IS THERE AN ACCEPTABLE HARD INCOMPATIBILIST POSITION ON MANAGING CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR?

Perhaps the most frequently and urgently voiced criticism of the type of view I am developing is that the responses to criminal behavior it will allow are insufficient for acceptable social policy. The way matters actually lie, however, is more complex than this objection suggests. Some of the most prominent justifications for punishing criminals will be undermined by hard incompatibilism, and thus in some respects it may appear to permit fewer policies for opposing crime than the alternative positions. But, as we shall see, each of these justifications faces significant difficulties independent of hard incompatibilist considerations. At the same time, hard incompatibilism leaves other methods for responding to such behavior intact, and arguably, these methods are sufficient for good social policy. As a result, we need not extend Dennett's advice to criminals and treat them as if they were morally responsible (with a possible exception, as we shall see). Let us discern which justifications for dealing with criminal behavior are legitimate and which are not, given hard incompatibilism, while taking care to note whether this view is left with fewer tenable policies than the alternative positions.

The problem for the hard incompatibilist position is that without the robust conceptions of agency that are ruled out if hard incompatibilism is true, it would appear unacceptable to blame criminals for what they have done, and we would therefore seem to have inadequate justification for punishing them.

In recent decades, with advances in psychology, sociology, and neuroscience, the notion that certain patterns of human behavior may ultimately be due to factors beyond our control has become a serious cultural concern. In our society, the possibility that criminal behavior, for example, may be caused by influences in upbringing or by abnormal features of the brain is very much a live hypothesis. Furthermore, many people agree that criminals cannot be blameworthy for actions and tendencies produced in this way. At the same time, most assume that even if criminal actions frequently have this sort of causal history, ordinary actions are not similarly generated, but rather are freely chosen, and we can be praiseworthy or blameworthy for them.

A less popular and more radical claim is that factors beyond our control produce all of our actions. Since the first appearance of strategies for comprehensive explanation in ancient times, philosophers have been aware that our theories about the world can challenge our commonplace assumptions about agency in this more general way. One reaction to this stronger claim is that it would leave morality as it is, or that if any revisions must occur, they are insubstantial. But another is that we would not then be blameworthy or praiseworthy for our actions – in the philosophical idiom, we would not be morally responsible for them. I shall argue that our best scientific theories indeed have the consequence that we are not morally responsible for our actions.

CHALLENGING COMPATIBILISM

In Chapter 1, I argued that whether an agent could have done otherwise is explanatorily irrelevant to whether he is morally responsible for his action. There I also contended that this argument does not undermine incompatibilism, for there is an incompatibilist intuition that remains untouched by it. The intuition is that if all of our behavior was “in the cards” before we were born, in the sense that things happened before we came to exist that by way of a deterministic causal process, inevitably result in our behavior, then we cannot legitimately be blamed for our wrongdoing. I also remarked that in the dialectic of the debate, one should not expect compatibilists to be moved much by this incompatibilist intuition alone to abandon their position. Rather, the best type of challenge to compatibilism is that this sort of causal determination is in principle as much of a threat to moral responsibility as is covert manipulation. In this chapter, I develop this argument.

This anti-compatibilist strategy plays a pivotal role in my argument for the causal history principle:

HARD INCOMPATIBILISM DEFINED AND DEFENDED

My version of hard incompatibilism consists of two main theses. The first is that all of our actions and choices are either alien-deterministic events – events such that there are causal factors beyond our control by virtue of which they are causally determined, or truly random events – those that are not produced by anything at all, or partially random events – those for which factors beyond the agent's control contribute to their production but do not determine them, while there is nothing that supplements the contribution of these factors to produce the events. The second thesis is that incompatibilism defined by the Causal History Principle is true. Traditionally, incompatibilism is the view that freedom of the sort required for moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism. I have expanded the notion to mean that freedom of this sort is incompatible with our actions and choices being events that lie on the continuum from alien-deterministic through partially random to truly random events. Together, these two theses yield the conclusion that we do not have the kind of free will required for moral responsibility.

The justification for each of these claims is implicit in the case I've made against libertarianism and compatibilism. The argument for the first thesis – that all of our actions and choices are events that lie on the responsibility-undermining continuum – arises from the arguments developed in Chapter 3 (Empirical Objections to Agent-Causal Libertarianism).

INTRODUCTION

Critics of libertarianism have contended that indeterministically free action cannot be reconciled with certain provisions in action theory that libertarians themselves would want to endorse. Specifically, they have argued that a libertarian theory of action cannot allow for agents to be morally responsible for freely willed action, for freely willed action to meet plausible general requirements on explanation, and for freely willed action to be rational. These kinds of criticisms are sometimes categorized as coherence objections to libertarianism. According to another sort of complaint against libertarianism, the free will it espouses does not harmonize with the empirical evidence. Our choices produce physical events in the brain and in the rest of the body, and these events would seem to be governed by physical laws. The libertarian position must make it credible that our choices could be free in the sense it advocates given the evidence we have about these physical laws, and according to the objection, this cannot be done. This challenge gives rise to a family of empirical objections to libertarianism, the subject of the next chapter.

The concern of this chapter is the coherence of libertarianism, predominantly the first of the three mentioned coherence objections – whether a plausible libertarian theory of free will can allow for moral responsibility.

TWO INCOMPATIBILIST INTUITIONS

The claim that moral responsibility for an action requires that the agent could have done otherwise is surely attractive. Moreover, it seems reasonable to contend that a requirement of this sort is not merely a necessary condition of little consequence, but that it plays a significant role in explaining why an agent is morally responsible. For if an agent is to be blameworthy for an action, it seems crucial that she could have done something to avoid being blameworthy – that she could have done something to get herself off the hook. If she is to be praiseworthy for an action, it seems important that shecould have done something less admirable. Libertarians have often grounded their incompatibilism precisely in such intuitions. As a result, they have often defended the following principle of alternative possibilities:

(1) An action is free in the sense required for moral responsibility only if the agent could have done otherwise than she actually did.

or a similar principle about choice:

(2) An action is free in the sense required for moral responsibility only if the agent could have chosen otherwise than she actually did.

I shall argue that despite resourceful attempts to defend conditions of this sort, any such requirement that is relevant to explaining why an agent is morally responsible for an action falls to counterexamples. I maintain instead that the most plausible and fundamentally explanatory incompatibilist principles concern the causal history of an action, and not alternative possibilities.

INTRODUCTION

When people are first confronted with hard determinism, initial reactions are often apprehensive. Frequently, the first response is that lives would then have no purpose, and a dispirited resignation to one's fate would be inevitable. Indeed, philosophical critics have contended that if hard determinism were true, we would lack the sort of control over our lives that would allow us to derive fulfillment from the projects we pursue. The power to affect our futures would not be ours in a sense sufficiently strong for our projects to count as our achievements, and as a result the possibility of meaning in life would be jeopardized.

Another common first response to hard determinism is that it would endanger the rich emotional texture of our relationships with others. We have seen that P.F. Strawson has developed a philosophical elaboration of this reaction. For him, a hard determinist conviction would imperil the other-directed reactive attitudes essential to the interpersonal relationships that make our lives meaningful. It could also jeopardize self-directed attitudes such as guilt and repentance, crucial not only to good relationships with others but also to personal moral development.

Philosophers have also contended that determinism can make a significant contribution to meaning in life. The Stoics argued that affirming determinism while taking a broader perspective can result in a profound sort of equanimity.

INTRODUCTION

The most significant empirical objections to agent-causal libertarianism challenge its capacity to accommodate our best natural scientific theories. Different aspects of this type of libertarianism give rise to two such objections. First, given our scientific understanding of the world, how could there exist anything as fabulous as an agent-causal power? It would appear that our natural scientific theories could not yield an account of a power of this sort. Second, given our scientific understanding, how could there be agent-caused decisions that are freely willed in the sense required for moral responsibility? Such decisions, it would seem, would not be constrained by the laws of nature, and therefore could not exist in the natural world.

Let us begin with the first of these two issues. Some libertarians maintain that there could be no natural scientific account of agentcausal powers. But they do not conclude from this that such powers do not exist, only that they could not be wholly physically realized. For others, a more congenial approach is to avoid non-physicalism by exploiting the resources of nonreductive materialism. According to nonreductive materialism generally construed, causal powers in the purview of sciences such as biology and psychology arise solely as a result of the organization of their material constituents, while they do not reduce to microphysical causal powers.

PERCEIVING THE WORLD THROUGH LANGUAGE

As I have described substance concepts, having these need not depend on knowing words. Preverbal humans, indeed, any animal that collects practical knowledge over time of how to relate to specific substances needs to have concepts of these. On the other hand, it is clear that language interacts with substance concepts in vigorous ways, completely transforming the conceptual repertoire. Putnam (1975) argued for what he called “the division of linguistic labor,” according to which laymen can borrow on the concepts of experts. Though offering an entirely different analysis, I will conclude similarly, that the public language plays a crucial role both in the acquisition of substance concepts and also in their completed structure.

The story so far about substance concepts seems to collide with the obvious fact that many of these concepts, both for children and adults, have been acquired without encountering the substances “themselves” but only by hearing about them. With regard to these very same substances, moreover, we are often in the position that Kripke (1972) and Putnam (1975) observed, having no unique descriptions of them in mind either, so that descriptionist theories of how extensions are determined also do not fit these cases. I will argue that this entire problem falls away if we view speech as a direct medium for the perception of objects.

It is traditional to assume that gathering information by being told things is a radically different sort of process from gathering information directly through perception.

THE PLAN

There are many alternative ways that a mind or brain might represent that two of its representations were of the same object or property – the “Strawson” model, the “duplicates” model, the “equals sign” model, the “synchrony” model, the “Christmas lights” model, the “anaphor” model, and so forth (Section 10.1). In the last chapter I discussed what would constitute that a mind or brain was using one of these systems rather than another in order to mark identity. In this chapter, I discuss the devastating impact of the Strawson model of identity marking on the notion that there are such things as modes of presentation in thought. I will then argue that Evans' idea that there are “dynamic Fregean thoughts” has exactly the same implications as the Strawson model. In Chapter 12, I will claim that, in fact, all of the other models of identity marking we have discussed are strictly isomorphic to the Strawson model, hence have exactly the same devastating results for modes of presentation. There is no principled way to individuate modes of presentation such as to achieve any semblance of the set of effects for the sake of which Frege introduced them.

NAIVE STRAWSON-MODEL MODES OF PRESENTATION

Suppose that our minds/brains used Strawson markers for marking identity. Keeping clearly in mind that the project here is neither exegesis of Strawson's text nor exegesis of Frege's, let us ask what, on this model, would correspond most closely to the Frege-inspired notion that the same object can be thought of by a thinker under various different “modes of presentation.”

When my mother was three, her father came home one evening without his beard and she insisted he was Uncle Albert, my grandfather's younger and beardless brother. She thought he was, as usual, being a terrible tease, and she cried when he didn't admit his real identity. Only when he pulled out her daddy's silver pocket watch with its distinctive and beloved pop-up cover was she willing to be corrected. But just who was it that she had been thinking was being so mean, this man (her daddy) or Uncle Albert? This is what I mean by a confused idea.

I have an old letter from Yale's alumni association inquiring whether I, Mrs. Donald P. Shankweiler, knew of the whereabouts of their “alumnus” Ruth Garrett Millikan. This seemed a sensible question, I suppose, as according to their records we lived at the same address. Since I lived with myself, perhaps I knew where I was? By not owning up I evaded solicitations from Yale's alumni fund for a good many years.

More often, confusions about the identities of things are disruptive rather than amusing. It is fortunate that we generally manage recognition tasks so well, and our ability to do so deserves careful study. I will argue in this book that the most central job of cognition is the exceedingly difficult task of reidentifying individuals, properties, kinds, and so forth, through diverse media and under diverse conditions.

ABILITIES ARE NOT DISPOSITIONS OF THE MOST COMMON SORT

The conception you have of a substance does not determine the extension of your concept. The extension is the extent of a certain substance in nature, not whatever you would identify as part of the extension. But the extent of which substance? That question is crucial. What determines, in the particular case, what particular substance one's perhaps stumbling, sketchy, and inadequate conception is aiming at? This chapter will make some progress toward answering that question. Further pieces of the puzzle will be added in Chapter 5, and the last pieces will finally settle into place at the end of Chapter 14.

Substance concepts are abilities of a certain kind. They are, in part, abilities to reidentify their assigned substances. How are these substances assigned? It is not a function of the cognitive systems as handed down by natural selection to identify any particular substance. Natural selection did not endow me with the ability to identify either 1969 Plymouth Valiants, or gasoline, or my husband. What I was endowed with was the capacity to acquire these abilities. Thus the general form of the question what determines the reference of a certain substance concept is: What determines what a learned ability is an ability to do? It will help to tackle the matter in this entirely general form.

The question of what abilities are deserves a lot of attention that it hasn't gotten.

THE COMPLAINT AGAINST EXTERNALISM

The view of substance concepts I am offering is an uncompromisingly externalist view. What makes a thought be about a certain substance is nothing merely in the mind, nor any mere disposition of the mind, not even a wide disposition, but the thought's origin – an external causal/historical relation between the concept and the substance (Section 4.8). But meaning externalism has recently come under heavy attack on the grounds that it leaves thinkers in no position to know themselves either what they are thinking about or whether they are genuinely thinking at all. And indeed, the best-known externalist theories all do seem to have this consequence. There is no necessity for an externalist thesis to have this consequence, however, and I propose to show how to avoid it.

What is needed to counter this entirely reasonable complaint against meaning externalism, I believe, is first an adequate account of what would constitute knowing what one is thinking of. If you are directly thinking about an external object, knowing what you are thinking of obviously cannot be done as Russell once described it, by having the object of thought literally within or before your conscious mind. Nor, a fortiori, can it be done by simultaneously holding your thought, or a thought of your thought, before your conscious mind, on the one hand, and comparing it with its object, also held before the mind, on the other. What on earth then could knowing what one was thinking about possibly be?

INTRODUCTION

I would like to understand what the basic principles are that distinguish the vision of thought we have generated using the Strawson image of sameness marking from Frege's original vision of thoughts as exemplifying modes of presentation. The first conclusion I will reach is that, surprisingly, the way the Strawson markers mark identity plays no role in determining this difference. The interaction of Strawson's image of sameness marking with Frege's vision of modes of presentation yields strikingly unFregean results. Yet these results are not merely an artifact of the Strawson model. They follow given any model of sameness marking. Strawson's way of marking identity highlights a general feature implicitly present in all other models as well. It will take a while to argue for this conclusion. I will place particular emphasis on the equals marker, and on the image of thoughts as sentencelike, in which the equals-marker model is embedded. For initially it is quite unintuitive that this particular model is isomorphic to the Strawson model. Such is the hold that the mental sentence image of thought has on all of us, with its careful but, as I will argue, illusory distinction between duplicates markers and equals markers, that is, between graspings of necessary identity and contingent judgments of identity.

Further search is thus needed to understand the division between the vision of thought we have generated and Frege's original vision of thoughts as exemplifying modes of presentation. What exactly is the source of the difficulties we have encountered in trying to interpret what a mode of presentation might actually be in a thinking mind or brain?