DETERMINISM AND FOLK PSYCHOLOGY (2003)

Witten in 2003, unedited

The highly discussed free will debate is based on our folk psychological understanding of responsibility. It is a popular notion that a person who is operating without free will cannot be held responsible for their actions. Since morality is a corner stone of our society, adapting a philosophy such as determinism that removes free will is often considered unacceptable. It is for this reason, the attempt to salvage our current concepts, that libertarianism and compatiblism are pursued today.

Compatiblism takes on the duty of merging the classical idea of free will, and the resulting moral responsibility, with the more modern and persisting idea of determinism. Libertarianism, on the
other hand, claims that the two are not compatible, and that, in the interest of salvaging free will, determinism is false.

But in our world of physical laws and neural science is free will, as we understand it today, possible? Or is it to be discarded and replaced along with many of our other folk psychological elements?

In this paper I will first discuss our concept of responsibility, and examine how it has been applied to the libertarian debate. I will then focus attention on the possibility of uncaused actions, upon which the libertarian argument rests. Finally, I will offer an alternate concept of moral responsibility that is not dependent on free will.

The majority of people in our society give praise and blame to people they deem “responsible” without ever questioning what responsibility truly is. They require no law book on responsibility or morality, nor do they require a logical proof as to whom they can blame and for what for. For the majority of people, praising and blaming simply comes naturally.

This is because our notion of responsibility is part of our folk psychology, just like our notion of love and pain. There is no empirical evidence for our folk psychology, and it is only fallible on a personal level. That is, person A could not tell person B that she is wrong about her feeling pain. The best person A could do is persuade B to no longer show that she is in pain, either by hiding her feelings or by removing the pain.

Responsibility operates in a similar way, although responsibility requires that two people acknowledge the situation for the communication to be complete. If A holds B morally responsible, and then blames B, the blame will not be effective unless B recognizes that she is deserving of blame. It is this unwritten law about what is blame worthy and what is not that dictates responsibility. Since this law is unwritten, there are often disagreements and miscommunications, as is common in folk psychology. One of the most challenge tasks in the philosophy of free will is to try to make clear the rules of responsibility, in order to decide if free will is in necessary. Often this task is overlooked and the basic idea of “if you ‘did it’ then you are responsible” is adapted.

In “Libertarianism” Carl Ginet explains, and then elaborates on an important function of responsibility crucial to direct incompatibilism. The direct incompatiblist’s argument contains four premises. 1. NRP, or non-responsibility for the past. 2. NRL, or non-responsibliity for the laws. 3. NRA, or non-responsibility
agglomerativity, and finally NRT, or non-responsibility transfer, which is the most controversial premise.

NRT, according to Ginet, goes as follows: For any truths P and Q, if P logically entails Q and S is not responsible for its being the case that P, then S is not responsible for its being the case that Q. In his paper, Ginet manipulates this premise to accommodate for pre-emption and causal overdeterminism. To account for that, Ginet developed this alternate form of NRT. NRT**, For any truths P and Q, if P is of the form ‘B and it follows from causal laws that if B then Q’, Q reports an event or state that occurred later than the condition(s) reported by B, and S is not responsible either for its being the case that P or for its being the case that B, then S is not responsible for its being the case that Q.

While this does successfully defend NRT from overdeterminism and pre-emption, it fails under other kinds of responsibility. If person A lends person B a camera for a film shoot, and during this film shoot person C trips and drops the camera, person B is responsible for the camera being broken, and will therefore be put in the position to replace the camera, or be appropriately blamed in another way. In this situation, person B is responsible for the camera being broken, but is not responsible for person C tripping. This situation can be applied to NRT** as follows. P is the truth that person C tripped, and Q is the truth that the camera is broke.
It follows from causal laws that if B then the camera will be broken. The camera breaking, Q, occurred after person C tripped, P, and S was not responsible for P. According to NRT**, S would not be responsible for Q, but I would not hesitate to hold S responsible for my camera, since it was he that I lent it to.

This point illustrates how the translation between folk psychology and a fixed law of responsibility is very difficult, if not impossible. Our language and interactions are full of way too many nuances to accurately pin down a law of responsibility.

Responsibility is not the only obstacle the libertarian faces. The biggest issue facing libertarianism, in my view, is whether or not an uncaused action is possible.

The story of Bu’ridan’s Ass illustrates my problem with an uncaused action.

“If a hungry ass were placed exactly between two hay-stacks in every respect equal, it would starve to death, because there would be no motive why it should go to one rather than to the other.”

Is this accurate to real life? Of course not. In real life the ass would eat one and then the other, without making a conscious decision. Since there was no difference between the two bales of hay, it would seem that the ass made an uncaused decision to eat one first. But there is a major flaw in this
interpretation. When we apply it to the real world, the two haystacks cannot be equal in every respect, or else they would be identical and the ass wouldn’t be faced with a choice at all. One of the most obvious differences between the two haystacks would be location. Even if both were equally far away from the ass, one would have to be to the right of the other, or on the opposite side of the ass. This difference alone would give rise to many causes of action. The ass eats the right one first because it is the one that first caught his eye, or eats the one in front of him first because he it is easier than turning around.

The ass was not placed in a situation with two options in which all things are equal, and for reasons I discuss later I am willing to say that if the ass was placed in such a situation, it would be unable to choose and would starve to death, assuming no differentiating factor came along.

Before I discuss why an uncaused effect is impossible, I will first illustrate what, as far as I can understand, an uncaused effect entails. Lets say I raise my hand, and that the starting action, something like my decision, is uncaused. Now lets roll back the world to before the starting action occurred, and play it forward with everything being exactly the same. This time the action doesn’t occur, and I don’t raise my hand, just as uncaused as if I had. But is this possible in our world? Can an action come about in one world and not in another?

First let us look at where this action could possibly come from. This is a surprising difficult task if you hope to avoid dualism. Lets examine the raising of a hand by a person. The hand physically rose because muscles contracted. The muscles contracted because a signal was sent to them through the nervous system. The brain, specifically the cerebrum, sent the signal. But how did the signal start in the cerebrum?
Who decided the cerebrum should send out that specific signal? Obviously our cognitive sciences are not yet developed enough to really understand how our brains work. But it is still important to recognize that
inside that brain needs to be an explanation of an uncaused event, and hopefully it is not a little person.

Even without a complete understanding of our brain we can still cast doubt on the idea of uncaused effects by appealing to the argument from the law of conservation of energy.

1. Energy cannot be created or destroyed;
   it may be changed from one form to another.

This is the law of conservation of energy. We accept this law as true on the basis of it
being a corner stone in our physics.

1. An
   action requires energy.

An action is defined as a change
in the current state of affairs. For a
change to occur, energy would be needed.

1. For
   an uncaused action to occur, energy would need to be created from nothing.

If the energy came from another
source, then the action was caused by that source, and not uncaused. If the action is truly uncaused, there can be
no source.

1. The
   creation of energy from nothing would be inconsistent with the law of
   conservation of energy.

The creation of energy from
nothing would mean that energy was created.

1. Therefore,
   an uncaused action would be inconsistent with the law of conservation of
   energy.

I am interested in hearing replies to this argument, for I am sure there are many. One response would be that mental events do not adhere to the law of conservation of energy, but of course this would imply the mind is of some other substance than the rest of our known world, which is something only a dualist would accept.

Another tactic might be to attack premise two and claim that an action does not require energy. Of course this claim would require a lot of defending, as of now I cannot imagine an action that does not require energy.

What about potential energy? Potential energy, just lying in wait in a spring or some other device could  trigger the action. Perhaps our minds are filled with potential energy that can be triggered without cause.
This is an interesting thought, but of course we must realize that this energy didn’t just come from nowhere. Potential energy was once kinetic energy. For a spring to contain potential energy, it must be compressed. To compress it requires energy from a source. So even potential energy has a cause.

Until a better idea of an uncaused event can be formed, I think it would be wise to set libertarianism, and compatiblism aside for now, and instead work on developing a better notion of responsibility and morality that is consistent with determinism. To do this, perhaps we can adapt the simple libertarian notion that you are responsible for an action simply because it is your action. Carl Ginet would argue that you have a non-causal relationship with your action that gives you responsibility.

Is this a plausible idea? A sort of responsibility system like this couldn’t be definitive, due to the trouble in applying laws to our folk psychology. But maybe a loose definition of responsibility is needed to deal with the troubles of folk psychology. If folk psychology and determinism were compatible, then we could praise and blame people on the basis of their actions being theirs, with out any more clarity.

This idea of responsibility would, of course, not account for the need for alternate possibilities. But perhaps the need for alternate possibilities is an incorrect interpretation of our folk psychology.

Alternate possibilities could be replaced by a non-causal relationship theory if the non-causal relationship theory is adequate for responsibility. Can an ambiguous law of responsibility be relied on? I think it must due to our ambiguous, folk psychological use of responsibility. I also see no reason as to why this would be unacceptable.

Since free will is based on responsibility, if we could get responsibility without free will, there would be no need for free will. This would radically alter the free will debate, but then we could put forth more effort towards the real issue of responsibility. Unless we gain more information on the human brain and how it works there doesn’t seem to be much progress to be made on the libertarian front. Until then it seems
that a deterministic world that coexists with responsibility is the best solution.

With our current laws of nature an uncaused action does not seem plausible, and if it were possible to come to a fork in the road in which all things are equal, I hold that you would no longer be able to travel.

Clearly the biggest difficulty in the free will debate, and much of philosophy, is trying to make compatible our tradition folk psychological beliefs with changing technological and scientific ideas. This
is an essential element, however, otherwise we would be either overthrowing our entire belief systems every time a challenging piece of information arose, or we would ignore all challenging pieces of information and be caught in a stagnant society. The most important choice is deciding what ideas are worth trying to salvage, and which ones can be let go for bigger fish.