Is responsibility essentially impossible?

Philosophical Studies

Volumn 99, Issue 2, 2000, Pages 229-268

  Hurley, S L ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 0141550083     PISSN: 00318116     EISSN: 15730883     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1018763930668     Document Type: Article

References (73)

1. Stephen P. Stich, "Radical Ascent: Do True Believers Exist?", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. LXV (1991), pp. 229-244, at p. 235; cf. Barbara
2. Hannan, "Don't Stop Believing: The Case Against Eliminativist Materialism", Mind and Language 8(2), 1993, pp. 165-179, at p. 176n11.
3. William Ramsey, Stephen Stich and Joseph Eliminativism, and the Future of Folk Psychology", in John D. Greenwood, ed, The Future of Folk Psychology: Intentionality and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 93-119, at pp. 95-96.
4. Stich, "Radical Ascent", op. cit.; Steven P. Stich, Deconstructing the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), ch. 1, sect. 12.
5. See Stich's discussion of Luhrmann's claims in Deconstructing the Mind, op. cit., p. 69.
6. Daniel C. Dennett, "Quining qualia," in Consciousness in Contemporary Science, A. J. Marcel and E. Bisiach, eds. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 42-77; see pp. 44, 47.
7. See and cf. G.E.Moore, "Reply to my Critics", in P. Schupp, ed., The Philosophy of G.E.Moore (Evanston, 111., 1942);
8. Stich, Deconstructing the Mind, op. cit., pp. 60ff, 171ff. Moore admitted that his account of analysis generated and did not resolve the "paradox of analysis": that some supposedly analytic truths are unobvious and open to disagreement.
9. David Lewis, "How to Define Theoretical Terms", Journal of Philosophy 67 (1970), pp. 427-446. A theoretical role may itself direct us to worldly context, such as the causes of our sayings, or direct us to defer to expert reference.
10. Another question is whether the term is defined functionally by its theoretical role, so that it refers to whatever might occupy that role in other worlds, however realized, or instead refers rigidly, to whatever does occupy it in this world.
11. For discussion, see Stich, Deconstructing the Mind, op. cit., pp. 32-33.
12. Hilary Putnam, "The Meaning of 'Meaning' ", in Mind, Language, and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 215-271.
13. Context-driven theories of reference need not require that the term whose reference is being theorized must figure in a scientific causal explanation of contexts of its use, as opposed, say, to normative explanations. But there is not space to develop this point here.
14. Cf. Adrian Cussins, "Nonconceptual Content and the Elimination of Misconceived Composites!", Mind and Language 8(2) (1993), pp. 234-252.
15. See Stich, "Radical Ascent", op. cit., on what this theoretical disagreement is responsible to, and to observe brisk breezes blowing through the temples of reference. See also n.7 above.
16. Stich, Deconstructing the Mind, op. cit., ch. 1,
17. spells out how various of these options bear on eliminativism about thought inparticular. David Papineau spells out how the theoretical role approach bears on eliminativism in general, in "Theory-Dependent Terms", Philosophy of Science 63 (1996).
18. See Stich, Deconstructing the Mind, op. cit., ch. 1, on the defects of the topdown 'semantic ascent' strategy, lack of clarity about what a theory of reference is supposed to do, and why what I have called the bottom-up, 'normative naturalism' strategy doesn't resolve issues about eliminativism either. Cf. Nathan Salmon, who argues that the theory of direct reference associated with Putnam and Kripke
19. needs supplementation with nontrivial essentialist premises to yield nontrivial essentialist conclusions, in Reference and Essence (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), especially ch. 6. The issue in the text is not so much about the relation between reference and essence as the relation between positions about both reference and essence, on the one hand, and about elimination vs. revision, on the other.
20. Again, see Stich, Deconstructing the Mind, op. cit., ch. 1.
21. See and cf. Terence Horgan, "The Austere Ideology of Folk Psychology", Mind and Language 8 (1993), pp. 282-297;
22. Stich, Deconstructing the Mind, op. cit.; Papineau, "Theory-Dependent Terms", op. cit.
23. At a certain level of abstraction, natural kinds might be regarded as functional kinds, where the function is given not be theory but the world; see also notes 7 and 8 above. And see Paul M. Churchland, "Evaluating our Self-Conception", Mind and Language 8 (1993), pp. 211-222. Cf. eliminativism about persons and disagreement about whether persons must be substances if they exist at all.
24. See and cf. Stich, Deconstructing the Mind, op. cit., p. 178.
25. Cf. Stich on Luhrmann on witches, Deconstructing the Mind, op. cit., p. 68ff.
26. Could thought be like this? Cf. Churchland, "Evaluating our Self-Conception", op. cit. Values?
27. Cf. J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1977), ch. 1, 2.
28. Cf. Putnam's denial that the members of the extension of a natural kind term necessarily have a common hidden structure. "It could have turned out that the bits of liquid we call 'water' had no important common physical characteristics except the superficial ones. In that case the necessary and sufficient condition for being 'water' would have been possession of sufficiently many of the superficial characteristics." But this doesn't mean that water might not have had a hidden structure, but rather that various bits of liquid with no common hidden structure, with only superficial characteristics in common, might have looked and tasted like water, filled lakes, etc. ("The Meaning of 'Meaning' ", op. cit., pp. 240-241). This suggests that we cannot infer from lack of any common hidden structure to elimination. Enough commonality to support reference to a kind may be found at a different, perhaps more superficial level. But if elimination is not to be impossible on context-driven accounts, there should be a distinction between cases where the explanation of the kind is relocated (eg from hidden essences to superficial characteristics, or from a physical to a functional essence) and cases where there is no explanation and the unity of the kind is illusory. This distinction requires there to be some constraint on arbitrary or accidental concatenations of properties counting as the referents of kind terms. The text appeals to explanatory depth to make this distinction. In the hodge-podge scenario, nothing has explanatory depth, even relatively shallow explanatory depth, in relation to the relevant contexts, so deconstruction/elimination rather than revision is appropriate.
29. These remarks are indebted to David Owen's discussion in Causes and Coincidences (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 64-65.
30. In "Theory-Dependent Terms", op. cit., Papineau develops a theoretical-role account in terms of T-yes, T-perhaps, and T-no assumptions: yes, that assumption is criterial, perhaps that assumption is criterial, and no that assumption is not criterial.
31. See also Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit, "Folk Belief and Commonplace Belief", Mind and Language 8 (1983), pp. 298-305, at p. 302, on "commonplace psychology" and "cautious Ramsey sentences".
32. S. L. Hurley, Natural Reasons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) develops an account of ethical terms that in effect allows for both theoryinternal and context-related explanatory depth by calling for reflective equilibrium between theory and context.
33. See and cf. John Roemer, Theories of Distributive Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).
34. See Dennett, "Quining Qualia", op. cit.
35. Galen Strawson, Freedom and Belief (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 56.
36. This is true whether the explanation in question is causal or not; impossible properties don't do normative explanatory work either.
37. Putnam, "The Meaning of 'Meaning' ", op. cit., p. 241.
38. Deconstructing the Mind, op. cit., pp. 60-63.
39. Kenneth J. Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values, 2nd edition (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1963).
40. For a materialist, are zombies like SWFs?
41. See and cf. Galen Strawson, "The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility," Philosophical Studies 75 (1994), 5-24;
42. and his Freedom and Belief, p. 36 of the 1986 edition, on how true self-determination is "both necessary for freedom and logically impossible".
43. E. g. Strawson, Freedom and Belief, 1986 edition, op. cit., p. 28ff;
44. "The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility", op. cit..
45. Pace Thomas Nagel, "Moral Luck", Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 26-27.
46. See especially Susan Wolf, Freedom Within Reason. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990;
47. Martha Klein, Determinism, Blameworthiness and Deprivation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990;
48. John Martin Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
49. These conditions are also discussed in my work in progress, Justice, Luck, and Knowledge.
50. See Strawson, Freedom and Belief, op. cit. 1991 edition, eg. p. 29, and "The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility", op. cit.; cf. Nagel, "Moral Luck", op. cit., pp. 26-27.
51. When used without the qualification 'causal', 'responsibility' is here intended in a desert-involving sense.
52. For discussion, see G. A. Cohen, "On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice," Ethics 99(4) (1989), 906-944, at 935ff;
53. Thomas Scanlon, "Equality of Resources and Equality of Welfare: A Forced Marriage?," Ethics 97 (1986), 111-118.
54. Note that neither choice nor control is intrinsically regressive. This is argued more fully in Justice, Luck, and Knowledge, in progress. Briefly: It is not hard to see that to choose something does not require choice of its causes. Control involves maintenance of a variable at a target value in the face of exogenous disturbance, where the variable is caused to take values caused jointly by factors endogenous and factors exogenous to a control system. To control something not only does not require control of its causes, but in fact presupposes causes exogenous to the control system. Control occurs in nature as well as in human affairs.
55. Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 225.
56. Strawson, Freedom and Belief, op. cit., 1986 edition, p. 106.
57. Such deep commitment to a regressive conception of responsibility can take a form such that when we press the question what such responsibilty could be, or what it would require, we are led into the regressive choice story, even though we never ordinarily think of such regresses. This is what Strawson has in mind (personal communication). Deep conceptual commitments may not be superficially accessible, may require such reflective questioning to reveal. Suppose this is what our commitment to a regressive choice conception is like. Such a commitment still constitutes us as having conflicting intuitions if at the same time we do not feel that our freedom is put in question by the fact that we cannot be truly or ultimately self-determining in any way. Thanks to Galen Strawson for prompting clarification here.
58. Freedom and Belief Ibid., pp. 8, 26-30, 49-50.
59. Strawson, Freedom and Belief, op. cit., 1986 edition, p. 30. In the 1991 edition Strawson revises this claim as follows: " But the freedom that is shown to be impossible by this sort of argument against self-determination is just the kind of freedom that most people ordinarily and unreflectively suppose themselves to possess, even though the idea that some sort of ultimate self-determination is presupposed by their notion of freedom has never occured to them. It is therefore worth examining the argument in detail. For the idea that we possess such freedom is central to our lives" (p. 30). Two points in response to this revision: First, my points are not ad hominem but directed to a position, so Strawson's earlier statement can still serve to put the position in play. Second, the revision does not in fact affect the points to be made. For present purposes, it doesn't matter whether what people presuppose has occurred to them or not. Suppose people do not feel that their freedom is put into question by the influence of heredity and environment, which means that they cannot be truly or ultimately self-determining. Suppose also they presuppose that their freedom has a feature that is incompatible with such influence. Then they are conflicted. This is true whether or not the presupposition they make has occured to them, and whether or not they realize that they are conflicted. Thanks again to Galen Strawson for prompting clarification.
60. Freedom and Belief, Ibid., p. 101.
61. Ibid., p. 96; see also p. 88. Nagel also suggests (in "Moral Luck", op. cit.) that we are conflicted, tending sometimes to more restrictive, sometimes to less restrictive views of responsibility. He regards the more restrictive views as most in accord with intuitive ethics. See also Bernard Williams, "Moral Luck", in his Moral Luck (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
62. So causation can be transitive even if it is not regressive.
63. Consider various versions of a reason-responsiveness requirement, perhaps coupled to requirements of choice and/or control; see, for example, John Martin Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control, op. cit.
64. Cf. Galen Strawson: "True self-determination is logically impossible because it requires the actual completion of an infinite regress of choices or principles of choice" (Freedom and Belief, op. cit., 1986 edition, p. 29).
65. Deconstructing the Mind, op. cit., pp. 60-63, 171ff.
66. Cf. Klein, Determinism, Blameworthiness, and Deprivation, op. cit., ch 4.
67. Cf. Klein, Determinism, Blameworthiness, and Deprivation ibid., ch 4.
68. For the alternate-sequence/actual-sequence distinction, see John Martin Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control, op. cit..
69. See Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control, ibid., on the idea of reason-responsiveness.
70. See Cohen, "On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice," op. cit., pp. 935ff;
71. Scanlon, "Equality of Resources and Equality of Welfare: A Forced Marriage?," op. cit.
72. Which are argued for in Justice, Luck, and Knowledge, in progress.
73. Animism need not differentiate between deterministic and indeterministic causation. Deterministic causation is no guarantee against minor malfunctions; an indeterministic mechanism can in principle be just as reliable as many deterministic mechanisms. Just as a thermostat that includes an indeterministic process can be just as good at controlling the temperature as one designed differently that includes no indeterministic process (Randolph Clarke, "Indeterminism and Control," American Philosophical Quarterly 32(2) (1995), 125-137 at 129), so a person who is realized in part by indeterministic processes can be just as good a chooser, a controller, or a responder to reasons as a person who is deterministically realized. Moreover, a regression requirement could in principle be applied to indeterministic causes as well as deterministic causes. 59 - In particular, setting aside complications introduced by important issues about reason-responsiveness. Various reason-responsiveness conditions for responsibility are investigated further in my Justice, Luck, and Knowledge (in progress), but they do not support a regression requirement.