A Very Bad Wizard

Morality Behind the Curtain

Tamler Sommers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781135108502
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In the first edition of A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain – Nine Conversations, philosopher Tamler Sommers talked with an interdisciplinary group of the world's leading researchers—from the fields of social psychology, moral philosophy, cognitive science, and primatology—all working on the same issue: the origins and workings of morality. Together, these nine interviews pulled back some of the curtain, not only on our moral lives but—through Sommers' probing, entertaining, and well informed questions—on the way morality traditionally has been studied.

This Second Edition increases the subject matter, adding eight additional interviews and offering features that will make A Very Bad Wizard more useful in undergraduate classrooms. These features include structuring all chapters around sections and themes familiar in a course in ethics or moral psychology; providing follow-up podcasts for some of the interviews, which will delve into certain issues from the conversations in a more informal manner; including an expanded and annotated reading list with relevant primary sources at the end of each interview; presenting instructor and student resources online in a companion website.

The resulting new publication promises to synthesize and make accessible the latest interdisciplinary research to offer a brand new way to teach philosophical ethics and moral psychology.

Part I
Free to Be You and Me? Maybe Not

Introduction

Samuel Johnson once said that “all theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience is for it.” Do you agree with that?

For the most part, yes. Philosophers and scientists have mounted strong theoretical arguments against free will for thousands of years.

And for thousands of years people have remained unconvinced

Right, because we feel free. We feel responsible.

That may be true, but it also feels like the earth is flat and that we’re at the center of the solar system. In almost every other field we allow logic and science to trump experience—why not here?

Some people worry about the ethical implications of denying free will and moral responsibility. They think it would drain our lives of meaning and purpose, and maybe lead to a world where “everything is permitted” and no one is held accountable. So if free will is an illusion, maybe it’s one we’re better off embracing.

Is that what the authors you interviewed believe?

Not at all. In Chapter 1, the philosopher Galen Strawson argues that we cannot freely create our characters, and therefore that we are not ultimately responsible for our behavior. But he still thinks that we can deny free will and lead moral and fulfilling lives.

You used to defend a similar view.

That’s true, Strawson was a huge inspiration for my early work. I still agree with him that we can’t spin our characters and personality out of thin air. But now I side more with his father—the great philosopher P. F. Strawson—who argued that blame and responsibility can be grounded in our emotional responses. We talk a bit about his view in the interview.

You also interviewed Philip Zimbardo. Isn’t there a movie about him?

Yes, it’s called The Stanford Prison Experiment and it’s a fictionalized retelling of his famous 1971 experiment. Billy Crudup plays Zimbardo.

The guy who played ‘Dr. Manhattan’ in Watchmen?

That’s him! And in Chapter 2, the real Philip Zimbardo discusses that study and several others that show how situational factors—our social and physical environment—can exert tremendous influence over our behavior. We discuss a whole tradition in social psychology that reveals our characters to be less stable than we think. According to Zimbardo, having a better understanding of the causes of our behavior can lead to a more just and effective approach to education, foreign policy, and criminal justice.

1
Galen Strawson

You Cannot Make Yourself the Way You Are

“You sound to me as though you don’t believe in free will,” said Billy Pilgrim.

“If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings,” said the Tralfamadorian, “I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by ‘free will.’ I’ve visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.”

—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Imagine for a moment that it was not Timothy McVeigh who destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, but a mouse. Suppose this mouse got into the wiring of the electrical system, tangled the circuits, and caused a big fire, killing all those inside. Now think of the victims’ families. There would, of course, still be enormous grief and suffering, but there would be one significant difference: there would be no resentment, no consuming anger, no hatred, no need to see the perpetrator punished (even if the mouse somehow got out of the building) in order to experience “closure.” Why the difference? Because McVeigh, we think, committed this terrible act of his own free will. He chose to do it, and he could have chosen not to. McVeigh, then, is morally responsible for the death of the victims in a way that the mouse would not be. And our sense of justice demands that he pay for this crime.

Humans have an undeniable tendency to see themselves as free and morally responsible beings. But there’s a problem. We also believe—most of us, anyhow—that our environment and our heredity entirely shape our characters. (What else could?) But we aren’t responsible for our environment, and we aren’t responsible for our heredity. So, by extension, we aren’t responsible for our characters. But then how can we be responsible for acts that arise from our characters?

This question has a simple but extremely unpopular answer: we aren’t. We are not and cannot be ultimately responsible for our behavior. According to this argument, while it may be of great pragmatic value to hold people responsible for their actions, and to employ systems of reward and punishment, no one is really deserving of blame or praise for anything. This answer has been around for more than two thousand years; it is backed by solid arguments with premises that are consistent with how most of us view the world. Yet few today give this position the serious consideration it deserves. The view that free will is a fiction is called counterintuitive, absurd, pessimistic, pernicious, and, most commonly, unacceptable, even by those who recognize the force of the arguments behind it. Philosophers who reject God, an immaterial soul, and even absolute morality, cannot bring themselves to do the same for the dubious concept of free will—not in their day-to-day lives, nor even in books, articles, and extraordinarily complex theories.

There are a few exceptions, however, and one of them is Galen Strawson, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin. Strawson is one of the most respected theorists in the free-will industry and, at the same time, a bit of an outsider. Two main philosophical camps engage in a technical and often bitter dispute over whether free will is compatible with the truth of determinism (the theory that the future is fixed, because every event has a cause, and the causes stretch back until the beginning of the universe). But if there is one thing that both sides agree on, it’s that we do have free will and that we are morally responsible. Strawson, with a simple, powerful argument that we will discuss below, bets the other way.

Strawson’s was not always such a minority view. Enlightenment philosophers like Spinoza, Diderot, Voltaire, and d’Holbach challenged ordinary conceptions of freedom, doubted whether we could be morally responsible, and looked to ground theories of blame and punishment in other ways. Strawson is a descendant of these philosophers, but still incorporates the British analytic tradition into his work. His views are clear and honest, and there are no cop-outs—quite unusual in a literature mired in obscure terminology and wishful thinking. And his essays are always deeply connected to everyday experience. One of the main issues Strawson addresses is why we so instinctively and stubbornly see ourselves as free and responsible. What is it about human experience that makes it difficult, maybe impossible, to believe something that we can easily demonstrate as true?

Galen Strawson is also the son of perhaps the most respected analytic philosopher of the past century, the great metaphysician and philosopher of language, P. F. Strawson.¹ Though not primarily concerned with the topic of free will, P. F. Strawson has written one of the classic papers of the genre, an essay called “Freedom and Resentment.” Galen (not from oedipal motives, he assures us) is one of its most effective critics.

March 2003

1 The Buck Stops—Where?

TAMLER SOMMERS: You start out your book Freedom and Belief by saying that there is no such thing as free will. What exactly do you mean by “free will”?

GALEN STRAWSON: I mean what nearly everyone means. Almost all human beings believe that they are free to choose what to do in such a way that they can be truly, genuinely responsible for their actions in the strongest possible sense—responsible period, responsible without any qualification, responsible sans phrase, responsible tout court, absolutely, radically, buck-stoppingly responsible; ultimately responsible, in a word—and so ultimately morally responsible when moral matters are at issue. Free will is the thing you have to have if you’re going to be responsible in this all-or-nothing way. That’s what I mean by free will. That’s what I think we haven’t got and can’t have.

I like philosophers—I love what they do; I love what I do—but they have made a truly unbelievable hash of all this. They’ve tried to make the phrase “free will” mean all sorts of different things, and each of them has told us that what it really means is what he or she has decided it should mean. But they haven’t made the slightest impact on what it really means, or on our old, deep conviction that free will is something we have.

TS: That’s true. Biologists, cognitive scientists, neurologists—they all seem to have an easier time, at least considering the possibility that there’s no free will. But philosophers defend the concept against all odds, at the risk of terrible inconsistency with the rest of their views about the world. If it’s a fact that there’s no free will, why do philosophers have such a hard time accepting it?

GS: There’s a Very Large Question here, as Winnie the Pooh would say. There’s a question about the pathology of philosophy, or more generally about the weird psychological mechanisms that underwrite commitment to treasured beliefs—religious, theoretical, or whatever—in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. But to be honest, I can’t really accept it myself, and not because I’m a philosopher. As a philosopher I think the impossibility of free will and ultimate moral responsibility can be proved with complete certainty. It’s just that I can’t really live with this fact from day to day. Can you, really? As for the scientists, they may accept it in their white coats, but I’m sure they’re just like the rest of us when they’re out in the world—convinced of the reality of radical free will.

TS: Well, let’s move on to the argument then. There’s a famous saying of Schopenhauer’s that goes like this: “A man can surely do what he wants to do. But he cannot determine what he wants.” Is this idea at the core of your argument against moral responsibility?

GS: Yes—and it’s an old thought. It’s in Hobbes somewhere, and it’s in Book Two of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and I bet some ancient Greek said it, since they said almost everything.

Actually, though, there’s a way in which it’s not quite true. If you want to acquire some want or preference you haven’t got, you can sometimes do so. You can cultivate it. Perhaps you’re lazy and unfit and you want to acquire a love of exercise. Well, you can force yourself to do it every day and hope you come to like it. And you just might; you might even get addicted. Maybe you can do the same if you dislike olives.

TS: But then where did that desire come from—the desire to acquire the love of exercise … or olives?

GS: Right—now the deeper point cuts in. For suppose you do want to acquire a want you haven’t got. The question is, where did the first want—the want for a want—come from? It seems it was just there, just a given, not something you chose or engineered. It was just there, like most of your preferences in food, music, footwear, sex, interior lighting, and so on.

I suppose it’s possible that you might have acquired the first want, that’s the want for a want, because you wanted to! It’s theoretically possible that you had a want to have a want to have a want. But this is very hard to imagine, and the question just rearises: Where did that want come from? You certainly can’t go on like this forever. At some point your wants must be just given. They will be products of your genetic inheritance and upbringing, in which you had no say. In other words, there’s a fundamental sense in which you did not and cannot make yourself the way you are. And this, as you say, is the key step in the basic argument against ultimate moral responsibility, which goes like this:

1. You do what you do—in the circumstances in which you find yourself—because of the way you are;
2. so if you’re going to be ultimately responsible for what you do, you’re going to have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are—at least in certain mental respects;
3. but you can’t be ultimately responsible for the way you are (for the reasons just given);
4. so you can’t be ultimately responsible for what you do.

TS: I suppose it’s the third step that people have the most trouble accepting.

GS: Yes, although the step seems fairly clear when you look at it the right way. Sometimes people explain why (3) is true by saying that you can’t be causa sui—you can’t be the cause of yourself, you can’t be truly or ultimately self-made in any way. As Nietzsche puts it, in his usual, tactful way:

The causa sui is the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far; it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic. But the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for “freedom of the will” in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Münchhausen’s audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness.

There’s lots more to say about this basic argument, and there are lots of ways in which people have tried to get around the conclusion. But none of them work.

2 Viewing Hitler Like the Lisbon Earthquake

TS: I notice that the argument makes no mention of the theory of determinism. But historically the debate over freedom and responsibility has revolved around the truth of determinism, and the question of whether free will and moral responsibility are compatible with it.

GS: Yes, many people think that determinism—the view that the history of the universe is fixed, the view that everything that happens is strictly necessitated by what has already gone before, in such a way that nothing can ever happen otherwise than it does—is the real threat to free will, to ultimate moral responsibility. But the basic argument against ultimate moral responsibility works whether determinism is true or false. It’s a completely a priori argument, as philosophers like to say. That means that you can see that it is true just lying on your couch. You don’t have to get up off your couch and go outside and examine the way things are in the physical world. You don’t have to do any science. And actually, current science isn’t going to help. Ultimate moral responsibility is also ruled out by the theory of relativity. Einstein himself, in a piece written as a homage to the Indian mystical poet Rabindranath Tagore, said that “a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, [would] smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.”

TS: And the illusion that he and others were morally responsible for their actions?

GS: Yes, but I just want to stress the word “ultimate” before “moral responsibility.” Because there’s a clearly weaker, everyday sense of “morally responsible” in which you and I and millions of other people are thoroughly morally responsible people.

TS: I suppose your lazy unfit man who acquires a love for exercise is responsible for his choice in this weaker everyday sense. He made the choice, and he acted on it. On the other hand, it seems that in order for this man to be deserving of praise for his decision, he would have to be morally resp...