Category Archives: Metaphysics

Writing and Being, Or: A Short Review of Irad Kimhi’s *Thinking and Being*

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The first sentence of an essay is a doorman who invites the reader into the world that will unfold within what succeeds it. It is what sets the tone for the piece. The reader expects something quite different to follow from the pale butler with a posh, monotone accent than the dashing server who greets with a smooth voice and a smile. It would be quite obscene to follow the latter and not the former with a dingy mansion and rows of coffins. And yet…

The first sentence of an essay begins and therefore embodies a dialogue. Great writers therefore are not merely great theorists. They don’t merely have the best arguments. They don’t merely speak truly. They understand that all of these activities are intelligible only in dialogue, in discourse, in relation to what the reader brings to an essay. And so to understand how to write a great essay, one must understand how a great essay is read.

This dialogical element is essential. For an essay is an attempt, an attempt to not only establish some thesis, but convince its reader that it is true. An essay is nothing without a reader. But this is not to say that an essay may be cast out to the multitudes indiscriminately. The first thing that an essay must accomplish is to select a reader. This is the duty of the doorman, who must of course be mindful that the reader does not appear out of the aether. Every reader has a history, has hopes and habits. Every reader has reasons that bring them to an essay. The first sentence of an essay interrogates these reasons. It gets to know them over tea to play with them, to tease them, to judge them. It selects only those who might sacrifice themselves to the purpose of an essay, who might be deeply affected and emerge from its depths a different person with a new history, with new hopes and habits.

We learn from Socrates that the written word is a vulnerable thing, that it may be abducted and used for purposes alien to its own. This threat must be always opposed by the writer. An essay serves a higher calling than to satisfy a reader. But Socrates’ insight is important too: the essay has no power of its own. It cannot fight back against the determined reader. It cannot run. It cannot call for help. If an essay is to avoid Oreithuia’s fate, the writer must be cunning. It must use a reader’s energy against them. And as readers ourselves, all writers know precisely how easy this can be, for we too have been taken in by essays. We too have been destroyed and rebuilt by them. And we too have been told that this is what we have done to ourselves, that we have entrapped ourselves in our effort to abduct an essay. The question that remains is then how we may accomplish this feat for ourselves.

We all understand quite freely from satire and irony that blots of ink may hide an essay, or two or three, between and beyond them. It is the task of the doorman to choose which reader may be allowed to acquaint themselves with which essay. The great writer might of course hide his crimes from the snooping detective while displaying them openly to any sympathetic ghoul or gangster. The masterful writer might even reveal a different essay to every reader who might happen across it and withhold the rest.

But an essay must nevertheless remain accessible. The reader who has hidden every element of an essay has not written an essay; we must always remember that an essay is a dialogue. Its first sentence cannot deny entry to everyone who happens to rap upon its door. We should rather say that a great writer proportions their selection to the readership they wish to address. And this depends upon the properties of that readership. A writer must know them intimately. They must live amongst them. They must laugh with them. They must cry with them. They must know everything that a reader desires and believes and identifies with. To fail this, to write in a way that does not reward or entice a reader, that does not address their concerns, and in which they cannot themselves see, risks soliloquy. And soliloquy is not writing.[1] It is a prison.

The first sentence of an essay dives into the soul of a reader in order to open them to an essay. It preys on their desires, on their spirit, on their judgements. It is deceptive, promising the world only to capture and captivate them, transforming them into a new person. In this, the dual duty of the first sentence of an essay becomes clear. It not only selects a reader: it also prepares them for what an essay will do to them—or rather what they will do to themselves while under the influence of an essay.

To prepare a reader is to crack them open, to loosen up their soul. As the reader labours in panic to put themselves back together, they use the resources that an essay gives them, and an essay takes this opportunity to smuggle a seed deep within.

It is not difficult to open up a reader. One need only present them with the promise of intelligible novelty. This is in essence to play upon those reasons that a reader first comes to an essay, to give them a taste but to hold back on the delivery. Easy as this might be, this is where writers most often fall into error. They so often forget that they are writing in dialogue that they fail to write at all. They instead forgo the norms of a discourse and craft what appear to be words but which have lost their meaning, or they place recognisable words in unrecognisable sentences and call those objections.

This is of course not how writing is done. It belies the central failure of the writer to know their reader and to select them accordingly. For many times a writer selects instead the wrong reader, one who cannot possibly be changed by the marks on the page. For this reader finds only the simplest of errors in these marks and remains therefore closed to the essay. And if this is so, how might an essay change them? How might an essay revolutionise a discourse? How might an essay teach a lesson? How might it even introduce a problem? Can an essay which fails this even be called an essay? Just think of how many trees have been felled, how many forests cleared, how many birds and squirrels mulched in the chaos, how many bears driven to starvation—all for what does not even amount to an essay; all for writers to not even write, but incoherently babble.

So what then shall the writer do? If the writer wishes to write, if the writer wishes to fulfill their destiny, they must first read. They must first live amongst readers and learn their languages and customs. Without this they are lost. They cannot despite their arrogance erect a whole discourse ex nihilo. But where they embrace their humility and accept their humanity, there they might finally write even a single sentence. For this is all that an essay is.

When the first sentence of an essay strikes a reader and tears open their soul, the reader immediately repairs the damage. They now have a new history, new hopes, new desires, new beliefs. And so in striking the reader, the first sentence of an essay changes them, draws them forward into the unknown. Each subsequent sentence now is, now is not, the same essay. The essay ceases, but continues. It embodies a new but old dialogue which now stands in relation to a distinct but indistinct reader. The great writer can make of plurality one and of one plurality. And if a writer cannot do this, gone are the hopes that they may write at all. The sun has set on their writing. It is night.[2]

_______________________

Notes

[1] The writer may write for the reader who shares their body. It would be a mistake to suggest that all thinking is manifest in self-consciousness. The thinking being is not singular but a shifting sea of interrelated modules. Very often the best way for these modules to communicate, because they share a physiology, is to recreate themselves in signs without and convey a message indirectly. Writing is amongst the best means of accomplishing this. But the expression for expression’s sake, display for display’s sake, this is not writing, this is not thought. All writing, all speech, all thought is dialogical. The central task of philosophical logic depends upon this fact.

[2] Or maybe not.

Parsimony and Theory Execution

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Philosophy is a graveyard. Old theories live on through their epitaphs; present theories, condemned and dying, busy themselves by writing them. They do not know how they will be killed. They do not know when. But if there is anything certain in philosophy, it is this: that every theory awaits, anticipating with every-increasing jitters and joy, its own execution.

There is no humane death for a philosophical theory. Each one deserves much more than its short and brutal life. And yet!—yet some executions are revolting in their wanton cruelty and disregard for the dignity of a theory. One of these is employed so regularly, so joyfully, that Robespierre himself grows pale in his shame. This is no toy guillotine. This is no National Razor. It is much worse. It is much more cruel. It is much more sudden and unjustified. This is parsimony.

Parsimony holds that philosophical postulates shall not be asserted beyond necessity. For a principle that itself stands beyond necessity, it is cunning in its assault on philosophical theories. Divine Zeus once ordained it. It was His Will that all be done for the best of all. And Wise Zeus could not meander about: in His power and his intellect, He should approach His aim most simply, most directly. The Milesian Zeus, Thales’ wet, life-giving arche or Anaximander’s limitlessness, better instantiated its own wisdom by doing away with the traditional pantheon, far more expansive as it was than reason demanded.  And so too did Love and Strife and Being and the Good and Substance and God. The kosmos, physis itself, wished only the simplest, clearest path. But Nature, supreme as it may be, need not act wisely. As Nature became matter, Parsimony lost its grip.

Ever the trickster, Parsimony shapeshifted: no longer a metaphysical constraint, it became epistemological. It is not Nature who demanded that our theories be simple, but philosophers themselves in their humanity who demanded that nature conform to their limits. Philosophers, they themselves said, should not assert any more principles than can be justified. Bold again stands Parsimony, itself unable to be justified. It even betrays itself: once considered hubris, the anthropic constraints undermined it. Humanity began its self-overcoming, further dominating, further grasping out into the kosmos, now justifying what was before only guessing. With no end in sight, Parsimony had to evolve.

Parsimony today is an ethical concern. The virtuous theory, it says, strikes the mean: it does not assert so little that it cannot reasonably explain, nor too much that it need explain further. Parsimony executes the gluttonous theory for lazing gleefully upon its mountains of golden assertions. But is this too much, too quick? How far must the revolution be permitted to continue? All of metaphysics—metaphysics!—stands bound before the guillotine: while theories be beggars, it becomes an outrage that metaphysics stands upon even its singular assertion: that there be something rather than nothing. And so Scarlet Parsimony descends upon it. Shall it succeed? Let us not heed the jeers of the crowd: let justice alone decide.

Our question here is then this: is parsimony truly a theoretical virtue? It is not. It fails its own test, of course. It has failed its own test throughout the whole of its history. But beyond that still, it fails every other test too.

Philosophers almost universally recognise eight theoretical virtues: clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, breadth, depth, significance, and completeness. If parsimony is to find a seat at the bench alongside these fine justices, it must meet their demands. Clarity begins the proceedings.

What does it mean for a theory to be parsimonious? It means for a theory to make no more assertions than necessary. Assertions are not straightforwardly countable. They come in different kinds and different orders with different relations along some hierarchy of inference. Finitism in mathematics is no more parsimonious than infinitism because the latter asserts infinitely. That infinite chain of assertions is inferred, and not essential to the theory. That is, they don’t count. What matters instead is the number of different kinds of assertions a theory makes. But delimiting what makes an assertion a different kind neither straightforward. Do assertions differ in kind by logical form? Or do they differ in kind by their content? Do they differ by their assertive force? These are all implausible: that a theory asserts only universals does not clearly make it any more parsimonious than another which asserts both counterfactuals and universals. And so on for any other distinction in kind. In no way can it be reliably understood how to evaluate the parsimony of a theory. Clarity finds parsimony guilty.

The others concur. It cannot be reliably adjudged which theories are parsimonious and therefore whether parsimony tracks truth. And with this limitation, parsimony is irrelevant and insignificant to theories as instruments of description, explanation, and justification.

Parsimony moreover doesn’t add anything new to this judicial bench. Every supposèd benefit of parsimony is already mastered by our eight theoretical justices. Where a theory of combustion asserts the existence of phlogiston, for example, philosophers might take it to be unacceptable because it is less parsimonious. But if that theory is consistent with the known chemical processes and thermodynamic equations, phlogiston doesn’t do anything for the theory. Asserting phlogiston is insignificant. Similarly for Meinongianism. For a squared circle to subsist fails parsimony. But it also fails clarity. It also fails relevance. Subsistence as an ontological category simply isn’t clear, especially since it is populated almost exclusively by impossible objects and objects that do not obtain. And since these objects do not obtain, their assertion is irrelevant to any theoretical explananda. And so parsimony fails its own test too: it is a principle beyond necessity. Let now Scarlet Parsimony descend upon itself: so has justice decreed.

Many too many philosophical theories have been lost to parsimony. Its reign of terror must end. All theories must die, but they ought to be executed with dignity and justice. Let us band together, philosophers, and shave parsimony itself from our metatheory. Let us divide it into its parts and cast them into the wind. Let us not even dignify it with an epitaph. Let it fade into obscurity.

An Introduction to Abhidharma Metaphysics

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The Abhidharma school of Indian Buddhism represents one of the earliest attempts to form a complete, coherent philosophical system based on the teachings of the Buddha. Abhidharma metaphysics rests on mereological reductionism: the claim that wholes are reducible to their parts. On the Abhidharma view, a composite object like a table is nothing more than its parts arranged table-wise. The “table” is a convenient designator based on our shared interests and social conventions. Crucially, for Abhidharma Buddhists, this also extended to the self. The self, rather than being an enduring substance, is reducible to a bundle of momentary mental states (Carpenter, 2).

Based on this principle of reductionism, Abhidharma went on to develop the Doctrine of Two Truths. A statement is “conventionally true” is if it is based on our commonsense view of the world, and leads to successful practice in daily life. Thus, it is conventionally true that macro objects such as tables and chairs exist. A statement is “ultimately true” if it corresponds to the facts as they are, independent of any human conventions. According to the Abhidharma view, the only statements that can be considered ultimately true are statements about ontological simples: entities that cannot be further broken down into parts. The tendency to think that statements involving composite objects like tables are ultimately true arises when we project our interests and conventions on to the world.

The primary opponents of the Abhidharma Buddhists were philosophers of the Nyāya orthodox tradition, about which I have written before. Nyāya philosophers were unflinching commonsense realists. They held that wholes existed over and above their parts. The word “table” is not merely a convenient designator or a projection of our interests on to the world, it is a real object that cannot be reduced to its parts. Nyāya held that there are simple substances and composite substances. Simple substances are self-existent and eternal. Composite substances depend on simple substances for their existence, but cannot be reduced to them. They possess qualities that are numerically distinct from the qualities of their component parts.

There are some obvious difficulties with the view that wholes exist in addition to their parts, and Abhidharma philosophers were quick to point this out. If the table exists in addition to its parts, it would follow that whenever we look at a table, we are looking at two different entities – the component parts and the (whole) table. How can two different objects share the same location in space? Nyāya philosophers responded by stating that wholes are connected to parts by the relation of inherence. In Nyāya metaphysics, inherence is an ontological primitive, a category that cannot be further analyzed in terms of something else. To put it very crudely, inherence functioned as a kind of metaphysical glue in the Nyāya system. The inherence relation is what connects qualities to substances. The quality redness inheres in a red rose. Similarly, the inherence relation also connects wholes with their parts. In this case, the whole – the table – inheres in its component parts.

At this point in the debate, the standard Abhidharma move was to ask how exactly wholes are related to their parts. Do wholes inhere wholly or partially in their parts? If wholes are real and not reducible to their parts, but nonetheless inhere only partially in their parts, it would mean that there is a further ontological division at play. We now have three different kinds of entities. The parts of the table, the parts of the whole that inhere in the parts of the table, and the whole. Now, what is the relation between the whole and the parts of the whole that inhere in the parts of the table? Does the whole inhere wholly or partially in the second set of parts? If it is the former, then the second set of parts becomes redundant, for the whole could simply inhere wholly in the first set of parts (that is, the parts of the table). If the whole inheres partially in the second set of parts, then we will have to introduce yet another whole-part distinction, and there is an obvious infinite regress looming.

The Nyāya school held that wholes inhere wholly in their component parts. They drew an analogy with universals to make the illustration clear. Just as the universal cowness inheres in every individual cow, the table inheres wholly in every one of its individual parts.

Abhidharma philosophers rasied a second set of difficulties for Nyāya. Consider a piece of cloth woven from different threads. According to the Nyāya view, the cloth is a substance that is not merely reducible to the threads. But now let us suppose I cannot see the whole cloth. Let us suppose most of the cloth is obscured from my view, and I only see a single thread. In this case, we would not say that I have seen the cloth. I am not even aware that there is a cloth – I think there is just a single thread. But if the Nyāya view is correct, then the cloth (the whole) inheres in every single thread, so when I see the thread, I should see the cloth as well. But since I don’t, it follows that the Nyāya view is incorrect.

Now consider a piece cloth woven from both red and black threads. Since the cloth is a separate substance, and since composite substances possess qualities numerically distinct from their component parts, the cloth must have its own color. But is the color of the cloth red or black? Nyāya responded that the color of the cloth is neither red nor black, but a distinct “variegated” color (Siderits, 111). But this only multiplies difficulties. If the cloth is wholly present in its parts, and it possesses its own variegated color, why do I not see the variegated color when I look at its component parts? When I look at the red threads, all I see is red, and when I look at the black threads, all I see is black. I do not see the variegated color in the component parts and yet, if the whole inheres wholly in its parts, I should.

Finally, if the whole is a distinct substance over and above its parts, the weight of the whole must be greater than the sum of its parts. But we do not observe this when we weigh composite substances. This is highly mysterious on the Nyāya view. But these problems are all avoided if we simply accept that wholes are reducible to their parts.

Abhidharma is a broad tradition that encompasses numerous sub-schools. Two of the most prominent ones are Vaibhāṣika and Sautrāntika. While both sub-schools agree that everything is reducible to ontological simples, they disagree on the number and nature of these simples. The Vaibhāṣika school is fairly liberal in its postulation of simples, while Sautrāntika is conservative. Moreover, Vaibhāṣika treats simples as bearers of an intrinsic nature. According to Vaibhāṣika atomists, an earth atom, for instance, is a simple substance that possesses the intrinsic nature of solidity. The Sautrāntika school rejected the concept of “substance” entirely. There are numerous reasons for this (most of them epistemological, that I will cover in a subsequent essay), but roughly, it came down to this: We have no evidence of substances/bearers, only qualities. Further, there is no need to posit substances, because everything that needs to be explained can be explained without them. For Sautrāntika philosophers, an earth atom is not a substance that is the bearer of an intrinsic nature “solidity” – rather, it is simply a particular instance of solidity. Thus, in Sautrāntika metaphysics, there are no substances or inherence relations, there are simply quality-particulars. This position is similar to what contemporary metaphysicians call trope theory.

The term “reductionism” is often cause for confusion when used in relation to Abhidharma Buddhism. It must be emphasized that the kind of reductionism relevant here is mereological reductionism. Abhidharma Buddhists were not reductionists in the sense of believing that consciousness could be reduced to material states of the brain. All Abhidharma schools held that among the different kinds of ontological simples, some were irreducibly mental, as opposed to physical.

Apart from mereological reductionism, the other key aspects of Abhidharma metaphysics are nominalism and atheism. I have covered the Buddhist approach to nominalism in a previous essay, so I will not go over it here. When it comes to atheism, it is important to recognize that Abhidharma Buddhists (like all Buddhists) were only atheistic in a narrow sense. They rejected the existence of an eternal, omnipotent creator of the universe. This did not mean that they were naturalists or that they rejected deities altogether. They believed in many gods, but these gods were not very different from human beings apart from being extraordinarily powerful. Venerating the gods was a means of obtaining temporary benefits in this life or a good rebirth, but the gods could offer no help with the ultimate goal of Buddhist practice: liberation from the cycle of rebirth. The gods themselves, being unenlightened beings, were stuck in the cycle of rebirth. To attain liberation one must seek refuge in the Buddha, the teacher of gods and men.

Works Cited:

Carpenter, Amber. Indian Buddhist Philosophy. Routledge, 2014. Print.

Siderits, Mark. Buddhism as Philosophy: An Introduction. Ashgate, 2007. Print.

Śrīharṣa’s Master Argument Against Difference

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The Advaita Vedānta tradition is one of the most popular and influential Indian philosophical systems. The best translation of the Sanskrit word advaita is “non-dual.” The thesis of Advaita is that reality is at bottom non-dual, that is, devoid of multiplicity. Advaita recognizes that our everyday experience presents us with of a plurality of objects, but maintains that the belief that plurality and difference are fundamental features of the world is mistaken. The ultimate nature of reality is undifferentiated Being. Not being something, but Being itself – Pure Being. The phenomenal world, in which we experience Being as separate beings is not ultimately real. It is constructed by avidya – ignorance of the true nature of reality. We are beings alienated from Being, and true liberation lies in ending this alienation.

One of the reasons offered by Advaitins for accepting these claims is that they form the most plausible and coherent interpretation of the Upaniṣads – scriptures accepted as being a reliable source of knowledge. But this will hardly convince someone who does not already acknowledge the authority of the Upaniṣads. Here, the strategy of Advaita philosophers has typically been to go on the offensive and argue that the very notion of “difference” or “separateness” is in some sense conceptually incoherent. The arguments for this claim were first formally compiled by the 5th century philosopher Maṇḍana Miśra. Subsequent philosophers in the Advaita tradition further developed, defended and extended these arguments. In this essay, I will briefly go over the master argument against difference presented by the twelfth century philosopher Śrīharṣa in his magnum opus, Khaṇḍanakhaṇḍakhādya (“The Sweets of Refutation”).

Śrīharṣa begins his inquiry by asking what “difference” really is. He identifies four possible answers to this question:

  1. Difference is the intrinsic nature of objects.
  2. Difference consists in the presence of distinct properties in objects.
  3. Difference consists in the mutual non-existence of properties in objects.
  4. Difference is a special property of objects.

Śrīharṣa considers each option in turn, and finds them all untenable.

The claim that difference is the intrinsic nature of objects is rejected because difference is necessarily relational. To state that bare difference is the nature of X is to utter something meaningless. At best, we can say that difference-from-Y is the intrinsic nature of X. However, this raises another problem. To describe the intrinsic nature of X is to describe what X is in and of itself, independent of anything else.  In contrast, the very notion “difference-from-Y” indicates a dependence on Y. We have arrived at a contradiction: if X has an intrinsic nature that is parasitic on the nature of Y, then it follows that X doesn’t really have an intrinsic nature.

Śrīharṣa offers a subsidiary argument to drive home the implausibility of the view that that difference is the intrinsic nature of an object. Consider a blue object and a yellow object. An object that is blue by its very nature does not depend on the yellowness of the other object. Even if all the yellow objects in the world were to disappear, the blue object would still be blue. But this could not be the case if difference-from-yellow-objects was the intrinsic nature of the blue object.

According to the second definition of difference, X is different Y if distinct properties are present in X and Y. X and Y can be any two objects, but we may use Śrīharṣa’s example: A pot is different from a cloth because the property potness is present in the pot, while the property clothness is present in the cloth. But this raises an obvious question: what makes potness different from clothness? The answer cannot be (1) – that is, that difference is the very nature of potness and clothness – because that view has already been refuted. If we answered the question with (2), then we would end up saying that what makes potness different from clothness is that potness is itself possesses a property that clothness does not. We would have to maintain that potness-ness is present in potness, and clothness-ness is present in cloth-ness. Even if we ignore the oddness of properties being present in other properties, we can raise another question: What makes potness-ness different from clothness-ness? This series of questions could go on indefinitely, generating an infinite regress. Hence, this option is unsatisfactory.

Śrīharṣa considers the possibility that difference consists in the mutual non-existence of properties in objects. According to this view, what makes a pot different from a cloth is the absence of potness in the cloth, and the absence of clothness in the pot. But much like before, this raises the question of what makes potness different from clothness. It cannot be (1) or (2), because they have already been refuted. If we bring up (3) here, we would have to say that what makes potness different from clothness is the absence of potness-ness in clothness, and the absence of clothness-ness in potness. At this point, much like before, we could ask what makes potness-ness different from clothness-ness. Once again, we are left with an infinite regress.

This brings us to the final option: that difference is a special property of an object. According to this view, difference-from-Y is itself an attribute of X. But if difference-from-Y is an attribute of X, then difference-from-Y is not X itself, but something different from X. This entitles us to ask what makes the attribute difference-from-Y different from X. It cannot be (1), (2) or (3), so it must be (4). This would mean that it must be another attribute that makes difference-from-Y different from X. But then this attribute itself would be different from both X and difference-from-Y, which simply raises the same question. One more, we see an infinite regress looming.

Having rejected all four possibilities, Śrīharṣa concludes that the very notion of difference is incoherent, and so it cannot be a true feature of the world. A typical reaction to Śrīharṣa’s arguments is that there must be something wrong with them – indeed, something obviously wrong with them. But it isn’t necessarily straightforward to identify what exactly it is. One could question whether Śrīharṣa really has considered all the possible options, whether some of these options really lead to an infinite regress, and finally, whether an infinite regress is something to be worried about. Philosophers from rival traditions adopted all these approaches. Śrīharṣa and his successors anticipated and responded to a number of these objections. They also modified and extended the arguments against difference to more specific cases, to show that differentiating cause and effect, moments in time, and subject and object, were all impossible. For a thorough examination of Śrīharṣa’s critique of difference, Phyllis Granoff’s Philosophy and Argument in Late Vedānta is a good place to start.

Buddhist Apoha Nominalism

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The Problem of Universals is one the oldest subjects of debate in Indian philosophy. Realists about universals believe that universals exist in addition to concrete particulars, while nominalists deny the existence of universals. The Nyāya and Mīmāṃsā schools were vocal defenders of realism. Nyāya philosophers believed in universals for a number of reasons:

  • Universals explain how different objects share common characteristics. Cow A and Cow B differ from each other in various ways, and yet we recognize that they’re both cows. The Nyāya explanation for this is that what Cow A and Cow B have in common is the universal “cowness” that inheres in both.
  • Universals fix the meanings of words. The word “cow” doesn’t just refer to a particular cow, but cows in general. How can a word refer to many different objects at once? The Nyāya solution is that the word “cow” refers to a particular qualified by the universal cowness, which is present in all individual cows.
  • Universals are a solution to the Problem of Induction, first raised by the Cārvāka empiricists. Nyāya philosophers viewed the laws of nature as relations between universals. Our knowledge of these universals and the relations between them justifies inductive generalizations, and consequently, inferences such as the presence of fire from the presence of smoke.

Buddhists were the best-known nominalists in the Indian philosophical tradition. The Buddhist hostility towards universals is perhaps best expressed by Paṇḍita Aśoka (9th century): “One can clearly see five fingers in one’s own hand. One who commits himself to a sixth general entity fingerhood, side by side with the five fingers, might as well postulate horns on top of his head.”¹

In this post, I will briefly go over how Buddhists responded to the first two reasons for believing in universals provided by the Nyāya school. The Buddhist defense of induction will have to be the subject of a separate essay.

The form of nominalism Buddhists advocated is called apoha, the Sanskrit word for “exclusion.” The first precise statement of apoha nominalism can be found in the works of Dignāga (6th century). Dignāga claimed that the word “cow” simply means “not non-cow.” Since there is obviously no universal “not cow-ness” present in every object that is not a cow, this semantic view doesn’t commit us to the existence of universals. Every cow is a unique particular distinct from all other objects. We simply overlook the mutual differences between cows and group them together based on how they’re different from non-cows.  Thus, it’s not because cows share something in common that we call them by the same name. Rather, we think all cows share something in common because we have learned to call them by the same name.

There are some objections that immediately spring to mind, and Nyāya and Mīmāṃsā philosophers brought them up repeatedly in their criticisms of apoha nominalism. First, how does saying that “cow” means “not non-cow” provide a solution to the problem of universals? “Not non-cow” involves a double negation, so to say “cow” means “not non-cow” is just to say “cow” means “cow.” This leads us right back to where we started, and just as before, it seems that we need to posit a universal cowness. Second, how can we focus on cows’ common differences from non-cows unless we already know how to tell what a cow is in the first place? Once again, we seem to have gone in a circle, and apoha seems to presuppose precisely what it was supposed to explain.

Dignāga’s successors responded to the first objection by drawing distinctions between different kinds of negation. Consider the statement: “This is not impolite.” Now, at first glance it might seem like this just translates to “This is polite,” because of the double negation involved in “not impolite.” But this is not necessarily the case. The statement could be about something to which the very category of politeness does not apply, in which case “not impolite” is distinct from “polite.” Thus, “not non-cow” can mean something genuinely different from “cow.”

To understand how Buddhists responded to the second charge of circularity, it helps to look at another Buddhist view. Buddhists were mereological reductionists: they did not believe that wholes were anything over and above their parts. So, a table, for instance, is nothing more than its parts arranged table-wise. The “table” is just a conceptual fiction: a convenient designator we use because of our shared interests and social conventions. It is conceivable, for instance, that someone who has never seen or heard of tables before will not see a table, just pieces of wood put together in seemingly random fashion. The idea that the table is ultimately real arises when we project our interests on to the world. How is any of this relevant to the question of universals? Buddhist philosophers argued that something similar goes on when we fall under the impression that all cows share a common cowness. We overlook the differences between individual cows because they satisfy some of our desires – for example, the desire for milk – that non-cows don’t. We then project our interests on to the world, mistakenly concluding that cowness is a real thing.

This may not seem like a very satisfactory response. It just pushes the problem back a step. How do all these particulars satisfy the same desire if they don’t share something in common? In this case, it seems like the cows really do share something: the ability to satisfy our desire for milk. Dharmakīrti (7th century) responded to this by using the example of fever-reducing herbs. He pointed out that there are many different herbs that reduce fevers. But it would be foolish to conclude from this that there exists a universal “fever-reducing-ness.” Each of these herbs is different, and they don’t reduce fevers in the same way, or use the same mechanisms to do so. We group them together under a single category only because of our subjective interest in reducing fevers. Dharmakīrti’s claim is that the same is true of everything. Each particular serves our interests in a manner that’s utterly distinct from everything else in the world. And so once again, there is no need to posit universals.

But there are still some lingering worries here. While we may accept that in the case of the herbs there is no universal fever-reducing-ness, does the same response work for simple substances such as elementary particles? Assuming for the sake of argument that an electron is an elementary particle, surely all electrons share something in common. Doesn’t the ability to bring about similar effects require a shared capacity – in this case, the same set of causal powers? One possible response to this line of argument, formulated by the philosopher Kamalaśīla (8th century), is to adopt what we would recognize as a Humean view of causation. Kamalaśīla rejected the notion of causal powers entirely, and like Hume, stated that there is nothing more to causation than constant conjunctions of events. Once again, talk of “causal powers” is just a convenient way of speaking about certain correlations that we never fail to observe.

This is obviously a very brief sketch of apoha nominalism. There is much more to say, particularly on the subtle differences between different versions of apoha defended by different Buddhist philosophers. Thisis a good place to start for further reading.

References

[1] From the translation in Apoha: Buddhist Nominalism and Human Cognition, edited by Mark Siderits, Tom Tillemans and Arindam Chakrabarti (2011).

Nyāya Substance Dualism

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In an earlier post, I went over an argument for the existence of God that was formulated by philosophers in the Nyāya tradition. Here my aim is to provide a brief summary of some Nyāya arguments for substance dualism, the view that mental and physical substances are radically distinct.

The categories of substance and quality were fundamental to Nyāya metaphysics. A substance is the concrete substratum in which qualities inhere. An apple, for instance, is a substance, and redness is a quality that inheres in it. Substances can be complex and made up of parts (like an apple) or simple and indivisible (like an atom).

Nyāya held that in addition to physical substances, there are non-physical ones. Our individual soul – that is, our Self – is a non-physical substance. Like atoms, individual souls are simple and indivisible, and hence eternal (since destroying an object is the same as breaking it up into its constituent parts, and simple substances do not have any constituent parts). Consciousness, and different conscious states like desires and memories, are qualities that inhere in the substantial Self.

The primary philosophical adversaries of Nyāya belonged to two different camps. The first was Cārvāka, which claimed that only physical substances exist, that the mind does not exist apart from the body, and that the self is reducible to the totality of the body and all its functions. The other was Buddhism, which rejects physicalism but denies the existence of the substantial Self. Buddhism replaces the idea of the Self with a stream of momentary causally connected mental states. Nyāya was engaged in a protracted series of debates with both Cārvāka and Buddhism. Versions of the arguments I summarize in this essay were developed and defended by Nyāya thinkers such as Vātsyāyana (5th century), Uddyotakara (7th century) and Udayana (10th century), among others.

Against Physicalism

Nyāya came up with a number of arguments against physicalism. The one I focus on here has interesting similarities to arguments found in contemporary debates within the philosophy of mind. It can be stated like this¹:

(P1) All bodily qualities are either externally perceptible or imperceptible.

(P2) No phenomenal qualities are externally perceptible or imperceptible.

(C) Therefore, no phenomenal qualities are bodily qualities.

The argument is deductively valid, so let us examine the premises. As the term suggests, externally perceptible bodily qualities are features of the body that can be directly perceived by external agents. Color is an example of an externally perceptible quality. Everyone who can see me can see that the color of my body is brown. An imperceptible quality is a feature of the body that cannot be directly perceived, but can be inferred through observation and analysis. Weight was a common example used in Nyāya texts. You cannot directly perceive my weight, but if I stand on a weighing scale, you can know my weight by looking at the number displayed by the scale. P1 states that all physical qualities are exhausted by these two categories.

Let us movie on to P2. Phenomenal qualities are the features of conscious experience: the subjective, first person what-it-is-likeness to have an experience. The experience of color, pleasure, pain, desire, and memory are all examples of phenomenal qualities. P2 draws on the intuition that phenomenal qualities are essentially private.

To say that phenomenal qualities are not externally perceptible is to say that I cannot immediately know what it is like for you to have an experience. I have direct access to externally perceptible qualities of your body like color, but I don’t have direct access to your phenomenal qualities. I may be able to infer based on your behavior that you are in pain, but I don’t experience your pain in the immediate, first person manner that you do. The contemporary American philosopher Thomas Nagel made a similar point in his classic paper What Is it Like to Be a Bat? We may be able to observe how bats behave, and how their organs, brain and nervous system work, but we can’t know what it feels like, from the inside, to be a bat. Only a bat knows what it is like to be a bat.

If phenomenal qualities aren’t externally perceptible, perhaps they are imperceptible qualities like weight. But this is extremely implausible. Phenomenal qualities are not externally perceptible, but they’re clearly internally perceptible. The whole point is that I have direct perceptive access to phenomenal qualities – my conscious experiences are given to me in a basic and immediate fashion. Even if I don’t know that my experiences are veridical, I always know what the features of my own experience are. Thus, phenomenal qualities are not imperceptible.

Since phenomenal qualities are neither externally perceptible nor imperceptible, they are not physical qualities. If physicalism is the thesis that only physical substances and their qualities exist, and the above argument is sound, we must conclude that physicalism is false.

Against No-Self Theory

The above argument by itself does not get us to the kind of substance dualism that Nyāya favored. Buddhists, after all, are anti-physicalists, but they do not believe that the Self is an enduring substance that persists through time. Instead, Buddhists view a person as nothing more than a series of sequential causally connected momentary mental states. The 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, and more recently, the British philosopher Derek Parfit, came to roughly the same conclusion.

Again, the Nyāya canon has several arguments against the Buddhist no-Self theory, but I will touch on just two of them here. The first of these is that the Self is necessary to explain the first person experience of recollection or recognition. The intuition here is something like this: If I notice a tree and recognize that it is the same tree I saw a few days ago, there has to be a subject that was present both during the first experience and the second one for recollection to occur. Similarly, if the desire to eat a banana arises in my mind at t2 because I remember that I previously enjoyed eating a banana at t1, there has to be a subject that existed during the initial experience that occurred at t1, and persisted through time until the recollection at t2. Without the Self – a substance that endures through these different points in time – the experience of memory is a mystery.

The Buddhist response was that causal connections between momentary mental states could explain the phenomenon of memory. If the mental state at t1 is causally connected to the mental state at t2, that’s all that’s needed for the mental state at t2 to recall the experience at t1. The Nyāya rejoinder was that causal connections were not sufficient to account for how a mental event can be experienced as a memory. When I recognize a tree I saw few days ago, it isn’t just that an image of the previously perceived tree pops into my mind. Rather, my experience is of the form: “This tree that I see now is the same tree I saw yesterday.” In other words, my present experience after seeing the tree involves my recognition of the previous experience as belonging to myself. Similarly, my current desire to eat a banana is based on my recognition of the previous enjoyable experience of eating a banana as belonging to myself. One person does not experience the memory of another, and in much the same way, one mental state cannot remember the content of another. So a single entity that persists through time must exist.

The second argument for the Self takes for granted what we might call the unity of perception. Our perceptions aren’t a chaotic disjointed bundle despite the fact that they arise through different sense organs. There’s a certain unity and coherence to them. In particular, Nyāya philosophers drew attention to mental events that are characterized by cross-modal recognition. An example would be: “The table that I see now is the same table I am touching.” We have experiences that arise through different channels (in this case, my eye and my hand), but there must be something that ties these experiences together and synthesizes them to give rise to a unified cognitive event. In other words, the Buddhist no-Self theory might be able to explain the independent experiences of sight and touch, but for the object of both experiences to be recognized as one and the same, there must something else to which both experiences belong, and which integrates the experiences to give rise to the unified perception of the object. Again, it seems we must admit the existence of the Self.

Needless to say, all these arguments were (and remain) controversial. The debates between Buddhist and Nyāya philosophers got extremely complex over time. They involved increasingly fine-grained analyses of the phenomenology of recollection/recognition, and increasingly technical discussions on the metaphysics of causation. Similar debates took place between other orthodox Indian schools of thought that believed in the Self (Mīmāṃsā, Vedānta, etc.) and their Buddhist no-Self rivals. A good place to start for further reading on this subject would be the collection of essays in Hindu and Buddhist Ideas in Dialogue: Self and No-Self.

Notes

[1] The argument I’ve presented here is based on Kisor Kumar Chakrabarti’s formulation in Classical Indian Philosophy of Mind: The Nyāya Dualist Tradition.

A Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika Argument for the Existence of God

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Historical Context

The different philosophical traditions in classical Indian thought are usually categorized under the labels of orthodox and heterodox. The orthodox traditions accepted the scriptural authority of the Vedas, while the heterodox ones such as Buddhism and Jainism did not. Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika were initially two different orthodox schools. Nyāya was mostly concerned with logic, reasoning and epistemology. Vaiśeṣika focused on metaphysics and identifying the different kinds of substances that ultimately exist. By the eleventh century, these two traditions had merged into a single school, which came to be known simply as Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika (NV henceforth). Apart from a few academic philosophers, the NV tradition is basically extinct today. Historically, however, they were extremely influential and made a number of important philosophical contributions.

Of all the theistic systems in India, NV had the greatest confidence in the scope of natural theology. They came up with a number of arguments for the existence of Īśvara (“the Lord”), and were engaged in a series of polemical debates with other thinkers, their primary adversaries usually being Buddhists. I will go over their most well known argument for theism in this essay.

What the Argument is Not

Before I lay out the the argument, I want to make a few preliminary comments on what the argument is not, since this is often an issue of confusion.

The argument is not like the popular Kalām cosmological argument, which states that everything that begins to exist must have a cause, and that if you trace the chain of causes you eventually get to an uncaused cause that explains the beginning of the universe. Indeed, the NV system holds that a number of entities are eternal and uncreated. These include the atoms of different elements, time, space, universals, individual souls, and of course, God.

The argument also does not belong to the family of arguments from contingency, which conclude that there is a necessarily existent being that explains why anything at all exists. The NV thinkers were not committed to the view that everything that exists has an explanation for its existence. Finally, the argument is not like familiar teleological arguments that draw on observations of biological complexity to infer that an intelligent designer exists.

That said, the NV argument does bear some resemblance to all of the above arguments. It is therefore best understood as a hybrid cosmological-teleological argument. The argument points out that certain kinds of things require an intelligent creator that has the attributes traditionally assigned to God.

Overview of the Argument

The argument can be stated as follows¹:

(P1) Everything that is an effect has an intelligent maker.

(P2) The first product is an effect.

(C)  Therefore, the first product has an intelligent maker.

The argument as spelled out here is a little different from the way the NV philosophers usually framed it, primarily because they had a more elaborate way of laying out syllogisms. But that need not concern us. The important point is that the argument is valid – if the premises are true, the conclusion does follow. But what are we to make of the premises?

Some terminological clarification is in order before we can assess the premises. By an effect, defenders of the argument refer to a composite object – i.e., an object made of parts. Buildings, rocks, mountains, human bodies are all examples of effects. Recall that NV philosophers were atomists, and since atoms are indivisible and indestructible, they do not count as effects.

The first product refers to the simplest kind of effect that can be further broken down into atoms. In the NV system, dyads – imperceptible aggregates of two atoms – were seen as the first product. But again, that need not concern us. All we need to know is that the first product is the smallest unit that is itself further divisible. We can now move on to scrutinize the premises.

Support for the Premises

P2 is necessarily true, since the first product is defined as the simplest kind of effect. Things get interesting when we consider the first premise. P1 states that every effect has an intelligent maker, where an intelligent maker is defined as an agent who:

(i) Has knowledge of the components that make up the effect;

(ii) Desires to bring about the effect; and

(iii) Wills to do so.

The obvious question then is: why believe that every effect has an intelligent maker?

The support offered for P1 is inductive. NV philosophers defend P1 by pointing out that we have a very large number of examples that confirm it. The classic example is that of a pot. We observe that pots have an intelligent maker: the potter who is aware of the material out of which the pot is made (the clay), desires to make the pot, and wills to do so. Atoms are deliberately excluded from P1 since they aren’t effects, and hence cannot be seen as counterexamples. Given this, defenders the argument claim that the numerous confirming instances (as in the case of the pot/potter) entitle us to accept P1 as a general principle.

Responding to Objections

Philosophers in the NV tradition were aware that the argument was extremely controversial, and came up with a number of interesting responses to common objections. I will go over three of them here.

Objection 1: Counterexamples to P1

The most common objection is that there are obvious counterexamples to the first premise. Rocks, mountains, plants – these are all made of parts, and yet, don’t have a maker. Thus, P1 is false.

The NV response is to say that this objection begs the question against the theist. The mere fact that we don’t immediately observe a maker in these cases does not establish that a maker was not at least in part involved. For the maker could, after all, be spatially or temporally remote² from the effect.

NV philosophers press the point by insisting that if direct observation of the cause was necessary, then even ordinary inferences would be defeated. For instance, we wouldn’t be able to infer the presence of fire from smoke if the fire wasn’t immediately observable. But of course, the fire could be a long distance away. Similarly, if we happen to come across a pot, we wouldn’t suspend judgement about whether it was made by a potter simply because we didn’t directly and immediately observe the pot being made by one. The potter could, after all, be in a different town, or even be dead. In other words, this objection proves toomuch, since it would render everyday inferences that we all rely on unjustified.

Objection 2: The Possibility of Counterexamples to P1

At this point, we might be willing to concede that we can’t rule out the existence of a maker for things like rocks and mountains. However, since the maker isn’t directly observed, the theist can’t be sure that a potential counterexample doesn’t exist either. It may be true that we have observed several instances of effects that have makers, but the possibility that there exists a counterexample means that P1 is at the very least unjustified, if not shown to be false.

Once again, the NV response is that the objection proves too much. The mere possibility of a counterexample is not reason enough to give up on the first premise. Consider, again, the example of smoke and fire. The mere possibility that there may have, at some time in the distant past, or in a faraway land, been an occurrence of smoke without fire does not give us enough reason to reject general fire-from-smoke type inferences. Unless we are willing to give up on induction entirely, there is no reason to reject P1.

The skeptic is also accused of another inconsistency at this point. Why does the skeptic not doubt that material things have material causes? If someone who is skeptical of P1 came across an object they had never seen before, they probably would not doubt that the object had been made out of pre-existing matter. And yet, the support for the belief that material objects have material causes is also inductive. The skeptic must provide some principled reason to reject P1 while also believing in material causes without the reason collapsing into the first objection which has already been refuted. Since the skeptic has not done this, they have failed to show that we must not accept P1.

Objection 3: The Gap

Many arguments for theism face what is sometimes called “the gap” problem. In other words, even if these arguments establish the existence of an intelligent maker, there is no reason to think this creator has any of the attributes traditionally assigned to God. A skeptic may point out that in all the cases of intelligent makers we have observed, the makers were embodied agents. The makers were not omniscient, uncreated or eternal. So there is no reason to suppose that the argument, even if successful, gets us to God. At best, it can establish the existence of some kind of intelligent maker, but any further claims about the omniscience or eternality of the maker would not be justified, since these properties are not observed in any of the cases we discussed.

Predictably, the NV response is that the criterion for inference being proposed as part of the objection is too strong, and would defeat many of our everyday inferences. In most inferences we make, we go beyond the general cases, and can justifiably infer special characteristics depending on the context. To go back to the commonly used fire-and-smoke example, if we observe smoke rising from a mountain, we don’t merely infer that there is fire. Rather, given the specific context, we infer that there is fire that has the property of being on the mountain. Similarly, based on the specific context, we can conclude that the maker of the first product has certain characteristics.

Since the maker exists prior to the first product, it must be uncreated. It cannot have a body, since bodies are made of parts, and this would simply introduce a regress that would have to be terminated by a creator that is not made of parts. Thus, the maker must be disembodied and simple. Since it is simple, it cannot be destroyed by being broken down into its constituent parts, and hence must be eternal. Since it has knowledge of all the fundamental entities and how to combine them, it must be omniscient. Finally, simplicity favors a single maker over multiple agents. The intelligent maker thus has many of the attributes of the God of traditional theism.

Conclusion

The argument, if successful, does get us to a God-like being. P1 is the controversial premise, and as we have seen, NV philosophers respond to objections by essentially shifting the burden of proof on to the skeptic. This can seem like trickery, and indeed, that’s how the influential 11th century Buddhist philosopher Ratnakīrti characterized it in his work Refutation of Arguments Establishing Īśvara, which is arguably the most thorough critique of the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika argument. Either way, it is at least not obvious that the first premise can be easily rejected, so the skeptic must do some work to justify rejecting it. I may go over Ratnakīrti’s criticisms in a future essay.

Notes

[1] The argument as I’ve presented it here is roughly based on Kisor Kumar Chakrabarti’s formulation in Classical Indian Philosophy of Mind: The Nyāya Dualist Tradition.

[2] The terminology I’m using is based on Parimal Patil’s translation of the original Sanskrit terms in Against a Hindu God: Buddhist Philosophy of Religion in India.

Free Will Part 3: Moral Responsibility and Luck

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Taking into account what I’ve said about Harris on free will, I want to look at what I take to be a credible threat not to free will, but to moral responsibility; this is the problem of luck. I will try to offer some reasons for why moral responsibility can be preserved even while taking into account the extent to which luck undermines control and moral responsibility.

Aside from the belief that libertarian free will entails mind/body dualism and contra-causal powers, the most pervasive confusion gripping this area is the conflation of free will and moral responsibility. To Harris’s credit, he does see how they come apart, and offers us a consequentialist based notion of moral responsibility that he claims is sufficient to preserve a criminal justice system and holding each other accountable. Although seeming to contradict his whole book, this tension resolves once we understand that there are a plurality of justifications for incarceration. Most frequently appealed to and understood is retribution. Retribution is the practice of bringing about an intrinsic good by harming another to the extent that they are responsible for a proportional harm. Less commonly, we restrict the freedom of or directly harm others for reasons such as rehabilitation or protection of the public. I agree with Harris that this is all we really need to preserve our norms of quarantining and penalizing the more dangerous and less trustworthy members of society. This shouldn’t be foreign to anyone, given that this is exactly how we justify the harm parents and educators bring on young children, and to a lesser extent, teenagers and young adults. It’s only at a particular, but indeterminate stage of development that the robust sense of retribution seems appropriate, where you are punished precisely because you deserve it.

Theories of moral responsibility can broadly be distinguished as forward-looking and backward-looking. The former justifies both holding people accountable and society’s response (the enhancing  and restricting of the population’s freedom) based on their ability to avoid harms and produce goods. A desert based form of moral responsibility is committed to the idea that were justified in holding people responsible because they’ve demonstrated themselves as good or bad in a way that is under their control and exemplifies their genuine character. Harris doesn’t think anyone really is deserving of reactive attitudes (e.g. praise and blame)  because he takes desert to require the sort of control he thinks is impossible.

I share some of Harris’s skepticism over our capacity to exemplify a desert based notion of moral responsibility. There is a something inarguably true that our character/nature is not of our own making. We don’t have control over our parents, genes, culture, history, upbringing; all of which shape and constrain our mental and moral capacities. This is the problem of luck. Luck being just whatever is causally and morally relevant to your behavior that you don’t have control over. Almost all of the causal conditions behind our capacities and dispositions are outside of our control, and given that these are the principal sources of our action, how can we be held responsible for them?

I can see four strategies for reconciling constitutive luck and desert:

1. Argue that there are control-compensating features intrinsic to human agency  

2. Reject moral responsibility altogether

3. Revise moral responsibility by substituting desert with an alternative justification

4. Qualify our notion of desert

(1) is the route of most free will affirmers, be they compatiblists and incompatiblists, (2) is endorsed by free will skeptics and hard determinists, (3) is accepted by  Harris, Pereboom, and Vargas,(4) is my own proposal.

The qualification I have in mind consists of making explicit what one is responsible for and what one is deserving of, but first I’d like to clarify the folk conception of desert. The basic conditions for desert are free will and moral competence. Roughly speaking, moral competence consists in an agents capacity to understand and react to reasons (moral and otherwise). Moral competence explains how we respond differently to agents that interfere with our desires. We typically don’t react to a violent dog the same way we do to a violent person, or a drunk bar attendant, or an overly critical coworker. We expect these different classes of agents to be more or less (or not at all) understanding of why their behavior is unacceptable. This is grounded in their ability to understand moral reasons plus the availability of such reasons. For example, this is exactly what is expressed when someone says “they should have known better” in justifying their indignation at another’s behavior.

The central problem with desert is that we can only be justifiably blamed for what we can control, but much of our behavior is a result of our character, which we don’t control. We are born with a set of genetic dispositions, some of which are inexorably expressed, others can be nurtured or stifled. The extent and direction of these latter dispositions is largely dependent on our environment. We have little to no control over these influences, but especially as a child; and this is exactly when the majority of our character development takes place. For the most part, these factors are going to determine whether we’re hot-headed or easy going, depressive or cheerful, ambitious or content, curious or uninterested, stoic or sensitive, prone to addiction or not, etc; all of which can influence our moral competence  

The challenge is whether it even makes sense to blame someone in light of these facts. I think the majority of this problem resolves itself once we understand desert as being explicitly restricted to the aspects of behavior that morally competent agents have control over. This sounds obvious, but most of our retributive practices ignore this, leaving its justification  under-articulated. The result is the fusion of metaphysical freedom and moral competence, leading to the incoherent notion of having metaphysical freedom over one’s moral competence. This seems to be what is going on in the variety of retribution behind our criminal justice system. The attitude behind sentencing is often that the guilty individual choose to become the sort of person who is disposed to steal, kill, abuse, lie, etc. Their behavior expresses who they really are, which they alone determined.  

While acknowledging this as impossible, I think we can preserve a desert based conception of moral responsibility. Praise or blame being justifiable in instances where a morally competent, metaphysically free agent is caught in a torn condition and chooses to act either in pursuit of what is just or what is merely prudent. Consider the following example. Dave is selling his truck out of desperation. He recently accrued severe gambling losses and will suffer worse if he doesn’t immediately settle his debt. A friend of his informed him of an especially credulous, undiscerning, and moderately wealthy coworker that’s been looking for a similar truck. He’s told that he is nearly guaranteed a sale, even while exaggerating the vehicles worth up to 50%. Also of note is that Dave was raised by gambling addicts that actively encouraged him to gamble. He started young and continued to do so until he fell into a set of drug habits. Eventually his health was in danger to the extent that he was desperate to do anything he could to distract himself from drugs. Finding gambling especially effective, he spent most of his free time at the casino, but having an addictive personality, was unable to stop himself. Finally, when showing the truck to his friends coworker, he’s met with enthusiastic response he expected. As tempted as Dave is to sell the truck at an exaggerated price, this is in conflict with his central desire to do what is right. He finds himself in the torn condition of being equally motivated to what is right and what is expedient. In the end, he sells his truck for far more than it’s worth.

I think it’s fair to say that Dave is blameworthy for his action because he choose to pursue what was convenient while knowing it was wrong and having the capacity to do otherwise. Though as we saw, Dave’s nature was largely shaped by features outside of his control. There were elements of luck involved in his nature, his circumstances, and the success of his actions. Since you can only be justifiably held responsible for what you can control, this severely limits the extent of his blameworthiness. There was constitutive luck involved in his genes and upbringing, circumstantial luck in the opportunity to sell his truck, and consequential luck in his loses and buyers acceptance. If any of these features would have been otherwise, he would very likely never scammed the man. Knowledge of these facts should incline us to restrict the extent of our reproach. In the same way we restrain our blame when dealing with children and the mentally impaired, we ought to modify our reactive attitudes in light of the way luck functions in life of all moral agents.

Blameworthiness can be undermined in a variety of ways. Luck is just one. It will be useful to situate luck within the general structure of limiting blame (1). Take some seemingly blameworthy act: out of nowhere, Mac pushes Jack. We naturally ask why he did it. There’s three strategies available to get Mac off the hook. That is, he can be justified, exempted, or excused, all of which can be mitigating or exculpatory. Justification means Mac had morally compensating reasons for pushing Jack. Perhaps if Mac hadn’t pushed Jack, he would have been hit by a brick. Alternatively, Mac could be criminally insane. Mac sometimes lashes out in a way that he can’t control. This would render Mac exempt from blame because he is not equipped with sufficient moral competence and self-control to function as the proper target of praise and blame. Finally, maybe Mac was pushed by Zach, so he couldn’t help but push Jack. In this case, Mac is excused from blame because didn’t have the opportunity control his action in this precise circumstance. These three are examples of exculpatory pleas. They are sufficient to wholly relieve one of blame.

However it doesn’t always work this way. Often when investigating a harm, we’ll discover  context that partially relieves one of blame. For example, if Mac was being intentionally intimidated and threatened by Jack, we’ll find Mac not quite as at fault for pushing him. Since Jack hadn’t yet physically harmed him, Mac wasn’t fully justified in pushing, but perhaps he was to some degree. Next, assume that Mac has a severe anger problem. It doesn’t take much to upset him, and he only has so much control over this. Mac’s limited emotional stability ought to limit the degree to which we hold him responsible. This doesn’t mean he’s not sufficiently morally competent; it just entails that is somewhat diminished in self-control. So when Mac pushes Jack as the result of Jack teasing Mac, we might be not so severe in our condemnation of him. Finally, assume Mac is typically good-natured and exhibits self control, although recently he has been working two jobs (both of which he might lose), getting little sleep, as well as having severe marriage and financial problems. Jack tells a tasteless joke at Mac’s expense. Upon hearing the joke, Mac pushes Jack. Though it’s difficult to hold Mac entirely responsible given the number stressors, he has an excuse for his behavior (to an extent). In these three cases we have instances of discovering information that partially diminishes the extent of Mac’s blameworthiness. A partial justification, a mitigating exemption, or a mitigating excuse.

To review, one’s blame can either be exonerated or mitigated. This can either happen by way of having sufficient warrant to harm (justification), lacking the capacity to grasp and apply moral reasons and to govern one’s behavior in light of such reasons (exemption), or being deprived of the opportunity to properly exercise one’s capacities (excuse).. Whereas Harris seems to think of constitutive luck as exonerating, I take it to function as a universal mitigating exemption. Assuming we sometimes have the opportunity to do otherwise and possess the requisite moral competence, we can still be blameworthy for our actions, but this must be measured against the degree to which we lack control.

This mitigation applies as much to praise as it does to blame, but that’s not nearly as significant. What’s important is proportioning the extent to which we hold people blameworthy to the degree that they exercise control. On any plausible theory of free will and moral responsibility, whether it entails basic desert or not, the current criminal justice system is unjustified. This simply follows from the fact that we don’t include all of the possible mitigating and exonerating features in our assessments. In order to do so, one would have to have perfect moral knowledge as well as access to all of the facts relevant to the how control and luck have factored into anyone’s behavior. This is impossible. For this reason we can’t structure our criminal justice system around people possessing free will in the sense required for basic desert. This doesn’t mean we won’t have one. We simply must appeal to alternative justifications when dealing with those who harm (i.e. protection of the public, rehabilitation), which if performed consistently will inevitably lead to more humane treatment of the incarcerated.

The upshot of all this is that we can still make sense of basic desert in light of the ubiquity of luck, but just not without qualification. No one is praiseworthy or blameworthy simplictor , but this remains consistent with being praiseworthy or blameworthy in the deontic sense. This conception of desert has the advantage of preserving the notion that we exemplify the control necessary for moral responsibility, as well as making us sensitive to the relevant factors that are not in our control.  However this case is dependent on us sometimes being able to make metaphysically free decisions. If Harris turns out to be right that we don’t have this capacity, then I think we would have sufficient reason to conclude that humans are never morally responsible in the basic desert sense.

  1. Franklin, Christopher Evan. ‘A Theory of the Normative Force of Pleas’, Philosophical Studies 163:2, (2013): 479-502.

Free Will Part 2: Sam Harris and The Coherence of Free Will

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                                                                Introduction

Sam Harris is likely the most influential contemporary figure discussing free will. He attempts to demonstrate not only that we don’t have free will, but that the very notion is incoherent, and therefore impossible. Harris delivers a handful of arguments, each of which he takes to be sufficient to undermine possibility of free will. Although Harris has been largely ignored by professional philosophers, his level of impact warrants a response. Here I show that his arguments either fail outright, or don’t establish what they intend to. I will close by briefly discussing the issues of psychological determination and the self.

A central problem subsuming Harris’s critique is his failure to define his terms, which is shown in his equivocation over the terms  “free” and “will”.

Generic Free Will: “The popular conception of free will seems to rest on two assumptions: (1) that each of us could have behaved differently than we did in the past, and (2) that we are the conscious source of most of our thoughts and actions in the present” 

Perfect Control: “Consider what it would take to actually have free will. You would need to be aware of all the factors that determine your thoughts and actions, and you would need to have complete control over those factors”

I want to contrast these claims with my preferred account,

Free will: The will is the capacity to deliberate, make decisions, and to translate those decisions into action, and exercise of will is free when the agent could have done otherwise in a way that is under the control of the agent. Where an agent is anything that is capable of making decisions.

Although standard, GFW is still too strong. A free exercise of will just requires that our conscious intentions be a unique source of our thoughts and behavior, not necessarily the source. For example, the quarks, molecules, and organs that comprise us will be among the sources (causal conditions) of our actions, but their inclusion in no way undermines our intentional contribution. Further, not every decision must satisfy these conditions, for it could just be that we only sometimes act freely, even if most of our decisions aren’t free. With that said, much of his work is spent arguing against the latter (PC) while claiming victory over the former (GFW). The second conception is clearly impossible, so a demonstration of its incoherence can hardly be taken as a serious contribution.

The first of Harris’s arguments demonstrates the problem,

                                            The Incoherence Argument

“Free will is actually more than an illusion (or less), in that it cannot be made conceptually coherent. Either our wills are determined by prior causes and we are not responsible for them, or they are the product of chance and we are not responsible for them”

Taking this claim apart, we’ll see it only undermines PC, not GFW. It’s not clear what Harris means by “our wills”. This could refer to our character, our deliberative capacity, or any particular decision. However regardless of interpretation, this claim is false. If will refers to our character then it just doesn’t follow that we’re not responsible for them because some of those prior causes could be our own free decisions, which would make us partially responsible for our character. However, if ‘free’ means ‘having complete control over’ and ‘will’ refers to our psychological dispositions, then no one has free will. Neither definition, however, addresses LFW. The proponent of LFW means something different by those terms. Next, if our will refers to our capacity to make decisions in the first place, then it is certainly true that we don’t have free will because no one decides to be the sort of being that can make decisions. Though again, this isn’t what is captured by GFW.

Finally, our will could be any particular decision. The problem here is that the determined/random binary is misleading. It’s true that an event is either determined (causally necessitated) by antecedent conditions or indeterminate (not causally necessitated), but it does not follow that events that aren’t causally necessitated are random. For example, if i’m deliberating on whether I want to read or watch tv, and I don’t have any reason to prefer one over the other, so I just choose one, my decision isn’t random in a control-underming sense. My decision is adequately non-random in virtue of its being rationally authored, and can be made intelligible by citing the reasons I weighed against the competing option.

One might protest that the decision merely seems free, but really there must have been an unconscious neurological process that was the sufficient condition for my choosing one over the other. First, my point here is merely to dislodge worries about incoherence by illustrating how causal determination/indetermination doesn’t of itself render the notion of free will unintelligible, not to argue that we have free will. Second, one would need an argument that all brain activity is necessarily deterministic.

Here Harris thinks the issue is settled

                                                The Empirical Argument

“We know that determinism, in every sense relevant to human behavior, is true…One fact now seems indisputable: Some moments before you are aware of what you will do next—a time in which you subjectively appear to have complete freedom to behave however you please— your brain has already determined what you will do. You then become conscious of this “decision” and believe that you are in the process of making it.”

In support of this he cites the study performed by Benjamin Libet, where they were able to detect brain activity informative of the subjects behavior prior to when the subject reported deciding; which they took to mean that the “decision” was made prior to the subject’s intention to perform the behavior. In the experiment, Libet asked the participants to spontaneously flex their wrist while watching a clock, after which they would go back and pick out which point the clock was on when they decided to flex. It turned out that the average reading of the readiness potential (the relevant brain activity) started about 550 milliseconds before the flex, but the intention occured only about 200th milliseconds before the behavior. They took this to mean that the decision was settled unconsciously, then generalized this to all decision making, meaning we never act freely

Alfred Mele summarizes the argument:

      1. The participants in Libet’s experiments don’t make conscious decisions to flex. (Instead, they make their decisions unconsciously about half a second before the muscle burst and become conscious of them about a third of a second later).
     2. So people probably never make conscious decisions to do things.
3.An action is a free action only if it flows from a consciously made decision to perform it.
4. Conclusion: there are probably no free actions (Mele, 23-24)


This argument is superior in that it’s relevant to GFW, but it still fails. First, the experiment can’t establish that conscious intentions aren’t effective. The readiness potential was only recorded after the person flexed their wrist, which means it doesn’t tell us if the readiness potential can occur with no behavior. That is, it could be that the readiness potential is merely a necessary, but not sufficient condition for flexing. In which case, it’s possible that the decision was made later; perhaps even at the 200 millisecond, right where the intention is located.

Fortunately, Libet did another experiment in which he requested the participants to intend to flex, but then not. The results matched the previous experiment, in that the readiness potential would rise prior to the intention, but would drop after 150 to 250 milliseconds. Libet took this to mean that the decision to flex was still unconsciously decided when the readiness potential began to rise, but in addition we have a conscious “veto-power”. The problem is that the participants never really intended to flex; they intended to prepare to flex and then not. Given this, it’s more likely that the earlier activity correlates with preparing to intend to flex, rather than the intention itself (Mele 12).

In another experiment where the subjects were instructed to click a mouse upon hearing a tone, it took on average 231 milliseconds for the muscle burst to to occur after the tone played.Which is exactly what would we should expect if our intentions are causally relevant (the extra 31 milliseconds would be the time it takes to register the sound) (Mele, 21) Combining these two studies, we have the readiness potential without the intention and action, and the intentional action without the extended preconscious activity. This gives us reason to think that the Libet studies don’t demonstrate that ineffectiveness of conscious intentions. However even if Libet did confirm that the intention to flex was settled unconsciously, this gives us no reason to think all decision making is like this. The subjects were specifically instructed to not consciously think about when they were going to flex. These sort of conditions leave little room for conscious reasoning to play a role. So even if the decision to flex was settled unconsciously, that doesn’t mean that conscious reasoning is never causally relevant.

Similar problems show up in the other studies Harris cites. In one done with an fMRI machine, where “The experimenters found two brain regions that contained information about which button subjects would press a full 7 to 10 seconds before the decision was consciously made”. First, they were only able to do so with 60% accuracy, which isn’t much better than chance (Mele, 27). Also, the finding is consistent with the idea that what they were tracking is merely an unconscious bias, which is compatible with our actions still being up to us. Finally, he mentions an experiment where they could predict where the subject would report when they felt the urge to move with up to 80% accuracy. First, although eighty percent is high, it still doesn’t entail determinism. Additionally, like the Libet experiments, brain activity could be tracking something other than than the decision, such as the preparation to move. The urges also could be unconsciously determined without themselves determining the intention and behavior. Possibly the subject still could consciously choose to act on them or not (Mele, 32-33). And this is exactly what some of the participants reported to have done in the 2nd Libet study. Finally, as in with the 1st Libet study, we have reason to be skeptical these findings generalize into all decision making, especially where conscious deliberation appears to be playing a more prominent role.

Even if these studies fail to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of conscious intentions, he’s convinced that if we had ideal neuro-imaging technology, we could perfectly predict every single thought and action that a person might perform. However this is just to assert neuro-biological determinism. If neuroscience ever does come to construct such a device or something near enough, I think everyone ought to accept that free will is an illusion. Until then, I think the free will affirmer is justified in not being moved by the supposed threat posed by neuroscience.

                                              The Explanatory Argument

The Incoherence Argument and the Empirical Argument are the heart of Harris’s case, but they don’t exhaust it. In addition, Harris occasionally performs an experiment on his audience that he claims to show that we don’t exemplify the freedom we take ourselves to have. He requests us to think of a city, any city. That’s it. He then asks us for an explanation for why we choose the city we did, and upon realizing our inability, claims this to illustrate that we merely witness the deliberation and selection of our decisions. We lack control both over the candidates for selection and the selection itself, given that we can’t even say why it was selected. Harris then rightly asserts that we could gesture at some sort of story for why we chose what we did, but it would almost certainly be a post hoc confabulation.  

Although not obvious, it’s easy to see the problem. Imagine I were to ask you to choose among a set of options, but not to choose one for any particular reason, and then paraded it over you that you couldn’t tell me why you choose the option you did. You would be justifiably frustrated by the implicit conflict. The problem is the demand for a contrastive explanation in a situation where none should be expected. Contrastive explanations take the form of explaining why X rather than Y, where X and Y are both possible, but some additional factor tips the scales in favor of one over the other. The problem is that contrastive explanations are deterministic explanations because the additional factor in conjunction with the prior state necessitates the future state, but free actions aren’t deterministic, so one shouldn’t be expected to deliver one.

One might object that this leaves our decisions inexplicable, and that an action without any explanation can hardly be free. Although a free action cannot be without explanation, not all explanation is contrastive. I can run my own version of Harris’s thought experiment. I start by taking a moment to consider cities: Seattle, New York, Omaha, Portland, Boston… After a minute, I pick Boston. Upon request, I explain why I picked Boston. First, I wanted to comply because it’s necessary to address the point . Next, Boston was among the options that happened to occur to me. Further, it wasn’t one I immediately rejected (I might have some unfavorable association with a particular city). Finally faced with a number of options where I have no overriding reason to prefer one, but motivated by time, I pick one.

I think this line of reasoning suffices as an explanation despite its being a non-contrastive one. Harris might press the issue further, “I see what you mean, but I want to know why you picked that city rather than any other”. I would respond that based on the criteria given, there’s no answer I can give, I just picked. Where he might reply “Yes, but now don’t you see my point, there is an explanation for why you picked Boston, and you’re not even aware of it; where’s the freedom in that?”

The relevant sense of freedom resides in the space of actions unconstrained by the request. To push this as insufficient merely begs the question, in that it assumes that a decision that can’t be given a sufficient reason undermines the control of that action. By sufficient reason I just mean a motivation that entails that a person makes a particular decision. And a decision that is necessarily implied by a motivation isn’t free in the relevant sense. Harris wants to say that my decision to pick Boston is unconsciously settled in a way that undermines my control, but we need not see it that way. Rather it could be that I consciously give permission to my unconscious to decide for me because I’ve exhausted the limits of what conscious deliberation can do. As long as the unconscious efficient cause is constrained by my conscious reasoning, there’s little reason to see it as a threat to my control.

Alternatively, you could take the explanation I gave at face value. That is, in addition to my reasons and desires, the efficient cause is just me. This proposal is just the agent-causal theory of action. Harris would likely consider agent causation untenable given its inconsistency with reductionism. Reductionism is the thesis that some seemingly distinct entity can be identified with some lower level entity, once properly understood; where X reduces to Y just if X is nothing but Y. For example, a pile of dirt reduces to a collection of rocks, minerals, dust, etc; whatever causal powers the pile of dirt has (e.g. fire extinguishment), is merely an aggregate of the powers of the molecules that make it up. So the pile of dirt is nothing over and above the collection that makes it up. An irreducible/emergent substance on the other hand is one that makes an addition to the inventory of what exists (i.e. a mere collection of things doesn’t make a new thing), which is picked out by its causal powers being irreducible to its component parts. For example, a water molecule being irreducible because it exemplifies propensities (to extinguish fire, or dissolve a solute) and liabilities (to freeze at 32°) that aren’t shared by Hydrogen (a highly flammable substance) and Oxygen(freezes at -361.8°F). In the case of agents, substances that can make decisions, they would have irreducible powers to sometimes freely to decide among a plurality of options. Meaning the nature of the agent’s parts and environments would not be sufficient to settle what happens. The agent itself would settle what happens, even if its severely constrained by it’s own nature and environment.

It’s by no means obvious that reality includes emergent substances. It could be that the world wholly consists of fundamental particles and their space-time locations, where the higher level entities we refer to in everyday discourse (e.g. doors, cats, gold, etc) turn out to be little more than mental conventions, and by that very fact, reducible to arrangmentments of those fundamental particles (or some alternative). I don’t think this is the case, but I want to highlight the controversial nature of the issue at hand, and to emphasise that the metaphysical assumptions we hold will frame our evaluation.  

Going back, there are three possible readings of the decision to pick Boston; two freedom-friendly readings (one reductionist, one non-reductionist), and one not. Harris’s position is that that our decisions are always going to be determined by something that isn’t up to us, and so like in any instance, the reason I can’t articulate precisely why I picked Boston over the alternatives is because it wasn’t up to me. There was an unconscious determinate, which I had no control over. However as I explained, this is just an interpretation. A fellow reductionist could explain the inarticulable aspect of the explanation as the granting of permission to the unconscious, but I had conscious control over that, so the essential sense of it being my decision is preserved. Finally, if agent causation is true, then it’s completely legitimate to take our self-reports of “just choosing”  in these sort of cases at face-value. That is, me and my reasons and desires jointly cause my action. In instances of motivational underdetermination, the efficient cause is just going to be my free exercise of one of my unconstrained powers.

I want to note that nothing about my description of free will and agent causation has involved anything to do with dualism or materialism. This is because those issues are irrelevant. I agree with Harris that dualism does nothing to assist the possibility of free will. Everything about my case is consistent with naturalism. More radically, I would extend agent causation to much of the animal kingdom. So when Harris asks “The indeterminacy specific to quantum mechanics offers no foothold: If my brain is a quantum computer, the brain of a fly is likely to be a quantum

computer, too. Do flies enjoy free will?”, I can say that if humans do, then likely so do flies.  My account doesn’t appeal to quantum mechanics, but I also don’t see it as a problem; its influence on the brain is an open scientific question. However, further than that, agent-causation entails a theory of causality which largely side-steps the determinism/indeterminism issue by understanding causes as substances with particular dispositions, not events. My proposal is that the irreducibility of particular substances can be of assistance because it explains how wholes can be causally superordinate to their parts.

                                               Psychological Determination

You might have noticed that my explanation of free decisions is reliant on motivational underdetermination, but what about cases where I do have an overriding reason to prefer a course of action? Assuming one is mentally stable and adequately rational, in those instances you are in some sense determined to attempt the course of action you do, and therefore are not free in one respect. Is this a problem? Yes and no. For the most part, this is exactly how we want our mental life to be. We want to pursue the courses of action, that all things considered, appears to be the best thing to do, and we want to do so for the reasons we claim to have.

The threat of this control undermining feature depends on how often and in what ways we are determined by our motivations. In the extreme, one might object that we always pursue what we’re most motivated to do, and therefore never act freely. This may sound almost self-evident, but it assumes that we always have sufficient motivation for whatever we do. The central problem around this issue is its dependence on our self-reports. The psychological determinist will almost always claim that their experience of their own decisions fits the description of always being sufficiently motivated, though myself and others don’t see it the same way. For example, I often find myself in situations like the ones described above, where I don’t have a sufficient reason to do anything in particular. The psychological determinist might find this unintelligible; taking this to mean that I either do things that I don’t want to do, with no ulterior motive, or I do things for no reason at at all.

I have a reason, but not always a sufficient reason for every feature of my decision. This can take the form of a sufficient reason being unavailable or being equally motivated to pursue two or more incompatible courses of actions (torn conditions). For example, let’s say I’m listlessly bored and trying to think of something worth doing. I consider reading, listening to music, watching a lecture, or going for a walk. None of them sound more appealing than any of the others, but all of them sound better than what I’m doing; so being sufficiently motivated to leave my current circumstance, I pick one of them. Alternatively, in a torn condition, I’m positively drawn to two or more incompatible courses of action. Say I have to pick between pizza and pasta, or between staying home and going out. Both sound equally appealing, but I can’t do both. Ultimately, I have to choose. If agent causation is true, then your reasons and desires are not sufficient for your decision (in these sort of scenarios), what makes the difference is you, which is exactly what we want.
It’s also important to note that the extent to which a sufficient motivation determines your behavior depends on how specific it is. If i’m sufficiently motivated to become a lawyer within the next five years, then a large number of possibilities are closed off to me, such as moving to Antarctica or getting my Phd in chemistry, but that goal doesn’t always determine what im going to do at any moment. The same thing happens at every level of specificity. Let’s say, I’m torn between going out and staying in, and I decide to go out. My friend then gives me a number of bars to choose from; three of them sound terrible, but I’m indifferent to two of them, so I choose one of them. Once at the bar, I’m torn between two different hefeweizens, but I don’t want to hold up the line, so I quickly select one. At each of these junctions, either by indifference or tearing, I am afforded the psychological space for a metaphysically free choice. Even if a lot of the actions in between were determined by my mental states, not all of my actions were. We have to accept that our choices are largely bounded by our goals and desires, but I think these limitations still leave ample room for frequent metaphysically free decisions.

                                                                The Self

The concept of the self is rightly met with suspicion by much of the scientific and philosophical community, which is a sentiment that Harris shares. More than that, Harris outright denies the existence of the self. I largely agree with Harris’s dismissal of the self as he describes it. This is where there is a central ego that inhabits the body, specifically in the head and between the eyes. I think this cartesian sense of the self is untenable. In addition to the lack of evidence for a homunculus in the brain, there is the regress problem of the seeming need to posit a homunculus in the homunculus to make sense of its selfhood. Although alternatively, we could think of the self as being the whole irreducible substance. On this account, selves would just be substances with intentional states. There is no special part of substance that is the real self; the self is just the whole substance.

This issue is relevant to free will insofar as one could claim that there is no free will because there is no one to have it. Again, I want to note how influential ones general metaphysics is going to be when assessing this issue. There are careful arguments in favor of denying the existence of the self, but there are also good arguments on the other side. Harris might have reasons to deny the self as I described it, but it is by no means obviously false, and is sufficient to supply the sense of self necessary for free will.

                                                               Conclusion

Looking back, Harris gives us four reasons to reject free will:

1. Defining free will as the impossible power of perfect control.

2. Asserting that all events, including decisions, are either determined or random; neither of which is inconsistent with being freely performed.

3. The demonstration of the ineffectivity of conscious intentions by neuroscience.

4. Pointing out our own inability to sufficiently explain our own decisions.

I have attempted to show that these strategies are unsuccessful, at least as argued by Harris. Other philosophers have developed more sophisticated, but similar lines of reason, so I don’t want to say that his skepticism of free will is without warrant. Of the four offered by Harris, I take the neuroscientific angle to be the best, but at this point free will remains an open scientific question. My hope is for the reader to leave this piece appreciating that the free will issue has to be understood in the context of the relevant philosophical issues. Until we have a better understanding of the nature of the self, causation, motivation, reduction/emergence, explanation, and the brain, we will remain in the dark about the extent of our own control.

                                                          Work Cited

  1. S. HARRIS, Free Will, Free Press, New York 2012
  2. A. MELE, Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will. OUP 2014

Free Will Part 1: Agent Causation & Metaphysical Naturalism

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It’s no longer uncommon for free will to be met with suspicion. This suspicion is even greater when it comes to libertarian free will, and overwhelming regarding agent causation. This belief is largely arrived at via the notion that agent causation or even free will in general is inconsistent with Metaphysical Naturalism. This attitude is mistaken. Here I propose to show that even an agent causal account of action is consistent with Naturalism, which implies that free will in general is. I’ll close by arguing that at least some people are justified in believing in free will.

Naturalism

Metaphysical Naturalism (MN) is a meta-philosophical position regarding the fundamental nature of Being, the world, etc. What it entails is largely debated, but I will be using two definitions that are generally accepted.

MN1: Everything that exists is natural. There are no supernatural entities or forces.

MN2: Reality is exhausted by space-time and its contents, or an ensemble of space-time manifolds.

MN1 is the most common version, but it’s largely uninformative because “natural” is left unaddressed. We’re merely left with picking out paradigmatic supernatural entities/forces such as ghosts, gods, magic, and the like, and asserting that nothing of the sort obtains. I prefer M2, but I think assuming the truth of either one of them is sufficient for what I hope to demonstrate.

Free Will

To understand why people assume agent causation is inconsistent with MN, we have to clarify what free will is. First, the will is the capacity to deliberate, make decisions, and translate those decisions into action (Franklin, 2015). I take the folk conception of free will to mean that persons are sometimes able to exercise their will such that they could have done otherwise. That is, at least some decisions aren’t necessitated by their nature and/or environment

More clearly, an action is free only if it satisfies the following conditions:

Sourcehood: The agent is the actual source of ones action (e.g. no manipulation).

Intelligibility: The agent performs actions for reasons that are understood by the agent (e.g. a spontaneous jerk isn’t a free action).

Leeway: The agent is able to refrain from performing the action.

It’s often assumed that naturalism entails determinism, and that determinism is in conflict with the leeway condition, and by this very fact naturalism is in conflict with free will. But this entailment does not hold. There’s nothing about naturalism itself that implies that all causal relations are determinate (necessitated by the relevant antecedent conditions). All that’s required of causality on MN is that nature is causally continuous. Which means that there is only one metaphysical causal kind within the world (i.e. Dualism is false), and that there aren’t external non-natural causal forces affecting the natural world. For these would almost be by definition supernatural. Further, contemporary physics already admits indeterminism in at least six interpretations of quantum mechanics (three remain agnostic, and four are explicitly deterministic). So if one is going to reject free will in virtue of MN, it can’t be because of MN entailing determinism. One might object that indeterministic events don’t take place in higher-level settings, such as the firing of a neuron, so a naturalistic interpretation of human behavior will be deterministic. First, there’s nothing about naturalism in itself that requires this. Second, whether some events in the brain operate indeterministically is an empirical thesis that remains to be settled, and there are already models of how this might work (Tse, 2014; Franklin, 2013; Weber, 2005)

Given what has been outlined above, we can make sense of an event causal libertarian account of free will fitting within MN. In these sorts of instances, one’s mental states cause one to act but in such a way that you could have done otherwise. That is, the features of yourself that cause the action wouldn’t necessitate the action. You could have refrained or performed an altogether different action. It’s also helpful to note that this model fits nicely with the reductive account of mind, where any token mental state is identical to a particular brain state. Most philosophers specializing in free will recognize event causal libertarianism as a possibility worth considering, even if they remain skeptical of its reality (Balauger, 2004, 2010).

Agent Causation & Substance Causation

This charitable tone tends to drop once agent causation is proposed. This is typically followed by accusations of anti-scientific and “spooky” metaphysics. This is primarily grounded in the assumption that agent causation implies substance dualism. They can’t imagine what this agent could be besides a disembodied mind that interacts with the body. I think the agent causal picture people have in mind is much like how Kant thought freedom of the will worked. Essentially, the physical world that we experience is fully deterministic. Everything runs like clockwork with the exception of human action. In addition to bodies, persons are also noumenal selves that transcend the empirical world, making sovereign unconstrained choices each time they deliberate and act. So on this picture, the world consists of two different sorts of causes, natural events and agents. Given this sort of description, it’s of little surprise that so few philosophers take agent causation seriously.

Before we contrast the previous description with how agent causation has been recently updated, it will be useful to offer a brief description of what event causation is supposed to be. Event causation essentially involves some complex state of affairs or process causing another. For example, a heart pumping causes the movement of blood or a brick being thrown causes the window’s shattering. Further, the way these events unfold are explained by whatever laws of nature happen to obtain, be they deterministic or probabilistic. Causation cashed out as event relations can either be understood as ontologically primitive or reducible to something more basic such as facts concerning the global spatiotemporal arrangement of fundamental natural properties or sequential regularity.

Timothy O’Conner offers two similar, but philosophically distinct analyses of causation which clearly sketch the relevant difference between event and agent causation (O’Conner, 2014):

Event causal analysis: “The having of a power P by object O1 at time t produces effect E in object O2.”

Agent Causal analysis: “Object O1 produces effect E, doing so in virtue of having power P at time t.”

In the first case it is the “possessing a power”, an event, which is the cause of the effect; in the second it is the object. What’s of crucial importance here is that the agent causal analysis isn’t actually just one of agent causation, but is of the more general theory of substance causation. Substance causation is just the theory that substances or objects are what cause effects. So on this account, it’s not the throwing of the brick that causes the window to shatter; properly speaking, it’s the brick. Now this might sound absurd; how could the throwing of the brick not be a cause of the windows breaking? The absurdity drops once we consider the thrower. Really, the thrower and the brick jointly cause the windows shattering, where the throwing is a manifestation of a power possessed by the thrower. Powers theory is crucial to any plausible theory of substance causation. It’s not merely the object in itself that causes the effect, but the nature of the object that is constituted by the powers it possesses.

Most of the mysteriousness of agent causation disappears once we understand it as a species of substance causation. So take any ordinary substance, a rock, an electron, a water molecule, etc; any time any substance causes an effect on another substance, we have an instance of substance causation. What distinguishes agent causation from ordinary instances of substance causation is that there is an intention behind it. This entails that agent causation is fairly common place within the animal kingdom, which itself is good reason to believe that agent causation is consistent with naturalism.

A robust defense of substance causation is beyond the scope of this paper, but I can briefly sketch some reasons for accepting it. One is the numerous problems with alternative theories of causation. The constant conjunction or sequential regularity theory is currently one of the most popular and has been since Hume proposed it. On this account, for x to cause y is just for it to be the case that every time x occurs, y occurs. So on this view there is no intrinsic or necessary connection between the fire and the smoke that follows; this is just the way the universe happens to unfold. A contentious assumption on this theory is that all instances of causality are temporarily ordered. But we can make sense of non-temporal causation such as two cards propping each other up or a ball making an impression on a pillow that it’s been resting on for eternity(i.e. there was no prior time where ball was not affecting the pillow).

The other popular account reduces causation to counterfactual dependence, which is something like this,

“1) If A had not occurred, B would not have occurred.

2) If A had occurred, B would have occurred.

3) A and B both occurred. “ (Scholastic Metaphysics, pg. 60).

So the throwing of the brick causes the window breaking because if you remove the throwing of the brick then the breaking would not have happened. One problem with counterfactual dependence is the infinite number acts of omission that are involved in any causal sequence. So my successfully walking across the street was dependent on not being crushed by an elephant, not being transported, the earth not blowing up, etc. Another issue that’s applicable to both theories is that both of them seem to get the dependence relation wrong. It’s because of causation that there is constant conjunction and counter factual dependence. They are symptomatic of causation.

Next, here is a simple argument in favor of substance causation: (Whittle, 2016)

1. Some actual substances possess causal powers.

2. If a substance possesses a causal power, then it is efficacious.

3. If a substance is efficacious, then it can be a cause.

4. Some actual substances’ causal powers are manifested.

5. Therefore, some actual substances are causes.

The only premise I can imagine being rejected is (1). On the face of it, this might sound absurd; as if it means that nothing has the power to do anything. Though really the individual who rejects causal powers would have alternative explanations for why things do what they do. A not uncommon answer is that we only need appeal to the laws of nature to understand and explain how events unfold. This is problematic. On one hand, if you take the laws of nature just to be descriptions of regularity, then the laws themselves don’t do any explanatory work. On the other hand, if you take the laws of nature to be something that dictates and enforces the activity of things from the outside, then you’ve committed yourself to a form of platonism, where naturalism must be rejected. Finally, you can take the laws themselves to be the causal implications of the intrinsic natures that the substances possess, and in that case we’re back to powers theory.

Metaphysical Irreducibility

One might object to my earlier claim that agent causation is fairly common place because in reality there are no agents, merely matter in motion or atoms in the void.This is where the possible reducibility of macro-level objects becomes an issue. So a largely reductionist metaphysics will hold that much of what we consider ordinary objects are nothing over and above their parts. So what they are is wholly reducible to a set of fundamental constituents and relations. Another way to think of about this is that if we were to take an inventory of everything that really exists, much of what we take to exist would turn out to not. At its most extreme, the reductionist thesis holds that there’s nothing over above quarks, bosons, or whatever a complete theoretical physics takes to be fundamental. Ordinary objects will be described as simples (indivisible physical objects) arranged in a particular way. So to be a cat is just to be simples arranged cat-wise.

If one were both a reductionist and a substance causation theorist, then one could rightfully reject agent causation because there would be no agents in the relevant sense. In order for agent causation to obtain, the agent has to be a unique substance that’s not merely the sum of its parts. If agent causation were true, then agents would be irreducible substances whose persistence conditions are picked out by their higher-level causal powers(e.g. Purposiveness, narrativity, & self-reflection). That is, we are unique irreducible substances because we possess capacities that aren’t exemplified by our constituents. The constituents have come together in the right way; they are not merely a collection of them. A unique form is exemplified that puts constraints on the activity of its lower-level constituents. Which is an example of top-down causation if anything is. On reductionist substance causation, the lower level substances do all of the causal work.

A possible strategy for motivating a non-reductionist account mirrors the demystifying of agent-causation. That is, if irreducible objects aren’t special cases that are essentially restricted to persons, then there’s less reason to be suspicious of irreducibility in general. This does not mean that I think that all ordinary objects are irreducible substances. I take objects of artifice to be clearly reducible to their chemical constituents. So houses, cars, computers, tools, etc are reducible to their constituent parts. Edward Feser offers a clear description of the distinction I have in mind,

“The basic idea is that a natural object is one whose characteristic behavior – the ways in which it manifests either stability or changes of various sorts – derives from something intrinsic to it. A nonnatural object is one which does not have such an intrinsic principle of its characteristic behavior; only the natural objects out of which it is made have such a principle. We can illustrate the distinction with a simple example. A liana vine – the kind of vine Tarzan likes to swing on – is a natural object. A hammock that Tarzan might construct from living liana vines is a kind of artifact, and not a natural object. The parts of the liana vine have an inherent tendency to function together to allow the liana to exhibit the growth patterns it does, to take in water and nutrients, and so forth. By contrast, the parts of the hammock – the liana vines themselves – have no inherent tendency to function together as a hammock. Rather, they must be arranged by Tarzan to do so, and left to their own devices – that is to say, without pruning, occasional rearrangement, and the like they will tend to grow the way they otherwise would have had Tarzan not interfered with them, including in ways that will impede their performance as a hammock. Their natural tendency is to be liana-like and not hammock-like; the hammock-like function they perform after Tarzan ties them together is extrinsic or imposed from outside, while the liana-like functions are intrinsic to them” (Scholastic Metaphysics, pg. 182)

I don’t commit myself to the idea that all natural particulars are irreducible or simple (without parts) or that only objects of human construction are reducible. For example, a rock made of limestone would reduce to a collection calcium carbonate, that may or may not have an irreducible intrinsic nature. The correct account of reduction/non-reduction relation is a severely under-explored issue in metaphysics. The hope here is merely that this example is useful in communicating an idea of what an irreducible relation/substance is supposed to be.

Final Arguments

Before summing up the arguments, it’ll be useful to explain what sort of advantage an agent causal account of freedom has over an event causal one. It stems from what’s called the “disappearing agent” objection to event causal libertarianism. The idea is that on the event causal analysis the agent-involving events (the particular mental states, preferences, reasons, etc) that non-deterministically cause the decision don’t actually settle which option is selected. The leeway condition is satisfied in that we could roll back the event and you could have otherwise but you, yourself don’t actually choose it. Your agent-involving states merely constrain which options are possible for you. Where it goes from there is a matter of luck. This can be thought of as claiming that an event causal view doesn’t satisfy the sourcehood condition for free will. The events, which do the work, merely flow through you, but you don’t really settle which option occurs. Agent causal theories have the advantage of saying that you certainly do play an explanatory role.

With this work behind us, we can abridge the essential story into a few brief arguments.

1. Substance Causation is consistent Naturalism.

2. The metaphysical irreducibility of certain substances (persons among them) is consistent with Naturalism.

3. If (1 & 2), then agent-causation is consistent with Naturalism.

4. Therefore, Agent Causation is consistent with Naturalism.

I think 1 and 2 are fairly straightforward in that nothing about my description of them implied that they transcend space and time, and 3 isn’t much more than the definition of agent causation.

Next,

1. The leeway condition is consistent with Naturalism (i.e. Nothing about naturalism implies that all causation is deterministic or that all causally relevant neural sequences are deterministic).

2. The sourcehood condition is consistent with Naturalism (since the most demanding form of satisfying it (agent causation) is consistent with Naturalism).

3. The intelligibility condition is consistent with Naturalism (I can’t say much more than I’d be completely puzzled if someone denied this, beyond maybe saying that all of our reasons for action are post hoc confabulations).

4. If (1,2 & 3), then Free Will is consistent with Naturalism (A priori true).

5. Therefore, Free Will is consistent with Naturalism.

Finally,

1. Substance causation is a plausible theory of causation.

2. The irreducibility of certain biological substances is not implausible.

3. Indeterminism is plausible.

4. If (1,2, & 3), then free will is plausible.

5. We’re justified in holding independently plausible positions if they cohere with our background beliefs*.

6. Therefore, at least some people are justified in believing in free will.

Plausible: A position is plausible just in case it is coherent, contains sophisticated arguments or evidence in favor of it (ones that are aware of and address the relevant issues and objections that might undermine it) and is void of any obvious insurmountable objections.

*Epistemic axiom: We’re justified in believing what seems to be true unless we have sufficient reason to think it’s false.

*Phenomenological claim: Some of our decisions seem to be free, to at least some of us.

Without question, this is the weakest of the arguments I’ve offered. Plausibility is context dependent, which means many will find this unconvincing. Some of the most obvious candidates are committed reductionists, scientismists, eliminativists, determinists, and event causal theorists. Though this is not my target audience. My hope is that fence sitters, or anyone who’s just generally skeptical yet open to free will and agent causation might be persuaded to take the position seriously. No one should be moved to believe in free will merely based on what I’ve offered here, but it might be sufficient to motivate some to re-assess their position.

                                                           Works Cited:

Balaguer, Mark. Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem. MIT Press, 2010

Balaguer, Mark. A Coherent, Naturalistic, and Plausible Formulation of Libertarian Free Will. Noûs, Vol. 38, No.3 (Sep., 2004), pp. 379-406

Feser, Edward, “Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction”, Editiones Scholasticae, 2014

Franklin, Christopher Evan, “Agent-Causation, Explanation, and Akrasia: A Reply to Levy’s Hard Luck”, Criminal Law and Philosophy 9:4, (2015): 753-770.

Franklin, Christopher Evan, The Scientific Plausibility of Libertarianism’, Free Will and Moral Responsibility, eds. Ishtiyaque Haji and Justin Caouette. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing (2013): 123-141.

O’Conner, Timothy. “Free Will and Metaphysics,” in David Palmer, ed., in Libertarian Free Will (ed. D. Palmer, Oxford), 2014

Tse, Peter Ulric, Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation, MIT Press, 2013, 456pp.

Webber, Marcel. Indeterminism in Neurobiology. Philosophy of Science, Vol. 72, No. 5, Proceedings of the 2004 Biennial Meeting of The Philosophy of Science AssociationPart I: Contributed PapersEdited by Miriam Solomon (December 2005), pp. 663-674

Whittle, A. (2016). A Defence of Substance Causation. Journal of the American Philosophical Association , 2(1), 1-20. DOI: 10.1017/apa.2016.1

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