The Significance of Free Will: Wrapping It Up

Let us go through Kane's book one more time, with appropriate links:

I bought the book because I had heard that Kane brought up to date the incompatibilist tradition of James and Isaiah Berlin.

Kane structures his own work in two parts: an ascent (showing why we have and value these strong intuitions about moral philosophy that are incompatible with determinism) and a descent (showing that indeterminism of the necessary sort may well be part of the natural physical world.)

Martin Luther was free even when, as he said, he could “do nothing else” than what he was doing. But this just means that his inability to do anything else at a given mature moment is the consequence of a long life of diverging paths at many points of which he could have done otherwise.

The issue of whether freedom and moral responsibility in strong sense of the terms are compatible with determinism necessarily brings us through some discussion of ordinary language, seeking help from that quarter. This has some interest, but is not dispositive.

The problem is brought to something of a head by B.F. Skinner’s portrayal of Walden Two, and its covert non-constraining controls on its happy campers.

We get to the top of our ascent, we understand the incompatibility of certain deep intuitions with determinism, when we come to understand our own development as individuals, from infancy onward, as ever-more-sophisticated attempts to accommodate a primordial desire.

But now, how do we get back down the mountain and find a place for this primordial desire in the real world? Consider certain critical willings as the subjective manifestation of genuine neurological uncertainties all the way down to the electron level. These are our self-forming willings (SFWs). I have presented my reasons for believing that Kane is overly elaborate  in his descriptions of the different types of SFW: that, following a cue from William James, we might better reduce them all to a single form, the sustaining of attention.

In his conclusion, Kane comes back to the writings of B.F. Skinner as a negative example, and argues that a belief in free will as a metaphysical and psychological matter may help contribute to a society that is free in the political sense.

The Significance of Free Will: Exegesis VIII

Kane’s chapter 10 is called “Objections and Replies.” The objections that he surveys here are from “astute and persistent critics of my view” as expressed in earlier publications, “to whom I am indebted for waking me from many a dogmatic slumber.”

I won’t go through the objections and his replies for you. They expand but marginally on the argument I’ve already presented. I will note, though, that one of the objections forces Kane to expand upon the quantum-theoretical gist of his own argument on the way "down the mountain." Could there be two people with exactly the same history, biochemistry, etc., whose deliberations on exactly the same point come to contrary conclusions? In a footnote, he explains:

“A natural objection here would be that the quantum-wave functions of the brains of the two persons would be exactly the same … combinations of the wave functions of their component particles. But these wave functions are abstract descriptions of the real brains that do not tell us what the exact positions and momenta of the component particles are. Rather they yield various probabilities that the particles will have such-and-such positions and momenta.” So, yes, so far as we know, this is possible. Just as it’s possible that in one context Schrodinger’s cat is dead and in another exactly identical context the cat is still alive when the lid is opened.

In his conclusion, chapter 11, Kane seeks to “situate the debates about free will … within broader intellectual currents of the late twentieth century and of the modern era in philosophy generally.”

Kane returns here to Walden Two, the B.F. Skinner utopia that many readers (Kane amongst them) see as an unintended dystopia. In the story, a philosopher named Castle asks some skeptical questions of the utopia’s leader, Frazier. Frazer says that scientists now know what the good life is, so it would be wrong to refuse to condition people into leading it. Castle asks, then: what is the good life?

Skinner/Frazier answers: It is a lengthy answer, beginning at p. 146 of the book and continuing into page 149. There are five points to the good life: physical and psychological health, a minimum of unpleasant labor, opportunities to exercise talents, satisfying personal contacts, and necessary opportunities for relaxation. There need be no philosophical explanation behind this list, in fact (Frazier says) efforts to get behind it philosophically are misguided, like “a centipede trying to decide how to walk,” when the thing to do is just walk.

“This response by Frazier temporarily silences poor Castle,” as Kane observers. But Kane comes to Castle’s aid. Castle's question is unanswered, and is unanswered for a reason that even the most practical of caterpillars should not ignore. The good life, including each of those five attractive things, might for all we know be satisfied in any of several or an “indefinite number” of different ways. Further, those different ways might well conflict with one another as Isaiah Berlin suggested in his writing about “value pluralism.” We might lose one way of satisfying these requirements for the good life as we grasp for another.

The idea of free will as Kane has expounded it, though, is inherently a “value experimental” idea. It suggests that we can and do remake ourselves, in ways that determine which values, in a world of competing value/projects, we will pursue. It is a justified rebuke to Skinner’s value monism.   

With that rebuke we may fittingly and freely end.

The Significance of Free Will

I've recently purchased The Significance of Free Will, by Robert Kane (1998).

I had heard that Kane is one of the few remaining free-willist/incompatibilists among contemporary academic philosophers. As to his academic credentials: he is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, and editor of a widely respected collection of essays on the broad subject, The Oxford Handbook of Free Will.

Compatibilism in philosophy is the view that freedom in any important sense of the word is perfectly compatible with the deterministic character of human thoughts, will, and actions. This is, of late, the view for example of Daniel Dennett.

Those who reject that, then, are incompatibilists. Among incompatibilists, there are those who say that since the ideas of freedom and determinism are incompatible -- since determinism is true -- we'll have to learn to live without outdated notions of freedom. That seems to be B.F. Skinner's view in Walden Two for example. On the other hand, there are incompatibilists who agree that the two are incompatible but contend that it is determinism we have to learn to live without.

Regular readers will know that I am of the view that William James got these matters more-or-less right.

James was a compatibilist in one sense. He did believe that determinism is compatible with notions of moral worth or blame: "instinct and utility between them can safely be entrusted to carry on the social business of punishment and praise" in any event, he wrote.

But he was an incompatibilist in another, and to him a more important, sense. He believed determinism incompatible with a deep human desire for a world with a plurality of forces, and one in which novelties come about through the relations and contentions of those forces.  Furthermore, his reaction to that incompatibility was the free-willist one: we aren't so determined, after all.

"The indeterminism with its maggots, if you please to speak so about it, offends only the native absolutism of my intellect, -- an absolutism which, after all, perhaps, deserves to be snubbed and kept in check. But the determinsim with its necessary carrion, to continue the figure of speech, and with no possible maggots to eat the latter up, violates my sense of moral reality through and through."

Isaiah Berlin adopted a position much like James' in his Four Essays on Liberty (1969). Indeed, Berlin was if anything a more thorough incompatibilist than James. He wrote that if he were convinced that acts of human choice "were themselves wholly determined by factors not within the individual's control ... I should certainly not regard him as morally praiseworthy or blameworthy. In such circumstances the concept of worth and desert, as these terms are now used, would become empty for me."  

Most philosophers who have written about the subject recently take a compatibilist stance. The dissenters adopt the determinist sort of incompatibilism. Free-willist incompatibilists -- outside the ranks of those working from a specific theological/ecclesiological program -- are quite few.  So I was happy to discover that Robert Kane exists.  I will have to see if the particulars of his argument warrant my happiness.

Pluralism and the Big Experiment

On Friday, I quoted William James thus:

"See everywhere the struggle and the squeeze; and ever-lastingly the problem of how to make them less. The anarchists, nihilists and free-lovers; the free-silverites, socialists, and single-tax men; the free-traders and civil-service reformers; the prohibitionists and anti-vivisectionists; the radical darwinians with their idea of the suppression of the weak, -- these and all the conservative sentiments of society arrayed against them are simply deciding through actual experiment by what sort of conduct the maximum amount of good can be gained and kept in this world."

This is from The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life, an essay in which James anticipated the point of view that later came to be known as "value pluralism," a theory in meta-ethics associated with Isaiah Berlin and Joseph Raz.

Henry responded, in the comments section, that James was too optimistic. Surely the advocates of some of those viewpoints were after things nastier than seeking the maximum amount of good that can be gained and kept in the world?

Yes, I answered, they were. And their counterparts today are. Indeed, James' language about those he here calls "radical darwinians" suggests he thinks of them as rather malevolent. He isn't referring simply to the Spencerian notion of failing to assist "the weak," but to something more active, the "suppression" of the weak, which seems to me a reference to the spread of eugenic ideas in his day.

But still, as Henry notes, James refers to these radical Darwinians as part of the great higgle-haggle with the others, so they must in some sense be part of the Big Experiment. Isn't this too optimistic a view of them?

I think James would say that the functioning of one particular faction within this Big Experiment does not depend upon the motives of anyone involved. Thus, for instance, at least some of those "free lovers" he mentions might be motivated by old-fashioned lust, and an unwillingness to abide by the contraints of monogamy. rather than by a desire to produce the best possible mutual accomodation of conflicting values. Still, if such a movement finds resonance, if it builds a base and becomes politically or demographically significant, it will be because it speaks to some dissatisfaction. It will be because the status quo locks out some sentiments, frustrates some energies, and there will be -- should be -- a constant press to include what is so far excluded.

And, yes, one could say the same about Nazism. Hitler didn't build a popular following because a lot of Germans decided they wanted to kill a lot of people. war. He built a following because life in the Weimar Republic was miserable for many, and he gavwe them a vent for that misery. This qualifies Nazism, too, as part of the Big Experiment deciding through actual experiment by what sort of conduct the maximum amount of good can be gained and kept in this world, even though nobody involved would have described it that way, and even though that particular trial was an enormous failure by that test. The idea of a Big Experiment is a way of understanding history, and thus a history-based way of understanding morality. It is not a hypothesis about the psychology involved among the people 'making' history.

Even the wreckage of Nazism, BTW, left some benefits behind. In the English-speaking countries, especially, the war seems to have thoroughly discredited eugenic ideas, for example, so that have disappeared from the fray.