Core Concepts
Actualism Adequate Determinism Agent-Causality Alternative Possibilities Causa Sui Causal Closure Causalism Causality Certainty Chance Chance Not Direct Cause Chaos Theory The Cogito Model Compatibilism Complexity Comprehensive Compatibilism Conceptual Analysis Contingency Control Could Do Otherwise Creativity Default Responsibility De-liberation Determination Determination Fallacy Determinism Disambiguation Double Effect Either Way Enlightenment Emergent Determinism Epistemic Freedom Ethical Fallacy Experimental Philosophy Extreme Libertarianism Event Has Many Causes Frankfurt Cases Free Choice Freedom of Action "Free Will" Free Will Axiom Free Will in Antiquity Free Will Mechanisms Free Will Requirements Free Will Theorem Future Contingency Hard Incompatibilism Idea of Freedom Illusion of Determinism Illusionism Impossibilism Incompatibilism Indeterminacy Indeterminism Infinities Laplace's Demon Libertarianism Liberty of Indifference Libet Experiments Luck Master Argument Modest Libertarianism Moral Necessity Moral Responsibility Moral Sentiments Mysteries Naturalism Necessity Noise Non-Causality Nonlocality Origination Paradigm Case Possibilism Possibilities Pre-determinism Predictability Probability Pseudo-Problem Random When?/Where? Rational Fallacy Reason Refutations Replay Responsibility Same Circumstances Scandal Science Advance Fallacy Second Thoughts Self-Determination Semicompatibilism Separability Soft Causality Special Relativity Standard Argument Supercompatibilism Superdeterminism Taxonomy Temporal Sequence Tertium Quid Torn Decision Two-Stage Models Ultimate Responsibility Uncertainty Up To Us Voluntarism What If Dennett and Kane Did Otherwise? Philosophers Mortimer Adler Rogers Albritton Alexander of Aphrodisias Samuel Alexander William Alston Anaximander G.E.M.Anscombe Anselm Louise Antony Thomas Aquinas Aristotle David Armstrong Harald Atmanspacher Robert Audi Augustine J.L.Austin A.J.Ayer Alexander Bain Mark Balaguer Jeffrey Barrett William Barrett William Belsham Henri Bergson George Berkeley Isaiah Berlin Richard J. Bernstein Bernard Berofsky Robert Bishop Max Black Susanne Bobzien Emil du Bois-Reymond Hilary Bok Laurence BonJour George Boole Émile Boutroux F.H.Bradley C.D.Broad Michael Burke Lawrence Cahoone C.A.Campbell Joseph Keim Campbell Rudolf Carnap Carneades Ernst Cassirer David Chalmers Roderick Chisholm Chrysippus Cicero Randolph Clarke Samuel Clarke Anthony Collins Antonella Corradini Diodorus Cronus Jonathan Dancy Donald Davidson Mario De Caro Democritus Daniel Dennett Jacques Derrida René Descartes Richard Double Fred Dretske John Dupré John Earman Laura Waddell Ekstrom Epictetus Epicurus Herbert Feigl Arthur Fine John Martin Fischer Frederic Fitch Owen Flanagan Luciano Floridi Philippa Foot Alfred Fouilleé Harry Frankfurt Richard L. Franklin Michael Frede Gottlob Frege Peter Geach Edmund Gettier Carl Ginet Alvin Goldman Gorgias Nicholas St. John Green H.Paul Grice Ian Hacking Ishtiyaque Haji Stuart Hampshire W.F.R.Hardie Sam Harris William Hasker R.M.Hare Georg W.F. Hegel Martin Heidegger Heraclitus R.E.Hobart Thomas Hobbes David Hodgson Shadsworth Hodgson Baron d'Holbach Ted Honderich Pamela Huby David Hume Ferenc Huoranszki William James Lord Kames Robert Kane Immanuel Kant Tomis Kapitan Walter Kaufmann Jaegwon Kim William King Hilary Kornblith Christine Korsgaard Saul Kripke Thomas Kuhn Andrea Lavazza Christoph Lehner Keith Lehrer Gottfried Leibniz Jules Lequyer Leucippus Michael Levin George Henry Lewes C.I.Lewis David Lewis Peter Lipton C. Lloyd Morgan John Locke Michael Lockwood E. Jonathan Lowe John R. Lucas Lucretius Alasdair MacIntyre Ruth Barcan Marcus James Martineau Storrs McCall Hugh McCann Colin McGinn Michael McKenna Brian McLaughlin John McTaggart Paul E. Meehl Uwe Meixner Alfred Mele Trenton Merricks John Stuart Mill Dickinson Miller G.E.Moore Thomas Nagel Otto Neurath Friedrich Nietzsche John Norton P.H.Nowell-Smith Robert Nozick William of Ockham Timothy O'Connor Parmenides David F. Pears Charles Sanders Peirce Derk Pereboom Steven Pinker Plato Karl Popper Porphyry Huw Price H.A.Prichard Protagoras Hilary Putnam Willard van Orman Quine Frank Ramsey Ayn Rand Michael Rea Thomas Reid Charles Renouvier Nicholas Rescher C.W.Rietdijk Richard Rorty Josiah Royce Bertrand Russell Paul Russell Gilbert Ryle Jean-Paul Sartre Kenneth Sayre T.M.Scanlon Moritz Schlick Arthur Schopenhauer John Searle Wilfrid Sellars Alan Sidelle Ted Sider Henry Sidgwick Walter Sinnott-Armstrong J.J.C.Smart Saul Smilansky Michael Smith Baruch Spinoza L. Susan Stebbing Isabelle Stengers George F. Stout Galen Strawson Peter Strawson Eleonore Stump Francisco Suárez Richard Taylor Teilhard de Chardin Kevin Timpe Mark Twain Peter Unger Peter van Inwagen Manuel Vargas John Venn Kadri Vihvelin Voltaire G.H. von Wright David Foster Wallace R. Jay Wallace W.G.Ward Ted Warfield Roy Weatherford C.F. von Weizsäcker William Whewell Alfred North Whitehead David Widerker David Wiggins Bernard Williams Timothy Williamson Ludwig Wittgenstein Susan Wolf Scientists Michael Arbib Walter Baade Bernard Baars Jeffrey Bada Leslie Ballentine Gregory Bateson John S. Bell Mara Beller Charles Bennett Ludwig von Bertalanffy Susan Blackmore Margaret Boden David Bohm Niels Bohr Ludwig Boltzmann Emile Borel Max Born Satyendra Nath Bose Walther Bothe Hans Briegel Leon Brillouin Stephen Brush Henry Thomas Buckle S. H. Burbury Donald Campbell Anthony Cashmore Eric Chaisson Gregory Chaitin Jean-Pierre Changeux Arthur Holly Compton John Conway John Cramer Francis Crick E. P. Culverwell Antonio Damasio Olivier Darrigol Charles Darwin Richard Dawkins Terrence Deacon Lüder Deecke Richard Dedekind Louis de Broglie Stanislas Dehaene Max Delbrück Abraham de Moivre Paul Dirac Hans Driesch John Eccles Arthur Stanley Eddington Gerald Edelman Paul Ehrenfest Albert Einstein Hugh Everett, III Franz Exner Richard Feynman R. A. Fisher David Foster Joseph Fourier Philipp Frank Steven Frautschi Edward Fredkin Lila Gatlin Michael Gazzaniga GianCarlo Ghirardi J. Willard Gibbs Nicolas Gisin Paul Glimcher Thomas Gold A. O. Gomes Brian Goodwin Joshua Greene Jacques Hadamard Mark Hadley Patrick Haggard J. B. S. Haldane Stuart Hameroff Augustin Hamon Sam Harris Hyman Hartman John-Dylan Haynes Donald Hebb Martin Heisenberg Werner Heisenberg John Herschel Art Hobson Jesper Hoffmeyer E. T. Jaynes William Stanley Jevons Roman Jakobson Pascual Jordan Ruth E. Kastner Stuart Kauffman Martin J. Klein William R. Klemm Christof Koch Simon Kochen Hans Kornhuber Stephen Kosslyn Ladislav Kovàč Leopold Kronecker Rolf Landauer Alfred Landé Pierre-Simon Laplace David Layzer Joseph LeDoux Benjamin Libet Seth Lloyd Hendrik Lorentz Josef Loschmidt Ernst Mach Donald MacKay Henry Margenau James Clerk Maxwell Ernst Mayr John McCarthy Warren McCulloch George Miller Stanley Miller Ulrich Mohrhoff Jacques Monod Emmy Noether Alexander Oparin Abraham Pais Howard Pattee Wolfgang Pauli Massimo Pauri Roger Penrose Steven Pinker Colin Pittendrigh Max Planck Susan Pockett Henri Poincaré Daniel Pollen Ilya Prigogine Hans Primas Adolphe Quételet Jürgen Renn Juan Roederer Jerome Rothstein David Ruelle Tilman Sauer Jürgen Schmidhuber Erwin Schrödinger Aaron Schurger Claude Shannon Charles Sherrington David Shiang Herbert Simon Dean Keith Simonton B. F. 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The Separability of Free Will and Moral Responsibility
Four Degrees of Separation:
(Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chapter XXI, Of Power, s.21) We must also separate "moral responsibility" from ordinary "responsibility" or simple accountability. If our intentions and decisions caused an action, we are responsible for it, but moral responsibility requires that the action has moral consequences. Immanuel Kant and the modern free willist Robert Kane think that only moral decisions can be free decisions. We think that is an "ethical fallacy." We must go even further and clarify the relationship between free will and moral responsibility. Some philosophers (e.g., John Martin Fischer, Derk Pereboom, and Manuel Vargas) deflect direct discussion of free will and study it only as the "control condition for moral responsibility." Finally, we should explore the connection between moral responsibility and punishment, both backward-looking retributive punishment (revenge or restitution) and forward-looking consequentialism (re-education and rehabilitation).
1) The Separation of "Free" from "Will"
"Free Will" - in scare quotes - refers to the common but mistaken notion that the adjective "free" modifies the concept "will." In particular, it suggests that the element of chance, one of the two requirements for free will is present in the determination of the will itself (in the second stage of our two-stage model of free will).
Critics of "libertarian free will" usually adopt this meaning in order to attack the idea of randomness in our decisions, which clearly can not help to make us morally responsible. We like to say "first free, then will," or "first multiple possibilities, some randomly generated, then an adequate determination by the will to choose one possibility." Unfortunately, some defenders of libertarian free will, Robert Kane and his followers, Mark Balaguer, for example) continue to add indeterminism into the "torn" decision itself, making such free will "unintelligible" by their own account. Despite the claim of some professional philosophers that they are better equipped than scientists to make conceptual distinctions and evaluate the cogency of arguments, they often mistakenly conflate the concepts of "free" and "will." They (con)fuse them with the muddled term "free will," despite clear warnings from John Locke that this would lead to confusion. Locke said very clearly, as had some ancients like Lucretius, it is not the will that is free (in the sense of undetermined), it is the mind or the man. Locke liked the idea of Freedom and Liberty. He thought it was inappropriate to describe the Will itself as Free. The Will is a Determination. It is the Man who is Free. "I think the question is not proper, whether the will be free, but whether a man be free." "This way of talking, nevertheless, has prevailed, and, as I guess, produced great confusion," he said. It has and still does produce confusion In chapter XXI, Of Power, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke calls the question of Freedom of the Will unintelligible. But for Locke, it is only because the adjective "free" applies to the agent, not to the will, which is determined by thoughts in the mind, and the adequately determined choice of which thought determines the action. Concerning a man's liberty, there yet, therefore, is raised this further question, Whether a man be free to will? which I think is what is meant, when it is disputed whether the will be free. (s.22)Freedom of human action requires the randomness of absolute chance somewhere to break the causal chain of physical determinism, yet the conscious knowledge that we are adequately determined to be responsible for our choices. Freedom, and the creation of new information in the universe (e.g, the evolution of new species), requires some events that are not causally determined by immediately preceding events, events that are unpredictable by any agency, events involving quantum uncertainty. These random events create alternative possibilities for action. The original idea of a random element goes back thousands of years to Epicurus and his "swerve" and to the philosopher Lucretius with his "clinamen." Randomness is the "free" in free will.
In short, there must be a Randomness Requirement, unpredictable chance events that break the causal chain of determinism. Without this chance, our actions are simply the consequences of events in the remote past. This randomness must be located in a place and time that enhances free will, one that does not reduce it to pure chance.
Freedom also requires an adequately determined will that chooses or selects from those alternative possibilities. There is effectively nothing uncertain about this choice. Adequate determinism is the "will" in free will. So there is also a Determinism Requirement - that our actions be adequately determined by our character and values. This requires that any randomness not be the direct cause of our actions. (Some libertarians do not like this requirement.) Adequate determinism means that randomness in our thoughts about alternative possibilities does not directly cause our actions. A random thought can lead to an adequately determined action, for which we can take full responsibility. We must separate our "free" thoughts from our "willed" actions. Our thoughts come to us (some randomly). Our actions come from us (usually deliberately).
2) The Separation of "Moral" from "Responsibility"
Responsibility for a willed action can be ascribed to an agent because the "adequately" determined will has started a new causal chain that includes the action and its foreseeable consequences.
But responsibility is not exactly the same as moral responsibility. It is merely a prerequisite for moral responsibility.
Responsibility is similar to accountability. Just as an action can said to be a cause of its consequences, so the agent can be held accountable for the action.
Different moral codes, which are the business of ethicists, may have different degrees of moral responsibility for the same actions and its consequences.
We must separate "moral" from "responsibility."
3) The Separation of "Free Will" from "Moral Responsibility"
From the earliest beginnings, the problem of "free will" has been intimately connected with the question of moral responsibility. Most of the ancient thinkers on the problem were trying to show that we humans have control over our decisions, that our actions "depend on us", and that they are not pre-determined by fate, by arbitrary gods, by logical necessity, or by a natural causal determinism.
John Martin Fischer says that some philosophers want to relate these two very strongly:
Some philosophers do not distinguish between freedom and moral responsibility. Put a bit more carefully, they tend to begin with the notion of moral responsibility, and "work back" to a notion of freedom; this notion of freedom is not given independent content (separate from the analysis of moral responsibility). For such philosophers, "freedom" refers to whatever conditions are involved in choosing or acting in such a way as to be morally responsible.The question of the existence of "free will" is an empirical and factual question about the nature of the mind and the physical world. It does not depend in any way on the existence of "moral responsibility," which is a question for ethics. Here is an example of the kind of problems caused by conflating free will with moral responsibility. Manuel Vargas follows Fischer in connecting free will to moral responsibility, then he wonders how and when children can suddenly acquire free will at a certain age. Vargas says: It is not clear that there is any single thing that people have had in mind by the term "free will." Perhaps the dominant characterization in the history of philosophy is that it is something like the freedom condition on moral responsibility. Roughly, the idea is that to be morally responsible for something, you had to have some amount of freedom, at some suitable time prior to the action or outcome for which you are responsible. That sense of freedom — whatever it amounts to — is what we mean to get at by the phrase "free will." However, there may be things for which free will might be important or other senses of free will that are independent of concerns about moral responsibility. For example, philosophers have worried whether free will is required for some human achievements to have a special worth or value, or for there to be values and valuing in any robust sense. Although I think much of what I will say can be applied to other aspects of thinking about it, I will primarily concerned with free will in its connection to moral responsibility, the sense in which people are appropriately praised or blamed. (Four Views on Free Will, p.128-9)Vargas then puzzles about children becoming free agents. Consider the question of how we go from being unfree agents to free agents. This is a puzzle faced by all accounts of responsibility, but there is something pressing about it in the case of libertarianism. As children we either had the indeterministic structures favored by your favorite version of libertarianism or we lacked them. If we lacked them as children, we might wonder how we came to get those structures. We might also wonder what the evidence is for thinking that we do develop said structures. Suppose the libertarian offers us an answer to these questions, and the other empirical challenges I raised in the prior section. We would still face another puzzle. What, exactly, does the indeterminism add? What follows in this section is not so much a metaphysical concern as it is a normative concern. It is a concern about what work the indeterminism does in libertarianism, apart from providing a way to preserve our default self-image as deliberators with genuine, metaphysically robust alternative possibilities. (p.148)Children, like larger animals, have free will from birth. It is part of their biological makeup. It is the moral responsibility that they "come to get" at some age. We must separate "free will" from "moral responsibility."
4) The Separation of "Free Will and Moral Responsibility" from Retributive Punishment (Revenge, Restitution) and Consequentialist Punishment (Education, Rehabilitation)
Liberal and humanitarian thinkers who see that retributive punishment is sometimes cruel and unproductive should not try to argue that punishment is not "deserved" because free will does not exist.
They have excellent reasons for preferring rehabilitation and education to vengeance.
Naturalists argue that humans are just a form of animal and that we lack free will because animals do. The idea that there is no free will in animals, that they are completely determined, was the old religious argument that God had given man the gift of free will. The new version is that animals lack moral responsibility, which is now being questioned in many sociobiological studies.
Whether man - and higher animals too - have free will is an empirical scientific question. Whether they have moral responsibility is a social and cultural question.
To make it depend on arguments against vengeance and retributive punishment is to get the cart before the horse.
Equating free will with moral responsibility, then to use spurious arguments to deny free will, and thus to deny moral responsibility - in order to oppose punishment - is fine humanism but poor philosophy, and terrible science.
We must separate "free will and moral responsibility" from "punishment," retributive or consequentialist.
Retribution (revenge) is backward looking and unproductive. Our justice system should recognize the many negative factors in the past life of a criminal that contributed to bad behavior and offer treatment and re-education to reduce or prevent future criminal behavior.
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