I know, I know, I haven't blogged in like forever. Anyway, here's an excerpt from a preliminary draft of something I'm working on for my class on the Metaphysics of Freedom. Let me know what you think!
I think we have to be careful when speaking about freedom and responsibility. There is too often an assumption in the texts that these terms refer to actual somethings. For instance, that my being free is a fact about me, rather than a description of my actions. The same goes for moral responsibility. We have a temptation to describe someone as “guilty” or “responsible,” when all we are actually saying is this individual was the primary actor involved in said event.
To say that I am responsible for breaking a certain vase is not to refer to a specific part of me that is a responsible-something. It is simply a summation of facts, which consist in a description of past occurrences taking place. My arm raised. That arm knocked into the vase. The vase was moved far enough off the table that it was no longer able to rest on it. The vase fell to the floor and shattered. Now, what caused the vase to break? These circumstances and nothing more. There may in fact be several causal mechanisms taking place in my head, but none any less perfunctory than these other ones. One may desire to posit a motivated agent that decided to lift his arm, but who is this agent and how can we be so sure about his mental faculties that we can rest assured that “he did it”?
Perhaps another example will illuminate things a bit more. It is the year 2050, and my grandchildren have hired a new Sony R8237 Robot to take care of me in my slovenly old age. It beats the nursing home. The R8237 looks like nothing more than bunch of metal scraps soldered together, but it is special in that it is trained to learn human behavior and emulate it to the best of its abilities. While watching a video program, the R8237 sees one of the actresses washing dishes. The actress is upset because her boyfriend never helps wash the dishes, so she starts to throw them against the ground, breaking them one by one. Later that night, when washing the dishes, the R8237 begins taking the dishes and systematically tossing each one onto the kitchen tile, shattering them. My grandchildren call tech support for an explanation of what happened, and they are informed that the R8237 was simply learning human behavior. Sony sends a wireless firmware download and the robot is instantly updated to never break dishes again. My grandchildren instruct me to not allow the robot to watch TV anymore. There is never a moment when we hold the robot blameworthy. We simply accept that its actions are the result of determined causes and effects that were out of its control.
Let us fast-forward another 50 years to the year 2100 and Sony has come out with its latest model caretaker, the S9348, upgraded to not only learn human behavior more accurately, but look human as well. In fact, instead of “S9348”, people just call him “Sam” because they can scarcely tell the difference between Sam and a real person. My great-great-grandchildren hire the robot to take care of my grandson. While working, Sam observes my grandson drinking Jim Beam from the bottle… a lot (chip off the ole block). Soon enough, Sam proceeds to do this as well. Eventually, my great-great-grandchildren observe this behavior on one of their visits and immediately scold Sam for drinking all day. No call to tech support. No firmware download. They just yell at him. What has changed between the R8237 and the S9348? The latter model looks human. What does this say about our concepts of moral responsibility and freedom? They do not come from observing the world and they certainly do not come from philosophical speculation. They come from us, and I mean this in the strict sense. How free are you? As free as I am. How responsible are you? As responsible as I would consider myself. I may have no more existential status than an R8237, but I look like I do. Why? Because I look like you and you feel like you do. How do I know you feel like you do? Because I feel like I do.
The debate over freedom is not a scientific one. If it was, it would have been decided eons ago. Based on the laws of physics, minus a few quantum-level inconsistencies, everything is determined. The idea of freedom is self-fulfilling; it comes from the idea itself, or perhaps the feeling that leads to the idea. The same goes for moral responsibility. I place as much moral responsibility as I would deem necessary for myself if I were in the same situation. This is not to say that if I eventually found myself in that situation, I would not balk at accepting blame. We quite often ask to be judged under kinder standards. But we usually follow that up by being more understanding of the same crime committed by others later. (Some of us are just hypocrites, but the fact we have a word for that just strengthens my point.) Sartre serves as a useful guide. Why are we ashamed from “the look”? Because we know how we would feel when looking at another performing the same action.
Do we have alternatives when it comes to performing certain actions? It would seem we believe we do. If I inform someone that what he did was wrong, I am assuming there was a right way to act. We constantly walk through the world, unsure of how people will act. I am walking across the street and I cannot tell whether the woman coming from the opposite direction will pass on the left or the right. If she follows the same rules as when driving, she will pass on the right. But this is not necessarily the case. She passes on the left instead and it requires a small readjustment of my own to make sure I do not bump into her. My head fills with disgust because she did not do what I had expected her to do. To me, she was a free actor, who had one of two ways to act and she acted “wrongly.” It does not matter if she was free or not, blameworthy or not, because on both accounts, I assert the affirmative.
How much is this a fact of our lives? I would venture to guess that if a scientist proved today, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the entire universe was determined, it would not have the least bit effect on how we perceive each other: free individuals responsible for our actions. Even in the case of compulsives, children or the mentally ill, we posit a certain sense of freedom, even if it is more limited than our own. It would seem the ability to place blame has an evolutionary advantage as well. If one can discover the individual root of transgression and remove it, the rest of the tribe, group, society, office, etc., is saved the continued aggravation.
There will always be those who need to know for certain whether the universe is determined, thinking that the answer to that question will also answer the question of free will. But I think it simply does not matter. Moral responsibility has nothing to with alternative possibilities as actually existing. Rather, it is associated with alternative possibilities as we feel they exist for ourselves, which we then reflect onto others.
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