It is generally believed that punishment presupposes responsibility. That is, it would be unjust to punish someone for doing something if he was not responsible for doing it. If I bonk your head with mine on purpose that is assault. If I do it because I trip, that is an accident. It would be fair to punish me for assaulting you. But it would be unfair to punish me for an accident. After all, I could not help it.
So what does it take for me to be responsible for my actions? Another thing that is widely believed is that I can be responsible only for those things that I freely will to do.
OK, so what is a free will? You will not be surprised to hear that there are different schools of thought about this question.
One side believes that my will is free only if my decisions are not determined by causes I have no control over. The other side thinks that this makes no sense: how could anything not have a cause? They think that my actions are free only if I am not impeded from doing what I want to do and that this could be true even if what I do is determined by causes lying outside of my control.
This is the philosophical debate about free will. It strikes many people as a merely academic question. Since we will never know whether our actions are causally determined or not, we cannot apply it to real world institutions like the law. But the achievements in neuroscience have made the free will debate a more urgent matter. While we are not yet capable of showing exactly how decisions are caused, it seems quite possible that we will do so. That gives the free will debate a new kind of urgency.
There are two questions each of which has two answers: “yes” and “no”.
Is determinism true? The two answers make up the columns in the table below.
Is it possible that our actions are free and we are responsible for at least some of the things we do even if determinism is true? The answers here are the rows.
| Determinism is true | Determinism is false | |
|---|---|---|
| Yes, freedom & responsibility are compatible with determinism | Compatibilism (Morse) | – (no one) |
| No, they aren’t (Incompatibilism) | Hard Determinism (Greene and Cohen) | Libertarianism (Libet) |
These labels are wonky. “Incompatibilism” is the name of the bottom row but “compatibilism” is only the name of the northwest box. And “hard determinism” is the name for only the southwest box while plain “determinism” refers to the whole western column. This is not the way I would have labeled the various positions. But we play the hand we’re dealt. Here is what those labels mean.
Determinism is the view that everything that happens is causally determined. To put it another way, everything that happens is the effect of a separate cause and causes make their effects happen. This includes human actions.
You may have qualms about whether the physical world is truly determinate or not. I think that probably won’t matter much in the end. The important question is whether human actions are caused in the same way that the movements of physical objects are caused.
Compatibilism is the view that our actions can be free, and we can be held responsible for what we do, even if determinism is true. Punishment is a way of holding people responsible for their actions.
Incompatibilism is the view that actions cannot be free, and we cannot be held responsible for what we do, if determinism is true.
Hard determinism combines incompatibilism and determinism.
Libertarianism combines incompatibilism with the denial of determinism.
Compatibilism is the more difficult position to understand, so I am going to spend a little time going over it. I am going to take a fairly simple version of compatibilism derived from Thomas Hobbes, a seventeenth century philosopher and mathematician. There are more complicated versions, but this will do to get us started.
A person’s actions are free, according to this simple version of compatibilism, if she can do what she wants to do. The idea is that freedom means there is nothing external blocking you from doing what you want to do. It does not matter whether your decision to do one thing rather than another was caused by factors outside of your control.
Here is a boring example to illustrate this simple version of compatibilism. No one can control whether they are are thirsty; thirst is not a matter of will. But thirst can cause us to do things like getting a drink of water. Imagine the following dialog:
“Where are you going?”
“To the kitchen to get a drink.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m thirsty.”
That’s the most ordinary thing in the world. And no one thinks I can control whether I feel thirsty or not. But no one really thinks that the fact that I have no control over whether I am thirsty means I am not free when I go to get a drink of water when my thirst causes me to get a do so. By contrast, if you blocked my way and prevented me from getting a drink, that would impede on my freedom.
Yes, yes, you can decide not to go to the kitchen even if you are thirsty. Maybe sitting through class is more important to you than getting a drink right now. But a compatibilist is going to say the desire to sit through class is something else that you do not control. One way or the other, your decision is going to be caused by something outside of your control.
Compatibilists think that this kind of example shows that they are describing what we ordinarily call free actions. They concede that if you asked someone an abstract question about whether freedom is compatible with causal determination, that person would say no. But, they think, the ordinary person’s descriptions of concrete actions as free or not free will match his definition. And the ordinary person’s abstract philosophical opinions are just confused: no one really understands what an uncaused action would be.
Incompatibilism is the view that responsibility for our actions is incompatible with the causal determination of our actions. Incompatibilists split into two camps depending on whether they think our actions are caused or not.
Libertarians think that our actions are not caused. That is why they deny that determinism is true. They think that there are some things in the universe that are not causally determined, namely, human actions. So they do not think that everything is causally determined.
Why would you be a libertarian? Perhaps you think that human beings are not exclusively material. If you think that a person has an immaterial soul and that this soul is what is responsible for making decisions, then you might think that our decisions are not subject to the laws that govern the physical universe.
The other branch of incompatibilism is called hard determinism. Hard determinists believe that our actions are caused and that causation is incompatible with responsibility. That is the view that Greene and Cohen defend.
Compatibilists are usually consequentialists about punishment. Incompatibilists, by contrast, are usually retributivists.
Compatibilists think our behavior is caused, so they tend to look for causes of good behavior, like deterrent threats.
Incompatibilists think that we are responsible for our actions only if we are free from causal influence. They think responsibility for actions has to be attached solely to the person who acts. So it is natural for them to think that the point of punishment is retribution for freely chosen evil.
That said there is no logical reason why the views on free will have to line up with those views about punishment. For example, Greene and Cohen are consequentialists about punishment but incompatibilists about responsibility.
Pay attention to the title: “For the Law, Neuroscience Changes Nothing and Everything” (italics added). There are going to be two sides to this: an argument for the conclusion that neuroscience changes nothing and an argument for the conclusion that it changes everything.
Greene and Cohen contend that the law is superficially compatibilist. The law only requires the capacity for rational behavior as a condition of criminal liability. That is compatible with the causal determination of our actions. You can be rational and have your actions causally determined at the same time. So, on the face of it, nothing that we can learn from neuroscience would directly contradict anything that the law says. That is why the title of their article starts with “For the Law, Neuroscience Changes Nothing.”
However, Greene and Cohen argue, we accept this superficially compatibilist rationality condition for incompatibilist reasons. They claim that we think of the rational person as a non-physical mind, distinct from the physical brain (the view that mind and brain are distinct entities is called dualism). They think we believe that a rational person can be held responsible because we think reason is free from the constraints of physical causation. The brain, by contrast, is subject to causal determination just like every other physical thing.
Neuroscience, according to Greene and Cohen, will undermine this dualist picture of persons by explaining more and more of our behavior as the product of physical causes. As a result, they believe, we will abandon the retributivist parts of our practices of punishment. The retributive ideal is that punishment is reserved for the guilty: those who freely chose to do bad things. Neuroscience, they believe, will show that no one freely chooses anything and so punishment for retributive reasons makes no sense.
In place of retributivism, they believe, we will take up a consequentialist approach to antisocial behavior. They think this is a good thing because they view consequentialism as the more humane approach to punishment. Because they believe that neuroscience will lead us to fundamentally rethink the purposes of the criminal justice system, they end the title of their article with the word “everything,” as in: “For the Law, Neuroscience Changes Nothing and Everything.” So really, in their opinion, neuroscience will change everything.
Greene and Cohen claim to show that we are tacitly incompatibilists with their example of Mr. Puppet. The idea is that Mr. Puppet would not be held responsible for his actions because they were so clearly formed by the scientist. But, they reason, if we aren’t willing to hold Mr. Puppet responsible for behavior that was caused, we should not hold anyone responsible for their behavior. Why? Everyone’s behavior is caused!
It seems to me that this is their main argument, so we will probably discuss it for some time. We are supposed to think that Mr. Puppet is not responsible and that, in turn, is supposed to show that we are incompatibilists. Without Mr. Puppet, I don’t see that they have another way of showing that people are implicitly incompatibilists.
You should be familiar with these points from today’s class.