibility that the heat shields of the Columbia were damaged and so they neglected to inspect thoroughly before reentry. The result was catastrophic. In fact, most preventable catastrophes are due to a lack of imagination, not intelligence (think 9/11). We need to consider these “impossibilities” since they are actually assumptions based on our limited knowledge. Note that this is not “looking for the invisible” or an exercise in religious faith. We are only concerned about how these possibilities may affect our deterministic world. If they may effect us in this dimension, then we ought to be able to deal with them rationally.

    2. The criminal justice system as it exists today is an absurdity as judged by Posner’s norms. I do not hold Posner accountable for this, but I infer that he is aware of this absurdity as he as invested a lot of thought and a good part of his life in dealing with the system. I am therefore assuming that he acts deliberately and intelligently in making his statements.

    3. Incompleteness is a fact of life. Have we experienced all possibilities? — even if we assume that our world is finite dimensional?

    4. I assume that Posner is well aware of the points just mentioned and I have read his related posts closely. He actually crosses the line in asserting the nonexistence of free will. This is a step further than to say that “For matters of practice, we may approximate justice by ignoring the possibility of free will”. Again, the implication of this leads to treating all beings as a means rather than as an end in themselves. The consequence is more than merely philosophical. How does Posner admit this implication? He ignores our empirical experience. Thus, by his own standards, he is spouting an untruth. Since such an untruth is rationally at odds with his premise (a lie has no value in a deterministic world) and since it is well considered and the product of his own volition (or deterministic calculations if you prefer), it is a contradiction at the end of an absurdity. However, there is a consistent explanation of this inconsistency if one allows for the possibility of free will. It is a lie meant to assuage guilt and to provide emotional cover to a deficient ego. Sorry that sounds harsh, of course to the determinist, it is all OK – just the product of my drives, so I am not so sorry actually. (I am actually doing Posner a good here by the insult in either case since this may motivate his self-awareness).

    5. Yes, exactly. And he knows that we know it if he is intelligent.

    I am assuming also that Posner’s remarks represented a straightforward assessment of his thought and that he is rationally consistent. So I have dismissed the possibility that he is being a devil’s advocate.

    Following your questions in order: Telling a willful untruth in a deterministic world may only be helpful to the individual if he can capitalize on the untruth before it is too late for others to react sufficiently to the untruth. Lying is a dissipative effect on the system as a whole so we should expect that a stable or growing system will have compensated through self-regulation in order to ensure that lying does not become the absolute norm. (This is the business that Posner is in).

    The idea of free will is not based on some hidden knowledge inaccessible to the general public. Posner does not assert that he is somehow of superior status as the Egyptian Pharaohs of old. We can all judge the truthfulness of his assertions ourselves. Indeed, Posner has been very public here so it is not rational to believe that has much of a hidden agenda. Unlike Chomsky, I think Posner is actually intelligent in the wide sense of the word. Again, if I am wrong, I am without fault here since I am simply operating along the same lines as Posner claims himself. I estimate that gaining a reputation as a source of error does far greater and more direct harm to such an individual as Posner by any standard of utilitarian calculus to be the product of a deliberate calculation so the utility of the lie is lacking in this particular instance. As a general rule to the system as a whole, lying is counterproductive (although individuals may profitably lie in limited situations as you suggest – this doesn’t appear to be such a case).

    Since telling an untruth is detrimental by the utilitarian calculus of Posner, it is a contradiction to his argument. However, it does support the counterargument as being the product of free will. If there truly was no such thing as free will, we would be free to admit the possibility that we simply don’t know. There are many things we don’t know or cannot verify one way or the other. Why deny the possibility of an irrelevancy? This is the absurdity of Posner’s argument and the contradiction.

    Thanks for your criticisms.

    Reply
  18. John Fischer

    I think Quiine's view, as cited by Judge Posner, is unduly simplistic. The view, evidently, is that as long as one's choice flows from one's motivational states, one is free, even if those motivational states are "rigidly determined". But what if those states are implanted, without one's consent, through hypnosis, brainwashing, or even direct stimulation of the brain (ala The Manchurian Candidate?) These are, as Susan Wolf has put it, "stock" examples of the lack of free will and the lack of moral responsibility.

    I am a "semicompatibilist"; that is, I hold that causal determinism rules out the sort of freedom that involves "freedom to choose and do otherwise," or alternative possibilities. But I believe that causal determinism is compatible with moral responsibiilty; moral responsibility is a matter of the way a piece of behavior is produced, and certain kinds of causal determiniation (but not all) are compatible with moral responsibility.

    Reply
  19. John Fischer

    I think Quiine's view, as cited by Judge Posner, is unduly simplistic. The view, evidently, is that as long as one's choice flows from one's motivational states, one is free, even if those motivational states are "rigidly determined". But what if those states are implanted, without one's consent, through hypnosis, brainwashing, or even direct stimulation of the brain (ala The Manchurian Candidate?) These are, as Susan Wolf has put it, "stock" examples of the lack of free will and the lack of moral responsibility.

    I am a "semicompatibilist"; that is, I hold that causal determinism rules out the sort of freedom that involves "freedom to choose and do otherwise," or alternative possibilities. But I believe that causal determinism is compatible with moral responsibiilty; moral responsibility is a matter of the way a piece of behavior is produced, and certain kinds of causal determiniation (but not all) are compatible with moral responsibility.

    Reply
  20. Patrick

    What makes you think that you can know from experience that you have free will? What part of your experience of performing some action is the part that lets you know 'Ah, this was freely done'? To have free will is for it to be the case that some of your actions are not causally determined. To know that you have free will is to know that there is no sufficient cause for you behavior. What part of your experience allows you to know that there was no sufficient cause for your behavior? At least when I do things, I am aware of the situation, my thoughts and feelings about the situation, my weighing the options, my coming to a decision and my moving some part of my body to do something or other. None of this counts as experiencing my free will, and I wonder what further component you think does the job?

    The point is that the fact that we have free will is not the kind of thing we could know experientially. We can know that we make decisions, but that is not the same thing as knowing we have free will. To know that you have free will would probably amount to knowing the exact state of your brain prior to making a decision and knowing that your brain being as it was is not sufficient for explaining your action (you would need to know more than this, since lack of determination could be a sign of simple randomness, not free will). How on earth could you know that from experience?

    And the reason to deny something that is irrelevant is the commitment to believe only what we experience directly and what is necessary to explain that experience. This is something like Occam's Razor. I don't agree with that principle of ontological commitment (as far as I can tell people like Quine, Mackie, and Harman have accepted it), but it is not in the least contradictory or absurd.

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  21. Paul Deignan

    Let's put the shoe on the other foot. The idea behind the claim of an absence of free will is that one might ascribe a motive to some accumulated complex states of the individual and say, "Aha! He did this or that for this or that reason."

    Phooey! That is all incomputable speculation. One can always cook up a "reason" for this or that in hindsight. Can you do it in foresight?

    If this claim holds, just as for any deterministic system, it should be 100% certain that 100% of the actions of the individual are predictable with 100% confidence for 100% of his lifespan from conception (and before). Of course, the advocates of this notion will say, "Yes we can do that, it is just that it is a complex problem beyond our ability to compute at this time." Guess what? There are algebraic (yes algebraic) problems that are absolutely information-theoretically unknowable by deterministic logic (see Chaitan's work based on Gödel http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS/chaitin/georgia.html ).

    If the claimant cannot account for the unpredictability of an algebraic system, what would lead one to believe that there is the slightest truth to the claim that he can predict individual human behavior?

    In short, the claim is unproven rubbish akin to the conspiracy theories of Chomsky. It's primary raison d'être is to absolve the claimant of moral responsibility. Frankly, it boggles my mind that some take this seriously at all.

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  22. Paul Deignan

    Patrick,

    It is possible to make a positive case for free will by brute analysis.

    Measure the information capacity of the brain — you will come to an integer, a very large integer that represents the number of possible states of the brain. Translate that integer into an entropic measure of complexity. Now, take that individual from that point on (assuming here that brain cells die and do not sprout — I'm not a neuroscientist, so I am just sketching the exercise), measure the complexity of the individual's actions that are willful and deliberate. (You could run him through a number picking test). At the point in time where he picks a number sequence, the entropy of which is larger than the complexity of the brain, voila!

    Actually, anyone can start this exercise themselves — talk to you later about your results 🙂

    P.S. Alternatively, you can adopt a macroscopic viewpoint — this is the method I prefer since time is precious.

    P.P.S. Or on the other hand, you could say to yourself and others, "I am!" (No feeling "I am", only thinking — and you have to mean it.)

    Reply
  23. Patrick

    Perhaps that is because you do not understand what its supporters are committed to.

    1. The view that people are not in fact responsible for their actions is an extremely minority view. The only person of note that I can think of who holds this view (in philosophy) is Derk Pereboom. The view that determinism holds on the macro-level is probably a majority position, so your claim 'It's primary raison d'etre is to absolved the claimant of moral responsibility,' is simply false. Most people who publish on this accept that determinism does not compromise moral responsibility.

    2. I don't know what you are talking about when you talk about 'deterministic logic'. I am tempted to think that you have invented this term so as to draw a tighter connection between your points about free will and Godel. Anyway, in none of the logic classes I have taken in the undergraduate or graduate level have we learned about deterministic logic. In fact it looks as though you are suffering from a misconception of what philosophers are talking about when they talk about this. Godel's proofs are about mathematics and logic; they are about the incompleteness of deductive systems. Determinism is not a thesis about the completeness or incompleteness of deductive systems. It is not even a thesis about the completeness of scientific theories. It is a thesis about causation, it entails nothing about what we are able to predict. (though admittedly some have tried to cash out the meaning of the thesis in terms of complete predictability. I have always taken this as a hueristic device, not an actual commitment). The fact that arithmetic is incomplete is not relevant to the truth or falsity of determinism. I begin to think that we are using terminology differently (another example is your use of the term 'dimension' which seemed so much nonsense to me, though perhaps you are simply using the term diferently than me) and so simply speaking past one another.

    3. In the hopes that some communication can take place I will present my reasons for accepting determinism. It simply seems to me that the only way to make action intelligible is to refer to the reasons that one had for them, and they only way for a mental state to count as a reason is for it to be the cause of the action. In addition I think that causation (on the macro level) entails necessitation. So even though determinism is likely false generally (small enough stuff doesn't behave deterministically) I think that it holds on the psychological level. None of those claims commits me to the insane claim that I should be able, even in principle to predict with 100% accuracy all human behavior. You need to have a very good argument to support your claim that I must accept that. I need not come up with a reason in foresight, explanation is backward looking. The reason I want to have actions explicable is that I think actions are intentional, to perform an action you must do so intentionally, and a way (perhaps the only way) to show that action is intelligible is to give the reason a person had in doing it. Importantly, the reason why I accept determinism is not to absolve people of responsibility, but to get what I need to ascribe responsibility to them. I cannot see holding people responsible for movements of their body that are not inentional, and so I want determinism to safeguard that.

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  24. Patrick

    Now I am sure we are speaking different dialects. I do not understand how you are using some jargon here. Doubtless some of it is that you study stuff that I dont and so use discipline specific terminology that I haven't learned. I will ask you to cut that out, as I have tried to cut out the more technical stuff in the philosophical debate about free will. I may need to do a better job of de-jargoning my stuff too. If so let me know.

    Specifically I do not understand:

    measure the complexity of the individual's actions that are willful and deliberate.

    How does one measure this?

    The best stab I can make at understanding what you are saying is that you think you can prove that the complexity of the brain is insufficient to account for the variety of human action. If this is so then please continue. (i have read that for each person there are more possible brain states than there are estimated stars in the universe, so I find your point hard to believe, even apart from being skeptical about what metric you could use to measure the deliberateness of human action.)

    Reply
  25. Paul Deignan

    Patrick,

    1. Read "responsible" in the context as "culpable". Ethics are based on free will. Otherwise why study the subject?

    2. "Deterministic logic" is a bit redundant. I hope you get the point of the redundancy. Now, take a step further into the implication. The individual is a system. As per the second post, complexity cannot be generated beyond the complexity of the generator. So, here I am pointing a finger at Posner and saying, "You say this? How do you know? Are you even able to say this and know that it is true? You cannot." This point is in line with my prior posts. This is to say that the individual cannot say for certain that he is deterministic — it is just a simple matter of an entropy inequality (if you assume determinism).

    Here is a better reference to Chaitin's work on this issue: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS/chaitin/conversations.html

    There may be something more concise at his homepage: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS/chaitin/

    3. Note that you are basing your willful decision to accept an unproven claim on pure speculation that you cannot judge. This is a leap of faith worthy of a monk (with free will). To even come close to being persuasive, you need to be able to predict your actions ahead of time — not generate "reasons" for them post facto. That proves nothing (but it may make you feel good).

    If you believe in determinism, you are saying that the human is fundamentally isomorphic to the internal combustion engines I use as examples in my studies of system identification. You are out of the realm of philosophy and into the realm of engineering. You will need to pick up on the engineering jargon since we are the experts in this area. Sorry, I have the same problems with mathematicians 😉

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  26. Paul Deignan

    Correction: One cannot 'encode' complexity greater than the complexity of the 'encoder'.

    Reply
  27. Patrick

    you are at least speaking clearer.

    1. Some have said this. Kant said something like this, that without freedom there could be no moral law. Of course plenty of people who are equally worthy of attention (Mill and Aristotle) showed no signs at all of requiring that free will (again in the libertarian sense of the term, in which it is incompatible with determinism) hold of an individual for ethics to be worthwhile. Mill as I recall explicitly rejected the kind of free will you are requiring. By simply assuming that you must reject determinism in order to do ethics you are simply ignoring a huge issue in ethical theory, and evincing an ignorance of the feild of philosophical ethics. There are quite a few people (and at least a few years ago they were the majority) who think that determinism is compatible with moral responsibility. There are even some people who think that you don't need people to be morally responsible to do ethics, though I do not agree with them. Alot of smart people do work in this area (one of them, John Fischer, has posted on this site) and it would do to read their work and not simply expound on areas where you don't seem to spend alot of time. I will also take a breif stab at 'the point' of doing ethics if you accept determinism. Determinism does not in the least undermine the grounds for making character judgments. If you cash honesty out as the tendency to speak the truth, then people can be honest even if determinism is true. We can then try to figure out under what conditions it is ok to not manifest honesty, if there are any such conditions. This can be used as a guide to conduct.

    2. 'Deterministic logic' is not redundant. It makes me suspect that you are not familiar with philosophical logic or with the free will/determinism debate that you think it is. The thesis of determinism is, essentially, the view that for any apparent set of possible events only one is possible, given the past and the natural laws. This is a thesis about how physical objects relate causally to one another. Logic is the study of the relations of inference, implication, entailment, etc. etc. between propositions. They don't have much to do with one another. Now there are many kinds of logic, (classical, modal, intuitionistic, fuzzy, two-valued, three-valued, etc.) and determnistic isn't one of them. The name is inapt.

    3. 'Note that you are basing your willful decision to accept an unproven claim on pure speculation that you cannot judge. This is a leap of faith worthy of a monk (with free will). To even come close to being persuasive, you need to be able to predict your actions ahead of time — not generate "reasons" for them post facto. That proves nothing (but it may make you feel good).'

    Here again you simply assert what you need to argue for. Why must I be able to predict actions if I am to hold to the thesis of determinism? It doesn't say anything about my ability or the ability of any other human being to predict actions. I hold to it because I think it gives the most plausible account of what is going on in human agency. I have given my reasons:

    (1) For some behavior to count as an action it must be intentional.

    (2) An action's being intentional consists in the agent having reasons which explain her acting in the way she did.

    (3) For a reason to explain an action, it must be a cause of the action.

    (4) Reasons are things like desires and beliefs, and our having them can be explained causaully (by things like upbrining, education, etc.)

    (5) If X causes Y, then given X, Y must occur.

    Of my reasons (3) is the most controversial, and if you want to have an argument rather than throwing around unargued for assertions in an arrogant way, then I suggest you attack it.

    Now I do not take myself to have proven that determinism must hold for us to be responsible. Perhaps you think that it is bad to beleive anything you don't have a deductive proof for. I would ask you then what proof you have that the worst natural disaster in our lifetime just happened in the Indian Ocean. I think you have good reason to beleive that such happened, but you don't have a deductive proof. I think that you are dealing with an absurdly high standard of evidence, and aren't being honest with yourself if you think you really accept it and live by it. It is immature to throw around 'But you haven't proved that'. Of course I haven't. Most things are too messy to admit of strict proof. So you get by with better and worse reasons to beleive something.

    And no, accepting determinism does not mean I think that humans are fundamentally like engines. I think that human beings are conscious and engines are not. I think that human beings think about objects, and engines do not. I think that human beings are appropriate objects of blame and praise and that engines are not. I think there are a lot of differences. Instead of simply saying that I must believe something why don't you argue for it.

    The proposition that free will is a problem of engineering and not philosophy is simply false. I refrained from telling you to speak my jargon out of courtesy, because you could not be expected to know the jargon. It is really audacious to say that to speak intelligently about free will I must know engineering jargon. I wonder how many classes in free will and moral responsibility you have had in engineering. I have taken several myself, though all the class descriptions included PHIL.

    The moral of this story? The only expert on this issue who has posted on this thread is Dr. Fischer. He is the only one who deserves the deference on this issue on either matters of fact or on jargon. If you want to debate, argue. Now I understand that we have more important things to do than to write treatises on Dr. Leiter's site, and so I know you cannot exhaustively enumerate the reasons to beleive each and every little thing that you say. I am not asking that. But you are debating the topic of free will, and the things you are assuming as true are the things that normally stand as conclusions of arguments in papers and books about free will. I don't think I am being too demanding in asking you to go a little more in depth than you have. That said, if you are not interested in doing that, or if you simply don't have any arguments and are expressing a conviction on the subject, fine. There are many issues on which I do not know enough to do more than express my convictions on the issue (global warming is an example. my reasons for believing it is happening and being caused by industry are very shallow relative to the debate, small though it is, as there hasn't been a paper in ten years to challenge global warming http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686 nonetheless I feel that those who disagree are doing so not because of science but because of money, even though I cannot prove that at all.) I dont feel that bothered by my lack of knowledge here. It is not my specialty and so I dont think I ought to be expected to know that much. That said I am not in the habit of debating chemists and meteorologists on the subject, and demanding that they start speaking philosophically to me.

    Reply
  28. Paul Deignan

    Patrick,

    Is John Fischer really smart or is he just operating on his environment? If he is not creating new information, then why should a person with free will be concerned with what he says? For the determinist, sub sole nihil novi est. There is no "thinking", just operating: chug, chug, chug ,chug, chug — choo choo.

    Remember, I can prove to myself to my own satisfaction that I have free will. I just assert my existence. This is sufficient. However, showing that something (or someone) else is deterministic (or not) is another matter. Aside from an exercise in information theory, it is hard to care less since the best policy is already to assume free will and hence moral culpability (thinking as an engineer here — not the author of philisophical trestise).

    Now, if I want you to give me a pass on moral culpability based on the claim of determinism, you would be a fool indeed as there is no way that I could prove determinism to you unless you were some sort of higher being and in which case you would know that I could not prove it already (dimensionality reduction). So then again, what would be the point? After all, the point of free will is to have a point.

    Remember, if you apply reductio ad absurdum to yourself, you have done it freely. Thus the contradiction and thus my disagreement with Posner. QED

    Reply
  29. Patrick

    'I am'. The only way your uttering this could disprove determinism is if this utterance could not be caused. No reason to think that.

    Listen, I am reasonably sure you are probably good in your feild. To put it unkindly though, you simply don't know anything about this topic. You have a lot to learn and a lot of cloudy confused thinking to overcome. I have never been the best person to deal with recalcitrant students, so I will let you either do the reading and work yourself, or leave you to stew in your ignorance. In a better world or even with a better me I would take the time to explain to you the meanings of the terms you are using, as they are used, and have always been used, by philosophers when they talk about free will (the people who have been dealing with this issue, almost exclusively, since it became relevant with Lucretius) but I no longer care.

    Good books to read on this subject are:

    Peter Van Inwagen's 'An Essay on Free Will'
    Gary Watson's two Oxford companions called 'Free Will'
    Robert Nozick's section on this in his 'Philosophical Explanations'
    Susan Wolf's 'Freedom Within Reason'
    The books Dr. Fischer has already mentioned.

    The Watson anthologies have great bibliographies, and from there you can familarize yourself with the subject. Good luck to you.

    Reply
  30. Paul Deignan

    Patrick,

    Think about determinism. If you are deterministic, actually you are not doing anything more than processing. There is an inequality in information theory known as the data processing inequality (see Cover and Thomas). It states that a processor cannot create more information though any encoding scheme than what he is processing on. Simple.

    So, in a deterministic world, since information is not generated by humans, it must come from somewhere else. It could simply be that the entropy of the universe is increasing and so we have an illusion of learning.

    Now consider that the deterministic world is a closed system in three spatial and one temporal dimension — at least the deterministic world as we understand it for this argument. Chaitan proves that we cannot encode (understand) even one of the most straightforward types of logical constructions — an algebraic system. Our ability to encode the information at hand using this system is limited and incomplete. Algebraic systems certainly are an element of our deterministic world since they are a conception of a hypothetical deterministic unit — us. But we know that there is information even in this closed system that is unknowable. The implication of this is that our ability to prove things in this world is absolutely limited. That means that the type of argument you are pursuing is dead end. It will prove nothing — just give the illusion of knowledge.

    The test of this that these determinists like to ignore is the application of their theory to predicting the future. If they can't do it beyond the limits of the data processing inequality, then they are snake oil selling frauds and should be considered as such.

    The trouble, Patrick, is that you do not have the intellectual tools you need to prove what you are setting out to prove. Your system of thought is insufficient for the problem at hand — you should know this if you believe that you are a deterministic information processing unit. Perhaps you should take some courses in math and information theory this next semester.

    Reply
  31. Patrick

    Look in your email soon for the corrections on the mistakes you are making. I do not have the maturity to allow you to have the last word it seems, and so I will try, again to tell you what is going on. But there is no reason to increase the clutter on Lieter's board with my simply telling you what all sides on this debate agree one, and what the meanings of the words you are using are.

    Reply
  32. Paul Deignan

    Patrick,

    I know I haven't been very tidy on some points — you know, it is possible to make even such discussions boring by being too axiomatic. I think the sketches, if thoughtfully read, will enlighten those with sufficient imagination to visualize the points.

    In particular, I have not strapped down the point on incompleteness. It refers to previous posts where I make the point that at best the determinist can say is, "There is a possibility of free will, but I can't see any evidence for it". You see, if he could completely describe his finite dimensional experience, he could argue from the contrapositive. However, even that method is not available here.

    The wheels started to fall off your argument several posts back when I made the point that philosophy may not be the proper tool to prove what you are attempting to prove. Imagine yourself as a point in 3D moving about space. You can look backward and you can direct your search forward. If you have a long memory and if you are smart, you can traverse what seems like all the interesting points in 3-space, encode that information and use it to describe your journey. However you will not be able to encode all of 3 space. That's a problem since if you can't, you cannot then say that as you pass over a point from another direction than as you have before, that you have sufficient memory of your past journeys to establish some sort of a local bijection in a time dimensional expanded 3 space. If you can't establish a local bijection, then there is the possibility that your trajectory is really a projection of a 4space (or better) i.e. that there is a dimension of your existence under your control that you cannot directly appreciate.

    Anyway, it turns out that this is a dimensionality problem very much akin to my successes in system identification that should be of interest to you. Since we do not presuppose a model, the best description of the dependency (your inputs to your directed search), is through an information-theoretic measure. Naturally, you are a bit more complex than an engine, but if you are a deterministic unit with a finite number of states (the brain states are finite — there is also a finite length genetic code), then the same analysis is applicable. At least the principles of the analysis hold (even I believe for infinite dimension).

    Note that you began to rely on appeals to authority lately. This is kind of funny to me since a person that might actually be deterministic (I cannot really prove that you are not a computer — and I haven't tried), is vastly subordinate to a person with free will. (I can perceive the extradimensionality of your trajectory that you cannot. If I measured you with care, I could predict better than you your future — I would be a god to you).

    BTW, this has been a neat discussion — one that should be of interest to many philosophy student is someone took the time to properly right up the dialogue and back up the arguments. So please go ahead an post any corrections or criticism here. I will give you the last word. 🙂

    Reply
  33. Paul Deignan

    I'll add this thought for those that read this site:

    Liberalism depends on free will as fascism relies on subordination.

    No real liberal argues for determinism. Without free will we are not intrinsically equals — we are different by some measureable aspect. Governments may then discriminate based on this measure and they have done so in the past leading to millions of deaths in our century.

    Honest determinists admit that they cannot prove their claim. Here the claim is not without consequences. It is no idle matter of philosophy. We have even here an example of a judge might do in promulgating judicial policy. Think of the implications …..

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