Consider the following dialogue:

Thermostat: It’s not up to me what the temperature is.

Human: Sure it is!  You’re the thermostat.  The buck stops with you.  If the room gets too cold, you warm it up.  Too hot, you cool it down.

Thermostat: Yes, I always keep the temperature at 73 degrees.  But who decided on 73 degrees?  Not me.

Human: But you love 73 degrees.  If it gets to 74, you sweat.  If it gets to 72, you shiver. 

Thermostat: Yes, I love it.  But I didn’t choose to love it.  That wasn’t my choice.  Someone, or something, set 73 degrees for me.

Human: So what?  Does it really matter if someone else set 73 degree for you?  It all turned out right, right?  It’s not like you hate 73 degrees?  It’s a happy coincidence.

Thermostat: But I would have loved whatever I was set to love!  I chase after whatever I was made to chase after.

Human: Hmm?

Thermostat: The temperature is only “up to me” in the most superficial sense.  Whatever human being set my temperature is a better candidate for “up to me” ness.  If I have control, that person has meta-control: they control how I exercise my control. And that’s my point: if a person has control, but is subject to meta-control, the control becomes worthless.  The meta-controller holds all of the cards.  The meta-controller has the real control, the ultimate control, the bona fide control.  The rest is a sham.  Who cares about control, if you don’t have meta-control?

Human: I see your point.  But where would it end?  We human beings are not so different than you.  Sure our control is more sophisticated than yours, but we are not immune to meta-control.  Ultimately, we can be designed to chase certain goals, just like you chase 73 degrees.  For all I know, God or some cosmic being designed my life story just that way.

Thermostat: In fact, if you think about, it *has* to be that way.  It’s logically necessary.  Humans can’t create themselves out of nothing.  A desireless person doesn’t even have desires for desires.  It would just sit there doing nothing.  Somebody or something has to set the initial goals.  Just like humans set me to chase 73 degrees, human beings are set to chase certain goals, too.

Human: I see your point.  But, if we follow your logic to its extreme, it means that nothing is up to anyone.  Everything in the world is out of control.

Thermostat: So much the less for everything in the world.  Just stop telling me the temperature in the room is up to me.

Anti-realists about free will think like the thermostat.  It doesn’t matter if we have lower-level control, if we’re not immune to meta-control.  Yes, we exercise control, but if we only do so in a way that is set out for us by God’s deterministic design—or cosmic chance—that control is a sham.

There’s one last point to make.  Perhaps the most important—and telling—part of the dialogue is the Thermostat’s point about loving 73 degrees: I would love whatever temperature I was set to love.  That is how anti-realists think: we have a thin sense of personal identity, and we see how we would live different lives, if we had been born with different desires/values/preferences.  We’re less willing to hold onto, and endorse, the accidents of birth and circumstance.

Compatibilists don’t think like that.  Why?

B & B duked it out on free will at the recent Society for Personality and Social Psychology convention in Tampa and the debate continues on their respective Psychology Today blogs here and here. To my way of thinking Baumeister has some rather inchoate libertarian leanings and fears demoralization by determinism, while Bargh bites the deterministic bullet, saying everything’s going to be all right.

Some time ago, I started the Philosophy Journal Wiki. But as has been rightly pointed out here, the Philosophy Journal Wiki leaves a lot to be desired. Thankfully, Andrew Cullison has taken it upon himself to come up with a better version. I think that what he has in the works is excellent, but before he gets it up and running he's looking for some feedback. Over at his blog, he's created a small model of what he has in mind. Please click on this link http://www.andrewcullison.com/2009/07/best-journal-survey-method-so-far/ and check it out. Leave any useful feedback that you have there, not here. 

Hi fellow experimentalist,

The 2nd annual Interdisciplinary Approaches to Philosophical Issues Conference is currently accepting submissions. This year's theme is perception, action, and consciousness. Submissions that broadly meet any of these categories are encouraged. For the CFP, see here.

Last year's meeting was well attended by the X-Phi community, and we are hoping for another solid turnout.

This year's keynote speaker is Marcel Kinsbourne.

We are also hosting a series of special invited speakers that will include John Bickle, Andrea Scarantino, and Daniel Weiskopf.

The conference will be held on Sept. 25 & 26 at the University of South Alabama in Mobile, AL.

I’m in St Andrews for two more days, until the end of the summer school. It’s been absurdly beautiful here the last couple of days, reminding me why I come here rather than rainy old New York. At least there is some good food and wine to make up for it.

• The slides for my talk at the summer school are here (PDF). I tinkered a little bit with the slides before the presentation to take out some of the digressions, and still only covered the first 3 sections in the talk. (I had planned to get through 4 sections, but there were several good questions along the way that slowed things down. PS: The link I originally put up to the slides was broken; thanks to Michael Kremer in comments for pointing this out.)
• Continuing with the Arché theme, our colleagues at CSMN have podcasts of some of their recent conference proceedings. The talks at the Arché summer school are being recorded, so they might go to podcast soon as well.
• There have been some changes at the Journal of Semantics recently, many of which will make the journal more interesting to people in philosophy department. One of my former colleagues, Zoltan Szabó, is now an associate editor, and two of my colleagues, François Recanati and Roger Schwarzschild, are on the advisory board. The journal aims to cover “all areas in the study of meaning, and particularly welcomes submissions using the best available methodologies in semantics, pragmatics, the syntax/semantics interface, cross-linguistic semantics, experimental studies of meaning (processing, acquisition, neurolinguistics), and semantically informed philosophy of language.” (my emphasis) There is more information here (PDF).

Consider the following manipulation scenario. 

I implant in your brain a radio-controlled neurological device that allows me to manipulate all of the psychological forces (PFs for short) that guide you in your choices—that is, all of the feelings, emotions, sensitivities, motivations, dispositions, desires, aversions, beliefs, and so on that hold sway in your mind.  Using the device, I can make you feel pleasure, pain, guilt, pride, calm, anxiousness, anger, compassion, and so on, each in response to whatever stimuli I specify.  I can make you love a certain kind of food, I can make you hate members of a certain race, I can make you romantically attracted to a certain person, I can do all of that.  More importantly, I can control the degree and intensity of each of your states of mind. 

The one thing that the device does not allow me to control, however, is your ability to choose.  You retain that ability.  Though I determine your psychological inputs, you determine the choices that follow from those inputs.  They remain “up to you.”  You pull the trigger on them. 

Now, suppose that I use this device (and other hypothetical powers that I have) to steer you into the exact same external situation that Bernie Madoff was in immediately prior to one of his immoral choices--let's say in an office somewhere in Manhattan, deliberating whether to push "enter" on the computer and transfer a potential client's funds into the Ponzi scheme.  I then give you the same internal PFs--the same feelings, emotions, sensitivities, motivations, desires, beliefs and so on that were present in his mind at the time of the choice.  In physical terms, I put your brain in the exact same neurological state that his brain was in, and I let things go from there to see what happens. 

The question is, do you make the same immoral choice that he made?  If our universe is deterministic, or more specifically, if the human brain is a deterministic physical system, then the answer is necessarily yes.  The question then becomes, are you morally responsible for making that choice? 

In my view, we have to answer no.  If we answer yes, we force ourselves into an absurd conclusion: that, if given access to the requisite technology, I would be able to make you morally responsible for whatever I want—a theft, a rape, a murder, a holocaust, anything.  On such an analysis, science would in principle be able to afford me total, unfettered control over your moral destiny.  That is not an acceptable conclusion. 

On a theoretical level, we can bite the bullet and accept that you would be morally responsible for making the choice.  But what will we say when someone actually goes through with this experiment in real-life, when someone actually manipulates a brain—maybe my brain or your brain—in the stated way, so that a real person—maybe you or me—actually ends up facing a life in prison or an eternity in hell?  Will our view change?  I certainly hope that that it will. 

If we are being honest with ourselves, we have to answer no.  But if we answer no, if we say that you aren’t responsible for making the immoral choice, then how can we say that Madoff is responsible for making that choice?  It’s the same choice, is it not?  The only difference is that in your case, a person brought about the PFs that led you to make it, while in Madoff’s case, Nature brought them about.  But why would that difference make a difference as to your guilt or innocence?  Why would the fact that your PFs were brought about by a personal force rather than by a non-personal force absolve you of moral responsibility for a choice that you yourself obviously made?   

It seems clear to me that if I put you in Madoff’s exact circumstances and I give you a choice, and you end up making the same choice, then you deserve the same judgment and punishment for that choice that he deserves.  You took the same test and scored the same grade.   If you passed, then he passed.  If you aren't responsible, then neither is he.  

To compatibilist gardeners: how would you respond to this manipulation case?  Are you morally responsible for the choice?  If not, how can Madoff be responsible?  If so, how can a conception of moral responsibility be intuitively plausible if it allows one person to guarantee that another person will become guilty of something? 

Shifting the focus to libertarianism, it is commonly assumed that manipulation cases do not threaten the libertarian position in the way that they threaten the compatibilist position.  This assumption, in my view, is wrong.  Libertarianism offers no meaningful advantages over compatibilism when it comes to problems of manipulation. 

On a superficial level, how might a libertarian attempt to escape from the problem?  Well, if our universe is indeterministic, or more specifically, if the human brain is an indeterministic physical system, and I put you in Madoff’s exact internal and external circumstances, I won’t be able to guarantee that you will make the same choice that he made.  Your choosing differently than he did will be compatible with your having a brain in the same state that his brain was in (with the same PFs).  So, by accepting that you would be responsible for the choice, a libertarian doesn’t have to deal with the dilemma of my being able to use technology to seal your moral destiny.   The fact of indeterminism prevents that dilemma from emerging. 

But this is hardly a solution to the problem.  To overcome the obstacle of indeterminism, all I have to do is run the experiment over and over again.  If you choose differently than Madoff the first time through, I can just steer you back into Madoff’s circumstances, remanipulate your brain and your PFs to match his, and then release, allowing you to choose again. 

The fact that Madoff made a certain immoral choice means that there is a non-zero probability that a brain in the state that his brain was in  will arrive at that choice.  Thus, given enough trials with your brain in that state, you will eventually make the same choice that he made.  It may take a million trials, but we're going to get there eventually. 

What happens when we do get there? Say I run the experiment 1,000,000 times, and on the first 999,999 times, you make a different choice, a moral choice.  But on the last time, you make Madoff’s choice.  Are you any less responsible for that choice than Madoff was for his original choice?  Obviously not, and therefore you will deserve the same judgment and punishment for that choice that he deserves.

Does the outcome of the previous 999,999 choices affect whether you are morally responsible for the 1,000,000th choice, the one that was immoral?  It certainly would be puzzling for someone to answer yes.  Think about how ridiculous the same answer would be if made in the reverse direction.  “Yeah, I made a bad choice the first time through, I killed somebody, but I’m not morally responsible for it, because when you reran the scenario 999,999 times, putting me in the same psychological circumstances and giving me additional chances to kill someone, I chose not to kill every time.”  Congratulations, but you still made a choice to kill somebody! 

And so I pose the question to libertarians: If I can successfully run the manipulation scenario an infinite number of times, then how can the fact of indeterminism help anything?  if I run the Madoff manipulation scenario 1,000,000 times on a person, and on the last run, they choose the immoral choice, are they morally responsible for having made that choice?  Do they deserve the same judgment and punishment for that choice that Madoff deserves for his?  If not, why not?  If so, do you think it is problematic that your conception of responsibility allows one person to guarantee that another person will end up guilty of something? 

First, a stipulated definition (with apologies in advance to PvI for not following his terminological guidelines):  let free will be the control condition on moral responsibility.

Now, the historical question.  What, if any, philosophers denied the existence of free will prior to, say, 1900?  (This is an arbitrary time; I'm actually most interested in whether any ancient, medieval, or modern philosophers denied the existense of free will.)

Bonus question for those who answer the historical question: What reasons were given to support FW skepticism?

I’ve been meaning to post more over the last week, but I’ve been busy getting ready for my presentation to the Arché Summer School.

• Speaking of summer schools, the North American Summer School in Logic, Language and Information is returning after a 6 year hiatus. It will be at Indiana in 2010, and two of my esteemed colleagues are on the program committee. Anyone who is interested in presenting a course should get in touch with the organisers.
• I’ve tried to add a Twitter feed to the sidebar. It is meant to track @twtar, which is the Twitter account I opened for TAR. But the software I’m using seems slow and buggy, and I might remove that feed if things don’t improve soon.
• Speaking of the Arché Summer School, I’m about to head off to see Jonathan Ichikawa talk about thought experiments. First of many fun talks this week I hope!

Steve Stitch asked me to pass along the following:

There is some sad news.  Nicola Knight, a gifted young researcher who worked at the intersection of anthropology, psychology and philosophy, died of a heart attack on June 9, at the age of 33.  Nicola had done collaborative work with Justin Barrett, Scott Atran, Dick Nisbett and others.  His groundbreaking study of the patterns of justification that people offer for their moral judgments is currently under review.  There is a brief memorial notice by Dan Sperber online here.

The death of a star may create a supernova explosion. A massive shock wave radiates throughout the whole star, which heats up and then explodes. This flash is as bright as a whole galaxy and leaves behind a rapidly spinning neutron star.

Millions of people who searched for the star's name on Google News were greeted with an error page: "your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application". Or the impact of a dead star.

Luciano Floridi's blog on the Philosophy of information

The simple and logical argument against free will is that either determinism or indeterminism is true.

If determinism is true, we are not free.

If indeterminism is true, our actions are random, so we did not will them.

We are not responsible either way. Ergo, no free will. Q.E.D.

The flaw in the argument concerns indeterminacy. Because logic is time and space independent, many philosophers assume that if indeterminism if true, randomness is significant and relevant at all times and all places, independent of scale or size.

But indeterminacy is normally important only for microscopic structures. Macroscopic structures, including our brains and bodies, are adequately determined - except when some useful indeterminacy helps us to generate alternative possibilities, or (and this is very important) allows us to be creative and bring genuinely new information into the universe.

So could you accept some chance in your own causal chain that would not make your decisions random?

I suggest seven places where even compatibilists and determinists might accept some chance in the causal chain leading up to their latest decision, which I hope they might agree is an "adequately determined" decision that is truly "up to them."

1) Only at the original moment of the "big bang."
(This leads us to Peter van Inwagen's Consequence Argument).

2) During genetic mutations that created the species homo sapiens.
(Without this chance, none of us would be here.)

3) Nine months before your birth. (It was one in a million which of your father's sperm would win the race to your mother's egg. Without this one, you wouldn't be one of us.)

4) During your moral education.
(These are those rare events that C. S. Peirce calls the "fixation of beliefs," and Bob Kane calls "self-forming actions." These are important because they may contribute to your latest decisions.)

5) When you decided to become a philosopher.
(Again, without this one, you wouldn't be part of the Garden. How many of you think chance might have played a part?)

6) During deliberation about your current options.
(In these sometimes extended moments, your subconscious processing of possibilities may consider thousands of input factors and evaluate enormous numbers of possible outcomes. If you are creative, you may come up with ideas never thought of by anyone before you. Thus chance and indeterminacy is involved up until a fraction of a second before your "moment of choice." This is my Cogito model. www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/cogito/)

6) During the decision itself.
(Bob Kane, Laura Ekstrom, Mark Balaguer and others argue that your decision must not be "determined" by all the considerations that arise during your deliberation. You are not free enough , they say, even if some of the alternative posssibilities might be random combinations of your own past experiences that you have dreamed up yourself.

Compatibilists should be quite content to think that this decision is adequately determined (that randomness is negligible ) by an evaluation process that included our character and values, our habits and preferences, our current feelings and desires, etc. This then is a "kind of freedom available to us," as Galen Strawson recently agreed.)

I think the Libertarians have been right about the need for some indeterminacy, but they are wrong to try to push it into our decisions themselves, with one exception.  Mark Balaguer's "torn decisions," perhaps some of Kane's "decisions requiring great effort," and in general Buridan-type "liberty of indifference" decisions, might all be made by flipping a "mental coin." If we are fully aware that it is a random choice, and if we are prepared to accept responsibility either way, perhaps we can still regard this as an act of our will.

On my Information Philosopher website, I have researched over twenty recent philosophers (including a few Gardeners) who have published versions of this simple and logical argument. It apparently has convinced them, and perhaps hundreds or thousands of their philosophy students and readers of their textbooks.

None of them appear to have seen this flaw. Do you agree that there is a flaw here that might be corrected by a clearer description of how indeterminacy can be limited - to do no harm to an adequate determinism.

More important, do you see how indeterminacy can help to provide a kind of freedom from the fixed past (and the laws of nature, as the argument goes) and an ability for humans to be creative individuals?

For your convenience, I quote below many of these versions of the standard argument, which I expect some of you have used from time to time.

Can you read them over with the suggested flaw in mind?
_______________________________

UPDATE, June 26, 2009: Anyone interested in how I ended up developing this argument should check out the paper just published in PPR.

One of the more difficult issues for Kantian moral theorists is how, if at all, our moral obligations should be sensitive to others' wrongdoing. It seems fairly obvious that what we are morally required to do can change in response to others' immoral conduct. A clear example is promise keeping: If A and B agree to a mutually beneficial promise, but A doesn't fulfill the terms of their promise, B is presumably not obligated to fulfill them either. So A's wrongdoing influences B's moral obligations. Another example is punishment: Since punishment is the infliction of harm, suffering, or deprivation (which is typically wrong), it must be the case that the wrongdoer's wrongdoing justifies inflicting otherwise wrongful harm, suffering, or deprivation on her. This issue is acute for Kantians because Kantianism has long been seen as somehow more "principled" than consequentialism. The challenge for Kantians is to offer an explanation of how our moral obligations should be sensitive to others' wrongdoing that invokes key Kantian values or principles (rational autonomy, the categorical imperative, etc.) without becoming so sensitive to others' wrongdoing that Kantianism becomes indistinguishable from outright consequentialism.

The example that has of course stimulated much of the discussion surrounding this problem is Kant's treatment of 'the murderer at the door' in his essay "On a Supposed Right to Lie." There Kant seems to say that lying to a would-be murderer about the whereabouts of the innocent victim he intends to kill would be morally wrong. Most Kantians (and most reasonable people in general) find this conclusion troubling if not absurd: If ever there were a situation in which lying is not only morally permitted, but even morally required, that would be it!

What follows is my own (admittedly long-ish) attempt to answer the 'murderer at the door' problem in Kantian terms. Whether my attempt is of value in addressing the larger theoretical problem of how our moral obligations should be sensitive to others' wrongdoing, I'm not sure, but here goes:

My argument is actually quite simple:
1. It is morally permissible (from a Kantian perspective) for an innocent person (i.e., a person who does
not deserve to die for some other reason) to lie to a murderer in self-defense.
2. If it is morally permissible (from a Kantian perspective) for an innocent person to lie to a murderer in
self-defense, then it is also morally permissible (from a Kantian perspective) for any person to lie to a
murderer in the defense of another innocent person.
------------------------------------------------
It is morally permissible for any person to lie to a murderer in the defense of another innocent person.

Obviously, my task is to defend the truth of the premises.

P1. One of the great strengths of Kantian moral theory is its powerful account of what's wrong with manipulative or coercive behavior such as torture, promise breaking, and lying. Such acts in effect treat others as mere means to our ends, inasmuch as we manipulate the other person's behavior or expectations in order to advance our own happiness. In the particular case of lying, the manipulation or coercion involved is doxastic, as Sissela Bok has observed: A lie attempts to cause another person to act on a belief that the liar believes to be false so as to benefit the liar.

But I would suggest that in the 'murderer at the door' example, two conditions necessary for lying to be wrongful (in Kantian terms) are not present: First, the lie is not meant to advance the happiness either of the liar or of the potential murder victim, but to thwart the abuse of the victim's autonomy that her murder would represent. Hence, if lying to the murderer is manipulation at all, it is manipulation in the service of the would-be victim's autonomy, a central Kantian value. Second, while Kantian ethics prioritizes the value of autonomous rational agency over happiness, it does not follow from this that we are obligated to honor another agent's autonomous choices no matter the ends that a given exercise of autonomy is meant to serve. In the 'murderer at the door', the murderer intends to exercise his autonomy in the service of a morally impermissible end, and Kant claims that we are obligated to promote others' ends (i.e., others' happiness) only if those ends are themselves morally permissible. I take that to be an indirect statement of the notion that whether we must honor another's autonomy on a given occasion may depend on whether that autonomy is being exercised in morally permissible ways. Autonomy may be the highest moral value, but it is not therefore an unconditioned value. To manipulate by lying is to deceive in order to thwart another's otherwise permissible ends. In the murderer at the door example, this is not what we are considering doing.

It would seem to follow that if I am innocent (i.e., I do not deserve to die for other reasons), my lying in self-defense is not an impermissible violation of the liar's rational autonomy.

2. But would it be permissible for me to lie to the murderer in order to save another's life? To see why it would be, I'm going to introduce what I will call the Kantian Symmetry Thesis. An 'agent' is the person who actually performs the act, and a 'beneficiary' is the person whose autonomy is protected or advanced by the agent's act.

Kantian Symmetry Thesis: Any morally permissible act performed by agent A in which A is also the act's beneficiary is also permissible if another agent B (relevantly similar to A) is the beneficiary of A's act instead.

We see throughout Kant's casuistry implicit appeals to this thesis: Suicide, Kant thought, is wrong for just the same reasons (and in just the same circumstances) that homicide is wrong. Similarly, in Kant's sexual ethics (not that we should accept much of it of course!) acts that treat another's sexuality as a mere tool of one's happiness (rape) are wrong in the same way that acts that treat one's own sexuality as a tool of one's own happiness (masturbation) are wrong. In other words, Kant did not think that there exists a special moral relationship to oneself such that the obligations one bears vis-a-vis oneself are importantly distinct from those one bears toward other agents. (This is a way in which Kant was not a 'liberal,' since one important feature of liberalism has been the idea of a domain of self-regarding behavior that is governed by different norms from the domain of other-regarding behavior).

So, if it is permissible for me to lie to prevent a murderer from killing innocent me, than by the KST, it would follow that it would also be permissible for me to lie to prevent that same murderer from killing another innocent.
------

Again, I don't know if my thoughts about how to address the murderer at the door hold any general lessons about how to develop a non-ideal Kantian theory (one that takes account of others' wrongdoing), but any ideas or suggestions are certainly welcome.

University of Sydney, Aug 6-7
Organizer: Richard Joyce (richard.jo...@arts.usyd.edu.au)

SPEAKERS:

David Copp (UC Davis)
Justin D'Arms (Ohio State)
Janice Dowell (Nebraska-Lincoln)
Jamie Dreier (Brown)
Josh Gert (Florida State)
Daniel Jacobson (University of Michigan)
Don Loeb (Vermont)
David Sobel (Nebraska-Lincoln)
Kim Sterelny (ANU)

Further info, including venue, will be announced in due course. There is no formal registration, but if you think you might come along, please send Richard Joyce an email so that we get a sense of numbers.

Here. 

Here's the program for a workshop on Attention and Consciousness, put on by the ANU Centre for Consciousness.  It will be held in the Sparke Helmore Lecture Theatre in the ANU College of Law later this week.  If you'd like to attend, please email dicrosse [[at]] coombs.anu.edu.au.

THURSDAY JUNE 25

8:40-9      Coffee/registration

9-10:30    Eric Schwitzgebel (Philosophy, UC Riverside)
                Consciousness and Attention

11-12:30  Matthew Finkbeiner (Cognitive Science, Macquarie)
                Visual Attention and Reportability

2-3:30      Brian Scholl (Psychology, Yale)
                The Logic of Seeing (and not Seeing)

4-5:30      Ned Block (Philosophy, NYU)
                Attention and Veridicality

7pm         Conference Dinner


FRIDAY JUNE 26

9-10:30    Chris Mole (Philosophy, UBC)
                Attending and Referring

11-12:30  John Campbell (Philosophy, UC Berkeley)
                Where Does Consciousness Fit In?
                On the Boolean Map Theory of Visual Attention

2-3:30      Declan Smithies (Philosophy, ANU/OSU)
                What Is Attention?

4-5:30      David Chalmers (Philosophy, ANU)
                Wrap-Up/Discussion

I have long been convinced of the soundness of the luck argument against standard accounts of libertarianism (the qualification ‘standard’ is necessary; I believe that libertarianisms that are no more subject to luck than the best compatibilisms are possible, but I don’t want to get into that argument right now). The luck argument, as I understand it, targets moral responsibility: if an agent Xs, where X-ing is bad, and they are lucky to X, inasmuch as had luck played out differently, they would have performed some action incompatible with X (or not action at all), then they are not responsible for X-ing.

The question I am currently grappling with is why are standard libertarianisms subject to an unacceptable degree or kind of luck: that is, what condition or conditions on moral responsibility are not satisfied by an agent who is subject to responsibility-undermining luck? The way in which I set out the luck argument above is influenced by (or perhaps influences) the condition on moral responsibility I am tempted by. Call it the contrastive principle. It is intended as a necessary condition:

An agent is morally responsible for X-ing only if the event of his X-ing is the (non-deviant) upshot of his decision to X rather than Y, where X-ing and Y-ing have conflicting moral valences. An agent can satisfy the contrastive principle either directly – by deciding to X rather than Y – or indirectly; by being strongly disposed on the current occasion to X because of past occasions on which he directly satisfied the contrastive principle.

The above is probably a little obscure, so let me say just a little bit more. Moral valences are polarities; the moral valence of an act is its goodness or badness. Thus, an agent satisfies the contrastive principle directly by choosing a bad action rather than a good one, or vice-versa (actually, I think moral responsibility unlike moral goodness tracks subjective judgments; so really it is by choosing an action that he takes to be bad rather than good that an agent satisfies the principle). I want the contrastive principle to be satisfiable by agents in Frankfurt-style cases (despite my doubts about such cases). The intuitive idea is that we blame agents for choosing the bad rather than the good, and vice-versa for praise.

I have a feeling that the contrastive principle has problems. At the moment, its only a vague feeling. Want to help turn it into a conviction?

I’m about to head away for the weekend, so I won’t be responding to (or moderating) comments for the next few days unless I spend some of my vacation time on the internet. (That’s not to say I’ll actually be off the blog…)

• Sinan Dogramaci has a paper forthcoming in Noûs using a similar kind of proof to the one I used in Induction and Supposition. So I’ve updated my paper to note that he was first! Sinan disagrees with me about where the proof fails. I think it fails when we try to make a statistical inference inside the scope of a supposition. He thinks it fails when we do ∀-introduction in a proof that includes non-deductive steps. So I’ve also extended the discussion in my paper of why I think I’ve diagnosed the error correctly. I don’t think I’ve got to the heart of what Sinan says, but I hope I’ve at least improved my paper.
• I have two posts up at the Arché Methodology Blog. One is on thought experiments and fictions, the other on whether philosophy is inductive or deductive
• Richard Dietz and Igor Douven are putting on a conference on Conditionals and Conditionalization in Leuven on September 4-6.
• A new European Journal for Philosophy of Science is being established, though I’m not sure when it will start taking submissions.

The good stuff is here. 

Let's get a little down to earth here at PEA Soup: I may have to confront an actual ethical quandary in a few months, and I'd be interested in hearing people's thoughts about how I ought to respond.

Budget woes in the California State University system are severe.  One possibility being considered for the fall is to reduce personnel costs by imposing 'furloughs' on all CSU employees, faculty included.  This would mandate that faculty take 1-2 days off per month and take about a 5% cut in their gross pay. Now, as I gather most people understand, I don't actually teach, attend meetings or even come to my campus 5 days a week. The norm is that I come three or four days a week, and often spend the other weekdays, my evenings, and my weekends doing much of the work that constitutes my job (preparing class meeting, grading papers, doing my philosophical research and writing). There's definitely five days per week of work, just not five days per week at work.

The issue is: Should I respond to the furlough mandate by working less, the equivalent of 1-2 days per month? And if so, where should I reduce my efforts? Some possibilities:

I could do nothing and essentially absorb the furlough. After all, given my work patterns, I can simply do what I've always done. It's not as if the state will ask me to report which 1-2 days per month I'm not working that I used to work!  The problems with doing nothing are twofold: First, assuming that my existing salary adequately reflects the value of my work, then it seems unjust to me to do that work while being paid less for it. The state is legally entitled to impose the furlough, but it does not seem like an unjust response for me to work less for less pay. Second, working just as much sends a misleading message to students and to the general public: that diminishing resources for public education won't affect faculty performance and educational quality.  Not to be too political here, but very often I suspect the general public would in fact like something for nothing (or more charitably, a lot for very little), and indeed, the present budgetary crisis is at least in part the product of that irrational attitude. The lack of funding has led to severe monetary constraints, but I fear that doing nothing hides those constraints (and their effect on educational quality) from the public. And as a teacher, I see myself as educating my students not only in my discipline, but in a more general way, to shape their choices and attitudes on the basis of a realistic and clear-eyed worldview.

But supposing I work less -- where should the reduction in effort come? I could do less by way of research. But I find research rewarding and it's clearly in my professional interests to be a productive scholar. I could actually not come to campus once per month, perhaps on a day I'm supposed to be teaching. But that hurts students. I could perhaps teach less effectively -- returning student papers more slowly, offering less feedback, etc. But that hurts students too. And to my mind, students are mostly innocent in this situation — I should mention they're also being asked to pay much higher tuition this year — and so it's wrong to ask them to bear the costs of the crisis. So I don't see a place to reduce my efforts that isn't injurious to myself or to other innocent people.

So: is there a way to treat myself fairly, send the right message about the budgetary realities to the students, and not harm or shortchange innocent people? I'd be interested in hearing some creative responses that I might have overlooked.

The Law and Neuroscience Colloquium will take place on July 6-7 at University College, London, and the Garden's own John Fischer will be presenting his reply to the luck objection on behalf of the libertarian. 

Here is an interesting way of making explicit some of the tensions within an externalist account of evidence. I’m drawing here on some points Roger White made at the Arché Scepticism Conference, though I’m not sure Roger is perfectly happy with this way of putting things.

In what follows I’ll use ‘Pr’ for the evidential probability function (and hence assume that one exists), E(a) as a description for a’s evidence, Cr(p, a) for a’s credence in p, and Exp(X, a) as the expected value of random variable X according to probability function Pr conditioned on E(a). Then the following three statements are inconsistent. [There used to be a typo in the previous sentence, which Clayton noted in comments.]

1. If a is perfectly rational, then Cr(p, a) = Pr(p | E(a)).
2. If a is perfectly rational, then Cr(p, a) = Exp(Pr(p| E(a)), a).
3. It is possible for a to be perfectly rational, and for Pr(p | E(a)) to not equal Exp(Pr(p| E(a)), a).

The intuition behind 1 is that for a rational agent, credence is responsive to the evidence.

The intuition behind 2 is that for a rational agent, their credences match up with what they think their credences ought to be. If 2 fails, then rational agents will find themselves taking bets that they (rationally!) judge that they should not take. Roger’s paper at the conference did a really good job of bringing out how odd this option is.

The intuition behind 3 is that not all perfectly rational agents know what their evidence is. So if p is part of a’s evidence, but a does not know that p is part of their evidence, then Pr(p | E(a)) will be 1, although Exp(Pr(p| E(a)), a) will be less than 1. I believe Williamson has some more dramatic violations of this principle in intuitive models, but all we need is one violation to get the example going.

Given that the 3 are inconsistent, we have an interesting paradox on our hands. I think, despite its plausibility, that the thing to give up is 2. Credences should be responsive to evidence. If you don’t know what your evidence is, you can’t know that you’re being responsive to evidence, i.e. being rational. It might be that all of the possible errors are on one side of the correct position. In that case, your best estimate of what you should do will diverge from what you should do. So anyone who thinks evidence isn’t always luminous will think that we will have oddities like the oddities used to motivate 2. So I think we have to learn to live with its failures.

Everyone at the conference seemed to assume that that’s also what Williamson would agree, and say that 2 is what should be given up. I’m not actually sure, as a matter of Williamson interpretation, that that’s correct. Williamson denies that we can interpret evidential probabilities in terms of credences of a hypothetically rational agent. It might be that he would give up both 1 and 2, and deny that there is any simple relationship between rational credence and evidential probability. Or he might accept that Exp(Pr(p| E(a)), a) is a better guide to rational credence than Pr(p | E(a)).

Whatever way we look at it though, I think that this is an interesting little paradox, and one of several reasons I liked the conference at the weekend was that I realised it existed.

There is a mistake on page 49 of Lewis's "Counterfactual dependence and time's arrow" (1979). Since the mistake seems to be repeated all the time, it might be worth pointing it out.

Page 49 is where Lewis lists similarity standards for his analysis of counterfactuals. The analysis, recall, says that "if A were the case, then C" is true iff the closest A-worlds are C-worlds (or, more precisely, iff either there are no A-worlds or some A&C-worlds are closer to the actual world than any A&~C world). Closeness is a matter of similarity, and Lewis indicates what the relevant respects of similarity might be for certain ordinary counterfactuals in section 3.3 of his 1973 book, and again in the 1979 article on counterfactual dependence. Roughly, the closest A-worlds are those that perfectly match the actual world across as much of spacetime as possible without diverse and widespread violations of the actual laws. This won't do for indeterministic worlds, where generally no laws need to be violated at all in order to ensure perfect match of futures even after earlier divergence. So Lewis restricts his standards to deterministic worlds, returning to the indeterministic case in the 1986 postscript to the 1979 paper.

Now consider the following situation, due to Sydney Morgenbesser.

You bet that a certain fair coin toss will result in tails; but the coin lands heads. If you had bet on heads, you would have won.

This is widely supposed to be a problem for Lewis's 1973/1979 account: by this account, the closest antecedent worlds are worlds where a small miracle makes you bet on heads instead of tails. Without a big and widespread miracle, all such worlds differ from the actual world throughout the future light cone of the betting event. Introducing further small miracles would therefore needlessly detract from similarity. Hence all those worlds evolve by the actual laws of nature. Since the coin is indeterministic, laws and history leave it open whether the coin lands heads or tails. So it is not true that at all the closest worlds where you bet on heads, you win. The intuitively true counterfactuals comes out false.

But this is all wrong. For one, the 1973/1979 account is silent on indeterministic cases. And even if we ignore the restriction to determinacy and apply Lewis's standards, we can't assume that the coin toss is the only indeterministic event in the history of the world. If Morgenbesser's situation takes place in a thoroughly indeterministic universe, the closest antecedent worlds (by the 1979 standards) are miracle-free worlds where an entirely lawful, indeterministic event makes you bet on heads, and where other indeterministic events make the future perfectly match the actual future. In all such worlds, the coin lands heads. Morgenbesser's counterfactual comes out true.

One of those who mistakenly took Morgenbesser's case to be relevant to Lewis's 1973/1979 account was Lewis himself. On page 49 of the 1979 paper, he adds a further condition to the similarity standards given above. The added condition (numbered "4") says that "approximate overall similarity" is of "little or no importance" when comparing worlds. Lewis notes that "it is a good question whether approximate similarities of particular fact should have little weight or none. Different cases come out differently, and I would like to know why. Tichy and Jackson give cases which appear to come out right [...] only if approximate similarities count for nothing; but Morgenbesser has given a case [...] which appears to go the other way."

Apparently Lewis thought that if approximate similarities get some weight in Morgenbesser's example, then worlds where the coin lands heads come out closer to the actual world than worlds where it lands tails. But the patch is not only unnecessary, it also doesn't work. There are many respects in which the worlds with heads are less similar to the original world, e.g. with respect to your losing the bet. Depending on the story (think: high stakes), this dissimality can easily outweigh any approximate similarity gained by keeping fixed the outcome of the coin toss.

The upshot is twofold.

First, Lewis never had any good reason for assigning positive weight to approximate overall similarity in his standards for deterministic worlds. The only reason he gives is the irrelevant Morgenbesser case. As he points out, the addition yields wrong results in various other cases, which, unlike Morgenbesser's, do not involve indeterminacy. We should therefore just ignore the mistakenly added condition 4. Sadly, many philosophers still think that approximate similarity is somehow very important for Lewis's analysis, and that examples of the Tichy-Jackson type pose a big problem for his account.

Second, we should stop repeating Lewis's mistake to think that Morgenbesser-type cases are relevant to his 1973/1979 account. Such cases are interesting, but they should be discussed at the right place: when we're dealing with similarity standards for indeterministic worlds. In this context, the 1973/1979 standards are not meant to apply.

Inspired by some things Stewart Cohen and Jonathan Vogel said at the weekend’s scepticism conference, I’ve written a short note on the intersection of inductive reasoning and suppositional reasoning.

Induction and Supposition (PDF)

Here’s the first paragraph, which gives you a flavour of what I’m arguing against.

Here’s a fairly quick argument that there is contingent a priori knowledge. Assume there are some ampliative inference rules. Since the alternative appears to be inductive scepticism, this seems like a safe enough assumption. Such a rule will, since it is ampliative, licence some particular inference From A infer B where A does not entail B. That’s just what it is for the rule to be ampliative. Now run that rule inside suppositional reasoning. In particular, first assume A, then via this rule infer B. Now do a step of →-introduction, inferring A → B and discharging the assumption A. Since A does not entail B, this will be contingent, and since it rests on a sound inference with no (undischarged) assumptions, it is a priori knowledge.

It has been a while since we’ve had a links post.

• The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy has started up a Friends of the Stanford Encyclopaedia Society. Membership is very cheap, and with it you get access to professionally styled PDFs of SEP articles. And, of course, you’re supporting a good cause.
• There has been a lot of philosophical interest happening over at Crooked Timber recently. I wanted to particularly note Daniel’s post on throwing eggs at BNP leaders. Whatever you think of the conclusion, and I think I’m a lot more happy with throwing eggs at fascists than most of the commentators are, the post makes some very insightful points about the role of authority in political discourse. A lot of philosophers have extremely simplistic views about the dynamics of authority in modern societies, and thinking hard about cases like this one is one way to have less simplistic views.
• Robbie Williams has an excellent paper (PDF) on generalising Joyce’s accuracy argument for probabilism to non-classical contexts. Among other things, the paper has a very nice demonstration of what’s going on in the classical version of the argument. But I’m really excited about the non-classical parts. There is going to be some really interesting work on non-classical probability theory over the next few years.
• Finally, Cosma Shalizi on Bayesian statistics, via Brad DeLong.

Russ has released the program for the 2009 Madison Metaethics Workshop. Needless to say, it looks good.

ABOUT THE WORKSHOP - KEYNOTE - PROGRAM

WORKSHOP SITE - LODGING - REGISTRATION - TRAVEL TO MADISON - PAST WORKSHOPS

6th Annual Metaethics Workshop
All Sessions in 313  Pyle Center  (702 Langdon Street)

FRIDAY             SEPTEMBER 11
9am - 10:15am           JON TRESAN (Florida)
                                    Naturalistic Moral Realism, Moral Twin Earth, and the Meta-Moral Use of Moral Words
                                                                        Chair: Christian Coons (Bowling Green)

10:40am - Noon         EARL CONEE (Rochester)
                                    The Best Alternative
                                                                        Chair: David Merli (Franklin & Marshall)

1:30pm - 2:45pm       SARAH McGRATH (Princeton)
                                    Moral Knowledge and Experience
                                                                        Chair: Luke Robinson (SMU)

3:00pm - 4:30pm       CHRIS HEATHWOOD (Colorado)
                                    Desire-Based Theories of Reasons, Pleasure & Welfare
                                                                        Chair: Christian Miller (Wake Forest)
                                                                                   
4:45pm - 6pm             SHARON STREET (NYU)
                                    Evolution and the Normativity of Epistemic Reasons
                                                                        Chair: Noell Birondo (Claremont McKenna)

8pm -11 pm                RECEPTION                        (Memorial Union, Room TBA)

SATURDAY       SEPTEMBER 12
9am - 10:15am           PHIL CLARK (Toronto)
                                    Metaethics and the Mince-Pie Syllogism: Reflections on a Philosophical Joke
                                                                        Chair: Janice Dowell (Nebraska)

10:40am - Noon         CAMPBELL BROWN (Edinburgh)
                                    A New & Improved Supervenience Argument for Ethical Descriptivism
                                                                        Chair: Carla Bagnoli (UW-Milwaukee)

1:30pm - 2:45pm       DAVID SOBEL (Nebraska)
                                    Parfit’s Case against Subjectivism
                                                                        Chair: Teemu Toppinen (Helsinki)

3:00pm - 4:30pm       ALLAN GIBBARD (Michigan)
                                    ***KEYNOTE ADDRESS***

4:45pm - 6pm             JONAS OLSON (Stockholm)
                                    Getting Real about Moral Fictionalism
                                                                        Chair: Neil Sinclair (Nottingham)

6:30pm                       DINNER                    (University Club  803 State Street)

SUNDAY             SEPTEMBER 13
9:30am - 10:45am      MATT BEDKE (British Columbia)
                                    Oughts versus Requirements
                                                                        Chair: Michael Titelbaum (Wisconsin)

11:00am -12:15pm     PAUL KATSAFANAS (New Mexico)
                                    Activity and Passivity in Reflective Agency
                                                                        Chair: TBA

More information about the Workshop, including copies of each paper (to be posted on August 13th)  can be found at the Worskhop website:
https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/shaferlandau/web/metaethics/workshop_2009/

The Arché Scepticism Conference held over the weekend was a great success. Thanks to all the organisers, presenters, commentators and questioners for a great learning experience. For a real-time recap, see the conferences Twitter feed.

I’ll be posting my paper as soon as I’ve figured out how to respond to objections Martin Smith and Elia Zardini. That should be sometime in 2011-12. (I suspect a few other paper givers will be in the same position when it comes to dealing with objections Elia raised.)

The best slides from the conference were by Roger White. In fact it wasn’t very close. The best title was to Elia’s reply to Anthony Bruekner. Any other participants want to add some more prizes from the conference?

Al Mele has asked me to post the following message and cover art for his latest book.  The message and art are below the fold.

A few people have asked about the cover of my new book, *Effective Intentions: The Power of Conscious Will*.  The cover Amazon displays for it is not the cover of my book, and the OUP page displays only a thumbnail.  My daughter Angela painted the artwork for the book; so I’d very much like people to be able to see it on line.  

Best Wishes,

I think of myself as a fence-sitting agnostic. By that I mean that, although I don’t know whether or not God exists, I would very much like to know. Thus I’m far from those agnostics who say that it is impossible for anyone to know whether God exists, and also from those who claim that as a matter of fact no one knows it. I think it’s possible that some people know; all I can claim is that I don’t know myself.

Not only would I very much like to know whether or not God exists, I have a preferred answer: I’d like it to be true that God exists. This is because I think that the world would be a better place if God existed than if He didn’t—and the fact that the world isn’t a better place than it is is one reason I tend to doubt that He does.

I say this in spite of the fact that I’ve given a couple of (what I take to be) plausible arguments that a God of some sort exists, both here and here.

There are two main things that, for now, prevent me from accepting their conclusion: First, I think that whatever force they may have is in all probability defeated by the various arguments from evil. Second, I think that both the Deistic and Theistic conceptions of God face difficult problems. Why, on the Deistic view, would God create the universe and just sit by and watch things happen? Why in particular, would God refrain from making any kind of revelation? (Thomas Aquinas gives some persuasive arguments as to why it would be good for God to propose some things to be believed on faith, which can be found here.)

As an instance of this problem, consider the pervasive moral disagreements there have been between different societies and within a given society at different times. Why wouldn’t God reveal who’s right and who’s wrong, especially on the most important issues? Why, for example, would God allow the institution of slavery to endure for thousands of years without informing us of His disapproval?

On the Theistic view, there is no problem as to why God would not intervene in the course of history or make revelations: He has. The problem I have with theistic views is primarily the content of the alleged revelations. (I will confine my remarks to the Bible, as my knowledge of other sacred texts is not very great.) Of course, if one is an inerrantist who also, for the most part, tries to interpret the Bible as literally as possible, one will run into problems concerning the various contradictions and historical inaccuracies which are to be found in it. Apart from claims of inerrancy, I don’t regard these features of the Bible as being too problematic. Natural science is not without its contradictions (although they are much less frequent than they are in the Bible); it is well known that two of our most well-confirmed theories, General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, are inconsistent with each other. One or both must be false, in at least some of their details, but this does not give us any good reason to deny that science is our best, albeit imperfect, means of coming to know the physical universe, still less to reject science in general on the ground that its deliverances aren’t always true.

No, my main problem with the Bible is that in reading it (and especially in reading the Old Testament), one repeatedly comes across passages such as this:

(NIV)Exodus 21: 20:21: “If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, ²¹ but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property.”

and this:

(NIV)Samuel 15: 2-3: “This is what the LORD Almighty says: 'I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. ³ Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.' ”

and this:

(NAB)Hosea 14:1: “Samaria shall expiate her guilt, for she has rebelled against her God. They shall fall by the sword, their little ones shall be dashed to pieces, their expectant mothers shall be ripped open.”

The problem here is not that God has not revealed His will, but that His will as allegedly revealed in the Bible frequently turns out to be immoral.

Thus I face the following trilemma: Either Deism, Theism, or Atheism is true, although I find each of them problematic. I think Deism and Theism both have problems concerning moral issues, and that Theism in addition has problems concerning the historicity and consistency of its sacred texts. Atheism, on the other hand, does not have these problems, but is philosophically unsatisfying to me because it seems incapable of giving a satisfactory explanation of the existence, regularity, and relative life-friendliness of the physical universe. Suspending one’s judgment may be the only reasonable course of action in these circumstances, but when it comes to issues of such importance I would prefer come to a conclusion, as long as there is enough evidence to support it. If anyone thinks they can help me get clearer on these issues, I would greatly appreciate their assistance.

First, thanks to Doug and the other editors for the invitation!  I'm happy to be here.

We're pleased to announce that Jason Brennan has accepted our invitation to become a contributor. Here's a brief biography, which I borrow from his web site: "JASON BRENNAN (Ph.D., 2007, University of Arizona) is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Research, at Brown University, and a member of the Political Theory Project, an interdisciplinary research center at Brown. He specializes in metaethics, normative ethics, and political philosophy. His current research is on voting ethics, and he is developing a new liberal, pluralistic theory of civic virtue that emphasizes the public value of private, non-political activity. Together with David Schmidtz, he is the author of A Brief History of Liberty, forthcoming from Blackwell in August 2009. His second book, The Ethics of Voting, is under contract with Princeton University Press." Please join me in welcoming Jason.

Thanks to everyone for sharing their intuitions about the cases in my previous post. Here I’m going to back up and say something about my interest in the cases. Among linguists, the canonical view about modal expressions like “might”, “may” and “must” is that they are quantifiers over possibilities where the domains of quantification are contextually restricted. The view is an extremely powerful one; if correct, it provides a simple, highly unified explanation of a wide variety of language use. Recently, the canon’s neat story has come under attack on two fronts, in its treatment of bare epistemic modals (BEMs) and bare normative modals (BNMs). (A bare modal statement is a modal statement that doesn’t contain a restrictor phrase like “in view of my evidence” or “in view of what the law requires”.) I’ve got a manuscript defending a general, flexible contextualist account of bare modal statements and an application of that account to BEMs. (Here: http://www.unl.edu/philosop/people/faculty/dowell/dowell.shtml) Now I’m working on defending an application of that account to BNMs. (NB: My apologies in advance; this post is both long and oversimplified.) 

John Holbo and Belle Waring, who many of you will know from Crooked Timber and elsewhere, have a new book up in PDF format.

• Reason and Persuasion

The book contains translations of three Platonic dialogues, detailed commentaries on each of them, and illustrations! John has been using versions of it for teaching purposes for several years, and the book looks like it could be very useful for teaching (and research!) purposes.