Since I was aged about 14 I have been profoundly bothered by a conflict in my understanding of how people act in the world. On the one hand, people seem to have free choice, meaning that whatever they do (unless physically constrained) they could have decided not to do it, and done something else instead. When I understand people's actions in this way I hold them responsible, and morally accountable, for their actions.

But I also see the world through science with its assumptions of strict causality. Does strict causality work for minds, for thoughts, desires, intentions, etc? Much of psychology and neuropsychology assumes it does - that our minds and activities are completely caused to do what they do - and that this is the whole story. This view leaves no room for ultimate moral judgement: there is no sense in which a person can be held ultimately morally responsible for their actions.

This conflict between two opposed ways of understanding people's actions has always bothered me hugely. What follows is a tidied-up account of where my reading and thoughts have led me on the topic. I focus on four philosophers I happen to have read, and, having never formally studied philosophy, what I have read is partly a matter of chance! This piece should perhaps be regarded as a bit of aleatory philosophy.

1. No freewill, no moral responsibility: Galen Strawson

Strawson argues that we are ultimately constrained in all that we think and do by our genes and experiences, and that this renders all moral judgements ultimately incoherent. His argument can be summarised thus:

1. When one acts in a situation one does what one does because of the way one is.
2. One is the way one is, initially, as a result of heredity and experience.
3. These are things for which one can't be held to be responsible.
4. One cannot at any later stage of one's life hope to become responsible for the way one is by trying to change oneself.
5. This is because the ways one is moved to try to change oneself, and the degree of one's success in such attempts, will be determined by the way one already is as a result of heredity and experience.
6. It makes no difference if random processes have affected the kind of person one is because one can be no more responsible for prior random processes than for prior deterministic ones.

Strawson illustrates what he means by ultimate responsibility with the myth of heaven and hell. Ultimate responsibility is the sort of responsibility we would have to have for it to make sense (were the myth true) to punish some with torment in hell, and to reward others with eternal bliss. And he argues that the myth cannot make sense given the argument adduced above.

In sum, he argues, we can like or dislike a person's actions, and we can judge them aesthetically, but we have no right to judge them morally. He admits that, in practice, we find it almost impossible not to think in moral terms, but regards such thinking as delusional.

I find Strawson compelling, but I also find it very hard to give up my ‘delusional’ conviction that in moral matters people have enough choice to allow for moral judgement. So let's see what the opposing camp offers?

Main texts consulted:

-'Luck swallows everything'

-'You cannot make yourself the way you are'

Both essays in: Galen Strawson: 'Things that bother me'

2. Total freedom, total moral responsibility: Sartre

Sartre was a phenomenologist and as such took the facts of consciousness rather than those of science as his assumptive start point. And his reading of consciousness was that it is totally free, although it often pretended it isn't (when acting in ‘bad faith’). Sartre's ‘argument’ operates at a first-person level, leans heavily on opaque predecessors (e.g. Hegel and Heidegger) and uses obscure metaphorical terms. The gist is that, as consciousnesses, we are radically free, inescapably separated, from the casual order of the world. As such we are ‘condemned to be free’ and we are totally responsible for our actions and the kinds of people we turn into. We are morally accountable through and through.

This comes pretty close to how I experience life. Strawson regards the experiences as delusional, whereas Sartre regards them as foundational

No progress on my dilemma so far!

Main texts consulted:

Sartre: ‘Being and Nothingness’

Gregory McCulloch: ‘Using Sartre’

Reconciling the irreconcilable 1: Kant

Kant clearly had the same problem as me with reconciling his moral experiences with scientific knowledge. Unlike Strawson or Sartre he was not willing to give victory to one of the two sides. Instead he argued that strict scientific causality and moral freedom could both be true. How?

First, in his Critique of Pure Reason he argues that the ways we see and know about our inner and outer worlds are strictly constrained by a priori constructs we impose on raw sensation. Because of this the world we experience is a phenomenal world not a world of things as they actually are (‘things in themselves’, which are inherently unknowable). Importantly, he answers Hume's scepticism about the reality of causal necessity by arguing that our a priori constructs force us to interpret phenomenal, empirical, reality as totally causally constrained. But, he argues, this does not mean that the casual necessity described by science applies to the unknowable world of things in themselves (also termed the ‘noumenal’). Therefore, he argues, it would not be contradictory to regard a human action as being both a free, empirically unconditioned, ‘effect’ of the noumenal self, and as being the effect of an empirically determined empirical self.

Kant went further than arguing freedom was a mere possibility. In his moral writings he argues that our everyday intuitions of moral necessity force us to the conclusion that when a rational being acts morally, it understands itself as obeying a categorical imperative it has itself legislated, and that such selflegislation necessarily places it outside the causal matrix governing the empirical world. So, he claims, unless we refuse to recognise the reality of our moral reasoning, we must be selfcausing in exactly the way Strawson says we cannot be.

To me this is having one's cake and eating it. Surely any meaningful freedom we feel we have exists as much in time as does any externally determined event, yet Kant claims there is no time in the noumenal world which freedom inhabits. Does this not mean that the price of Kant's ‘leakage’ of noumenal freedom into the phenomenal world is the contradictory notion that some empirical phenomena are caused by both chains of causal predecessors and by ourselves as uncaused causes?

Main texts consulted:

Kant: ‘Critique of Pure Reason’

Kant: ‘Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals’

Sebastian Gardner: ‘Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason’

Korner: ‘Kant’

Reconciling the irreconcilable 2: Davidson

For me, a more satisfactory attempt at reconciliation can be extracted from a classic philosophy of mind paper by Donald Davidson. The paper is short, dense and a fiendish read, and I'll restrict this summary to an outline of its overall gist.

Davidson was a mind-body monist, meaning that, unlike Descartes, he thought there was only one kind of stuff in the world and that this could always be described physically. He was also a property dualist arguing that some events have both mental and physical properties, which are describable, respectively, using mental and physical language. There are two type of property dualist: (1) type identity theorists who argue that a given type of mental event is the mental property of a given type of physical event (eg felt pain is a mental property the firing of C-fibre neurones) and (2) token identity theorists who merely claim that each singular dated mental event is always the property of a singular dated physical event, but that types of mental property cannot be strictly aligned to types of physical property. Davidson was a token identity theorist.

Importantly for his argument, Davidson regarded causal relationships between singular dated events as being a basic property of the universe, but he also regarded causes as only being describable by means of strict deterministic laws (whenever a happens b follows). He thereby made a distinction between the ontological being of causes from how they are described.

A crucial step in Davidson's argument is his claim that the languages we use to describe mental and physical events have ‘disparate commitments’. Our mental concepts are embedded in normative theories of rationality and of what it is to be a rational being. In ascribing beliefs and other mental states to a person, we assume this person to have a system of beliefs, intentions, desires, etc which rationally coherent both with one another and with the person's speech and behaviour. Without assuming such principles we forgo the chance to understand the other as a normal person. Strict deterministic laws cannot describe how we actually think because such laws would require us to redefine mental properties so radically that they would no longer be embedded in a constitutive normative theory describing rational relations to other mental properties. This would redefine the mental out of existence.

In contrast, physical properties are understood without any commitment to rationality: changes described physically are explained purely in terms of scientific theories that connect them to other changes also described physically. And these theories explain such changes (described physically) in terms of strict deterministic laws.

He then argues that because strict deterministic laws can be framed in physical language but not in mental language, our brains can be described deterministically, whereas our minds have to be described as operating rationally.

How then does the physical interact with the mental? He argues that mental properties supervene upon physical ones. By this he means that there cannot be two events that are alike in all physical respects which differ in a mental respect and, equivalently, no mental change can occur without some physical change likewise occurring.

Overall, Davidson's argument is dense, but to me it kind of works, at least as a proof of concept - that it is possible to give a coherent account (which unlike Kant's attempt, does not lean on ontological unknowability) that reconciles my everyday understandings of how people are when I talk to them with how they are when a brain surgeon opens their skulls.

Main texts consulted:

Donald Davidson:‘Mental Events’

Jaegwon Kim: ‘Philosophy of Mind and Psychology’ in Kirk Ludwig (ed) ‘Donald Davidson’

Coda

Hannah Arendt says something like this in a paper where she discusses her phrase ‘the banality of evil’. In it she claims that many people caught up doing bad things are not so much inherently wicked as just people who do what they feel is expected of them without thinking about what this means. By thinking she means interrogating critically one's actions and thoughts on the model of Socrates. She concludes her essay with:

‘The manifestation of the wind of thought [ie thinking ‘Socratically’] is no knowledge; it is the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly’

Text:

Hannah Arendt: ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’