FROM THE FIELD: A REPORT ON DANIEL DENNETT'S HOPKINS VISIT
-by Lorenzo Lazzerini-Ospri
“ In the Mind there is no absolute or free will; rather, the Mind is determined to will this or that by a cause, which has also been determined by another cause, and this again by another, and so on to infinity.”
(Spinoza, Ethics, II, Prop. 48)
(Spinoza, Ethics, II, Prop. 48)
C.J. was a thoroughly ordinary, unremarkable young man. An engineering student at the University of Texas, he had average grades, a loving wife, and an honorable past in the Marine Corps. That a sinister disposition was silently brewing inside him was a carefully kept secret, only revealed in the pages of his private diary.
Finally, on July 31, he decided: people had to die. Meticulously, he sat down and started to type:
“I don't really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I can't recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts. These thoughts constantly recur and it requires a tremendous mental effort to concentrate on useful tasks. [...] I talked with a Doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt overwhelming violent impulses. After one session I never saw the Doctor again, and since then I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail. After my death I wish an autopsy be performed on me to see if there is any visible physical disorder. I have had some tremendous headaches in the past and have consumed two large bottles of Excedrin in the past three months.”
He then proceeded to kill his wife, “[whom] I love dearly”, and his mother, stabbing both in the heart. Afterward, he drove to campus, aptly armed with plentiful guns and precision rifles, barricaded himself in the Main Building Tower, and started shooting people at random from the observation deck.
Sixteen people died that day before the sniper himself was gunned down by police.
Charles Joseph Whitman got his last wish: an autopsy was performed on his body. And bulging out of his hypothalamus, a malignant tumor was found, squashing a nearby almond-shaped structure called the amygdala.
Speculation has been rife ever since that the murderous impulses that drove Whitman to his killing spree were brought about by his brain tumor, without him having any “real control” – as he noted himself – over his own actions. The most disquieting aspect of the whole story might be not what it reveals about Mr. Whitman, but what it implies about ourselves. If extreme abnormal behavior is caused by extreme neurological abnormalities, isn't our ordinary, everyday behavior likewise determined by regular, free-flowing neural processes, over which we have absolutely no control?
This is the conclusion drawn by many modern-day adherents of materialism, including most neuroscientists, who have taken the underlying assumption of their discipline, namely that the physical processes of the brain engender the mind, to be mortal poison for our traditional notion of free will.
The dearly-held conviction that our conscious self has absolute control over our own actions, magically free from the constraints of physical causality acting on our brain is a vestige of old spiritualism – they aver – and is inconsistent with the scientific worldview. What follows next, inexorably, is that moral responsibility is an illusion. If a criminal's actions are determined by an unbreakable chain of causes and effects playing out in his neurophysiology, he cannot be held morally responsible, can he? Not really, just as Charles Whitman couldn't.
This notoriously unpalatable verdict is mainly challenged in the naturalist camp by so-called libertarians (no relation to political libertarians), who invoke quantum indeterminism in order to buttress belief in free will. According to them, the mind is indeed the master product of the brain, but the brain itself is a matchless device evolved in humans to harness the non-deterministic resolution of quantum events in order to exempt our choices from the hard necessity under which everything else in the universe must unfold.
Unfortunately, it's easy to see this alternative position is untenable. Even granting that quantum events may play some sort of role in neural function, they're as constrained by causality as their deterministic counterparts. The source of confusion here is the libertarians' failure to realize that chance is as incompatible with final causes as is hard necessity.
So, what's left to would-be defenders of free will and moral responsibility? Noted philosophical titan and author, Daniel Dennett, regaled us at Hopkins with a fun and thought-provoking conference last November, over which he expounded his personal take on this age-old intellectual fray.
Dennett champions a third way solution, a compatibilist approach avowing an unrecognized harmony exists between deterministic materialism and free will. The conflict – he argues – is the actual illusion, stemming from unthinking acceptance of the traditional ideology about the manifest image of the world.
The manifest image is simply the world of ordinary experience, made up of people, objects, animals, colors, words, and so on: The stuff we need in order to keep track of our environment so that we can fulfill our evolutionarily mandated role of thriving and, hopefully, reproducing in it.
Dennett argues free will is a self-evident fact of the manifest image, “as real as colors, as real as dollars.” Denying its existence is just as silly as decreeing colors illusory since all that “really” exists is photons of different wavelengths impacting our retinas. What Dennett calls for is doing away with the ideological overgrowth festering on the notion of free will. How? By effectively redefining the expression “free will” as traditionally understood (i.e. the conscious self choosing one's own actions among an array of equally possible alternatives at any given moment) to mean something else, namely the power of the brain to control our behavior so as to produce context-appropriate, rational, and desirable courses of actions. The conscious self needs not concern itself too much with all the causal antecedents impelling us to make a choice. In fact, there are theoretical reasons out there suggesting that keeping the actual decision-making from consciousness may be an evolved strategy to produce optimal outcomes (very briefly: imagine life as a game of poker; it is in your best interest not to give away your intentions to your opponents; what's the best, absolutely most effective way to achieve that? Why, not being aware of your intentions yourself!).1
Since rational control, not conscious choice, is emphasized here, how does this conception of free will measure up to the job of restoring an intellectual foundation for moral responsibility? Because that's the crux of the matter.
Free will has always been at heart a religious concept, a theologian's trick to try and reconcile the glaring contradiction of an omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent God, who allows people to suffer in this life, and condemns some of them to everlasting torment in His favorite dungeon in the next.
Being lucky enough to live in the age of naturalism, we can dispense with this metaphysics. But the most dreaded consequence of this graduation from ontological naivete has always been perceived to be the loss of any grounds for moral responsibility. Without free will, no system of blame appears immediately sound or satisfactory, as Whitman's case at the beginning of this article exemplifies.
Dennett in a way solves the problem by the stroke of a pen, by claiming (his definition of) free will is moral competence. A human being is deemed to have “free will” if she's conventionally understood to be fit for signing a contract: she's not under the control of another agent, she's motivated by more or less “normal” desires, she behaves overall rationally; more pithily, we can say that in order to be a morally competent (a.k.a. free-will-endowed) agent, a human being must be potentially swayed by the punishment that would befall her in case she reneged on the contract. This automatically provides a built-in, consequentialist justification for a system of penalties propping up pro-social behavior.
You do not jail a murderer because that's the way to dole out his just desert; his action was indeed not a metaphysically free choice between moral and immoral alternatives at the moment of the murder, making the guilty deserving of suffering in the form of involuntary confinement. No, you jail a murderer because the penalty of detention makes up a deterrent for other would-be murderers.
There are would-be murderers out there who will never be swayed - no matter the punishment. This is the case of people with certain limbic tumors or extremely toxic upbringings, arrant imbeciles, and so forth. These people should be regarded as lacking free will, and be excused traditional punishment (which doesn't mean they should be left loose in society; indeed, by lacking free will they forgo most of the rights of citizenship).
So, to sum up, what can be said of Daniel Dennett's intellectual project? It is undoubtedly a noble one.
One cannot avoid the impression that his chief drive was to fend off the threat of fatalism, which he regards as socially deleterious2, but in such a way that would not provide renewed intellectual vigor to our traditional view of punishment, i.e. retributive punishment, a sadistic approach that only caters to our baser instincts, and regrettably so much inform the American criminal justice system.
No, Dennett's beatific vision encompasses a world where free will and moral responsibility retain their seat, citizens have rights, yet the account of punishment is scrupulously a consequentialist one.
If the nobility of the enterprise cannot be doubted, what about its objective merit? It's clear that Dennett's definition of “free will” has hardly anything to do with what is commonly understood by that term. Dennett claims the traditional understanding is mistaken ideology, but that doesn't change the fact words serve no other purpose than making us understand each other. If radically redefining a historically charged term runs the risk of obfuscating the debate, isn't it better to abandon the term altogether?
Dennett's position is indeed an incompatibilist one so far as the claim goes that humans have a unique metaphysical ability of making conscious choices free of physical causality. Why not just say then that a consequentialist version of moral responsibility exists and doesn't require free will after all?
The “reformed” notion of free will, linked as it is to moral responsibility and consequentialist punishment, also exposes Dennett's system to a further criticism, in that the distinction between those possessed of free will and those without, is a political one, and arbitrary withal.
Let's make an example. A clinical psychopath has abnormally high impulsivity and a physiological unresponsiveness to the threat of punishment. You can measure his skin conductance in response to the threat of an electric shock in the lab, and it won't budge from baseline. It's safe to say a subject such as this lacks Dennettian free will. Now, the problem is, psychopathy is a personality type that shows up in different people to different extent. There's a psychometric scale to measure it, ranging from 0 (best buddy you can ever meet) to 40 (full-blown bastard). Will you say only people scoring 30 or under are endowed with free will? Or should it be 35 and under, perhaps?
Dennett claims this is analogous to making 16 the cut-off age for allowing people to drive a car: fundamentally arbitrary, but not without a bit of social justification. So, this may be a useful notion, but is it satisfactory?3
And does it really achieve what it purports to? Take Bernard Madoff as a further example. Does he have free will? It does seem so: he doesn't suffer from any apparent neurological disorder, no mental retardation, no psychopathy (so far as an external observer can tell). He is in fact a man of remarkable talents, and yet he engaged year after year in a behavior that he knew would inevitably lead to his downfall. In other words, he was undeterred by punishment.
You may conclude there's a whole bunch of people who appear to have free will until they're revealed (ex post facto) not to. Indeed, any law-breaker in an ideal (or perfectly totalitarian) society where the chance of punishment for law-breaking is virtually identical to 1 would not have free will. Doesn't this degenerate, at the very least, into what we were seeking to avoid in the first place, namely moral exculpation?
Dennett argues in the negative, proclaiming that the acceptance of the benefits of living in society justifies the system. Again, this may be useful, but how does it compare to an alternative where a purely consequentialist approach is used for crime that doesn't invoke free will or moral responsibility at all? The latter was classically regarded as a dystopian system, where people could be subject to preventive “treatment” before even committing a crime, summary round up and detention for the innocent as well as the guilty, just because any notion of rights or responsibility would be let to lapse.
But this unrefined and primitive utilitarianism is hardly propounded by anybody nowadays. It is a straw, and surely Dennett cannot contend to be debating it. The serious alternative is a consequentialist system where maximizing utility, or common happiness, takes into account the innate desires of humans for security and stability (a system, therefore, where legal rights are upheld).
Is Dennett's alternative really more consistent, rationally defensible and conducive to better real-world outcomes?
There are no universally agreed-upon answers, but it is perhaps most fitting that we should end this report by leaving open questions for the reader, that each may work out his or her own answers. For if modern science and philosophy have taken away a great deal of ontological innocence from men (and women too), they've never ceased to urge them on to greater and greater understanding after their own reason.
NOTES
1-For more on this, see Clegg, Liam F. (2012) Protean Free Will. California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.
2-Telling people they don't have free will indeed encourages them to behave badly. This has been carried out in a controlled study; see Vonasch AJ, Baumeister RF. (2012) Implications of free will beliefs for basic theory and societal benefit: Critique and implications for social psychology. Br J Soc Psychol.
3-For a fuller account of Dennett's argumentation on this matter, see Dennett, D. (2003) Freedom Evolves. Viking Books.
4- Wikipedia page for Daniel Dennett
Finally, on July 31, he decided: people had to die. Meticulously, he sat down and started to type:
“I don't really understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an average reasonable and intelligent young man. However, lately (I can't recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts. These thoughts constantly recur and it requires a tremendous mental effort to concentrate on useful tasks. [...] I talked with a Doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt overwhelming violent impulses. After one session I never saw the Doctor again, and since then I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail. After my death I wish an autopsy be performed on me to see if there is any visible physical disorder. I have had some tremendous headaches in the past and have consumed two large bottles of Excedrin in the past three months.”
He then proceeded to kill his wife, “[whom] I love dearly”, and his mother, stabbing both in the heart. Afterward, he drove to campus, aptly armed with plentiful guns and precision rifles, barricaded himself in the Main Building Tower, and started shooting people at random from the observation deck.
Sixteen people died that day before the sniper himself was gunned down by police.
Charles Joseph Whitman got his last wish: an autopsy was performed on his body. And bulging out of his hypothalamus, a malignant tumor was found, squashing a nearby almond-shaped structure called the amygdala.
Speculation has been rife ever since that the murderous impulses that drove Whitman to his killing spree were brought about by his brain tumor, without him having any “real control” – as he noted himself – over his own actions. The most disquieting aspect of the whole story might be not what it reveals about Mr. Whitman, but what it implies about ourselves. If extreme abnormal behavior is caused by extreme neurological abnormalities, isn't our ordinary, everyday behavior likewise determined by regular, free-flowing neural processes, over which we have absolutely no control?
This is the conclusion drawn by many modern-day adherents of materialism, including most neuroscientists, who have taken the underlying assumption of their discipline, namely that the physical processes of the brain engender the mind, to be mortal poison for our traditional notion of free will.
The dearly-held conviction that our conscious self has absolute control over our own actions, magically free from the constraints of physical causality acting on our brain is a vestige of old spiritualism – they aver – and is inconsistent with the scientific worldview. What follows next, inexorably, is that moral responsibility is an illusion. If a criminal's actions are determined by an unbreakable chain of causes and effects playing out in his neurophysiology, he cannot be held morally responsible, can he? Not really, just as Charles Whitman couldn't.
This notoriously unpalatable verdict is mainly challenged in the naturalist camp by so-called libertarians (no relation to political libertarians), who invoke quantum indeterminism in order to buttress belief in free will. According to them, the mind is indeed the master product of the brain, but the brain itself is a matchless device evolved in humans to harness the non-deterministic resolution of quantum events in order to exempt our choices from the hard necessity under which everything else in the universe must unfold.
Unfortunately, it's easy to see this alternative position is untenable. Even granting that quantum events may play some sort of role in neural function, they're as constrained by causality as their deterministic counterparts. The source of confusion here is the libertarians' failure to realize that chance is as incompatible with final causes as is hard necessity.
So, what's left to would-be defenders of free will and moral responsibility? Noted philosophical titan and author, Daniel Dennett, regaled us at Hopkins with a fun and thought-provoking conference last November, over which he expounded his personal take on this age-old intellectual fray.
Dennett champions a third way solution, a compatibilist approach avowing an unrecognized harmony exists between deterministic materialism and free will. The conflict – he argues – is the actual illusion, stemming from unthinking acceptance of the traditional ideology about the manifest image of the world.
The manifest image is simply the world of ordinary experience, made up of people, objects, animals, colors, words, and so on: The stuff we need in order to keep track of our environment so that we can fulfill our evolutionarily mandated role of thriving and, hopefully, reproducing in it.
Dennett argues free will is a self-evident fact of the manifest image, “as real as colors, as real as dollars.” Denying its existence is just as silly as decreeing colors illusory since all that “really” exists is photons of different wavelengths impacting our retinas. What Dennett calls for is doing away with the ideological overgrowth festering on the notion of free will. How? By effectively redefining the expression “free will” as traditionally understood (i.e. the conscious self choosing one's own actions among an array of equally possible alternatives at any given moment) to mean something else, namely the power of the brain to control our behavior so as to produce context-appropriate, rational, and desirable courses of actions. The conscious self needs not concern itself too much with all the causal antecedents impelling us to make a choice. In fact, there are theoretical reasons out there suggesting that keeping the actual decision-making from consciousness may be an evolved strategy to produce optimal outcomes (very briefly: imagine life as a game of poker; it is in your best interest not to give away your intentions to your opponents; what's the best, absolutely most effective way to achieve that? Why, not being aware of your intentions yourself!).1
Since rational control, not conscious choice, is emphasized here, how does this conception of free will measure up to the job of restoring an intellectual foundation for moral responsibility? Because that's the crux of the matter.
Free will has always been at heart a religious concept, a theologian's trick to try and reconcile the glaring contradiction of an omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent God, who allows people to suffer in this life, and condemns some of them to everlasting torment in His favorite dungeon in the next.
Being lucky enough to live in the age of naturalism, we can dispense with this metaphysics. But the most dreaded consequence of this graduation from ontological naivete has always been perceived to be the loss of any grounds for moral responsibility. Without free will, no system of blame appears immediately sound or satisfactory, as Whitman's case at the beginning of this article exemplifies.
Dennett in a way solves the problem by the stroke of a pen, by claiming (his definition of) free will is moral competence. A human being is deemed to have “free will” if she's conventionally understood to be fit for signing a contract: she's not under the control of another agent, she's motivated by more or less “normal” desires, she behaves overall rationally; more pithily, we can say that in order to be a morally competent (a.k.a. free-will-endowed) agent, a human being must be potentially swayed by the punishment that would befall her in case she reneged on the contract. This automatically provides a built-in, consequentialist justification for a system of penalties propping up pro-social behavior.
You do not jail a murderer because that's the way to dole out his just desert; his action was indeed not a metaphysically free choice between moral and immoral alternatives at the moment of the murder, making the guilty deserving of suffering in the form of involuntary confinement. No, you jail a murderer because the penalty of detention makes up a deterrent for other would-be murderers.
There are would-be murderers out there who will never be swayed - no matter the punishment. This is the case of people with certain limbic tumors or extremely toxic upbringings, arrant imbeciles, and so forth. These people should be regarded as lacking free will, and be excused traditional punishment (which doesn't mean they should be left loose in society; indeed, by lacking free will they forgo most of the rights of citizenship).
So, to sum up, what can be said of Daniel Dennett's intellectual project? It is undoubtedly a noble one.
One cannot avoid the impression that his chief drive was to fend off the threat of fatalism, which he regards as socially deleterious2, but in such a way that would not provide renewed intellectual vigor to our traditional view of punishment, i.e. retributive punishment, a sadistic approach that only caters to our baser instincts, and regrettably so much inform the American criminal justice system.
No, Dennett's beatific vision encompasses a world where free will and moral responsibility retain their seat, citizens have rights, yet the account of punishment is scrupulously a consequentialist one.
If the nobility of the enterprise cannot be doubted, what about its objective merit? It's clear that Dennett's definition of “free will” has hardly anything to do with what is commonly understood by that term. Dennett claims the traditional understanding is mistaken ideology, but that doesn't change the fact words serve no other purpose than making us understand each other. If radically redefining a historically charged term runs the risk of obfuscating the debate, isn't it better to abandon the term altogether?
Dennett's position is indeed an incompatibilist one so far as the claim goes that humans have a unique metaphysical ability of making conscious choices free of physical causality. Why not just say then that a consequentialist version of moral responsibility exists and doesn't require free will after all?
The “reformed” notion of free will, linked as it is to moral responsibility and consequentialist punishment, also exposes Dennett's system to a further criticism, in that the distinction between those possessed of free will and those without, is a political one, and arbitrary withal.
Let's make an example. A clinical psychopath has abnormally high impulsivity and a physiological unresponsiveness to the threat of punishment. You can measure his skin conductance in response to the threat of an electric shock in the lab, and it won't budge from baseline. It's safe to say a subject such as this lacks Dennettian free will. Now, the problem is, psychopathy is a personality type that shows up in different people to different extent. There's a psychometric scale to measure it, ranging from 0 (best buddy you can ever meet) to 40 (full-blown bastard). Will you say only people scoring 30 or under are endowed with free will? Or should it be 35 and under, perhaps?
Dennett claims this is analogous to making 16 the cut-off age for allowing people to drive a car: fundamentally arbitrary, but not without a bit of social justification. So, this may be a useful notion, but is it satisfactory?3
And does it really achieve what it purports to? Take Bernard Madoff as a further example. Does he have free will? It does seem so: he doesn't suffer from any apparent neurological disorder, no mental retardation, no psychopathy (so far as an external observer can tell). He is in fact a man of remarkable talents, and yet he engaged year after year in a behavior that he knew would inevitably lead to his downfall. In other words, he was undeterred by punishment.
You may conclude there's a whole bunch of people who appear to have free will until they're revealed (ex post facto) not to. Indeed, any law-breaker in an ideal (or perfectly totalitarian) society where the chance of punishment for law-breaking is virtually identical to 1 would not have free will. Doesn't this degenerate, at the very least, into what we were seeking to avoid in the first place, namely moral exculpation?
Dennett argues in the negative, proclaiming that the acceptance of the benefits of living in society justifies the system. Again, this may be useful, but how does it compare to an alternative where a purely consequentialist approach is used for crime that doesn't invoke free will or moral responsibility at all? The latter was classically regarded as a dystopian system, where people could be subject to preventive “treatment” before even committing a crime, summary round up and detention for the innocent as well as the guilty, just because any notion of rights or responsibility would be let to lapse.
But this unrefined and primitive utilitarianism is hardly propounded by anybody nowadays. It is a straw, and surely Dennett cannot contend to be debating it. The serious alternative is a consequentialist system where maximizing utility, or common happiness, takes into account the innate desires of humans for security and stability (a system, therefore, where legal rights are upheld).
Is Dennett's alternative really more consistent, rationally defensible and conducive to better real-world outcomes?
There are no universally agreed-upon answers, but it is perhaps most fitting that we should end this report by leaving open questions for the reader, that each may work out his or her own answers. For if modern science and philosophy have taken away a great deal of ontological innocence from men (and women too), they've never ceased to urge them on to greater and greater understanding after their own reason.
NOTES
1-For more on this, see Clegg, Liam F. (2012) Protean Free Will. California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.
2-Telling people they don't have free will indeed encourages them to behave badly. This has been carried out in a controlled study; see Vonasch AJ, Baumeister RF. (2012) Implications of free will beliefs for basic theory and societal benefit: Critique and implications for social psychology. Br J Soc Psychol.
3-For a fuller account of Dennett's argumentation on this matter, see Dennett, D. (2003) Freedom Evolves. Viking Books.
4- Wikipedia page for Daniel Dennett