I.

As a child I had a somewhat bizarre fear — I was afraid of morally blind alleys, where a morally blind alley is a situation in which no matter what you do, you would be morally blameworthy for it.  James Rachels (2003) argues that the right thing to do is what you have the best reasons to do, but in a morally blind alley a person who does the right thing would still be blameworthy.  This frightened me in a visceral way — because it doesn’t make sense.  Bad things, like being struck by lightning, can happen to good people, but these agents don’t deserve such evils.  The horror of a morally blind alley is that a good person could find herself in a situation where, through no fault of her own, she does deserve such evils.

In Elbow Room, Daniel C. Dennett asks why we find the problem of free will compelling.  One reason, he says, is because “philosophers have conjured up a host of truly frightening bugbears and then subliminally suggested, quite illicitly, that the question of free will is whether any of these bugbears actually exist.” (4)  In this book, Dennett argues for a revisionist theory in which free will is consistent with universal causal determinism, the theory that there exists only one possible future, completely causally determined by the laws of nature and the state of affairs present at the beginning of time.

Morally blind alleys are bugbears — and if Dennett is right, then these bugbears do exist; our entire lives are (remarkably narrow) morally blind alleys — our every action (blameworthy or not) is unavoidable.

II.

          This is a review of the New Edition of Elbow Room; one of two books Dennett has written on free will (the other being Freedom Evolves 2005).   Elbow Room is a well written, engaging argument for a certain, revisionist, account of free will.  This edition adds a new preface (the only substantive addition) in which Dennett addresses scientific skepticism about free will, identifies his position as revisionism rather than compatibilism, and writes “… there is nothing in the substantive claims and arguments in Elbow Room that I would wish to recant today.”  This review focuses on this preface.

          Compatibilism is the theory that free will is compatible with determinism; incompatibilism is the theory that it isn’t.  Dennett says that he took himself to be offering a compatibilist theory in Elbow Room and Freedom Evolves; however he now sees his project as being revisionist.  A revisionist about free will argues that we ought to abandon our current, commonsense (apparently incompatibilist) conception of free will and adopt a compatibilist account.  He says “I have tentatively explored abandoning the term “free will” altogether — on the grounds that it simply has too many unfortunate and apparently irresistible connotations to survive reform — while persisting with the topic:  the conditions underlying the moral responsibility of normal adult human beings.” (xi)

          Dennett begins by taking a troubling stance — that the varieties of free will “worth wanting” are not “threatened” by advances in science. (ix)  This is a mistake; surely there is some conceivable set of scientific observations that would require us to abandon just about any belief we have (short of René Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”).  However, the threat he seems to be referring to here is the threat of the determinism.  But science cannot, in principle, prove the truth of determinism — it merely assumes it — so this is no threat at all.

Much to Dennett’s dismay, many scientists claim that free will is an illusion.  They have been driven to do this, he says, out of “dismay with our current punishment practices.” (x)  If we abandon our illusory beliefs about free will, they believe, it will lead to positive prison reform… despite (1) the fact that neither compatibilist nor incompatibilist are happy with the current state of affairs in our prison system, and (2) mounting evidence that people who believe free will is an illusion act less morally than those who believe it is real (Baumeister and Brewer 2012; Alquist et al. 2013;Rigoni and Brass 2014; Feldman et al. 2016; Protzko et al. 2016).

Dennett — believing that the majority of philosophers are compatibilists — asks why scientists don’t appeal to experts, such as himself, when discussing moral responsibility.  However, the answer seems clear — incompatibilists have long argued that compatibilists cannot point to a morally relevant difference between moral agents and non-agents.  Compatibilists, like David Hume, believe our behavior is largely determined by our character, so if a villain can rid herself of her bad character, she would no longer be a fit target for blame.  On this view people are not blameworthy for their actions, so (1) the number of crimes you commit is irrelevant to determining your guilt (you can be blameworthy even if you haven’t committed any crime) and (2) the moment you get rid of your bad character, you are no longer blameworthy.  For compatibilists, ideally prisons would be comparable to mental institutions — once the undesirable character is removed, incarceration and blame is inappropriate.  Criminals are to be fixed in very much the same way that you might remove malware from your computer.  Uninstalling a vicious character, and installing a virtuous one, would make someone a productive member of society.  But this is causal responsibility, not moral responsibility, and there is no substantial difference between a causally determined human being and a causally determined computer, except maybe complexity or ease of repair. 

Dennett does not shy away from this comparison; when discussing the (lack of importance) of alternate possibilities, he compares agents to werewolves, caused by the moon to run amok, and malfunctioning robots, about which engineers would be trying to correct problems for existing and new models. (147; 152-156)  But neither wolves nor robots are moral agents, and this illustrates the hurdle compatibilists need to overcome – compatibilist accounts of responsibility are reductionist; moral responsibility is just causal responsibility – nothing special.  But for laymen and experts alike, it doesn’t make sense to hold wolves or computers morally responsible.

Dennett doesn’t see this as a problem; rather the problem is that philosophers have made monsters – bugbears – out of such concerns to motivate people to worry about the metaphysics of free will.  However, Dennett now recognizes that his position isn’t descriptive, it’s revisionist.  People already believe in those other theories of free will — theories which require alternate possibilities and deny the existence of morally blind alleys.  But Dennett is telling us that bugbears are real, but nothing to be afraid of.  Aren’t they, though?

 

Works Cited:

Alquist, J. L., Ainsworth, S. E., & Baumeister, R. F., 2013, “Determined to conform: Disbelief in free will increases conformity,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 49(1),80–86.

Baumeister, R. F., & Brewer, L. E., 2012, “Believing versus disbelieving in free will: Correlates and consequences,” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 6(10): 736–745.

Dennet, Daniel C., 2003, Freedom Evolves, New York: Viking

Feldman, Gilad; Chandrashekar, Subramanya Prasad; Wong, Kin Fai Ellick, 2016, “The freedom to excel: Belief in free will predicts better academic performance Personality and Individual Differences,” Personality and Individual Differences 90: 377–383.

Protzko, John; Ouimette, Brett; Schooler, Jonathan. 2016.  “Believing there is no free will corrupts intuitive cooperation,” Cognition 151: 6-9.

Rachels, James, 2003, The Elements of Moral Philosophy Fourth Edition, McGraw-Hill.

Rigoni, Davide; Brass, Marcel, 2014, “From Intentions to Neurons: Social and Neural Consequences of Disbelieving in Free Will,” Topoi 33(1): 5 — 12.

 

 

© 2016 William Simkulet

 

William Simkulet, Ph.D., University of Wisonsin, Marshfield/Wood County