Free Will Debate: Daniel Dennett vs. Gregg Caruso

welcome to the michael shermer show i'm your host michael shermer before i introduce my guests today to guests uh tell you about our sponsor most of you know about this already for those of you who are listening to the podcast for the first time it's the great courses plus they are one of my favorite online content providers they provide this is the teaching company the great courses they produce these college-level courses hundreds and hundreds of them at studio so they're professionally done high quality sound and visuals and with the app you get a subscription model in which you can access instead of buying a single course you can access all of the courses like here's one my favorites big questions of philosophy with my friend and colleague david k johnson it's a professional philosopher and this is some of the great questions you can ask like how do we reason carefully why should we trust reason what is truth is knowledge possible when can we trust testimony is faith ever rational do our souls make us free well that's a good one because that's the subject of today's podcast i'm introduced in a moment to access the great courses plus you go to thegreatcoursesplus.com slash shermer that'll get you the uh 20 discount on the annual subscription rate which comes out to about um i think it was 30 bucks off a year plus a free trial that's thegreatcoursesplus.com shermer check it out all right my guests today are two of them daniel c dennett and greg d caruso just desserts debating free will and that's what we do for the next two hours this is an interesting conversation because although both are highly regarded um and respected professional philosophers you'll see a distinct difference dan's trafficking very much in the real world with lots of real world examples of free will determinism crime punishment just desserts and so on greg is very much sticking to um the way he thinks and writes as a professional philosopher that is carefully defining his terms and then moving out from there and uh so that much of the tension you'll see i think between the two different positions is very much dependent on what you mean by these particular words and then how those words cash out in the real world with examples so we pretty much cover everything there is to conceivably cover on this topic although there's a lot more in the book so if you're really into this this is the best volume i've encountered so far kind of summarizing all the different positions you can take on this issue so with that i give you dan dennett and greg caruso thanks for coming on the show my first debate i will have hosted on this podcast i've had double guess but never never a formal debate the book is just desserts to give it a proper introduction here debating free will and uh i it's the best volume i've i've read yet on the subject that kind of captures everything dan you always talk about steel manning the other guy's position well we have the steel man right here so it's a perfect way to i think address these uh these deep issues as i um told you i wanted to start off with just quoting this survey and then say why i'm quoting it uh of which you're both familiar with a 2009 survey asked 326 philosophy professors and grad students to weigh in on 30 different subjects of concern in their field from a priori knowledge aesthetic value and god to knowledge mind and moral realism i'll include a link to this survey in the right up here on the topic of free will quote free will colon compatibilism libertarianism or no free will the survey found the following results accept or lean toward compatibilism 59.1 percent accept or lean toward libertarianism i guess that'd be true free will or something like that 13.7 percent except or lean to nor no free will 12.2 and then other almost 15 percent um so um and the reason i quote this on the other on the one hand it doesn't make any difference because as einstein said in response to that book uh that was published in his time 100 scientists against einstein he said why a hundred one would do it if i'm wrong uh but the reason i like this survey is because i like to think about the history and philosophy of science and so maybe this doesn't apply here but in science usually there's a community of experts uh studying a particular problem eventually come to some consensus uh you know climate change 97 percent of climate scientists think that climate change is human caused and so forth uh but this would be like if if if we were still debating the big bang theory versus the steady state theory and after 70 years it's still not clear which is the right one and cosmologists are still split as an outsider i would think well there's something wrong here either the problem is incredibly hard or else they're just conceiving it conceptually wrong and are running the wrong experiments but maybe that doesn't apply to philosophy why after 2500 years are we still debating free will and determinism i'll let either of you jump in there well i think philosophy got off on the wrong foot several thousand years ago when socrates and plato convinced people that they should look for essential properties and try to i say euclidify philosophy geometry was the obvious candidate for the most wonderful and perfect science there was and the idea was to make philosophy as much like geometry as possible and that just turns out to be a big mistake in the real world outside of the world of mathematics there just aren't very many bright lines clear edges definitions that will stand the test of counter examples and philosophers for several thousand years have spent way too much time fighting over definitions and being counter example mongers when they should take a deep breath adopt population thinking that is derived from darwin and recognized that this process of strict definition and proof which is for many philosophers it's just what philosophy is is in almost every area doomed and they should just recognize that and and revise their practice i mean i i i guess i would add you know part of it is i think that this is one of those big parallel problems and the fact that we're still debating it after 2 000 years i do think reflects um its philosophical and practical importance i think one of the things dan and i share is the fact that the way that we conceive of free will is intimately connected in fact i interdefine it with issues of moral responsibility um and so so it touches every aspect of our daily lives i mean what you think about free will is going to impact what you think about interpersonal relationships certain types of moral practices what you might think of certain types of legal practices i think one of the things that makes the free will problem hard is that it sort of touches on or crosses over a number of different areas of philosophy and subfields of philosophy so some people conceive of it as a purely metaphysical problem a problem about whether or not determinism is true and in that case i would agree with you you know like wouldn't we have some consensus at this point as to the way the fundamental nature of reality is shaped but some people view the problem of free will as a kind of ethical moral problem a problem about whether it justifies various kinds of moral practices like praise and blame and and you know certain types of uh legal practices and retributivism and and resentment and things like that um some people view it as a kind of um social political problem because it it affects social and political policies particularly legal policies and some people view it as kind of existential problem like what you know can we have meaning and purpose in life in the universe guided by immutable unchanging laws of nature um but i would add on top of that that at least and i think maybe dan shares this is that i don't think this is a sort of scientific problem that is i don't think it's going to be solved scientifically there are aspects of the problem that have empirical constraints they're like you know libertarian claims about um you know indeterminacies percolating up to the right level of neural networks well that's an empirical question right and we could perhaps find an empirical solution to that you know problem um but it's particularly i think in the way that dan and i approach it in the book um the problem is really a philosophical one in how you define free will but also how you define concepts like dessert um what you take to be the most relevant and salient kind of notion of moral responsibility how you see the relationship between those things the only thing that shocks me on that survey is the the um percentage of professional philosophers still believe in libertarian free will yeah um i mean there are certain naturalistic versions of libertarianism and i would hope the majority of the professional philosophers are maybe adopting those um but i do think there's been some progress i mean for one thing i don't think um really many people in the philosophical community take it seriously that we have soul control or some kind of um a gentle libertarian agent causal control over our actions where we're some sort of unique non-physical substances capable of causing various you know physical events um so i do think progress has been made i think particularly in the last 50 years or so there's been a number of really important distinctions and um additions i think philosophically that have helped clarify which parts of the debate um we should be focusing on what kinds of distinctions are relevant um so i just think that's how philosophy moves it moves slowly and there's room for disagreement especially when you're doing some form of conceptual analysis so just to be clear both of you both of you reject that oh sorry dan i will say i would just add to that that you do have to consider that a lot of philosophers just have hobby horses that they want to ride because they know how to ride them and even though the views that they're maintaining are not about anything that anybody should care about they can get a small coterie of philosophers to care about them and so they have great fun uh batting definitions and fruits back and forth i've become less and less uh patient with that over the many years of my career and i'm ready to call it out when i see it i think i think libertarianism is a great case this is there's nothing good to be said about libertarianism nobody's ever offered a coherent model of a libertarian free will and it just flies in the face of everything that we've learned about uh physics and biology and the way people are put together it's it's a it's an embarrassment just to be clear just to be clear dan you mean there's no soul there's no ghost in the machine there's no soul there's no mini me up here calling the shots and and because many me would need a mini mini me inside many me and add infinite so forth yes i mean some people don't like playing with that but i i'm tired of it yeah and just to also be clear because you debunked this i think back in the 90s uh quantum randomness and and and that kind of chanciness to life that also doesn't give you free will yeah for a very for a very simple reason yeah we do need the randomness of coin flips and dice throwing and that kind of randomness we need that we do you can't be a robust and resilient and autonomous agent if you can't keep your future to some degree uncertain and unknowable by your by by other agents um but that's not the point flips are a great example of a random phenomenon except they're not quantum random and they don't have to be so quantum physics doesn't get you anything that you can't get with coin flips so you've already got pointless unproblematic they're just as determined as dice throws and just as uncontrollable the issue is control not causation okay that's a good distinction yeah i mean i would just add that uh maybe i'm a little bit more patient with libertarian accounts just because uh i don't have the status there and has to sort of just dismiss them um but i do think that there have been some recent you know improvements in terms of libertarian accounts uh robert kane and mark uh balaguer and uh you know erica uh there's been some dance shaking and said there's been some approve but i would agree with dan that um for me the reason so there's two different types of libertarian accounts you should you know sort of separate them but the kind that just introduces indeterminacy at the level of physical events i think for me the real problem there is um that the agent um lacks the ability to settle which outcome ultimately occurs that is even if you place the indeterminacy at a very philosophically strategic moment in deliberation so there are these really sophisticated accounts that say like well when i'm deliberating a really difficult choice i'm torn and there's this phenomenological that is a felt sense of indeterminacy and that that felt sense of indeterminacy corresponds to some real indeterminacy and it percolates up the level of neural networks and i have reasons supporting either outcome and as long as whichever outcome i do it's reason-backing that is i have reasons backing that choice and therefore it makes it rational and we should be held morally responsible i mean that's an improvement over the creation swerve um but maybe only marginally an improvement because i think that the idea is that the agent um may have reasons for having performed that action but they can't settle which set of actions occur like if god rewound the tape if there's true indeterminacy involved you would just get this rat you know this you know probabilistic distribution of outcomes each time and it seems like if the agent simply lacks the control and action necessary i think for my for me to hold them morally responsible in the relevant sense um if it's just some indeterminacy plus again empirical constraints these accounts are assuming a whole bunch of scientific things that have that have very little support like quantum indeterminacies can exist at the appropriate level of brain activity and all of that so i think there's very you know very little reason to to be hopeful for those kind of accounts dan you wanted to say something you wanted to well i was going to say greg your opening comments made me think of kind of a pragmatic approach um pragmatism approach to the issue um that one of my heroes and mentors was martin gardner who was one of the founders of the modern skeptical movement columnist for scientific american forever and uh and he even though he was a skeptic he was not an atheist and he made an argument he that he called the deism that he said he got from miguel unamuno and william james that if you have an issue that cannot be resolved ultimately either through reason or empiricism you can make a leap of faith as it were just just kind of a pragmatic it works for me but martin used to say this would drive atheists crazy you know i i believe in god even though i think atheists have better arguments than the theists have and and in immortality and then the third one was a free will he said i know the determinists have really good arguments but i feel free it works for me it makes my life better to assume i'm making volitional choices so greg you know scaling up to society level it would you would you make the argument that even if we can't settle this issue in a debate like this it's better if we assume determinism for prison reform for the rehabilitation of criminals and things like that it has a practical outcome which one you choose even though maybe you personally feel like you make free choices so you assume i'm free and everyone else is determined but society wise we should assume determinism because it's better for for a practical outcome um so assume determinism or assume free will well either way for you personally for you personally maybe freedom yeah i mean i i guess i'd say a couple things here first i think we should state our views i mean so i'm a free will skeptic dan's a compatibilist and so my free will skepticism i define as uh the thesis that who we are and what we do is sort of ultimately the result of factors beyond our control and because of that we're never morally responsible in a very particular and pervasive sense which i call the basic dessert sense dan disagrees that that's the relevant sense but um so that's my thesis um what i would say in response to the kind of pragmatic art because i've seen similar pragmatic arguments recently for libertarian free will um john lamos has a book right now that actually makes exactly that kind of pragmatic argument for why we should assume some form of libertarian free will even if it's a mystery um uh ben inwalk and peter van sort of has this view too that um you know free will's a mystery there's no way of really making sense of libertarian free will but we must have it because otherwise morality would crumble um so so so i would say a couple of things like one i don't i i don't think the assumption is about determinism here or or whether that's true or not because dan thinks determinism is true and free will still exist and i would say free will doesn't exist whether or not determinism is true that is whether or not um the universe is deterministic or indeterministic we lack free will but i do have an argument now this is this is getting deep into our disagreement i think uh the disagreement between dan and i on the practical value of preserving the belief in free will um i have a new book another book coming out called rejecting retributivism and i run an argument in that book against legal punishment that's predicated on the idea that individuals have free will um and the argument is called the epistemic argument and it runs something like this if you're going to intentionally impose harm on individuals you have to have good prima facie justification for thinking that individual justly deserves to be intentionally harmed if you lack you know sufficient warrant to think that individual has that kind of uh free will and more responsibility than it be prima facie morally wrong to intentionally harm them but the justifications of uh legal punishment or even certain types of interpersonal um you know moral responsibility practices and and institutional practices like retribution presuppose that individuals have free will and the required form of moral responsibility and yet i would argue that as you point out um philosophers disagree this is a debate that's been waging for 2000 years there's no clear consensus um and it's not clear that we have libertarian free will or even compatibilist free will or at least it's unclear that the kind of free will damn things we have is enough to ground the kind of moral responsibility practices necessary and so my conclusion would be that it lacks the high epistemic burden needed to justify these harmful practices now dan is just going to disagree because he doesn't think these practices are harmful he thinks the harm would be giving up these practices but i might just to finish my my argument just very quickly would be um these are not innocuous practices these practices involve intentionally blaming intentionally harming individuals intentionally punishing individuals sometimes the severe you know severe levels especially if you're talking about public policy and so the burden of proof falls on those that want to maintain the assumption that agents are free in the required sense um and so that kind of skepticism is a much weaker skepticism than my own personal skepticism my own personal skepticism is that our best philosophical and scientific arguments give us reason for thinking uh for concluding we lack free will it's the only rational position that we that we that we should that's left that we should adopt the weaker skepticism here is that even if you don't agree with that um the burden of proof is on those that want to justify certain types of harmful practices on the assumption that agents deserve it and if it's unclear that agents deserve it in the required sense i.e because it's unclear they have the kind of free will necessary to ground that kind of uh harm those kinds of dessert based practices then the default position is that we shouldn't intentionally harm agents on the assumption that they deserve it um there might be other justifications you can give for harming them consequentialist justifications but not the ones based on dessert okay dan first of all i want to remind you of the important subtitle of my first book on free will the varieties of free will worth wanting i think the reason free will is a topic that electrifies students and can still get the attention of a lot of people is people think it matters and it does and it matters for the reasons that greg sort of started out with namely we want to know about responsibility and whether whether we deserve blame and praise and so forth and as long as you stick to that as long as you stick to the fact that that's the kind of free will that matters then first of all libertarian free will doesn't matter at all because having it wouldn't give you responsibility not having it wouldn't take it away from you um nobody's ever been able to show a good reason why let me let me back up on that that is a better way of putting it look around us we see people who manifestly do not have control of themselves they're they have mental disorders they've got brain damage they in one way or another maybe they had terrible childhoods that have left them really in a bad way they don't have free will we have a nice clear distinction between those people and the people who are in in charge of themselves who are in control who can take responsibility what we really want is for people to take responsibility now one of the real uh unfortunate consequences of the free will skepticism line that bragged in your parable of others maintain is that it actually gives people encouragement to deny that anybody's ever really responsible and haven't we after four years of trump seen enough don't we want we don't want trump to say oh i'm not responsible but nobody's ever responsible for anything no i don't want to live in a world where people behave like trump i want to live in a world where people take responsibility and they take responsibility because there is a socially evolved and intelligently redesigned and communally established set of traditions and laws under which people are responsible and conditions under which they're not and the conditions under which they're not responsible are not strange metaphysical conditions having to do with determinism or independence it's whether they can control themselves and when you get out of control then right you don't have responsibility but you can be responsible for not going out of control we're not responsible for being able to control ourselves in the first place that's the luck of being born and having a more or less normal upbringing but once you are a responsible agent then you have a responsibility to maintain your autonomy and your self-control and you can be uh criticized not just criticized but even punished or negligently relinquishing self-control because the rest of us all depend on you maintaining your self-control and i want to live in a world a secure non-failed state where people can go about their business freely and securely they don't have to worry about being harmed by people because people pretty well know how to control themselves and they have good reasons to control themselves now that world depends on the law and it depends on punishment nobody has not greg not anybody has ever described a system which has laws and no punishment well well just just greg hang on one second just to clarify dan and your model um the assumption is that the person who has some level of control some degrees of freedom could have done otherwise but he didn't he didn't have to shoot the gun he didn't have to drink the bottle of alcohol or take the drugs but he did and and we're holding him responsible for making that decision because he could have done otherwise that's right and there's a perfectly legitimate sense of could have done otherwise has nothing to do with determinism and determinism determinism doesn't show look if determinism showed that we could never do otherwise and what are we doing are we trying to persuade each other or something it would be a pointless effort if i if it weren't a possibility that you could change your life don't say well i could never do otherwise you know because determinism is true no we look around we see people changing all the time determinism does not tie our hands it does not imprison us it does not prevent us from turning over a new leaf it does not prevent us from making better choices all of those things are open in a very straightforward sense and it's the one that we rely on when we make decisions about who's responsible under the law and who's responsible you know when does a child grown into responsibility very small children we don't hold them morally responsible for what they do they grow into it there's no magic moment where they suddenly have the moral competence but it's it's a we do have some some bright lines that we draw from legal purposes like you can't drive before you're 16 and you you know vote or drink or whatever those are arbitrary conventions they might be changed for better or worse we could adjust them but the idea that there's some metaphysical condition free will which depends crucially on whether or not determinism is true that's just a fantasy it's a philosophical it goes back to democritus and it's just time to abandon this yeah we're seeing that yeah go ahead greg go ahead yeah i mean there's a lot in there i mean there's some things i just want to clarify and sort of i mean one thing is that i don't i want to make it clear at least my free will skepticism um and i would say it's true of uh dirk pierre booms and neil levees as well um we don't deny all forms of responsibility we are very particular in that the kind of more responsibility we're denying is what we call basic desert law responsibility i.e the kind of responsibility that would make one truly deserving of praise and blame and punishment and reward um now i think in a purely backward looking sense but we come back to that um there is there are other senses there there is some clarification yeah well all right let me come back to that though for a sec in a second because i think that i just want to make it clear there are other notions of responsibility that remain totally intact um i mean obviously concepts like causal responsibility and we use that kind of senses for even inanimate events right like uh you know hurricane katrina was causally responsible for the destruction of new orleans or the tree branch was causally responsible for the damage to the roof of my car when it broke but there are other notions like attributability where we attribute various traits and characteristics and even flaws uh to individuals or even or even um uh virtuous attributes so we could attribute to einstein um ingenuity some sort of um um you know uh creativity we could attribute to einstein various work habits um and dedication and all of that while still not thinking he is self-made and responsible for making himself into that kind of an agent we can also and this is the important one for me engage in certain types of moral exchanges and moral uh practices where you know moral protest is even justified this is what i you know uh dirk peregrine calls a kind of forward-looking uh form of moral responsibility a conversational version where we engage an agent in some kind of moral conversation where we ask them to reflect upon the reasons for why they acted in that way the agent might um recognize some flaw in themselves that was the cause greed maybe or jealousy uh for why they did what they did and recognize and and maybe acknowledge um a desire to change that aspect moving forward and lay out a sort of plan perhaps for how we could do that that kind of responsibility in my mind can be justified on the skeptical perspective without any appeal to dessert instead it's grounded not in in the notion of dessert or basic dessert which is more important than me but instead it's grounded in three non-dessert desert i'm i.e future reconciliation future safety future moral formation and a lot of ways i think dan and i agree on a whole lot when it comes to those kind of practices um where we disagree is on whether or not we're justified in preserving um the dessert system and whether the dessert system um presupposes certain kinds of things now i think that the kind of um the kind for me and i'll be very clear how i define free will free will for me is the control and action required for basic dessert more responsibility in basic dessert more responsibilities the kind of responsibility um that would justify certain types of moral practices judgments attitudes like resentment indignation um moral anger blame retributive punishment and it would be one where the agent deserves these basic judgments attitudes practices um simply because they perform the action not for any forward-looking reason now dan's view is giving us a forward-looking consequentialist justification for the system of dessert and within the system things still retain backward-looking features that's a much more complicated view but hey i want to say that at least in my reading of the literature that's not the traditional compatibilist view and second i think there are reasons to challenge even dan's perspective one thing i would say is whether or not dan's kind of consequentialist way of approaching it um should should seek to preserve the notion of dessert at all um and that's because dan why don't you jump in there he identifies this idea of basic moral desert i think that's that's a red herring there's no such thing banish it it's not it's not well defined well it's easy to define that's well defined no it's like it exists yeah it is not let me you when you were talking about the kinds of dessert that say that dirk allows and you were talking about people who are open to moral improvement and conversation and all this so let me just give you an example and keep it nice and simple you come up to donald trump and you say you know you've committed all these crimes and uh we really wish you would try to reform your character and improve and say you're sorry and all this he says no thanks don't think i'm going to do that that's the do not think you do not think that the state has the right to coerce a criminal to pay for the advantages that they have taken that are violations of the laws of the land so i do think because you think donald trump doesn't have basic moral uh responsibility and i think he's got enough moral responsibility for us justifiably to imprisonment and to imprison him to find him and for that matter to sully his name and reputation i so i think there's i think that that's wrong in terms of what my view can can do here i mean i don't think you think you think you tell me how far you can go with let's use the example of trump all right yeah let me say this i of course i think the state has the right to the right to coerce people and limit liberty in particular my analogy well let me let me explain i mean my analogy with quarantine right is is exactly that the the right to coercion and and limiting of liberty and the restrictions um are predicated on the right of self-defense and public safety so the idea is that look we could we could coerce people to be um quarantined and we could coerce people to be quarantined by removing their liberty and this is not a form of punishment in any intuitive sense we don't punish the ebola patient when we quarantine them but we have the right to um incapacitate them on the grounds that they pose a significant threat to public safety and the argument would be um you know criminal acts that that equally pose a significant threat to public safety can justify liberty limiting restrictions um and forms of state coercion on the right of self-defense and prevention of harm to others analogous to the justification for quarantine and you could do so without appealing to free will retribution basic dessert just desserts moral responsibility um of course with someone like trump i think the idea is that um if he were to hold public office again that would be a significant threat i think he should have been um not only um impeached but there should have been a resolution uh barring him from ever holding public office again and that could be justified on my model because the the restrictions on liberty would be justified on on on the principle of least restriction those are the least restrictive measures that are necessary to protect public safety um that is prevent someone from from holding a position in office again where they could do such damage um i on the other hand and this is maybe where we disagree and you maybe just have more retributive impulses here than i do i don't think uh imprisonment is necessarily warranted in this case but i think that's just the matter of degree um not a matter of a a difference in kind so i think the idea for me is um instead of ratcheting up our retributive reactions and our punitive reactions to white-collar crime so that they match the kinds of punishments we dole out for uh physical crimes uh i think we should ratchet down the retributive and punitive reactions to both um and so i don't think trump should get off easier than someone who's arrested with marijuana or someone who failed to post bail or someone who robbed a liquor store in that i think a lot of these crimes could be better dealt with less punitive measures so instead of ratcheting them up the white collar crimes to match our reactions to to blue collar crimes i think we should be ratcheting down the mall but i do have the tools necessary to justify restrictions and coercion it's just a different type of coercion not grounded in dessert but grounded in the right of self-defense okay so if i understand you right greg um trump can just say okay okay i'll quarantine myself in quarantine myself in mar-a-lago for the rest of my life um uh and uh i to pub public office you happy with that well i think that there might have to be other things so like for example well tort law i mean tort law is not predicated on accountability in the same sense as criminal law and there might be um kinds of um other crimes that he's committed i'm almost certain that there are um in terms of tax evasion in terms of contracts that have been broken in terms of other dealings with the with the especially the state of new york criminal law well what i'm saying is like so restitution might be required um there might be other penalties that are opposed again if he refuses to pay the penalties we could seize income right as a form of restitution there are measures the state can take right um but those measures are can all be done in the same way that we currently conduct sort of turret law in which case they don't need to be again predicated on the notion of um criminal accountability or in even this case physic um philosophical uh desert-based responsibility well i think i think you have a very uh naive an optimistic view of how this quarantine system of yours is going to work as i've explained in the book um there's going to be coercion you're going to have to have coercion and um you're going to have to uh have escalation clauses sure i'm okay with that but i also very cautious about how they do it and what the justification is so for example look i i'm not calling for drawing and quartering people after all i'm saying we have to have a practical system of laws that will uh permit people to have the freedom of the state in the confidence and security that they won't be imposed on by citizens that just don't care and so we have to arrange so i i agree i agree with this and i i mean i think you you accuse me of being naive i accuse you of underestimating the tools that are available i mean part of me actually thinks you are a free will skeptic and so in a lot of ways the kinds of uh policies and kinds of justifications you give are ones that are open for skeptics to adopt in the sense that look you deny basic dessert you deny uh that we're responsible in this standing before god sent you deny that were responsible in any ultimate sense um in a way maybe that you know the debate could end there because free will skeptics could say that's exactly you know what we cared about in the first place they feel responsible enough to take responsibility to be punished legitimately and to be praised legitimately for their good deeds um there is a good role for dessert there mainly we only punish those that deserve punishment let's say let's say that there's two characters maya and marina and they each exist in a deterministic universe my existing deterministic universe a marina exists in deterministic universe b and everything that the laws of nature have been set up such that everything in each universe is completely causally determined uh from the moment of the big bang on such that in universe a maya uh rob's a liquor store on her 21st birthday and marina gives uh 10 000 to a charity on her 21st birthday but each did so deterministically um now if we could imagine a case where um well the question obviously is whether or not any difference in treatment towards maya marina would be justified on on our on our accounts right so i'm a free will skeptic i say know that my marina um uh because their actions are are determined in a way that the that not only their actions right but their inner psychological states the rash the reasons that came to them in that particular moment the reasons that were most salient that weighed most heavily on their deliberation um the habitual character that they develop their constitutive nature all of that let's say has been determined right because that's what we're assuming when we're assuming determinism does everything yeah right so so the idea is that the particular reasons that move maya and the particular reasons that move marina are the result of factors beyond their control their psychological dispositions and so the question is whether or not a difference in treatment would be licensed um in terms of praise and blame punishment and reward i would argue no now i would even argue to help it make it clearer for me imagine a scenario where there were no forward-looking benefits to praising um uh marina and punishing maya that is that the only justification we would give let's imagine it's sort of like the the move the show um uh the good place where you get tally points right through your life and then in the afterlife you either go to the good place or the bad place and let's assume there's no further moral development in the good place of the bad place um can we justify a difference in treatment between maya and marina if they both um lived in deterministic universes that were set up before they were born from the moment of the big bang on such that they were determined to either rob the liquor store or give to charity all right so i think this is where we disagree at least we have a good intuition here right so my my clarity for for what matters in terms of basic dessert is whether or not we could justify differences in in treatment resentment indignation moral anger all the way up to retributive punishment and eternal damnation and reward um predicated on whether or not these individuals um were free and responsible in the required sense and i would i would argue because they both existed in deterministic universes they lacked the free will i.e for me the control and action required now not because they couldn't have done otherwise i'm a sourcing compatibilist so my reason for why they're not morally responsible in the required sense is because they're not the appropriate source of their actions in the right sense that is that there for them to be the appropriate source the action can't be causally determined by factors beyond their control okay the big mistake that i think you're making greg is you're confusing causation and control in the following way maya and marina you haven't told us what their upbringing was how much self-control they have let's assume they're both very well self-controlled yeah they they read the plateau for you they reach your plateau of that's right so um the reason that they are both responsible one for the good deed one for the bad is that they are both not suey generous self-made and kausa-sui that's a philosopher's fantasy but because they're largely self-made they've been making themselves for 20 years they've been learning and practicing and growing and thinking and getting a moral education or not and they've been exposed to arguments and reasons and consequences and they've thought about it now if one of them is just a complete moralist and has no sense of of uh morality at all then that's then then that one is is seriously uh defective in in self-control but we're not supposing that so i i would have know first of all i've had no trouble saying that uh provided that maya is a self-controlled autonomous individual not only is she liable for punishment and for being sent to prison for her crime but she may well agree and say right i needed that i broke the law i'm sorry uh i deserved that i did deserve that and and and she wouldn't be wrong so we assume hang on greg hang on greg so we assume in this example dan that that she could have done otherwise now if we discover she had a if we discover she had a brain tumor or you know she had you know neural network damage or something we would treat her differently and that's a very important point because could have done otherwise has been inflated by philosophers into a bizarre feature which is of still no relevance at all i mean i i just say this i think could have done otherwise where if you've got the degrees of freedom and if you've got between self-control we can say you could have done otherwise and what that means is you weren't tied up you weren't damaged you weren't deliberately misinformed about the case you you acted on the basis of reasons you basically are a well-functioning individual people in that state there is a sense in which they can do otherwise than what they do and let me jump in with a real world example if i may determine yeah if i may so i get a lot of letters from prisoners because they don't have anything else to do so they write me for and ask for free stuff and we send them magazines and books because i know the christians and muslims do the same thing so but that's beside the point so um one guy was writing me about we should do a special issue of skeptic on abolishing the death penalty now he was on death row he had raped and murdered a bunch of women and he it so i asked him why why did you do that and he explained i don't really know i just have these impulses that this is all i think about when i see a woman i just want to rape her and kill her and he told me that uh in after his conviction and he's put on death row i think this is in massachusetts actually dan um that he's in the van locked up to the seats with armed guards next to him and they're driving him to the jail from the courthouse and he sees a woman walking on the sidewalk and he says all i could think about is how can i get out of the cuffs get out overcome the guards and get to that woman and rape her so he said don't ever ever let me out this would be a disaster so now him we we might say yeah okay so um obviously he's got something wrong with his brain much like charles whitman the texas university of texas shooter that had the tumor you know and so on but you know for me those thoughts never enter my mind it's it's it's not like i have those thoughts in those cases and then say we're all like that no we're not right right i'm not saying that i'm not saying all right so okay a couple things i mean one thing is there's no denying and i don't deny i don't think i don't know of any skeptic that denies the the kind of distinction dan makes between agents that are reasons responsive and agents that are non-reasons responsive agents that approve of their own first order will and those that disapprove of their first order will all the kind of compatibilist distinctions that have been made over the last 20 to 50 years um the question is not the question is whether or not those distinctions are enough to ground the kinds of more dessert-based moral practices that we're debating um and i do think those those those distinctions matter they matter in all kinds of important ways but they matter for different reasons they matter in terms of um how we deal with them what kind of rehabilitation would be most effective what kinds of sanctions are warranted but not because of assessing blame or or desert but let me say something i think this is turning on what we mean by words you keep using the word desserts i don't think dan is saying in addition to not letting this guy out of jail we should maybe torture him every week as punishment nothing like that saying that what dan is saying is that the individual deserves to be punished and that individual that individual is so damaged that individual should be should be quarantined i'll use your so this but that's because that individual doesn't have control of themselves all right so so so that's good yeah fine but great that's a great okay greg let me ask you this question so if we take like a bernie madoff he probably doesn't have a brain tumor he probably doesn't have a horrific background he's nothing like these damaged people um and should he not be punished for choosing to scam people in some sense um i mean my view is no not not in the in the traditional sense not in the retributive sense um uh but i do think you know sanctions and other measures are justified well again it turns on these words i mean okay he's we don't want to torture him but you know he should pay these people back he should never be let out these are these are really important distinctions between what kinds of how the how the justifications are what kinds of justifications are given for whatever measures one is proposing whether we ratchet them up or ratchet them down the question is still how we're justifying them i in general across the board want to ratchet down punitive responses dan does too i think um and so i would say the same thing i said about donald trump in that instead of ratcheting up our punitive responses to white-collar crime uh so they measure they they they correlate or match violent crime we should be ratcheting them both down because in many many cases i think better alternatives exist with bernie madden off clearly you know things like taking away his ability to trade and also in terms of restitution again in cases of liability and tort law and all kinds of other cases where we could justify repossessing his his wealth um giving it back to the people he duped all of that would be completely justified and then maybe other measures we have to look at the particular so without looking at particulars it's hard to say exactly what measures but the justification wouldn't be retributive it also wouldn't be justified on desert or blame it'd be justified on my model and other things let me go go back because i still want to be able to say something about this dan often makes this distinction between causation and control um but i do think that there's a little bit of a um sleight of hand that's happening here if i can so what i would say is that we need to distinguish between two different loki of control the kind of control that dan cares about and that we're generally talking about is internal control or what we might call agent control which is essentially the kind of control compatibilist posit when they say the agent doesn't have to be free from determinism they just have to cause their actions in the right kind of way that is they have to be caused by a certain set of psychological states um and maybe certain other conditions like responsiveness to reasons etc they have that kind of control then they're in this category but then there's this external control where we worry about control by um an external manipulator an external agent who has intentions to manipulate the agent control so there's these two different loki of control dan seems to be presupposing that the only real threat or the only way that you could undermine agent control or internal control or compatibilist control is if the if if if causation was somehow turned into external control where you had agents that were trying to intentionally manipulate agents again doesn't think that the kind of um the identics of the the kind of control that's required for free will can't be undermined by luck can't be undermined by determinism it it it it generally can only be undermined when there are these external agents trying to control us with a different set of control within themselves i would argue that that's simply begging the question in favor of the the the compatibilist and we have all kinds of arguments against compatibilism to essentially show the kind of control dan cares about let's just call it dan control um the kind of control dan council there's still an open question about whether or not that kind of control is sufficient for holding agents responsible in the desert-based sense and the reasons why we could say that there's an open question is because you could run all these arguments the uh no forking pat's argument the consequence argument the basic argument the manipulation argument to show that there are intuitive ways to threaten people's intuitions that individuals deserve to be blamed or praised or punished or rewarded in these cases even when they have dan control even when they have compatibilist control greg do you mean if we can move away from punishment for just a minute and think to me you sound a little bit like dick thaler and cass sunstein like a behavioral economist tuning the knit knobs of incentives and and punishments to to nudge people to do the right thing in the book we spent about 20 pages on the manipulation argument and in the book uh the main response that dan gives to the manipulation argument is that these are not really threats because these are cases where they're external agents in fact i give examples where there's manipulation or at least determination in ways that may intuitively undermine uh more responsibility where there's no external agent that is intentionally seeking to manipulate so my mis my my uh what is it called the brain implant now fact malfunctioning case i give where you this woman let's call her elizabeth has a brain implant not for purposes of manipulation um but maybe she is suffering from seizures or uh or um some sort of shaking and this is implanted simply to help you know help her in terms of controlling her tremors but one day this brain device malfunctions and it causes in elizabeth an egoistic desire to kill bloom right now elizabeth let's say retains all of the compatibilist she satisfies all the compatibilist conditions on free will i.e um she has a desire to kill bloom she approves of her desire to kill bloom she's moderately reasons responsive that is if there were um sufficient counter factual reasons against killing bloom that they and they weighed significantly in her decision she would in that particular case not kill bloom she's sensitive to all kinds of other things but in this case the the egoistic desire that tips the scales to kill bloom is caused by a a malfunctioning brain implant now here's a case where we don't have an external agent who has who is intentionally manipulating elizabeth you're going to say no false i said there's an external agent that plays a very big role in this and that's the company that made the brain implant there they are liable for the malfunction and their liability removes her responsibility but here's the challenge for the compatibilist is that if those internal desires let's say the egoistic desire that ultimately weighs wins out and causes her um to kill bloom is caused by the malfunctioning device or it's caused by her upbringing her prior experiences uh factors going back before she was even born into the remote past if they're caused they're caused and for the compatibilist they're caused right they're causally determined right you know well they are right if you're assuming determinism if you're not assuming determinism then we're talking about something else right i'm happy to for the sake of this argument i'll be in out mountain card carrying determinist yes right so so the inner psychological states that causally determine elizabeth to kill bloom um are are what they are at time t1 whether or not the way she got there was caused by a malfunctioning brain implant or whether it's caused by an external set of neuroscientists or whether it's caused by natural factors beyond our control now i guess i know you're going to say that last case is different than the former but what i'm what i'm arguing is that by talking about the distinction between control and causation and you're begging the question because you're assuming that the only thing that could undermine that kind of responsibility is when there are external agents involved well i don't think i'm begging the question because i've been given good reasons why it's the controlled by other agents that matters but i could come up with examples where there's a natural those are if you like political reasons that is to say um we live in societies we live in in societies that have laws and that have other agents and we have come to recognize that other agents play a disproportionate role in the behavior of our fellow human beings and also sometimes because of their plans desires and projects to interfere with the activities and control of other agents that's what makes the cases different let me give you let me give you a different case this is not mine this is another thought experiment yes you haven't given me one yet on this point great but greg before we get in another thought experiment how would your model deal with say the degrees of murder there's first degree murder second degree murder and so on let me for our listeners let me just go through them again because the laws already kind of dealt with this first degree murders the unlawful killing of one human being by another with malice a forethought second degree murder unlawful killing of one human by another without malice a forethought voluntary manslaughter unlawful killing of one human being with without prior intent to kill and is committed under circumstances that would cause a reasonable person to become emotionally or mentally disturbed like in a crime of passion and then involuntary manslaughter like you accidentally hit somebody with a car and kill them in your system the law already kind of deals with this with shade different different degrees of punishment or and what we're going to how we're going to respond to that socially illegally how would you change that or how would your system handle that yeah so i have a whole other book coming out that develops my whole model but i'll give you the short answer um i think a lot of those distinctions can still are relevant but they're relevant again in different ways so let me give you an example where we could tease apart some of them so let's say there's three mothers let's keep it two from the beginning um two mothers that are causally responsible for the death of their children um both of the mothers left their child in a hot car and the child died let's say the first mother um did so with a man's rhea she had a premeditated plan to murder her child um she wanted to do it in a way that maybe it looked like an accident so she could get away with it so she set it up so that you know uh she drove the supermarket left the child in a hot car and the child dies mother too let's say um was up all night last night with the stomach flu um vomiting she was sick didn't get any sleep she had a really important meeting this morning dropped off her two oldest children at school but but the baby the infant follows us fell asleep she forgot to drop him off at daycare goes into work halfway through the day forgets runs out discovers that the baby died in the car um my model says that yeah these distinctions are are are important and they're important in particular ways because the future threat that mother a poses to her other children is significantly different than the future threat that mother to poses to her children mother two's um in this case it might be involuntary manslaughter or some other thing that she's she's guilty of but in my model um she doesn't pose the same significant threat to her other children because she lacked the guilty mind the intention this was a one-off accident the other mother um assuming she has other children assuming that she um has certain kind of criminal tendencies that pose a threat to other members of society um we think we would justify incapacitation um now let's add a third mother a third mother who also accidentally left her child in the car but the difference between the two mothers that accidentally left the mother in the car has to do something about their habitual character the third mother let's say is habitually negligent she always forgets to pick up her children at school there are numerous occasions where she's accidentally left the child in the car and they survived this occasion is one in which a child didn't survive she's significantly different than mother too the mother too who who normally is very attentive very responsive a very caring compassionate and and uh concerned parent but in this particular case through the stomach flu ended up having a really bad really unfortunate um brain fart an oversight right mother three and this is where my different accounts of responsibility are relevant you can attribute different types of character traits to the different agents in all three of these cases and that that attributability responsibility is relevant because i would argue that mother three is different than mother two because she does pose a potential threat to her other two remaining children um if those children remain in the home let's say and she's habitually negligent now i don't think incapacitation or jail would be warranted in the third case but i do think maybe supervision or child protective services getting involved or mandatory parenting or counseling something in this case the sure the safety of those children but in i can account for exactly the distinctions the law counts for which means man's rea intent guilty mind criminal act of course criminal act matters actus rays matters because we want to make sure we hold the agents who are causally responsible um you don't want to incapacitate people who are not a threat to society in any fashion that sounds a lot like what stan's been arguing dan no no no because the conceptual framework is significantly different causal responsibility here is not about assessing blame it's saying that this is the agent that look you don't want to imprison me for the death of the child if i wasn't involved in any three of these cases obviously the one problem with with greg's view and this is something that we do go in the book um uh again we're in thought experiment land um uh uh greg's colleagues invent a pill which renders one uh no longer likely to commit a crime and the first mother the one that did it and deliberately tried to get away with murder and we catch her she said okay i take the pill gulp thank you now uh let me go about my the rest of my life just fine um i'm no longer a threat to anybody um i i did it on purpose uh i did it deliberately i did it with mandrea but now that i've taken the pill i'm not dangerous so of course let me go oh okay yeah i mean i would say i mean i don't want to i answered the question directly in the book and i just bite the bullet in that case but what i would yeah i mean what i would say though in addition is that there might be all kinds of good moral reasons to oppose such a pill there are clearly ethical concerns there are questions about whether or not the pill changes individuals and one's deep self if there is a deep self so there's all these kind of reasons to to be practic to say okay this is this is again thought experiment land but in a way my model does say right that the only grounds for incapacitating the individual is the future threat the individual poses and in this hypothetical case um i think that uh yeah we wouldn't incapacitate the person but i also want to add that if these hypothetical technologies become available um i think there will be all kinds of legitimate considerations that everyone on the spectrum retributivist non-retributivist consequentialist incapacitationists um are all going to have to grapple with in a very deep way in the sense that you know if we could um in less invasive ways or ways that uh respected autonomy and consent if we could um rehabilitate agents so that they're not a future any longer of a threat of recidivism or repeating violent crime do we have the grounds for holding them i do think there'd be a whole there would need to be a whole rethinking of not only um the justifications for punishment but the length of punishment the form of punishment and uh whether or not imprisonment is justified so i don't think it is black and white in that case even for the retributivist um just to be clear greg just greg to be clear on what you're objecting to so like these crazy stories from the middle ages when somebody killed somebody else with an axe the guy got punished and the axe got punished i mean this is crazy obviously we all we would all object to that uh but you seem to be making the argument that even though humans are more complex than tools we are kind of a machine that you could twist the dials to nudge in one direction or another direction in a deterministic way is that and therefore no one's should be punished for anything this is another this is another bug bear that i want to i want to dispel which is i agree completely with what dan said much earlier in our conversation which is um people change their minds um people can be moved by arguments um in this sense i think the compatibilist and and and i are on the same footing in that we both think that um rational deliberation is consistent with determinism no one i mean no at least no one on this screen i hope um thinks that determinism is a threat to rational deliberation um so in that regard i think look you know the arguments you give the reasons you give the philosophical kind of cases you can give to change people's minds can change beliefs and beliefs change you know cause actions i mean reasons or causes right reasons or causes and you could affect an individual's actions by affecting their reasons for action there's nothing inconsistent with that in being a determinist there's nothing inconsistent in in in agree in acknowledging that and denying free will okay let's stop there and let let's see craig let's stop there for a second let dan respond to that argument those arguments you just made greg the issue about punishment is not the kantian retributive desire to you know even the eternal store in heaven or something like that it's to maintain respect for the law and you can't do that unless it's public unless people have access to the knowledge they need they have to know what the law is and they have to know what the punishments are now that says nothing about determinism or indeterminism it simply says if you want to have a well-functioning society you have to have laws and laws have to be respected right those will not be respected if they are to draconian if the punishments are too severe or if there are no punishments at all all right okay so and what you and eric and others keep trying to turn this into a metaphysical issue about determinism where determinism in fact has simply nothing to do with the case it doesn't matter whether determinism or indeterminism is true or false what matters is whether homo sapiens as a species has managed to come up with cultural inventions like systems of law and order which are worth preserving and maintaining i say the answer to that is obviously yes that makes me a consequentialist believer in dessert because of the good consequences of having laws that are respected that's why we have punishment and people realize that because they're moved by reasons they recognize that when they do something that's against the law they deserve to be punished and they accept that they understand that they deserve to be punished now the people that are not up to that the people who are brain damaged and so forth they don't deserve to be punished they we treat with one of something version of your quarantine model but the others we treat we give them the benefit of the doubt and we treat them as responsible agents and for instance the last thing i think we want to encourage is the medicalization of our system with punishment in the soviet union which i don't do it does again another no let me say i got i got a couple of things i have to say you take quarantine and i say prison yeah dan what just greg hang on dan what does the medicalization of prison or punishment mean you may remember an awful book by carl meninger called the crime of punishment where the idea was we're going to get rid of punishment altogether and we're just going to treat people and we're going to cure them well who says they're cured well it may take the rest of their lives in the appropriate uh institution to determine whether or not they're cured but it's not punishment it's uh it's a it's uh it's a cure well the trouble is that greg's quarantine system he he recognizes this is a cliff he doesn't want to fall over but i don't think he's put enough barriers up and when he does put the barriers up what he's going to have is a system of humane punishment okay draculian punishment not retributivist punishment but humane punishment and the the violent criminals will be humanely punished and the white-collar criminals will be humanely punished and the white-collar criminals will will have uh more punishment than they do now because they deserve more punishment and they're getting away with a lot more than the others are i respond there's so many things i have to say here but um one thing i would just say is there's so much more in the book because there's a lot of a lot of distinctions here that are being overlooked um and i don't want to make things more complicated for the listener and that's why i think the the the you got to read the book but one thing so okay two things first of all i am you got to distinguish my own particular view this public health quarantine model and the view the different types of views that are available for free will skeptics okay um free will skeptics can agree a lot with what dan just said i.e in the need for punishment the need for transparency in law for for everyone to understand the system for contractualist approach all of that um and in fact many free will skeptics and the majority of free will skeptics are consequentialist about punishment and so one of the things i've repeatedly questioned dan about is if dan defends a view of punishment that's consistent with the same views that are held by foreign skeptics how is his view any different um and why why does it need free will and so one thing i would just say is for the listeners you could agree in part with some of dan's criticisms of my own view i i think i have responses um but even if you did that doesn't entail that we need to bring back free will and basic dessert um and i think one thing is being confused here is that when we got off on the discussion of punishment is that we fail to distinguish between all the different types of justifications for punishment there are retributivist justifications for punishment there are consequentialist justifications for punishment and there are mixed justifications for punishment and dan gives a version of a mixed account yeah and so so i think that i think we need to be very clear and we need to also be clear about what each of those forms of justification for punishment need and presuppose philosophically retributive punishment does presuppose free will and basic deserve consequentialist justifications do not mixed accounts might retain some and and therefore we have to get into the weeds so i think that instead of talking about the punishment because i think that you could hold a consequentialist justification for punishment that's contractualist you could hold the justification for punishment that's based on deterrence or future goods that are produced um and all of that's consistent with the rejection of free will so there's there's absolutely no reason to have to be a compatibilist to defend what dan wants to defend the fact is and what we've been avoiding is that the thing that dan wants to preserve that does tie us back to the free will system issue is he wants to preserve the system of desert the the system of moral not just punishment because punishment could be preserved without dessert punishment could be well dan's saying no but there are just look at just look at jeremy bentham um there are accounts of punishment that have been out there and developed and and i think there are arguments against them but they're moral arguments um and and so i reject those for different reasons but not because they presuppose free will they're perfectly coherent and they are um free of desert claims at least they're free of any controversial dessert claims so what i want to know is what you know dan's defending a view that is in my mind very hard to distinguish from some of these varieties of consequentialist accounts of a punishment that free will skeptics did and the only thing that seems to separate it is the language of dessert that dave dan wants to preserve um and he and so what i what i what i want to know is exactly what that dessert amounts to and i think if it collapses to a very thin notion of dessert then in a way we're on the same side and there's very little that separates dan from the free will skeptic if it's a robust notion of dessert then i think that there are significant philosophical issues at play and and then i do think it's a matter of whether or not um which one of us you agree with wins the kind of debate over free will but it all is about the kind of dessert i'm very clear about what my dessert is and what it means dan agrees we don't have that kind of dessert dan agrees that compatibilist control is not enough to preserve basic dessert and i see that as a victory the next part of the argument is let's let dan reply to that whether or not let's let dan reply to that part yeah sorry the next point is whether or not dan's non-basic dessert what it amounts to and how much of it is is really true of dessert okay dan well this is this is the problem uh dirk pereboom and greg have this idea of basic moral desert and i think that's that's a term for nothing uh and in a way they agree they say right there is no such thing as bait as basic moral dessert yeah but then there's still a notion of of dessert and it's one that's familiar to all of us when you say um i hope the better team wins because the better team will deserve to win that's an everyday use of the word deserve um uh you deserved the first prize because you did better work than the others or you deserve punishment because you promised to do x and you didn't do x you had no good reason not to do x so shame on you you should be punished there's a this is an everyday notion of of dessert that's the reason that's the notion i'm using and i think that the idea of basic moral dessert is introduced precisely because if you don't if you think determinism is true then you don't think there's any room for a basic moral desert so much the worst for basic moral desserts no such thing okay so i'll just say that dessert that matters is the everyday notion of dessert which i just gave you some examples of which is strictly independent of both determinism and determinism yeah so i would say yeah we also just keep on clarifying that it isn't determinism alone that's the threat for me it's in determinism to end luck um and so i'll just keep on clarifying that we're not assuming determinism here what i would say is is you know dan's notion of dessert um the question or not is whether or not that notion of dessert really requires free will or whether or not it's controversial enough to be what has been of of central philosophical and practical importance so one one one reason why pieroboom and i define free will in terms of basic dessert is that we think um there's a couple really important benefits and and also i think uh um requirements in defining free will in this way i mean one in this part dan and i agree in is it keeps free will tied to really important practical matters so free wills of control an action that's required for a very particular kind of moral responsibility i don't need to fight down on that because we both agree but the other part is that the notion has to be of significant controversy enough to divide the traditional views and the problem is dan's watered-down consequentialist notion is not one that most free will skeptics deny and so it's unclear what kind of controversial form of free will he's seeking to preserve the third thing i would say is that um there is a real divide even among compatibles and i've had a lot of fun with this over the years you know i've run you know if i i've written posts about this but i would like to write a paper entitled may the real compatibilist please stand up because the compatibilist thesis has been stated by a thousand different compatibilist and it amounts to a thousand different claims by each compatibilist many contemporary compatibilists are seeking to preserve basic dessert and many contemporary compatibilists think that we can make the kind of more responsibility i'm denying consistent with the truth of determinism dan's not one of those um and so there's a new strand which you might call an old strand i think dan is going back to an older version of compatibilism that may have been more prevalent before recent times where people are giving forward-looking justifications for this backward-looking system of desert um in modern times the only two well-known people i know that defend that view is dan and manuel vargas the vast majority of people like john martin fisher like uh susan wolf like um um david shoemaker uh michael mckenna all of these other compatibilists um are seeking to preserve something i think that's more than what dan is seeking to preserve so one thing i'm unclear about and we spent a lot of time on the book is whether or not the thing that dan wants to preserve is significant enough to really divide our views um if it's not i'm happy to to acquiesce to certain kinds of conceptions of game play and dessert right um like i could say that my you know when my daughter does something good she deserves to be you know uh rewarded and when she does something bad she deserves maybe to be scolded or have a privilege removed but the forward-looking justification for that is that i want to form her into a kind of moral person that has good moral reasons for acting and i want to affect those moral reasons um those kinds of things are things that most free will skeptics think are non-problematic what what most compatibilists are well what a lot of not all but many compatibilists are seeking to preserve is something more than that i think um susan wolf calls it italian blame which i find insulting because i'm italian and uh david shoemaker calls angry blame he really wants to preserve angry blame um and so that is a kind of basic dessert type of blame that goes beyond what dan wants to preserve i think that notion is what has been of central philosophical and practical importance and by shifting it over to something much weaker um i think dan is unfortunately confusing the waters because when you retain the language of dessert it's hard to and dan admits this in the book it's hard to shave off all of these retributive and intrinsic good um notions that have been attached to it over time and so this is maybe just a pragmatic difference between our approaches is about whether or not um it's worth preserving certain terms i'm happy with talking about degrees of autonomy i'm happy talking about different degrees of control i'm happy if we drop the language of free will and uh dessert altogether and replaced it with different specific languages about different moral practices that we could then go through in a checklist saying is this practice justified is this practice justified and maybe maybe the philosophical community would be better suited by just dropping these contentious notions because i think that they're too loaded with let's let let's let dan jump in there okay great great that's a lot uh how do you want to parse that down i think what greg has just said uh illustrates part of what the problem is because there's all these philosophers out there with different access to grind and different brands of ism and greg has just pointed out that there are self-styled compatibilists that have stronger claims that they want to defend than than what i want um too bad for them they're they're i i'm defending my view which is the same view i've been defending you know since 1983 when i wrote elbow room uh and it seems to me to be it seems to me it shouldn't be controversial i don't want it to be controversial it seems to me the only thing that's controversial about it is that a lot of philosophers and a lot of scientists have been conned into thinking that if determinism is true they're not morally responsible and that's just not true that's i just want to block that i say free will worth wanting the kind that we should all want and want others to want and want to preserve is a social socially embodied constructed endorsed relied upon a set of practices and concepts it includes a notion of desert that notion includes sometimes joy and anger yes it is understandable that people would be angry with somebody who they know knows better than to do something they do something wrong they deserve our not just our criticism they deserve to be punished in the everyday sense of desert not basic moral desert whatever that is that's a philosopher's only notion it doesn't play any role in the law and it doesn't play any role in the intuitions that support the policies we have about holding people responsible in fact if we think about responsibility to me the most perhaps the most important point about responsibility is that people can take responsibility they can take responsibility they it is within their power they have the moral competence to take responsibility and if they are good folk they do and when they don't and responsibility is attributed correctly to them then their refusal to take responsibility is itself a moral fail now all of this can be conducted independently of any discussion of determinism or indeterminism or for that matter luck let me give you my own thought experiment i wrote i wrote i as a non-philosopher i wrote my own thought experiment here it is john doe is an exceptionally moral person who's happily married to jane doe the chances of john ever cheating on jane is close to zero but the odds are not zero because john is human so let's say for the sake of argument john has a one-night stand when he's on the road and jane finds out how does john account for his action does he pace the standard deterministic explanation for human behavior say something like this to jane honey my will is simply not of my own making my thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which i am unaware and over which i exert no conscious control i do not have the freedom you think i have i could not have done otherwise could he even finish the sentence before the slap across his cheek comes from his wife's hand because of course he could have done otherwise now if john is a serial philanderer she should just divorce him because obviously he can't control it but in most cases when these things happen the assumption is you could have done otherwise and you god damn well better not do it again or else and and and that punishment has to be sold such that john feels massive guilt and shame he should feel it to his bones and she should give it to him in a way like you deserve to be really punished for this because i am so hurt and in that sense that's kind of our evolved emotions there's a reason that that we have those moral emotions because you got to sell it you can't just you can't deliver it in in a way that's kind of a calculated behavioral economics we're going to tune the the dials to uh increase the incentives and so on it's got to be it's got to be real so in dan's example of of trump and the impeachment the second impeachment this was never going to happen everybody knew it was go there's only two weeks to go the whole point of it was a public punishment to other politicians this is what we're going to do to you if you do something bad like this it reminds me of a real case of just a year or so ago where a judge i think in texas um led a juvenile off because the juvenile had been pampered too much right he was the spoiled um and uh outrageously the judge decided that that this uh this excuse his his uh you know his inexcusable and and negligent behavior i don't know who it was who said it maybe you will recall this phrase some child-rearing expert said um people are often told never strike a child in anger to which the response was never strike a child except in anger methodical i'm not angry i'm just uh providing a uh a stimulus that's that's not what we really want uh can i say yes um so i mean there's a couple things to say i mean one is um i've been letting this slide this uh could have done otherwise language because i i largely don't defend that kind of incompatibilism but i'll just add depends on how many things you want to hold uh uh still in terms of the uh hold hold uh fixed in terms of what we want to say whether something someone could have done otherwise and so the way that we're using it here we're holding certain things fixed like the laws of nature and and the remote past um but we we're allowing variability in the uh counter factual in terms of the inner psychological states if we hold the inner psychological states fixed then it becomes a different discussion so i just want to be clear i don't even want to get into that the second thing uh so it's unclear whether we could have done otherwise in the relevant sense we could have done otherwise in a in a sense that ma in a sense that we do use in the sense that we hold certain things fixed but not other things fixed um the other thing i would say is i i i want to make sure i i comment on this because it's come up and not i agree with dan a lot about the the um social construction of our moral responsibility practices and how they evolved over time in the evolutionary account of these um but i also think a byproduct of that story is that they can change and they evolve and they have evolved we've evolved um from from um uh societies that punished um innocent people we we evolved from what are called honor cultures to individualistic cultures and part of that for me opens up the hope that we could evolve our moral responsibility practices further in a way that um relinquishes what i think of as outdated and unjustified and in my mind potentially harmful types of concepts like dessert and just desserts and retribution in terms hold on and in terms of the the the case with the with the wife and the cheating again i want to reiterate that punishment is not the issue a um free will skeptic could justify punishing the husband if they're a consequentialist if they're a deterrence-based theorist and in that case again um dan's view is not unique and separate from the free will skeptic who's a consequentialist so it's not about punishment i don't personally want to preserve punishment but a free will skeptic could and you can preserve everything you said and still be a free will skeptic the third thing i would say about that case is for me the wife can still justify leaving um and not again because she holds the person um uh uh morally responsible in the basic sense um but because um of self-protection if the person has uh cheated on her in the past and um even if it were low probability prior behavior is a good indication of future behavior and um i just want to isolate myself from a situation where i could be emotionally harmed again and so all of that is justified right the guy could offer that excuse it doesn't have to hold water even on my account okay it doesn't have to hold water for the consequentialist to defense punishment on forward-looking grounds um and so what you want to preserve i think is retributive reactions that does presuppose free will well only to sell it so that he he truly understands and one last thing the the i agree with the evolutionary emotional reactions um and this is in philosophy sometimes called the reactive attitudes and i agree that the reactive attitudes have probably ever emerged over time evolutionarily speaking for various reasons um but i also want to make sure that we distinguish between the naturalness of those emotional reactions and whether or not we should give those emotional actions um justifiatory force i.e use those emotional reactions to justify say public policies to justify retributive punishment in the form of the legal context dan was just factually wrong before where he says the law doesn't presuppose basic desert i would argue it does when it when it tries to give retributive justifications for punishment which require exactly the kind of dessert i deny retribute you admit this then you and yes why you reject retributivism that's why i think i think that's why the law is not dependent on retributivism no but in many states ours included part of the justification for punishment in fact the new model penal code doubles down on retributivism as the primary justification i'll send you the passages well well let's fix them i agree i'm going to fix them we're not going to fix them by holding on to the language of just desserts because even your version of just desserts is giving cover mistakingly to those that use the same concept of just desserts to justify basic set of practices and so one of the things i would argue practically speaking is that we are more allies than we are foes when it comes to reforming the criminal justice system but i think you inadvertently leave um too much on the field to to satisfy the retributivist because i think that the retributivist will appeal to the same common sense notions of basic dessert and just desserts that you want to preserve to justify something you don't want to justify and so maybe you'd be better off if we allied ourselves in terms of calling out what we both disagree with focusing on that rather than focusing on trying to preserve something that i think gives equal cover to the enemy well you you said that you agree with me that our systems of laws and morals that these have evolved over time certainly they have nobody would want to live in a world of old testament morals today we've come a long way from that and it will come a long way again where we differ is that you think that the idea of punishment should go retributive punishment and for me for moral reasons keep putting that word retributive in and i say my view is that i have a consequentialist justification of punishment we have a mixed punishment it's not retributive i know some philosophers use the term retributive retribution and punishment as if they were synonyms they are not yeah i would argue that you're so i think that your idea that it would be good to put our shoulder to the wheel and eliminate the concepts of responsibility moral and punishment from our from our practices and i say no no no we want to keep both moral responsibility and punishment what we want to get rid of is the fantasy of basic moral responsibility or basic moral desert and the concept of retributive punishment what is missing in the forward-looking account of responsibility the conversational account of responsibility that you know peer boom and i defend that matters to you and if you could accept the same kind of conversational model that we propose then i don't know what separates us the thing that separates us is that you want to hold on to those backward-looking features that must be doing some work they are sir must be doing some significant justificatory work otherwise it could drop out altogether and be a purely consequentialist theory and by the way i totally disagree with you that your theory is um purely consequent it's a mixed justification and there are plenty of retributive mixed accounts that give forward-looking consequentialist reasons for preserving retributive practices um wait a minute for preserving punishment no for if i define retributivism i'm going to define it for you as um saying that in the absence of excusing conditions people that are in you know incapable of of being held accountable wrongdoers morally deserve to be punished to proportion their wrongdoing that's what the retributivist wants to say wait a minute i thought we agreed that over the top retributivism that's retributive that's pure retributivism but there's mixed retributivism and mixed with it retributive the the concept of the agent the wrongdoer deserving the punishment is doing something in justifying the practices it has a justificatory role because consequentialist justifications of punishment justify the same forms of punishment the same practices without that dessert and so you want to retain the dessert and you want to retain that that dessert is doing real philosophical work if it's not let's just get rid of it but if it is doing work then your account is a mixed account it's a two st it's this two-staged account walls offers an account like this so does um uh um um oh i'm forgetting his name uh with his famous paper on punishment um feinberg um it's a two-tiered type approach where you give a consequentialist justification for preserving retributive practices not punishment practices but practices that are justified on the grounds of desert where wrongdoers deserve the punishment and proportions of the wrongdoing what does punishment mean then punishment is our street right so punishment the consequentialists could justify harsh treatment um for deterrence reasons without without appealing to dessert so much of this turns on just what we mean by these words uh i mean cesare beccareias uh uh you know enlightenment improvement that the punishment should fit the crime that was a huge step in you know western jurisprudence before that you know it was capital punishment for everybody or torture for everybody um and so but greg you seem to be objecting to that the punishment should fit the crime if not that then what proportionality i mean principal proportionality i mean i have to reject that proportionality principle because i reject the retributive version i i retain a different proportionality principle which is that the individual sanctions or limiting liberty limiting uh restrictions should be uh in accordance with the future threat the individual poses and so she's proportional to the threat so this reminds me wait i'll let you finish then you just reminded me of a disagreement we had in the book which i think is really relevant right here the account of you know harsh practices or punishment that isn't retributive that greg is defending here has one i think embarrassing consequence it would justify umpires calling strikes when the pitcher threw balls if he thought the consequences for the pitcher would be better rather than calling them as as he sees them uh my view of punishment says you have a consequentialist justification of the whole system of punishment but then you leave consequences aside you don't you don't want the referee in the soccer game saying it's going to hurt this guy's feeling so much if i give him a red card moreover it'll mean that milan won't go to the finals no no that's completely out of bounds you do not look at consequences when you are uh following the rules now my account then of punishment is that we do not look at individual cases and treat them with consequentialist reasoning we don't say well in this case will it do more harm than good to punish this person no that undermines respect for the law we have the rules and we have agreed to play by them and if on occasion people get hurt in ways that are unfortunate tough they agreed to play the game these are the rules and they don't have any complaint because they did the interaction i mean you'd never have a soccer player saying to the referee oh but i couldn't do otherwise because determinism is true so you can't give me a penalty preposterous yeah i think that's it i mean i understand that of your theory i think that's an improvement over true that's fine yeah with the question i have is um again how that differs because a consequentialist could say that too a pure consequentialist free of dessert could say that and say that the reason why the rules have to be enforced equally and transparently is because other that's that produces the best overall outcome if you muddy them up if you play around with them internal to the practices then abuses open up and all kinds of things occur um but the question i'm still having is when you mention your justification for for punishment again you're not bringing dessert in and i think you want to bring dessert in and that's why you think it's unique that's why i call it a mixed account if if dessert is doing nothing and could drop out completely and we're left with purely consequentialist uh justifications of these practices um then i i wonder what you know why couldn't causal responsibility be the backward looking feature that does the work for you that is you know okay you know mother a was causally responsible for the death of the child she um she needs to be sanctioned because she poses a different kind of threat moving forward no you want to say something significant about dessert here and that's why i'm calling you a mixed theorist because that feature is doing some justifiatory work other than the pure consequentialist theory is it's doing exactly the same consequentialist work as the referee giving the red card in the last five seconds of the game i think there's a difference between he's going to do it again it said he broke the rules and he did it egregiously and that's why he gets the red card and he deserves the correct deserves the record yeah he deserves a red card in that case that's right yeah i mean i i would say that you know the sports analogy i find always find hard because i think there's perfectly instrumentalist and practical reasons to enforce rules within games um that i think the free will's kept but society is like a game yeah it makes yes there are similarities with the with games like board games and sports and there are dissimilarities i think what dan is trying to say is that game blame let's call it game blame when i blame the person who committed the foul that got the red card um that that's the uh it's the same thing writ large in society and i do think that there are similarities between board games and rules that are enforced within board games and there are dissimilarities in that the kind of interpersonal um uh our interpersonal practices have a lot higher stake than game blame um and they could do a lot more harm and i think they play different functions than they do that's why that's why we have criminal penalties not just red cards because in society more harm is being done if you do something egregious enough in soccer you'll go to jail yeah well all right let me give you analogy up downstairs before i came up i'm playing monopoly with my daughter and my wife and you know my daughter lands on the go to jail box and so i say no you got to go to jail right um and literally like in the game go to jail right and so um that kind of rule following is that's a punishment it harms her in the sense that you know it's a it's a consequence she doesn't want to endure um it harms her in the in the in the context of the game right so you're you're intentionally harming someone in this way um but no one would see that that's involving anything you know uh um reaching any level of dessert that's of significant philosophical interest to the free will debate we could preserve that practice absolutely fine without preserving any kind of uh deep desert that is i think of any kind of philosophical significance in the debate that we're having about free will game blame or game rules in that context could be enforced without kind of condemnatory components that make punishment punishment and without certain kind of communicative functions that make interpersonal reactive attitudes significantly different than the enforcement of rules and games actually i disagree with you there uh greg i think if you look closely you will see that what you're calling game blame and leave monopoly aside for a moment unless they say basketball or football and there are penalties for uh deliberately rough play for egregious fouls and these carry moral a program with them they really do and they should and and not just the championship may depend on it the future salary of the player may depend on whether or not they get these punishments and these are serious punishments they're deserved and they're my my view greg is that human society is the best game in town uh we all want to play it because it sure beats living in the state of nature and the penalties that society i call it the moral agents club the penalties that you agree to live by if you want to be a member you agree if you if you violate these principles you are to blame and you will be punished and this is bedrock it is a it is a it is the cornerstone of a free and secure society and it has nothing to do again with either luck or determinism yeah i think uh maybe another real world example um in my sport of cycling you know lance armstrong got uh you know his career ended and so on for doping and well everybody was doping and so on yeah but uh but the the rewards he got for the doping were far greater than anybody else got and so the punishment should fit the crime in that sense now he's no bernie madoff but bernie madoff destroyed way more lives than lance armstrong hurt uh and so therefore again we're scaling up the punishment should fit the crime and and so on i wonder how you guys think about back to i mean why can't we say you know in a case like this that you know not only you know not only should uh he be stripped of those because he was right he was stripped yeah there's seven jerseys yeah yeah i mean and the idea you know all of that could be still i think accounted for on my account without without you know resorting to uh purely backward looking blame in the sec in the sense that in this case the reason why we would be stripping him of his titles is that um he won them by unfair advantage um it's a comparative kind of notion um in that um we have rules as dan says to the game and um if you play the game unfairly that gives someone an unfair advantage and we don't want to um you know distribute titles to those who play the game unfairly and so finding out discovering that that he was doping um can't license us to restrict it but the the parts that are are different and again i think the re so my account let me just add one little wrinkle to this because it's actually worse uh i mentioned that pretty much everybody was doping and and and everybody he beat they were doping and so it seems like well maybe the best guy won anyway since they were all doping but the bigger problem is is that everybody inside the sport including the sporting organizations that were running and enforcing the rules they knew what was going on so the whole system is corrupt and this is like a third world country that falls apart right so back to dan's point you you really gotta enforce those rules because if you don't then you get the spiral down where there's kind of a behavioral logic a you know rational choice on the part of lands well the only way i'm ever going to win is if i do everything these other guys are doing and more well that's in a sense yes he's responsible but it's also the society is responsible for letting the corruption even escalate to the point where everybody is violating the rules then you have no support which is why we got to have that rule of law anyway so you know and i just i wanna you know sort of maybe end with i i agree with dan um i think the idea for me though is that um you know you have to you have to you know enforce a certain sort of uh set of rules within the society and there might be you know rules that i enforce the same parenting you know keep it in an interpersonal context um and i might i might reward my daughter when she does good things and i might take away her cell phone when she does bad things um the question i you know that i still think is the more philosophically relevant question is not whether or not those practices would be justified but the question about whether certain types of reactive attitudes would be justified because those are the ones that are philosophically significant right do i want to attach to my parenting when i when i punish my daughter by taking her cell phone away do i want or am i justified in exhibiting resentment or indignation or moral anger um and i would argue that look if our mor if our if our moral practices are culturally evolved which i agree they are and that they are open to modification through philosophical reasoning and tinkering and all kinds of other interventions these philosophical arguments that i and others provide can cause us to adopt certain kind of replacement attitudes for those few there's only a few reactive attitudes that we think are unjustified that is the vast majority of our reactive practices would remain in place whether skepticism is true or not true the kinds of reactive attitudes that are problematic the ones that presuppose free will are things like resentment and indian nation and moral anger what i would argue is that many of those practices are sub-optimal to begin with and we would be better off adopting replacement attitudes so instead of exhibiting moral anger on my daughter maybe i could exhibit disappointment or sorrow and that is consistent let's say with with free will skepticism because it doesn't presuppose uh basic dessert and it does exactly the same work in that interpersonal reaction in fact it might be more effective in many cases i think moral anger and blame is corrosive to our interpersonal relationships and does more harm than good um so not only do i think it's not justified i think it you know we'd be better off in many cases replacing it but i also want to make sure we distinguish between the natural reaction and whether or not that natural reaction is justified there are plenty of things that evolution has hardwired us for that we wouldn't want to say or morally justified practices so simply being natural doesn't justify it right we need and i think dan and i agree with this in the book there has to be a philosophical case to be made to say that these practices are justified so even if i can't i'm not a buddhist monk even if i can't rid myself of these reactive attitudes like if someone harms me in an intimate personal relationship i'm sure i'll feel resentment um but i could also from a more rationally reflective perspective um disavowed that emotional reaction in the sense that i don't give it any justificatory force in justifying certain types of things i would do beyond that that immediate context dan well the example and that this is going to be the last thing i have to go in two hours yeah go ahead well my my last comment um of course with your daughter saying you're disappointed in her much more powerful than being angry much more useful but that's when your daughter is 11 12 13 14 15 16. if she's 21 or 30 you're entitled not only are you entitled to be morally angry if she does something terrible but you're you're you're justified in moral anger i you know i will return to our our stalking horse here and say i don't think that you want americans to say to donald trump you know we're so disappointed in you really i'm so i we expect so much more of you you've really disappointed me today this year these last four years no we want to say you crook you cheat you criminal what if michael's right michael's right and he's a sociopath and not a member are you gonna you gotta change well no but it would be a signal to other politicians don't do this how much control yes and on that note i'd like i'd like to uh uh take my leave of this discussion it's been fun gentlemen go ahead greg yeah i just want to end by saying i have deep respect for dan i really enjoyed our exchange both in the book and and here and i hope people read the book just dessert check it out everybody all the details are in there dan thank you greg thank you

Channel: Skeptic

Views: 40,505

Keywords: Michael Shermer, Skeptic, compatibilism, debate, determinism, free will, moral responsibility, morality, The Michael Shermer Show

Id: AxhA7S3q49o

Length: 126min 7sec (7567 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 30 2021