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Brooks, reconfigured

In an analysis of the Columbine massacre written two years ago, New York Times columnist David Brooks opined that “My instinct is that Dylan Klebold was a self-initiating moral agent who made his choices and should be condemned for them.  Neither his school nor his parents determined his behavior.”  According to Brooks back then, Klebold and his behavior aren’t fully traceable to determinants – he created himself as a moral agent, and is condemnable on that basis. 

Fast forward to a May 7, 2006 op-ed “Marshmallows and Public Policy” in which Brooks presents a thoughtful analysis of the determinants of self-control in children.  Here’s a very different columnist, deeply interested in understanding behavior and in applying that knowledge to build communities and schools that allow kids to become responsible citizens, not killers. 

He points out that self-control in children is positively correlated with better SAT scores, attending better colleges, less involvement with drugs, and other measures of adult stability and satisfaction.  Given this connection, he asks the right question about causality: “…how do we get people to master the sort of self-control that leads to success?”   Kids differ in their innate capacity for delaying gratification, no doubt, but self-discipline is also a learned skill, and Brooks wants society to pay more attention to teaching it.  Excellent.

Tellingly, and rightly, he discounts “sheer willpower” as a factor in explaining where self-control comes from.  After all, willpower is just another name for self-control, and we can’t suppose that it creates itself – a logical impossibility.   Instead, he recommends we follow University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Heidt’s suggestion to create “stable, predictable environments for children, in which good behavior pays off.”* 

So in this op-ed Brooks does not suppose, as he did in discussing Dylan Klebold two years ago, that something other than environment and heredity determines how kids turn out.   If becoming a self-disciplined adult is fully caused, why should we suppose that becoming a morally good person, which after all centrally involves control capacities, is not?  The upshot is that present Brooks is implicitly calling earlier Brooks into question  As his current reasoning suggests, it’s the full complement of causes, not a capacity to rise above one’s circumstances, that explains whether or not self-control and moral virtue are achieved.  From a naturalist’s standpoint this shift in perspective is good progress.

However, my guess is that Brooks would still resist this conclusion about moral agency, and insist there’s something about it that transcends causation. After all, this is a central dogma of our culture, especially for conservatives: we are first causes of ourselves in a way that makes us really responsible – we are “moral levitators.”  But if we accept that self-control is determined, we have to say what other aspects of agenthood aren’t, and then provide a plausible alternative account of them.  This is difficult, to put it mildly, once we eschew causality.    

If Brooks wants to believe that Klebold was a self-initiating moral agent and that kids are fully determined in their control capacities, he ends up in implicit self-contradiction, in which case he has some self-reconciliation to do.   But that’s OK; after all, who doesn’t?  Reconfiguring ourselves in the light of new insights, we all agree, is how we become better moral agents. 
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*What’s puzzling in Brook’s analysis is that he pooh-poohs what he calls “structural reforms” such as smaller class sizes and universal day care.  Clearly, the creation of stable environments for kids in which they are taught self-control could profitably include such reforms.

5/06

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Responsibility roundup

A naturalistic understanding ourselves challenges some conventional notions of freedom and responsibility, as the following news stories make clear. But we needn't fall into a moral panic.  Paradoxically enough, seeing that we don't ultimately create ourselves gives us greater opportunities for self-control, as the last piece illustrates.  The titles in quotes are the original articles. 

"Free Will: You Only Think You Have It"  There's considerable controversy among philosophers about whether people think having free will requires us to be free of determinism, or not (see the Research page at the CFN).  According to Zeeya Merali in the May 6 issue of New Scientist, a new theory of quantum phenomena developed by Dutch physicist Gerard 't Hooft reveals reality to be fundamentally deterministic, and "abandoning the uncertainty of quantum physics means we must give up the cherished notion that we have free will."  John Conway and Simon Kochen, professors of mathematics at Princeton, also believe free will requires indeterminism, and Kochen is quoted as saying that if 't Hooft's theory is right, "Our lives could be like the second showing of a movie - all actions play out as thought they are free, but that freedom is an illusion."   It's curious that Merali, Conway and Kochen think (as do many, perhaps) that indeterminism would somehow give us a free will worth wanting, to use Daniel Dennett's phrase from his book Elbow Room.  As David Hume saw long ago, indeterminism can't possibly give us authorship or responsibility for our actions.  Whatever sorts of freedom and responsibility we have (and we do have some as natural creatures), they don't gain power or plausibility by denying determinism.

"Far Out, Man. But Is It Quantum Physics?"  Writing in the New York Times science section, Dennis Overbye also relates physics to free will in a review of the movie "What the Bleep Do We Know?".   He ends the article saying: "I'd like to believe that, like Galileo, I would have the courage to see the world clearly, in all its cruelty and beauty, 'without hope or fear,' as the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis put it. Take free will. Everything I know about physics and neuroscience tells me it's a myth. But I need that illusion to get out of bed in the morning. Of all the durable and necessary creations of atoms, the evolution of the illusion of the self and of free will are perhaps the most miraculous. That belief is necessary to my survival. But I wouldn't call it good physics."  One wants to know, of course, how an illusion you know is an illusion gets you out of bed. You can't call something a belief if you believe it's false, so the free will illusion probably isn't necessary for Overbye's survival.  Yet, like John Horgan, he persists in claiming it is.  Such is the power of "belief in belief" in (contra-causal) free will, to borrow yet another phrase from Dennett (Breaking The Spell).  Here's another spell that needs breaking. 

"Does eating salmon lower the murder rate?" - As reported by Stephen Mihm in the New York Times Magazine, researchers in Britain discovered a correlation between consumption of omega-3 fatty acids (found in fish such as salmon) and lower rates of anti-social behavior among prisoners.  But, Mihm worries, "What would it mean if we found a clear link between diet and violent behavior? To start with, it might challenge the notion that violence is a product of free will." And further: "...there's something that many people may find unnerving about the idea of curing violent behavior by changing what people eat. It threatens to let criminals evade responsibility for their actions. Think, for example, of the infamous 'Twinkie defense,' in which an accused murderer's lawyer suggested that junk food was partly to blame for his client's compromised mental state." What's operating here is the idea that free will operates outside of cause and effect, so when we discover the empirical causes of violence, justifications for holding people responsible seem to collapse.  But of course knowing the real causes of violence doesn't mean we let criminals go free.  It simply means there's no good justification for retribution, and that we'll be smarter in preventing crime (safe, healthy communities and salmon for everyone) and rehabilitating offenders (life skills education, job training and, of course, salmon).

"Kagan: Mind Matters, But So Does Morality" -  Interviewed by Carey Goldberg of the Boston Globe, Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan warns against supposing that determinism, biological and environmental, obviates all ascriptions of responsibility:  "It is dangerous to be lulled into believing that an adolescent who commits a violent act of aggression 'couldn't help it' because of temperament or life experiences and, therefore, should not be held responsible. Every adolescent, save the tiny proportion with serious brain damage, knows that harming another is wrong and has the ability to inhibit that behavior."  The question, though, is what our responsibility practices should be, given that, as Kagan understands, the ability to inhibit harmful behavior is fully determined by the interaction of innate temperament and life experiences.  One sort of responsibility practice often overlooked in discussions of harmful behavior is to deliberately increase adolescents' powers of self-control (see below and also "Brooks, Reconfigured").  To imagine that kids simply choose to misbehave in a way that transcends the failure to learn self-control is to set them up as targets for punitive retribution, and retribution need not (and should not) be part of our responsibility practices.

Better Kids, Naturalistically - Jeffrey Bruns is marketing software to help children learn to be more successful and responsible.  He takes an unflinchingly causal, Skinnerian view of behavior, which he claims will give parents more non-punitive leverage in getting their little darlings to shape up.  He says: "The law of cause and effect is predictable and irreversible. Knowing how to use the law, kids can attract success and happiness. Ignorance of the law can result in boredom, frustration, and failure, which can lead to fear, drugs and suicide.”  And here's a sure draw for overworked caretakers: “In about three weeks, children start to change their strategy from arguing to get what they want, to looking for ways to earn it. Kids go from not doing their chores and you having to constantly remind them, to asking for extra chores to help out. Think of all of the time you will save.”  Now, your results may vary, but at least Bruns is taking the science of human behavior seriously.  New York Times David Brooks should know about this, see his piece advocating more attention to teaching children self-control skills, mentioned above. 

5/06

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Spirituality, Naturalized?   

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Time and Free Will

A Radio Lab production with science reporter Robert Krulwich called "Against Time," the section on "No Special Now," explores the somewhat discomfiting implications of the Einsteinian 4-dimensional "block universe" for free will.   Courtesy of physicist Brian Greene, who questions the idea that the future is open, and neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, who discusses the famous Libet experiments on the timing of readiness potentials, Krulwich discovers that he isn't perhaps quite "in charge" the way he thought he was.  Greene is sympathetic to Krulwich's concerns, but can't honestly reassure him about free will, and tries to distract him with multi-verse cosmology.  But Krulwich doesn't buy it; he wants his free will back.  Ramachandran is trenchantly definitive: the unconscious readiness potential precedes the conscious choice to move one's finger by .5 seconds, so consciousness can't be in control the way we thought.  No solace for Krulwich. 
        Green talks about time in his terrific book The Fabric of the Cosmos, chapter 5, "The Frozen River," and chapter 15, "Teleporters and Time Machines," (see pp. 451-8 re free will).  Each moment we experience as flowing from future to past is actually "an eternal and immutable feature of spacetime," so past, present, and future co-exist in the block universe.  Time as a dimension is simply there, just as up/down, left/right and forward/back are all there, laid out in front of us.  This means all our past, present and future actions co-exist as well, strange as it may seem.  But this can be understood as a time neutral re-statement of what science, from our (illusory) time-bound conscious perspective, describes as causal relations over time.  The way one moment effortlessly gets transformed into the next – no hindrance or obstacle, just a smooth transition – suggests the next moment was (is) simply there, waiting for the mind to experience.  Naturalist attorney Bob Gulack explores time and free will in one of his talks for the Ethical Culture Society of Bergen County, New Jersey, see here.

3/06

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Scientism vs. Science 

 In his New York Times review of Dennett's Breaking the Spell, Leon Wieseltier writes: "Scientism, the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical, is a superstition, one of the dominant superstitions of our day...".   But are science's explanatory ambitions, over-reaching or not, rightly called scientism?  Responding to Wieseltier, Duke philosopher Owen Flanagan deftly counters as follows:  "First, ‘scientism’, as most intellectuals and philosophers understand it, is not the tame regulative hypothesis (which is falsifiable) that science can, in principle, explain ‘all human conditions and expressions,’ but the incredible view that everything worth expressing can be expressed in a scientific idiom.  Most naturalistic thinkers, including Dennett and myself, think that science can, in principle, explain the nature and function of art, music, and religion.  But no one, save possibly long dead positivists, ever thought that science could express whatever is worth expressing.  So let’s accept that what Bach, Mozart, Coltrane, Michelangelo, Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammed expressed cannot be expressed scientifically.  This leaves open the possibility that science can shed light on their musical, artistic, and spiritual productions, including what is expressed and why.  This is all Dennett’s important project assumes, not ‘scientism.’"  See also Flanagan's further critique of scientism and what he calls "global metaphysical materialism" in Science for Monks: Buddhism and Science, pp. 15-17. 

3/06

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Childhood's End

The threat of creeping naturalism (as some might call it) is on display at Edge.Org, which features a forum of noted thinkers on their candidate for the world's most dangerous idea.  Ideas can be "dangerous" simply by upsetting conventional wisdom, but they might also pose a danger by undermining what some suppose are psychologically or socially necessary assumptions about human nature.   As many contributors to the forum show, we are being naturalized at a terrific pace, in that we can increasingly understand ourselves without appealing to anything immaterial or supernatural.  The biological and cognitive sciences are compiling explanations of human behavior which leave no role for the soul or contra-causal free will, the power of the person to choose and act without her and her choices being fully caused in turn.  Not surprisingly, the challenge to such bedrock assumptions can be perceived as dangerous in both the superficial and deeper senses.  As Australian art critic Miriam Cosic says in a piece about the Edge forum (emphasis added):

But it's also quite possible to understand these developments - on the assumption that science gets it right - as our coming of age as a sentient species.  The increasing awareness of naturalism is childhood's end, to borrow the title of Arthur C. Clarke's novel.  We're gradually growing up, getting too big, cognitively, for our supernatural attire.  The danger of science to our conventional understandings of human nature is undeniable, but whether the end of our illusions - in particular the illusion that we are causally privileged over nature - is dangerous to us and our culture, is an open question.  Daniel Dennett thinks Darwinism a dangerous idea in the first sense, but certainly not the second, since he believes we can live in the light of the truth of natural (and artificial) selection.  Likewise, it might be the case that we can live, even flourish, while understanding ourselves as entirely natural creatures, without souls or contra-causal freedom.  Indeed, organizations which champion science and naturalism, such as the Center for Naturalism, the Center for Inquiry, and the American Humanist Association, are betting that an empirical understanding of ourselves is the best way forward, and that supernaturalism, not naturalism, poses the greater threat to psychological health, social stability, and the planet.  

To grow up and grow old gracefully as a species, we have to get a clear understanding of the implications of naturalism, otherwise we might fall into a moral panic, in particular a free will panic.  A few contributors to the Edge unfortunately misrepresent to a greater or lesser degree these implications, abetting unnecessary fears, for instance that we are now "merely" physical creatures, or that naturalism undercuts all viable notions of responsibility, rationality, and political liberty.  These misrepresentations tend to hold onto normative criteria rooted in supernaturalism (e.g., that the non-physical is somehow more dignified than the physical, that we must be contra-causally free to be rational or be moral agents), when in fact there are naturalistic alternatives that fill the bill quite nicely.  These misrepresentations, some of which are critiqued below, also tend to assume that our social practices, for instance our criminal justice system, are somehow immutable or optimal, when in fact the naturalization of human nature suggests there's considerable room for improvement.  

On the other hand, some contributors tout the marvelous possibilities of naturalism, for instance Carolyn Porco, who speaks to a naturalistic spirituality.   Not only must we defuse fears, we must display the ethical and practical viability of taking on a science-based view of who we are.  This will make growing up positively attractive, not a bitter pill or a fall from grace.  More on this below.

1/06

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Naturalizing goes on apace

A more compassionate libertarianism

Cathy Young, syndicated columnist and contributor at Reason, recently took an enlightened view of poverty - for a libertarian.  She comes across as reasonably compassionate, compared for instance to Randian Objectivists, the radical me-firsters some of whom advocated withholding aid for hurricane victims.  Young disavows such cold-blooded reliance on "personal responsibility," acknowledging that people can't simply bootstrap themselves out of poverty:  "Most of us, if born into bad circumstances, would have likely ended up trapped in the same self-defeating patterns."  Of course she still takes a  small government position, saying that "spending more money won't cure poverty," when progressives would argue that more money, intelligently allocated, can make quite a difference.  Nevertheless, overall Young models a more altruistic libertarianism that takes a causal understanding of the culture of poverty seriously.  This is progress, even if Young isn't yet a progressive, as evidenced by her views on retribution. 

1/06
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Ethical Culture challenged on free will

The Ethical Culture Society of Bergen County, NJ was regaled with a hard-hitting and very entertaining talk by Robert Gulack on what he calls the "third lie" of contra-causal free will, the first two being god and immortality.  He cites a host of luminaries, all of whom were skeptics about such freedom (Spinoza, Hume, Mill, Jefferson, Lincoln, Twain, Einstein, Darrow), and draws out the progressive implications of seeing ourselves as fully caused participants in the natural order.  And he reassures us that, just as we don't need god to be good, "In just the same way, ethics can exist without free will.  We can make ethical commitments even though we are not, in some ultimate sense, free to choose what those commitments will be.  In fact, we do make ethical commitments when and only when we are caused to make them. "  By all means read the rest of what Gulack has to say - it's an excellent example of how naturalists can, and should, challenge what Alan Watts called the taboo against knowing who we are. 

11/05

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Rocker into naturalism

Turns out that Greg Graffin, founder of the band Bad Religion, is a full-fledged naturalist.  He studied at Cornell with ally-of-naturalism Will Provine, doing his Ph.D thesis on "Monism, Atheism and the Naturalist Worldview: Perspectives from Evolutionary Biology."  He's also running the Cornell Evolution Project, and he's got a video clip that explains the main findings, well worth a look.  Stay tuned for more from Graffin about naturalism in the next few years. 

11/05

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Searching for Ethics in a New America  

Hamilton College professor of religion Heidi Ravven is working on a Ford Foundation project, Searching for Ethics in a New America, in which she exposes the roots of our common cultural misunderstanding of the human person as free and self-originating.  She's conducting interviews with immigrant Buddhists, Muslims, and native Navajos to search for more realistic ways to understand human action and ethics.  Regarding which, she has a paper here on Spinoza and naturalizing ethics just out in Cognitive, Emotive, and Ethical Aspects of Decision Making in Humans and in Artificial Intelligence, Volume III.  In it she writes: "The doctrine of the freedom of the will is problematic because it both mis-describes the human person and also has negative personal, social, and public policy consequences. Assigning to the individual complete responsibility for his or her triumphs or failures aggrandizes the privileged and blames the poor and needy for their situation. It suggests that all solutions are individual rather primarily social and systemic."

11/05

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The Theory of Negligent Design, according to Stanislaw Lem

Scene:  The Rhohchian's have sponsored a motion to accept Earth as a member of the Galactic Council, but the Iridian representative challenges the motion by relating the true story of humankind's origins ...

"I shall now put a few final questions to the honorable delegation from Rhohchia!  Is it not true that many years ago there landed on the then dead planet of Earth a ship carrying your flag, and that, due to a refrigerator malfunction, a portion of its perishables had gone bad?  Is it not true that on this ship there were two spacehands, afterwards stricken from all the registers for unconscionable dealing with duckweed liverworts, and that this pair of arrant knaves, these Milky Way ne'er-do-wells, were named Gorrd and Lod?  Is it not true that  Gorrd and Lod decided, in their drunkenness, not to content themselves with the usual pollution of a defenseless, uninhabited planet, that their notion was to set off, in a manner vicious and vile, a biological evolution the likes of which the world had never seen before?  Is it not true that both these Rhohches, with malice aforethought, devised a way to make of Earth - on a truly galactic scale - a breeding ground for freaks, a cosmic side show, a panopticum, an exhibit of grisly prodigies and curios, a display whose living specimens would one day become the butt of jokes told even in the outermost Nebulae?  Is it not true that, bereft of all sense of decency and ethical restraint, both these miscreants then emptied on the rocks of lifeless Earth six barrels of gelatinous glue, rancid, plus two cans of albuminous paste, spoiled, and that to this ooze they added some curdled ribose, pentose, and levulose, and - as though that filth were not enough - they poured upon it three large jugs of a mildewed solution of amino acids, then stirred the seething swill with a coal shovel twisted to the left, and also used a poker, likewise bent in the same direction, as a consequence of which the proteins of all future organisms on Earth were Left-handed?! And finally, is it not true that Lod, suffering at the time from a runny nose and  - moreover - egged on by Gorrd, who was reeling from an excessive intake of intoxicants, did willfully and knowingly sneeze into that protoplasmal matter, and, having infected it thereby with the most virulent viruses, guffawed that he had thus breathed 'the bloody breath of life' into those miserable evolutionary beginnings?!  And is it not true that this leftwardness and virulence were thereafter transmitted and handed down from organism to organism, and now afflict with their continuing presence the innocent representatives of the race Artefactum Abhorrens, who gave themselves the name of 'homo sapiens' purely out of simple-minded ignorance?  And therefore is it not true that the Rhohches must not only pay the Earthling's initiation fee, to the tune of a billion tons of platinum, but also compensate the unfortunate victims of their planetary incontinence - in the form of Cosmic Alimony?!"

 - from Stanislaw Lem, The Star Diaries, "The Eighth Voyage," 1976 Avon Press paperback, pp. 42-43.

9/10/05

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Freedom from cognitive illusions

Sam Harris writes about contra-causal free will in a footnote from his book The End of Faith, and pretty much nails it as a morally harmful, logically incoherent illusion.  Just one quibble about agency at the end....

Here's the quibble:  We can still talk about human agents and agency in a deterministic context, since when I act freely - that is, without being coerced - I do author my actions, since no one else does.  Put another way, I am, partially, my actions.  Human agents, although fully caused, don't disappear under naturalism, about which see here.   But such naturalized freedom, agency and authorship don't  support the ultimate sort of praise and blame that accrues to the contra-causal, self-made self, as Harris makes clear.  

9/10/05

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Will Provine on the front lines, again

Cornell biology professor Will Provine continues to fight the good fight against contra-causal free will.  Most recently on August 29 (2005) he gave a lecture for the Bioethics Society of Cornell.  As the Cornell Sun reported,

He added that if society recognized the absence of free will, society would ultimately be much kinder to its less fortunate.

“I hated the idea of human free will,” Provine added. He also argued that humans mostly provide their own moral guidance, and that “ultimate moral responsibility is nonexistent.” He admitted, “Free will is the hardest [preconception] … to give up.”

The lecture received mixed reactions from the crowd.

Mixed reactions are no surprise when challenging centuries of received wisdom about human agency.  Although many academics recognize the incoherence of libertarian free will, few are willing to come out and say so in a public forum, or suggest the significant consequences of giving up the idea of contra-causal freedom for our attitudes and behavior.  Provine is to be congratulated for taking a strong, explicit stand on a matter of such controversy and importance.  And he's been at this a long time, see here. 

9/10/05

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The Limits of Reason

In Soul Survival at Reason magazine, Cathy Young considers the conference on The New Neuromorality hosted by the American Enterprise Institute.  Since Naturalism.Org has two takes on this conference, one here (directly below) and one here, and since Young's pro-retribution views have been critiqued here, what follows is just a brief rejoinder to a few questionable assertions. 

That the thirst for retribution might be inherent in human nature is of course not an argument in its favor, since there are many natural impulses worth resisting so long as they have no moral justification, for instance to cheat, dominate, enslave, or kill.  A legal system that instead appealed to our capacity to understand causality, which in turn undercuts the assumption of the self-caused self that deserves retributive punishment, is not an impossibility.  True, for it to command respect requires that we marginalize the retributive impulse, but that's exactly what Greene's dismantling of the soul helps us to do.  That his research shows the prevalence of desert-based responses argues for public education, not resignation to retribution.  Young concludes by saying:

Young and Morse are right: we have to treat each other as rational and autonomous creatures, but in the light of naturalism there's no longer any good reason to treat each other as first causes deserving of retributive punishment.   That traditional commonsense ethics admits we are caused in some respects doesn't negate the fact that it still clings to the myth of contra-causal agency, which is the usual justification for punishing people without regard to consequences.  Young is also right that our rational and moral consciousness is more than the sum of our neurons: it's one of the higher level emergent properties of our socialized brains.  But again, there's nothing in such emergence that justifies our retributive punishment practices (about which see the Criminal Justice page).  That Young, Morse and other retributivists nevertheless countenance such practices shows the limits of reason in the face of an entrenched and irrational commitment to our punitive legal tradition.

9/10/05

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Unlikely allies: responsibility sans soul, courtesy of conservatives

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think-tank, hosted a one day conference in June, 2005 on The New Neuromorality, a meditation on the impact of neuroscience on our conceptions of self, responsibility, free will, ethics and the law.  The entire proceedings are available here, and they're well worth a look.  Speakers included Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, UPenn law professor Stephen Morse, and Princeton neurophilosopher Joshua Greene, among others.

What's most striking about the presentations is the general acceptance of neural materialism, or more broadly, a naturalistic determinism.  In their talks on how neuroscience might influence our thinking about moral responsibility and criminal justice, Morse describes himself as "a good-enough-for-government-work determinist" and both Pinker and Greene explicitly debunk contra-causal free will.  This means, necessarily, that all three favor conceptions of responsibility, moral and criminal, that are brain-based, not soul-based.  Pinker suggests that when assessing culpability we shouldn't ask any longer whether someone has free will, only whether or not they are deterrable.  Similarly, Greene argues that, having put the soul out of a job, we should move from a retributive model of punishment toward a more humane deterrence-based system, in which we stop supposing people deeply deserve to suffer for their crimes.  Morse, equally the materialist and determinist, nevertheless holds out for retributivism, even though he concedes the function of the law is to guide behavior (why he does so will be food for thought in a forthcoming analysis, now available here).

The tenor of this affair contrasts markedly with a 1998 conference on more or less the same theme, Neuroscience and the Human Spirit, hosted by another conservative think tank, the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC).  There, many were concerned that neuroscience threatens widely held beliefs about free will and the human "spirit" (soul), and some presenters did their best to defend dualism, (although this proved difficult since most were scientists).  That those meeting in 2005 weren't worried about the death of the soul and its special freedom might reflect a growing acceptance of naturalism, at least among the intelligentsia.  Or it might be a matter of the particular speakers at each event, since the AEI panel was overall pretty liberal (which speaks to the open-mindedness of Sally Satel, organizer of the conference).  In any case, both the AEI and the EPPC are to be congratulated for providing forums in which the implications of scientific naturalism for our self-concept and for policy were thoughtfully explored. 

7/7/05

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No Offense Taken

Naturalists and supernaturalists are equally standard issue human beings with largely the same complement of needs, but they seem to inhabit very different epistemic and metaphysical universes, at least according to what they say.  To the supernaturalist, the project of naturalizing such things as rationality and ethics seems absurd, since there's no external guarantor of truth or moral principles.  Without god and a causally privileged free will, what's to prevent us from being systematically misguided?  How, without certain foundations, or a causally uncorrupted point of view, can we certify our beliefs?  For the naturalist, these are admittedly tough problems, but resorting to supernatural justifications seems too easy an out - tennis without a net, as Daniel Dennett puts it.  There's got to be independent evidence for something special outside or above natural causality, otherwise we're simply positing the backup we need - how convenient.  And really, having all these problems solved in one fell swoop is simply too dull a prospect.  Better a wild universe than tame, naturalists think.

Such differences came vividly into focus recently as the Center for Naturalism was discovered by Christian evangelicals.  They were delighted to have found, at last, actual unabashed proponents of naturalism incautious enough to reveal that crazy worldview in all its illogicality.  Joe Carter of the Evangelical Outpost got the ball rolling with a nice broadside, Naturalism for Dummies, which sparked a good deal of additional comment at other religious blogs, and then more at Joe's place, including a roundup of posts from fellow religionists and a meditation on the absurdity of naturalist ethics. 

It's good occasionally to see yourself through the opposition's eyes just to understand their concerns, so I recommend naturalists have a look (and it's not unamusing to witness such incredulity).  The denial of contra-causal free will, not surprisingly, catches a good deal of flack, since this seems to undercut choice, moral responsibility and ethics.  And how can we be merely collections of molecules without souls?  After all, molecules can't create meaning, or understand anything, or make free choices.  How can an authentic spiritual response to existence arise if we don't have literal spirits residing in us?  Since we obviously do understand, make choices, behave ethically, and have spiritual lives, naturalism must be false. 

So you get the essentialist picture, and there's no help for it, reassurances about naturalism notwithstanding.  Between the naturalist and supernaturalist there are very different cognitive commitments and very different tastes in what a universe should look like.  There are desires for security, comfort, specialness, and scripted meaning on the one side vs. excitement, questioning, perplexity, and  astonishment on the other.  They pity our unmoored floundering, and we their staid incuriosity (to generalize unfairly about both sides just for effect).  But would we have it any other way?  Imagine there were no opponents to poke fun at us, and none for us to generalize unfairly about.  Now that would be a dull universe.  So thanks Joe, and keep up the good work. 

TWC 5/05

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Fear of Mechanism

Kenneth Silber (“Are we really just smart robots?” in Reason, April, 2005) is worried about the encroaching scientific understanding of our brains and behavior.  If science shows us to be simply smart biological machines, he believes this undermines liberal democracy, human rights, moral responsibility, and self-worth; all is permitted and authoritarian regimes will flourish.¹  Fortunately, he argues, John Searle (Mind: A Brief Introduction) and Jeff Hawkins (On Intelligence) have shown the mechanistic thesis is false, so we needn’t worry.  Human beings, although part of nature, nevertheless have a special something that grounds our dignity and value.

The difficulty is that Silber doesn’t quite specify what this special something might be.  Is it consciousness?  Nothing in Searle’s biological naturalism or in Hawkins’ account of intelligence requires that our capacity for consciousness couldn’t be computable and thus a property of a machine, once we understand the functions of the neural processes subserving consciousness.  Could it be free will?  But even Searle admits that the experience of free will might be an illusion, perhaps an adaptive illusion at that (although it’s more likely the result of not being able to see the causal workings of our own brains).  Could it be personhood?  But personhood rests on physically instantiated capacities for sentience and self-concern, and complex though these are, there’s no reason in principle why intelligent machines might not someday have moral claims on us, were they given such capacities (on this point, see I Robot, and Benjamin Soskis’ article “Man and the machines” in Legal Affairs).

Although he doesn’t establish the existence of a special human something (a soul, perhaps?), Silber needn’t worry that the mechanistic thesis poses a threat.  Even if it turns out that we’re amazingly complex biological machines, we nevertheless remain persons, and our desire to be treated as ends in ourselves won’t diminish.  After all, that’s “hard-wired” into the very neural architecture of our brains, as are the rest of our basic motives and desires.  We’d still love and protect our families, fear death, abhor tyranny, enjoy a good meal, and generally life would go on, minus the belief in the soul.  So we can relax: there’s no moral or political threat stemming from science, should it unmask us as “mere” machines.  Even if we are, we’ll continue to defend our freedoms with all the resources nature has given us.

TWC 4/05

1. This is also Paul Davies' worry about the scientific attack on contra-causal free will, see "Davies' Really Dangerous Idea."

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Liberals, evil, and free will

Libertarian Tibor Machan, writing in the Desert Dispatch (and reprinted in Free Inquiry, Oct-Nov, 2005), inveighs against liberals, claiming that "Liberals tend to excuse all evil with stories about bad luck and disease and a bunch of other impersonal forces that make people do bad things."  He goes on to say that "The basic philosophical thesis behind the liberal mentality...is the denial of free will."  So according to Machan, by accepting that evil has causes, liberals deny free will, and in so doing deny the basis for moral judgments.  But is it true that if everything is caused, everything is excused?

First, it's hardly the case that liberals deny free will.  Liberals, like most people of all political persuasions, tend to suppose that we have contra-causal freedom.  True, they are more likely to look for causes, since they are less likely than conservatives to suppose that people are self-made (see George Lakoff's book Moral Politics on this).  But most liberals, regrettably, are not yet full-fledged naturalists in their understanding of persons and their relationship to the world. 

But even if they did deny free will, would that make liberals the dangerous deniers of morality, as Machan seems to think?  No.  First, we don't lose our moral compass when we acknowledge that persons and their behavior, like everything else in nature, are entirely caused phenomena.  After all, we still retain our deeply held desires to protect ourselves and our loved ones, and to promote a more flourishing, humane society.  Second, we still have all our causal powers available to bring to bear in defending these values, so we don't lose our efficacy as agents.   In short, we don't need to suppose, as Machan thinks we must, that there's something self-caused within each person to justify moral judgments and enforce standards of right and wrong.   For more on this see "Materialism and Morality."

Machan says liberals must "toss their derisive attitude toward the rest of us who think it is perfectly sensible to distinguish between good and evil, right and wrong."  But liberals aren't derisive of such distinctions, and to say so is a calumny.  They simply are more likely to think, justifiably, that such distinctions are compatible with admitting that behavior, including evil, has causes. 

Machan is very much like David Brooks (see immediately below on "moral levitation") in supposing we must be causally privileged over nature in some respect to be moral agents.  But there's no evidence that we are thus privileged, or that such exalted status is necessary to ground our moral practices.

TWC 12/2004

Machan replies.

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The Moral Levitation of David Brooks

- must we float free of causality to count as moral agents?

In his latest book, Freedom Evolves, Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett coins the wonderful term “moral levitation” – you’ll even find it in the index.  It names what some philosophers and many lay people think is required for morally responsible choices: “Real autonomy, real freedom, requires the chooser be somehow suspended, isolated from the push and pull of…causes, so that when decisions are made, nothing causes them except you!” (p.101-2, original emphasis).

New York Times regular David Brooks expresses this view perfectly, writing in his May 15, 2004 column, “Columbine: Parents of a Killer,” that “My instinct is that Dylan Klebold was a self-initiating moral agent who made his choices and should be condemned for them.  Neither his school nor his parents determined his behavior.” 

By claiming Klebold was self-initiating, Brooks isolates Klebold from the causal push and pull of school and parents, disconnecting him from the world so that he can count as a “real” moral agent.  Brooks seems to think that Klebold’s choices are morally condemnable only if he wasn’t determined to make them.  But as Dennett, myself, and others continue to point out, such supernatural moral levitation isn’t in the least necessary to sustain judgments of right and wrong, or to justify holding persons responsible.  Causal determinism – being fully caused to be who you are, and do what you do – isn’t a threat to moral agency, although it undermines certain justifications for punishment which Brooks and other conservatives may not want to give up.

Very briefly, moral agency survives under determinism because most people, having capacities of rationality and anticipation, can legitimately be held responsible in order to “guide goodness,” as University of Pennsylvania law professor Stephen Morse succinctly puts it.  Those who are insane and those children who haven’t yet reached the age of reason don’t count as moral agents, because the prospect of being held accountable simply doesn’t work to shape their behavior.  Rationality and reasons-responsiveness are causal, deterministic functions of our complex but fully physical brains, and if such functions weren’t deterministic, they wouldn’t be reliable.  Likewise, the processes of moral, legal, and criminal accountability that shape good behavior (or not, if the agent or the processes are defective) are causal, not magical or supernatural in their operations.  Dennett explores these themes at length in Freedom Evolves and his other book on free will, Elbow Room, as does Duke philosopher Owen Flanagan in his book The Problem of the Soul.

So Klebold, an adolescent having reached the age of reason, and undoubtedly knowing that what he and Eric Harris were contemplating was wrong, counts as a moral agent. But he was determined – by his biological endowment, parents, school, bullies, peer influences, Harris, the availability of guns, and other factors unknown – to commit mayhem just as certainly as objects fall to earth.  To suppose otherwise is to imagine that human behavior is supernatural in some respect, magically self-initiated in a way that owes nothing to one’s history or genetic endowment or current circumstances.  We are not causally privileged moral levitators, and don’t need to be to be judged and held responsible.  Indeed, if we were in some respect independent of causality, then our responsibility and accountability practices wouldn’t work. 

It’s important that our hard won, scientific understanding of behavior should be reflected in these practices, and in this instance it should modulate our condemnation of Klebold.  Seeing the determinants of his character and actions, we can no longer demonize him in the way Brooks does – we can no longer suppose his atrocity had no roots beyond him.  The naturalistic appreciation of causality forces us to acknowledge that Klebold was not self-initiated in his depravity, but a product of his biology, his parenting, his friends, his town, and his culture.  This doesn’t in the least undercut the judgment that what he did was depraved, but it illuminates the factors that made him who he was and therefore materially contributed to the fatal outcome.  This means that retributive justifications for punishment based on the traditional notion of contra-causal, libertarian free will – that the agent before us is a causa sui, the ultimate source of himself and his evil – lose their footing.  Not a happy prospect for those who relish the imposition of just deserts. (Of course, this is not to say that we don’t have other very good reasons for detaining dangerous individuals.)

The explanatory stance – to acknowledge that there is indeed a full causal explanation of human behavior, albeit partially hidden to us – is strikingly absent in Brooks’ analysis of the Columbine massacre (both here and in an earlier column on Harris), possibly because it conflicts with claiming retributive satisfactions.  According to Brooks, Klebold’s parents, although they cite the “toxic culture” of the school as a possible contributing factor, “confess that in the main, they have no explanation.”  But not having a complete explanation in hand is quite different from supposing that no real-world explanation is conceivable.  The latter supposition feeds the assumption of moral levitation: that morally consequential behavior, whether good or bad, must somehow arise independently of the push and pull of causality.  It also legitimizes the supposed inscrutability of evil: the pernicious doctrine that horrific behavior is in a realm apart, beyond our understanding or control. 

An interesting and important question is whether Brooks and the legions committed to the assumption of libertarian free will can be persuaded to examine this assumption, or first, even see it as an assumption.  Despite the logical and empirical implausibility of contra-causal agency, and despite Dennett’s and others’ explicit attack on libertarian free will, there are considerable forces arrayed in its defense.  We love our retribution, we love taking ultimate credit and assigning ultimate blame, and we don’t particularly like the hard work of figuring out causal explanations.  But if we can demonstrate that moral responsibility survives determinism, and moreover requires it, then perhaps the fear-based objections to a naturalistic understanding of ourselves can be overcome.  In any case, showing that David Brooks is committed to something as implausible as moral levitation – thank you Dr. Dennett – might be a good start. 

TWC  5/17/04   

See also this  letter published in the Times on Brooks' column, and Brian Leiter's trenchant critique, quoting Nietzsche to good effect.

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Reason Continues to Evolve

As someone involved in promoting naturalism, I was pleased to see Julian Sanchez’ review in Reason of Owen Flanagan's excellent book, The Problem of the Soul (I’ve reviewed it for Human Nature Review). Like his colleagues senior editor Jacob Sullum and science correspondent Ronald Bailey, Sanchez seems willing to take science seriously regarding ourselves and to more or less accept the implications, which as he notes do not leave things untouched.  We don’t, as Flanagan says, have Cartesian, contra-causal, libertarian free will, and this fact has major personal and social consequences, explored at Naturalism.Org. 

Sanchez says that "Perhaps the case for retributive punishment is weakened, but it would surely be a mistake to conclude that only radical freedom would make it appropriate to hold people responsible for their actions."  Actually, the case for retribution is very much weakened by naturalism; see for instance “Against Retribution”. And Sanchez is certainly right that other sorts of freedom – the sorts compatible with determinism – are sufficient for moral responsibility, although they don't support retributive punishment (see "Science and freedom").

But not everything changes.  Among other things, I particularly appreciated Sanchez’s rebuttal of libertarian alarmist Sheldon Richman, to whom I've replied similarly (see point 5 of my commentary).  Being fully caused creatures is not, as Richman supposes, to lose a necessary condition for rationality.  As Daniel Dennett among others has pointed out, it’s only our deterministic connections to the world that make reliable prediction and control possible.  Any causal unlinking of the mind from its surroundings would make us less, not more rational.

On one major point, however,  I think Sanchez gets it wrong.  He sees no particular implication from naturalism to any necessary rethinking of social inequality.  But there is an implication: vast differences in material well-being and opportunities are often justified by appeals to metaphysical desert based in free will, and once that justification is subtracted via naturalism, then it's a good deal more difficult to make the case for such differences. He writes:

“Similarly, critics of liberalism – and some liberals as well – believe that disparities of wealth and income are justified only if the well off ‘deserve’ what they have in some deep sense. But as the late philosopher Robert Nozick observed, there are many things to which we are entitled, even though they are not deserved ‘all the way down.’ Being born with two working eyes is an accident of fate, not something the sighted have done anything to ‘deserve.’  It does not follow that our eyes are up for grabs, subject to political reallocation. Our decisions – our capacities and the uses we make of them – are as much a constitutive part of us as our bodies. Respect for embodied persons still requires deference to our ‘unfree’ choices and their consequences.”

The analogy between having eyes and having great wealth or talent is weak, since virtually all of us are born with eyes, while only a small minority have the luck to be born into the ranks of the well-off, or to be endowed with superior mental and physical capacities.  Offsetting such luck with progressive social policies is not to redistribute or rob anyone of anything essential, but it would be to improve the lot of millions.  And although "respect for embodied persons" is an important value, it doesn't imply that each of us has a moral right to all our lucky advantages.  John Rawls made this point in A Theory of Justice; see the Social Policy page, note 1.  It's simply to recognize that personal liberty (for instance, to amass unlimited wealth) can’t be supposed to trump all other values, all the time, in the ordering of a just society. 

This caveat and a few other minor quibbles aside, Sanchez assesses Flanagan’s book, and the naturalistic picture of ourselves, fairly and positively.  Although libertarians often tend to be vociferous defenders of radical freedom (after all, they style themselves rugged individualists, beholden to no one and to no thing), Reason counters this stereotype with Sanchez’ review and Ronald Bailey's earlier interview with Daniel Dennett, both of which explicitly challenge contra-causal free will.  Reason thus evinces a commendable courage to question one of our culture's most cherished beliefs, something that few newsstand publications dare to do (other exceptions are the Humanist, Free Inquiry, and New Scientist).  I hope Reason continues to evolve in a naturalistic direction under the enlightened supervision of Sanchez, Sullum, and Bailey.

TWC  3/19/04
 

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Luck Swallows Everything*

On 9/28/03, the Boston Sunday Globe published an essay by Matthew Miller, "The Wages of Luck," in which he draws out the policy implications of the fact that none of us chooses our parents, innate abilities, or social status at birth.   He suggests that since the social inequalities that result from such luck aren't deserved, they shouldn't be left unremedied.   Concerning the genesis of such inequalities, conservative economist Milton Friedman is quoted as saying, remarkably enough, "What you're really talking about is determinism vs. free will...In a sense we are determinists and in another sense we can't let ourselves be.  But you can't really justify free will.''   Indeed.  I'd only offer the suggestion that we can, and should, permit ourselves to be determinists, or at least disavow libertarian free will.

All this is in line with what John Rawls wrote some time ago in his book, A Theory of Justice: 

"It seems to be one of the fixed points of our considered judgments that no one deserves his place in the distribution of native endowments, any more than one deserves one's initial starting place in society.  The assertion that a man deserves the superior character that enables him to make the effort to cultivate his abilities is equally problematic, for his character depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit.  The notion of desert seems not to apply to these cases" (p. 104).

The upshot is that by accepting Rawls' view of of luck and desert, Friedman agrees with Miller that more should be done to provide equal opportunity for education and an improved standard of living, including a negative income tax.  Such an agenda is one of the main policy goals of the Center for Naturalism, see http://www.naturalism.org/policy.htm.

It's encouraging that Miller and Friedman are not only making the connection between determinism and lack of metaphysical desert, but understand and accept the egalitarian policy implications as well.

TWC, 10/5/03

*I've borrowed this title from Galen Strawson's piece on free will.

A Question for Brights:  How Naturalistic Are You?