Although I do not share Dennett's Laplacian tendencies, I do agree with his approach, which is to try to identify in what significant, worthwhile respect we (and/or our wills) are free beyond the lower animals. (He speaks of "the kind of freedom worth having.") This is also how the late neuroscientist Roger Sperry approached the matter, although from a different vantage-point. (See the review essay of Sperry on my webpage at
http://members.aol.com/REBissell/indexmm.html )
I personally maintain that our conceptual ability, especially our ability to imagine or project the future, gives us a range of alternative actions that frees us from the more limited, concrete-bound, range-of-the-moment perspective of the lower animals. This is a kind of freedom worth having, and that sets us apart from the lower animals, and it also explains a lot of the choices and actions humans take. I also maintain that, barring disease, disability, or coercion, we are free to at least attempt to take whatever action we most want to take at any given time. Animals, also, are capable of this, but their range of such wants and actions is limited by their not having a time-spanning conceptual faculty, so we are free-er than they are, in that regard.
This approach, examining the actual behavior and its range for different kinds of living beings, is empirical and inductive, and it allows one to carefully include all the things that living beings are capable of, without imputing to them, from the armchair, the ability to “have done other than one did, even if one didn’t want to.” When asked why someone chose x rather than y, Leonard Peikoff, the leading spokesman for Objectivism, says, incredibly, “There is no why.” In other words, for Peikoff, free will means (among other things) that you didn’t choose to do what you did because it was what you wanted most (in that context). You just chose it, period, and you could have chosen otherwise, period. I respect Peikoff a lot, but this particular argument of his is just atrocious.
Once, however, you ask “why” someone chose a particular thing, it seems to me that you are stuck with this answer: because that’s what they most wanted to choose. In other words, our choices and actions are determined by our values. Thus, I regard humans' wills or actions being free in the sense I described above as being compatible with determinism. Animals are free, also, but (as described above) with a more limited range of choice/action, and thus less free than humans in that respect. Animals, like humans, however, must act in accordance with their values. So, the freedom of both animals and humans is compatible with determinism – not of the Laplacean kind, or the clockwork universe kind, or the micro-reductionist kind, or the environmental determinist kind, or the genetic determinist kind, but the value-determinist kind.
Here is another way of saying what I mean: animals and humans are so constructed biologically that – barring disease, disability, or coercion – there is no existing barrier or block between what they most value and their pursuing that thing in their actions. This is the way in which all animals are free – recognizing that humans, being conceptual, are free-er than the lower animals. The absence of any such barrier or block is what I mean by freedom of action and determinism being compatible. There is nothing to bar animals and humans from doing what their values dictate they must do.
I further hold that one's actions being determined by one's values is equivalent to agent causation. Or, as Tibor says, “For my money, there is no reasonable doubt about it: human beings, unless crucially incapacitated, have the capacity to initiate some of their conduct.” However, I would go further than this. I think that the lower animals are agents, too, though not deliberative agents. They, too, are the center, the wellspring of their actions, just like humans. And the specific aspect of their nature that determines what they, as agents, will do is their values. This is the form of causality that governs the actions of living beings (including plants, to the extent that they may be said to have values) – hierarchical, entity-action, end-oriented, value-determinism.
Finally, while I maintain that we could not have done otherwise than we did in any given situation (unless we had chosen differently), I nonetheless hold that morality, rights, and punishment of crime are all compatible with determinism. However, I think we have to be very careful about using the term “moral responsibility.” I think it’s obvious that not everyone is morally responsible. Any person can choose to be morally responsible, if he wants that more strongly than to not be morally responsible. But that “if” is the whole problem. Moral responsibility is not a given, not an inherent attribute of human beings, but a choice.
Further, if we want a healthy, functional society (more than we want something that conflicts with it), we ought to behave in that manner, and we ought to teach our children, students, etc. to behave in that manner, and we ought to set up the laws and mores so that they reward such behavior and punish irresponsibility. But one thing I've held for a long time is that, whether or not one has chosen to be morally responsible, that is irrelevant to whether or not one should be punished or held accountable for violating another's rights. Using non-defensive force against others (I'm not talking about making kids take medicine or stopping them from running out into a busy street) is the same kind of existential evil (i.e., threat to human life) as an attack by a rabid dog.
I often hear the objection that determinism undercuts punishment of crime or immorality. However, it is not "unfair" to punish a rights-violator who couldn't help doing what he did (because he had not chosen to be morally responsible), any more than it is "unfair" to put to sleep a rabid dog that couldn't help doing what it did. I have every right, as do the rest of the people in society, to take appropriate measures to defend myself against threats to my life, regardless of the fact that those animals or people threatening my life cannot help what they are doing. So, being determined to act in accordance with one's values does not let one off the hook for punishment, and in that sense being responsible (i.e., answerable) for what one does.
Best to all,
Roger Bissell
|
