Experimental philosophy of Freedom...

Free Will....

Philosophy : The Science of Free Will

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Zizek on Free Will

Brad Delong nails it....

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Appeal to "Undecidability" as Last Gasp

Friedman's argument against social democracy was that it would not do the job--that you would lose a lot of economic efficiency and some political liberty and in return get no equalization of economic power because the government would redistribute income and wealth the wrong way, and the beneficiaries would be the strong political claimants to governmental largess who would not be those with strong claims to more opportunity.

By the time you have resorted to arguing that "human existence in the shadow of a nanny state doesn't conduce to 'Aristotelian happiness'... because it strips human beings of the deeper sorts of agency and responsibility that ought to be involved in a life well lived..." you have lost the argument completely. And I have not even raised the point that Aristotle thought that Aristotelian happiness was possible only if you yourself owned lots of slaves:

Aristotle:

There is in some cases a marked distinction between the two classes, rendering it expedient and right for the one to be slaves and the others to be masters.... The master is not called a master because he has science, but because he is of a certain character.... [T]here may be a science for the master and science for the slave. The science of the slave would be such as the man of Syracuse taught who made money by instructing slaves in their ordinary duties.... But all such branches of knowledge are servile. There is likewise a science of the master... not anything great or wonderful; for the master need only know how to order that which the slave must know how to execute. Hence those who are in a position which places them above toil have stewars who attend to their households while they occupy themselves with philosophy or with politics...

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Features: 'Philosophy’s great experiment' by David Edmonds | Prospect Magazine March 2009 issue 156

Features: 'Philosophy’s great experiment' by David Edmonds

Situations have a bigger influence on how we behave than we think they do. Perhaps, then, rather than worrying so much about character building in an Aristotelian vein we should be making people more aware of how easily apparently irrelevant factors can shape what we do. As Appiah asks: “Would you rather have people be helpful or not? It turns out that having little nice things happen to them is a much better way of making them helpful than spending a huge amount of energy on improving their characters.”

Is this all a storm in a common room? The repercussions of the experiments cannot be so easily dismissed. Think of the impact on political liberalism. At the heart of liberalism is the idea that an educated adult is and should be capable of choosing how he or she lives. But if, for example, situations affect us more than the reasons we give for our actions, and we use those reasons to rationalise them retrospectively, this assumption may need revision. This branch of x-phi might be nudging us towards Nietzsche’s view that what we take to be the inexorable conclusions of clear rational thought are nothing but reformulations of our innermost desires—disguised as the products of logic. We are not as in control of our thoughts as we thought. Nietzsche fully grasped how profoundly unsettling this notion was.

Free will! Can I have one? | Psychology Today Blogs

Free will! Can I have one? | Psychology Today Blogs

The Free Will debate is something that I have pondered from a very early age. I truly believe that the Free Will question answers a lot of confusions on the part of people regarding political questions.

The more we learn about what really causes us to tick, the better we can structure our society, laws, and political systems--with the goal being to allow individuals to freely flourish.

I personally believe free-will is an illusion, which survived as a useful mechanism for our ancestors to flourish, those having such a processing tool were better able to reproduce and multiply over those who lacked it.

I think that more effort to look into why this illusions and/or brain processing function was useful to our ancestors will help us better understand our biological system.

I think free-will is popular because it allows us to justify our own actions and condemn those whom we disagree with. Even saying free will is popular will send your mind in two different directions 1) if we lack free will to say it is popular would be a mistake 2)does someone stop justifying their own actions and condemning others whom they disagree with when they "say" they don't have free will anymore?

My thoughts on 1...
This is a great example of the crux of most philosophical problems i.e. confusions of language. I can count 5 problems that are created by carelessness and/or double meanings of some of the words in

if we lack free will to say it is popular would be a mistake

So one big problem is simply that we run so haphazardly with words.
To the questions of 2...
No... justification and condemnation don't stop. Or at least the things that what we perceive those words to mean do not. But to quickly argue that this disproves those who argue against free will would be sloppy, and miss the point completely. The question at hand is what exists and why. We have to differentiate between the words we use to describe things and the things in themselves.

So the question of free will is split into two:
1. What biological processes exist (either we do or don't... or somewhere in between)
2. What words/descriptions are best used to resolve question 1

Finally I think most of the "debates" I end up having with people aren't about 1... and I hardly ever get people to dealing with the gravity of question 2; most of the debate which ends up happening is on questions of ethics. People sound terrified by the idea that they lack the "freedom" to choose of their own volition and want to dig into ethical questions to prove how outlandish it would be to lack free-will. Ethics are are different issue from whether free will exists, though ethics is the core of what drives me to want to apply our findings on the question of free will to politics.

Another asymmetry is that determinism excludes the possibility of free will, whereas free will does not fully negate determinism. There is supposed to be a privileged domain in which the will is free. But how did this precious free zone open up? How did it emerge from an otherwise deterministic universe? And what are its boundaries? The self-congratulatory answer is that free will is uniquely human. Upon reflection, however, we are "determined" to realize that the boundaries are fuzzy. The behaviors of infants, senile or autistic humans show clear evidence of will, but that will does not appear to be free in the folk psychological sense. There is little reasoning, deliberation, or rationality.

I think that Baumeister's approach to the boundary problem lies in the role he accords perceptions of responsibility. This is his argument number three. The proposition is that if people have free will, then they are personally responsible for their actions. I do not argue with this proposition, but with its inverse. The fact that people hold humans (mostly others) to be responsible does not mean that there is free will; it does not even mean that they think there is free will. In fact, people hold others responsible even if they agree that the behaviors in question (e.g., heinous crimes) are determined by causes outside the person (Nichols & Knobe, 2007). If the allocation of rewards and punishments is an indication of perceived responsibility, people treat many animals as if they think these animals have free will. A similar argument can be made for power. Finding that many people pursue "the right to make decisions that may affect others" (Baumeister, p. 16) says nothing about the presumed freedom of those decisions. Many non-human animals are concerned about power, rank, and status, and they struggle to get it. Yet, they are widely regarded as automatons.

update:
Here is the post from Garden of Forking Paths that sent me to this piece. Go read the comments thread. That dialogue is exactly one thing that blogs and the Internet are great for... I love fruitful debate. And this thread digs a lot more in-depth into the free-will debate, hitting far more than my own post does...

the end of economics as we know it...

The tendencies of irrational behavior

incompatibilism...

Is the burden of proof on incompatibilists?
A few people have responded to my 2007 PPR paper, “Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?” co-authored with Stephen Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer, and Jason Turner. But most of the responses have focused on the experimental results that suggested incompatibilism is not as intuitive to non-philosophers as incompatibilists have claimed. While I (unsurprisingly) think these results are illuminating, I also think that the more interesting parts of that paper came before and after the discussion of the experiments themselves. And I don’t think anyone has responded to the arguments we offer in those parts--perhaps illustrating that I’m wrong about those arguments being interesting, but I’ll be charitable and hope that it’s because those arguments were drowned by the flood of excitement about the experiments. ;-}

In any case, Shaun Nichols asked me recently if anyone had a response to our (interrelated) arguments that the burden of proof should be on incompatibilists (rather than compatiblists) and that there is little reason to accept libertarians’ more demanding conditions for free will unless they are motivated by widespread intuitions supporting them. I am hoping some of you might offer food for thought about these arguments. Below I have cut from pp. 30-33 of the article to summarize some of these arguments. I would love to hear where people think we went wrong (or right).

[After showing that incompatibilists have tended to claim their view is commonsensical and compatibilism is counterintuitive and then explaining why we think ordinary intuitions matter to the free will debate, we say…]

It is especially important for incompatibilists that their view is supported by ordinary intuitions for the following three reasons. First, incompatibilism about any two concepts is not the default view. As William Lycan explains, “A theorist who maintains of something that is not obviously impossible that nonetheless that thing is impossible owes us an argument” (2003: 109). Either determinism obviously precludes free will or those who maintain that it does should offer an explanation as to why it does. The philosophical conception of determinism—i.e., that the laws of nature and state of the universe at one time entail the state of the universe at later times—has no obvious conceptual or logical bearing on human freedom and responsibility. So, by claiming that determinism necessarily precludes the existence of free will, incompatibilists thereby assume the argumentative burden.[note 1]

Second, the arguments that incompatibilists accordingly provide to explain why determinism necessarily precludes free will require conceptions of free will that are more metaphysically demanding than compatibilist alternatives. These libertarian conceptions demand more of the world in order for free will to exist: at a minimum, indeterministic event-causal processes at the right place in the human agent, and often, additionally, agent causation. To point out that incompatibilist theories are metaphysically demanding is not to suggest that they are thereby less likely to be true. Rather, it is simply to say that these theories require more motivation than less metaphysically demanding ones.

Consider an example. Suppose two philosophers—Hal and Dave—are debating what it takes for something to be an action. Hal claims that actions are events caused (in the right sort of way) by beliefs and desires. Dave agrees, but adds the further condition that the token beliefs and desires that cause an action cannot be identical to anything physical. Now Dave, by adding this condition, does not thereby commit himself to the claim that token beliefs and desires are not physical. But he does commit himself to the conditional claim that token beliefs and desires are not physical if there are any actions. On our view, if T1 and T2 are both theories of x, then to say that T1 is more metaphysically demanding than T2 is to say that T1 requires more metaphysical theses to be true than T2 does in order for there to be any x’s. So, Dave’s theory is more metaphysically demanding than Hal’s because it requires more metaphysical theses to be true in order for there to be any actions. Likewise, incompatibilists—whether libertarians or skeptics—have more metaphysically demanding theories than compatibilists since they say that special kinds of causation (indeterministic or agent-causation) must obtain if there are any free actions.[note 2]

Since incompatibilist theories of free will say the existence of free will is incompatible with determinism, these theories, other things being equal, will be harder to motivate than compatibilist theories, which do not require the existence of extra metaphysical processes, such as indeterminism or agent causation, in order for free actions to be possible. As we’ve seen, many incompatibilists have attempted to motivate their metaphysically demanding theories, at least in part, by suggesting that other things are not equal, because our ordinary intuitions support incompatibilist views. This is not to say that incompatibilists must appeal to such intuitions in order to motivate their demanding theories (see §§4.2-4.3 below). Nonetheless, it is certainly unclear why, without wide-scale intuitive support for incompatibilism, the argumentative burden would be on compatibilists, as suggested by Ekstrom when she claims that the compatibilist “needs a positive argument in favor of the compatibility thesis” (2000: 57) and by Kane above [“Ordinary persons have to be talked out of this natural incompatibilism by the clever arguments of philosophers” (1999: 217).]

Finally, if it were shown that people have intuitions that in fact support incompatibilism, it would still be open to foes of incompatibilism to argue that, relative to ordinary conceptions of freedom and responsibility, their view is a benign revision towards a more metaphysically tenable theory.[note 3] Incompatibilists, on the other hand, do not seem to have this move available to them in the event that their view is inconsistent with pre-philosophical intuitions. After all, it is difficult to see why philosophers should revise the concept of free will to make it more metaphysically demanding than required by ordinary intuitions (see §4.3).[note 4] So, if incompatibilism is not the intuitive view, or if no premises that support incompatibilist conclusions are particularly intuitive, then there seems to be little motivation for advancing an incompatibilist theory of free will.

FOOTNOTES

[1] See Warfield (2000) for an explanation of why the proper incompatibilist view is not the contingent claim, “If determinism is true then there is no freedom,” but the stronger claim, “Necessarily, if determinism is true then there is no freedom” (169). See also Chalmers (1996) who writes, “In general, a certain burden of proof lies on those who claim that a certain description is logically impossible…. If no reasonable analysis of the terms in question points towards a contradiction, or even makes the existence of a contradiction plausible, then there is a natural assumption in favor of logical possibility” (96).

[2] Even though hard determinists or skeptics about free will are not committed to the existence of libertarian free will, they are committed to the libertarian conception of free will since their arguments require this conception to reach the conclusion that free will does not (or could not) exist. Hence, skeptics, like libertarians, require motivation for the accuracy of this conception, and they often do so by suggesting that incompatibilism is the commonsensical or intuitive view (see, for instance, Strawson 1986 and Smilansky 2003).

[3] See Vargas (forthcoming). Compatibilists may also be better situated to offer error theories to explain why people sometimes express incompatibilist intuitions even though this need not commit them to incompatibilist theories. See, for instance, Velleman (2000) and Graham and Horgan (1998).

[4] There is a fourth reason that some incompatibilists should want their view to be intuitive to ordinary people. Peter Strawson (1962) offered a compatibilist argument to the effect that we cannot and should not attempt to provide metaphysical justifications for our practices of moral responsibility (e.g., praise and blame), which are grounded in reactive attitudes such as indignation and gratitude. He suggested such practices are subject to justifications and revisions based only on considerations internal to the relevant practices and attitudes, but not on considerations external to the practice, including, in his view, determinism. But incompatibilists, notably Galen Strawson, have responded to this argument by suggesting that the question of determinism is not external to our considerations of moral responsibility (see also Pereboom 2001). That is, they claim that our reactive attitudes themselves are sensitive to whether human actions are deterministically caused. As Galen Strawson puts it, the fact that “the basic incompatibilist intuition that determinism is incompatible with freedom … has such power for us is as much a natural fact about cogitative beings like ourselves as is the fact of our quite unreflective commitment to the reactive attitudes. What is more, the roots of the incompatibilist intuition lie deep in the very reactive attitudes that are invoked in order to undercut it. The reactive attitudes enshrine the incompatibilist intuition” (1986: 88). If it turned out that this claim is false—that most people’s reactive attitudes are not in fact sensitive to considerations of determinism—then this particular incompatibilist response to the elder Strawson’s argument would fail. While there are other responses to Peter Strawson’s views, we interpret some of the claims that incompatibilism is intuitive as attempts to shore up this response that our ordinary reactive attitudes and attributions of moral responsibility are sensitive to determinism. And we accordingly view any evidence to the contrary as strengthening Peter Strawson’s suggestion that determinism is irrelevant to debates about freedom and responsibility and, accordingly, as weakening incompatibilism.

free will blogging...

TED HONDERICH: DETERMINISM AS TRUE, COMPATIBILISM AND INCOMPATIBILISM AS BOTH FALSE, AND THE REAL PROBLEM

from the THE DETERMINISM AND FREEDOM PHILOSOPHY WEBSITE

or go straight to the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Free Will