Welcome to the seventh lecture of general philosophy. Today, we'll be talking mainly about free will,
but you will see that what we have to say also brings issues to do with mind and body personal identity action and so forth.
Here we've got David Hume, Charles Darwin, Peter Van in Waggon and Harry Frankfurt, who will play quite a big role today.
OK, so just to remind you, we've got the issue of free will and determinism,
and on the one hand, the incompatible list claims that if determinism is true,
if everything we do is completely causally determined, then that gives us no power to do anything other otherwise than we actually do.
In which case, according to the incompatible list, any moral assessment, any responsibility is out of the question Where is the soft determinist?
That's a compatible list. Who actually believes in determinism takes the world to be determined,
but nevertheless says that moral assessment of our actions is entirely appropriate because these are caused by and manifest our desires,
our purposes, our virtues and vices. So let's focus on this key phrase I could have done otherwise.
It does seem plausible for an action of mine to be genuinely a free action, one that is morally assessable.
It has to have been in some sense possible for me to do other than I did.
So. My doing a wasn't free unless I was able to choose something else may be.
Now if we then interpret the ability to do otherwise in terms of causal possibility,
that leads us towards incompatible ism, but compatible lists are going to interpret the phrase differently.
So most compatible, I think, would accept the principle that to be free, it needs to be possible for me to have done otherwise.
But they'll read that phrase differently. So here I've got an imagined conversation.
The libertarian says you can't have been genuinely free if in fact you had no power to do anything other than you actually did.
And the compatibly says yes, agreed. But if I'd wanted to do B instead of a,
then my own thought process is guided by my own desires and purposes would have caused me to do B instead of a.
There was no external barrier to my doing B. Had I chosen to do so?
That's what I mean when I say I could have done otherwise.
And then the libertarian comes back and says, but actually, if you were causally determined it wasn't in your power to want to do B instead of A.
OK, I want to say a little bit about the concept of choice, because that's playing quite a big role here.
And I think some clarification of exactly what we mean when we talk about a choice can help.
I think it's plausible that when we think of the could have done otherwise intuition, the thought that I'm only free if I could have done otherwise.
We are often thinking in terms of making a choice. But the notion of choice is a very slippery one.
Suppose I'm walking along with my mobile phone. Somebody comes and holds a gun to my head, says, Give me your phone or I'll shoot you.
Some would say I had no choice. I gave him the phone. Suppose somebody looks inside my brain and knows exactly what I'm going to do.
Does that imply that I have no choice? Well, let's consider that.
Noticed there are quite a lot of things that are sometimes meant by a I had no choice.
I've listed sort of five ways in which the phrase might be interpreted.
And you can see some of these are very different from others. Now, I want to object to the hijacking of the notion of choice here,
because it seems to me that the word choice rather unlike the word free, by the way, which carries all sorts of moral implications.
I think the word choice is a perfectly normal word in language that we learn when we are children.
So the standard way of learning the notion of choice is to be given a choice,
say my mother says to me when I'm very young, well, dear, would you like ice cream or would you like cake?
Or would you like fruit? It's your choice. You can have any one of those that you wish.
That's how we learn the notion of choice. Now, if that is a paradigm case of being given a choice,
then it's very odd for some philosopher to come along and say, Oh, but it wasn't a real choice.
If that's what we mean when we talk about a choice, then it was a choice.
Right now, you might want to say, well, it wasn't a free choice or it wasn't an undetermined choice, maybe.
But let's not have the word choice hijacked when it's a perfectly normal word of English language.
Now, let's consider the case where somebody comes and holds a gun to me and asks for my phone.
But let's suppose in this case, it's not actually my phone, it's yours.
You have lent me your phone. I'm walking down the high street with it.
Somebody comes, puts a gun to my head and says, Give me your phone or you're dead.
OK, so I give them your phone.
Now, the fact that it's your phone adds a certain moral dimension to this, though you might raise the question was I right to give the phone over?
And you might think, Well, I did something wrong there, I gave away your phone.
It wasn't mine to give, but I gave it. But actually, I can be absolved of blame because I wasn't responsible.
I wasn't morally responsible because I was acting under coercion.
Now, I just want to point out, there's an easy way out of that.
What the compatibles can say is, no, I did have a choice there.
I even had a free choice there. I made a decision in that situation to do one thing rather than another.
I chose to give your phone away rather than risk being shot.
But I'm not morally blameworthy, I agree on that.
But the reason I'm morally blameworthy is not because I wasn't acting as a responsible individual.
It's because I didn't do anything wrong in that situation. Giving your phone was the right thing to do.
And it seems to me that's a plausible line of argument, right?
So you can see that there are different ways of as it were cutting up the situation,
some people would say, well, there wasn't a choice there or there wasn't a free choice.
The compatibles can perfectly say, well, well, say, yeah, there was a free choice, but every free choice is made in a situation,
and in some situations it can be right to do what in other situations it would be wrong to do.
It would be wrong to me to just give away your phone to any passer by. But if I'm threatened with a gun?
Arguably, that's the right thing to do. OK, with those clarifications in mind,
let's come to this question of could have done otherwise and the the so-called principle of alternate possibilities,
which Harry Frankfurt states thus. So a person is morally responsible for what he's done.
Only if he could have done otherwise. Now Frankfurt, in fact, wants to deny this principle.
He is a compatible host who wants to deny it. I've said that many compatible list would be happy with the principle Frankfurt wants to deny.
It's because he thinks there are certain situations which are often called Frankfurt.
Cases where I can be morally responsible for what I've done can be kind of a free choice as well.
And yet it may not be the case that I could have done otherwise. So let's take such a case.
Here's Jones. He's pondering whether to escape from a building via Dora or Daub.
Maybe he needs to get out, you know, the buildings on fire or something. He's got to get out.
Well, he's got a choice. He can either go for Dora or he can go for it or be.
But in fact, it turns out there's no choice because if he goes to Door B,
he will find that it's actually locked and so [INAUDIBLE] have to go out door A anyway.
Now, think of the case where he chose to go through door.
In that case, we're tempted to say he went through door a freely if there any moral issue hung on it,
he was morally responsible, but arguably he didn't have an alternative.
He could not have got outside to be. So it was kind of inevitable he was going to go out of Dora.
Now, Frankfurt gives some sort of hypothetical examples here, imaginary examples,
where instead of the door being locked and that being the problem, imagine we've got some nasty chap called black who is manipulating Jones.
So action a here is probably some wicked thing that Black wants Jones to do.
Now, Jones might actually choose to do a. In which case we can all agree that he's morally responsible, but black is monitoring Jones's brainwaves.
And as soon as he sees that Jones is inclining towards be instead of a, he interferes with Jones brain waves and makes him choose a instead.
OK, now we'll we might agree that in case be sorry in the if Jones is manipulated by black,
he's not morally responsible for doing it because he was manipulated into it.
But if he chooses a directly, we're inclined to say he is morally responsible.
But arguably he couldn't have done otherwise because if he had started off doing otherwise, black would have interfered and prevented it.
OK, so that's the sort of structure of a of a Frankfurt case.
Now I want to dispute Frankfurt's argument here.
It's it seems to me that it's it's not at all so clear. I mean, first of all, it is rather a farfetched example.
I think we should be genuinely, generally rather sceptical about far fetched examples.
But more crucially, I want to go back here and draw a distinction between S1 and S2.
So S1 is the situation where Jones is initially contemplating what to do.
S2 is the case where he started thinking about it and is moving inclining towards be.
And this is at the point when black intervenes.
Now it seems to me that one can argue that Jones is going for a in situation as one is different from his going for an situationist two.
So if he went for a in situation one, there was something else he could do.
He did have an alternate possibility, which was to head for B and end up doing it via the route with S.
So it's not clear to me that the Frankfurt case is actually dispose of the principle of alternate possibilities.
Now, if we stick with the principle of alternate possibilities, as I've said,
I think most compatible is would in incompatible lists almost certainly would for an incompatible is the principle of alternate possibilities.
The claim that we're not free unless we could have done otherwise.
Is the basis of their claim, for example,
via the consequence argument that to be free determinism has to be false because if term determinism was true in this sense,
we could not have done otherwise. But notice that the compatibles gives a different interpretation.
The compatibly says, Well, I could have done otherwise if I had wanted to.
There was no external barrier to my doing otherwise.
So how should we go? With regard to this.
Well, let's accept that there is a difference between those who are autonomous and those who are not.
If I'm a drug addict or an obsessive.
Then I may be driven by certain desires of mine in such a way that I feel as it were under compulsion to go with them.
You know, if I'm a kleptomaniac and I go to a shop, I may go in intending not to steal anything,
and then I just end up doing it right or I sincerely want to give up cigarettes.
But then I'm with people who are smoking and I simply cannot resist it.
Now, in those sorts of cases, you may say that I'm not free because although I'm doing what I want,
which you might think fits with the compatibles notion, you know, to be free is just to do as you choose.
My choices are not under my control, but that looks rather different from the case where I am choosing something because I genuinely want it.
I mean, suppose, for example, I am given a choice between ice cream and cake, and I choose ice cream.
Why do I choose ice cream? Because I prefer ice cream. My choice of ice cream is utterly predictable.
Anyone who knows me would be able to predict very easily what I'm going to choose.
But am I under some kind of obsessional compulsion, though?
It's just a preference. Now, in that sort of case, it seems odd to say that I'm a slave to my desires.
I'm following my desires because I want to, but it's not like I would change anything about that.
That's very different from the case where you have a compulsive desire that you can't do anything about.
So the compatible list, as well as the incompatible list,
is going to want to acknowledge that we can sometimes as it will be controlled by our desires in an undesirable way.
Now Frankfurt brings in a useful distinction here between First Order desires, for example,
to smoke a cigarette and Second Order desires, for example, to quit smoking and to cease to want them.
Right. So it's a second order desire because I am desiring something about my first order desires.
I'm desiring to cease desiring cigarettes. And if our second order desires are unable to overcome our first order cravings.
It seems plausible to say that we are not fully autonomous.
We are less free than we would be if our second daughter desires were able to control our First Order desires.
So notice that even within a compatible framework, we can make some sorts of distinctions.
So going back to here, we have the distinction between the compatibility and the incompatible view of could have done otherwise.
We have the compatible is basically saying I'm free if I've done what I wanted to and thus seems to be taking our design desires a sort of fixed.
We've now seen that there is some reason for modifying that, for allowing that we may have layers of desires,
some of which we are quite happy to take is fixed, but some of which we actually would wish to be able to modify.
In a similar way, we achieve more intellectual autonomy if we're able to reflect critically on our own commitments rather than being tracked by them.
And this obviously has implications with regard to economic thinking, political thinking, morals, moral and religious assumptions and so on.
And it seems to me that this is a way in which one can think that studying philosophy is a very good way of increasing your autonomy.
It's actually encouraging you to think reflectively and critically about your own assumptions, about your own desires, your own ideals.
And that is giving you an extra layer of autonomy over somebody who is simply a slave to their background.
And if we allow degrees of autonomy in this way, you can also plausibly apply them to infants.
You might allow levels of freedom to animals, even arguably intelligent robots, but we won't go there right now.
So the point here is that we have got the means within a broadly compatible framework,
though clearly an incompatible it could use some of this as well, but a compatible list can accept that there are degrees of autonomy.
None of this contradicts compatible ism.
But isn't this enough? Why should we want more?
Why should we want in determinism if we have this kind of deterministic autonomy where we are able to reflect on our views,
we're able to change our desires, all of that under deterministic causal laws, the indeterminate says that isn't enough.
Now, I suspect that the intuition behind the desire for in determinism is the thought that somehow,
if everything is determined, I'm not genuinely responsible.
I may have this deterministic autonomy, but ultimately everything that I do is caused by prior conditions and the laws.
And that isn't enough, but I'm inclined to respond.
What why should I want in determinism? What's the value of that?
I mean, suppose I'm calculating a chess move. I'm actually very, very happy that my calculation is deterministic.
I'm very happy if I'm in a situation where somebody can come along, look at the position and say, Oh, I know exactly what Pete is going to do there.
So, you know, three move checkmate. I'm sure [INAUDIBLE] see it. Yeah.
Well, I want it to be the case that if there's a three move, checkmate, I will see it right.
I don't want in determinism in that case, why should I and others?
So I'm now going to deal with some, I think, misunderstandings that can lie and lie behind this sort of in deterministic thought.
So some people might say, well, look, if you're determined, you're not really playing an essential role in what goes on.
If everything is determined, you know, it's a thousand years before you were born, it was inevitable that what you are doing now would happen.
Then you aren't playing a role. Well, clearly that's not true.
OK? The explosion of a bomb may be determined. That doesn't imply the bomb isn't doing anything.
The bomb is doing something. It was determined to do something. It's not like without the bomb, things would have gone on in the same way.
So it's not clear why. Also in determinism is going to make me more responsible than otherwise.
I mean, suppose in my brain there is some that there is some kind of random number generator,
which is making me do different things in a completely deterministic way or some quantum mechanical process that has that effect.
How does that help to make me responsible? It's not clear that it does.
And here is Hume arguing that on the contrary, morality requires determinism so far from determinism being contrary to moral responsibility,
moral responsibility ability actually requires that what I do flows from me, from my settled purposes, desires, tendencies.
Actions are, by their very nature, temporary and perishing where they proceed,
not from some cause in the character and disposition of the person who performed them.
They can neither be down to his honour if good nor infamy. If evil is the way I act is actually random,
maybe because I've got some tumour in my brain or something like that that's causing me to act in a completely capricious way.
You don't hold me responsible. You say, no, it's not responsible because it didn't come from your established character and desires and so forth.
So I want to say a little bit now about explanation,
because I think to understand some of the confusions that lie behind some of the thoughts we've been we've been exploring here,
it's good to look at it from a sort of theoretical perspective.
So there's a tempting mistake, and the mistake is to assume that deterministic causal explanation excludes other types of explanation.
So you might think if the causal process x fully explains event e, there's no room for anything else to explain or to be responsible for a.
And I think this is quite a common mistake in incompatibility lines of thought, I mean, you can see how it leads to incompatible ism.
If what I do is determined by the causal laws, then it can't have been due to my purpose is my choices and therefore I'm not responsible.
Interestingly, I think Hume himself makes this mistake or something very close to it.
I've put six slides on him in the appendix. I'm not going to talk about those in this lecture, but do consult those.
So let's go back to the first couple of lectures where one of the things I was pointing out
was that there have been a succession of scientific paradigms going right back to Aristotle,
where and in Aristotle's time, more or less everything was explained in terms of purposes.
Then we got mechanism coming in. After Galileo challenged Aristotle.
When Newton came along, we got explanation in terms of forces and got quantum and space time curvature and so on from physics.
But the one I want to focus on first here is evolution by natural selection, because I think that is a very, very clear illustration.
Now, evolutionary explanation is entirely compatible with determinism.
But it's completely different in structure, and it can be applied in situations where deterministic explanation cannot be applied.
So I want to give you a little example here. All right now, I'm not going to go through this in detail,
but what what we've got here is a brief explanation for why a certain equation called the logistic equation gives a plausible way
of modelling the successive population of a colony of insects within an environment which has limited capacity to support them.
So the point here is you've got the population there up the left from zero to 100000.
Here are the generations being plotted along here, and here is the logistic equation.
Now what we're doing with starting with a random value. And then the population is being plotted.
According to a deterministic equation, and you can see what we're getting is complete chaos, right?
So it depends on the value of the the constant are.
So I'm playing with different values of, AH.
Incidentally, the logistic equation, it's so simple and it's amazing that you can get such complex behaviour from such a simple equation.
Those of you who are studying economics and are at all led to believe that whenever you have an equilibrium in a situation,
you will necessarily reach it. No, absolutely not.
In nature, you can have an equilibrium. There is an equilibrium in all of these, but unless you hit it, spot on.
It's never reached OK. And once we get above 3.5 seven, you can see the behaviour is entirely chaotic.
So deterministic systems, probably most deterministic systems out there in nature,
as opposed to the artificial ones that we study in physics labs or something like that have an element of chaos.
What that means is you get sensitive dependence on initial conditions if you have two scenarios that are very close together,
but just a little bit different. Those differences can amplify instead of smoothing a way towards an equilibrium.
That means that, in fact, an awful lot of what goes on in the world is, in principle, unpredictable.
It's unpredictable because in order to measure things sufficiently accurately to be able to predict what was going to happen,
even if you have the computational power and the knowledge of all the parameters and all the rest.
Basically, it would just completely change the situation, you have to have sensors everywhere in the air,
you know, so the weather is simply unpredictable in principle. Right up to a point when beyond a certain point.
So now let's go for a biological situation.
Bearing that in mind. So there's a famous biological puzzle.
This was discussed back in near the beginning of the 18th century by John Arbuthnot.
It was actually, you know, in the context of is there here? An argument for divine benevolence.
The puzzle basically is why in sexually reproducing species, the ratio of males and females is roughly one to one.
Now we humans, you might think, Well, that's because we're generally monogamous.
You know, we pay a bond and so forth. What about cows?
There's no way it's in the interest of a population of cattle to have equal number of bulls and cows.
Right? It's in their interest, as well as in the interest of the farmers to have lots of cows and very few bulls.
The bulls will be happy and the cows, which are far more useful in virtually every way they have young, they nurture the young.
And if if they're on a farm, they provide milk and so forth. So not.
But it's not only the farmer who prefers lots of cows. Actually, you would think a benign nature would prefer lots of cows.
It would be better for the population breed more effectively and so forth.
If there were more cows than bulls and yet nature produces 50 50.
Why? Well, we can model this, and here is a simple model, but it's the same, you know?
So what we've got here is a model where we have an imaginary species called them dingbats.
And this species actually have a gene. They carry a gene which determines the probability of the offspring being female.
I call this the female offspring probability gene. The FOP gene.
OK. And what we have here is a model where you get males and females.
Initially, the FOP gene value has been sent set to over 90 percent for both the males and the females, as you can see, right?
So I'm biased in favour of a female population. And now what are we going to have these males and females randomly breeding with
random inheritance of the FOP gene with a certain degree of random variation?
And if we run the simulation, you can see at the bottom there, the proportion of females in the population zooms up to 90 percent.
And then inexorably comes down to around 50.
And will end up basically random walking around 50. If they'd had that in the 18th century, if they'd been able to run this sort of model,
what it would have told them is that there is something in the logic of evolution that pushes it, pushes it towards 50 percent.
It's nothing to do with men, all the mill pair bonding. It's nothing to do with X and Y gametes.
It's not random. There is something in the situation that pushes it to 50 percent.
Now, the solution was actually discovered by a guy called Ronald Fisher, a statistician.
And the explanation is below. Imagine you start off with a population that's mainly female.
Suppose there are 90 percent females, 10 percent males. Imagine that you are about to give birth would from the genetic point of view,
from the point of view of your genetic fitness, would you rather give birth to a male or a female?
Well, a male, because every bull on average.
Also that I'm talking about cows here or every male dingbat, if you like, is having nine times as many offspring on average as the females, right?
So if you give birth to a male. You are likely to have far more grandchildren than if you give birth to a female,
so that means if you imagine different individuals with different probability of giving birth to males or females,
those that all happen to have genes that predispose them to have more male offspring will have more grandchildren than the others.
So that gene that predisposes them towards having more male offspring will spread more in the in the grandchild generation.
And the same will go the other way round if you get a bias in either direction. There will be a genetic push back in the other direction.
Now, this is genuinely insightful. All right.
We learn something from that.
We can understand why if I ran that programme a thousand times, you would always find it going towards 50 percent, right?
Always happens. And we've got an explanation why.
But please notice this is not a deterministic causal explanation.
Right? The deterministic causal explanation would all be in terms of one female mating with another female.
Sorry, mating with a male, a certain gene being inherited with a certain random variation and blah blah blah.
The explanation for even you know, the programme I wrote, there would be probably hundreds of thousands of lines.
But the genuine explanation of the phenomenon we want to explain which is not why did this particular individual mate with this one?
But why did it go towards 50 percent? That explanation is illuminating, and it's in evolutionary terms, not in deterministic causal terms.
And just by the way, a lot of this will go for our behaviour, right?
I mean, the way I behave will depend on general tendencies and general desires and so forth.
It won't be a matter of one individual neurone firing in a particular way is that Neurone hadn't fired,
you know, maybe because I had a drink of alcohol before or something. Not a lot.
Just enough to disturb the running of the neurones. All right, then I'd still have done the same, but by a different causal path.
Right?
So, you know, most of what we do, there are lots and lots of countless different causal paths that could all lead us in the same ultimate direction.
And as with the evolutionary case, there may be a good explanation of why we do what we do.
But the the revealing, the insightful explanation is not in terms of lots of individual neurones doing their stuff any more than in this case.
The insightful explanation is in terms of lots of individual, male and female matings.
Take another example of non causal explanation, and this again, is kind of familiar one in this position.
One of my favourite chess positions, partly because I got it against the next British champion in a knockout game when I was 17.
I had, of course, analysed the position before reuptake takes check, really quite a beautiful checkmate.
Now imagine putting that on a computer and the computer plays rook takes night check.
And you can ask, why did it do it? Well, you might think that the explanation is in terms of the circuitry.
No, actually, the revealing explanation is in terms of the rules of chess.
Rook takes Knight is by far the best move. It wins by thoughts quickly.
That's why the computer played it.
Now, of course, there is a causal story about how the computer has been designed so as to enact computer programmes.
And there is a story about how the computer programme, which is running here, has been designed to mirror the laws of chess.
But if you want to predict what a chess computer is going to do on a particular case, the if what you do is not analyse the electronics,
you analyse the chess and analyse the algorithms you know which which have been written in order to control how it plays it.
So I've talked about causal explanations, not excluding other types of explanation, and I'm saying here we have a physical system,
a chess computer, which has been programmed so that it operates to respect logical constraints, constraints about the logic of chess.
So it's a complete fallacy to argue like this. Well, the computer chose takes F6 check because it was physically determined to do so.
So it didn't choose it on any logical ground, and hence we have no reason for taking its decision seriously.
Right? That's obviously nonsense.
The fact that a computer programme which has been designed to solve some problem is acting deterministic doesn't give you any ground, whatever,
for being sceptical about its choice because if it's been programmed well,
then it's deterministic at just deterministic processing is precisely designed to reach the best choice.
Now, presumably, our brains have evolved so that our reasoning likewise generally responds to rational constraints,
that that's why we've got big brains right there useful.
Of course, there are cases where they don't go so well, but generally in ordinary everyday circumstances,
the kinds of circumstances that our brains and bodies have evolved to deal with our brains are normally very efficient problem solvers.
The fact that they are determined should not give us any reason to doubt what they lead us to do.
On the contrary, what they lead us to do is likely most often to be a pretty good guide.
So though tempting, you know, it is tempting to say, well,
if if such and such is causally explained, then it can't be explained rationally or whatever.
That's just not true. Seriously mistaken determinism does not make human action ultimately metaphysically
indistinguishable from the law governing emotions of physical things,
like with the chess computer. You can distinguish between the behaviour of the chess computer and the behaviour of some random physical
system because the chess computer is designed in such a way that what it does respect logical constraints,
which means you can have a logical explanation of what it behaves, how it behaves.
An explanation in terms of the laws of chess, not just physical explanation.
And of course, the same is true for us. And this, by the way, is where Hume makes a mistake.
I mean, Hume obviously is arguing for compatible ism. He is a soft determinist.
But his argument actually involves saying the same kind of causation is involved in every case.
I'm saying, No, he's wrong, actually.
He hasn't noticed that you can have a different kind of explanation, even though you have a system that's equally deterministic.
Yeah, and I make the point at the bottom there that even purely physical events can be explained in one way,
it's a mistake to think that, you know, when something happens, there will only be one explanation of it.
There may be quite a number of explanations that quite a number of different levels.
OK, I suppose I'm contemplating a move in chess, and I'm calculating the possibilities.
I see a way of forcing checkmate and I play accordingly.
So what I did was determined by my desire to win my knowledge of the game, my knowledge of what winning requires.
And my calculation of how winning could be achieved. So let's suppose it was indeed fully determined like that.
Now imagine the incompatible list coming in and saying, but then it wasn't really a free choice of yours.
If it was fully determined by your state of mind, your desires, your knowledge or calculating abilities, your power of movement and so on.
Then you weren't really responsible for it. Now.
That just seems to me to be bizarre. The incompatibility seems to be thinking of my self as some distinct thing.
Something completely outside the causal nexus. An immaterial soul.
So we're coming back to the mind and body stuff. It seems to be like dark arts for you, and we've already seen some difficulties with that.
It's hard to see how some immaterial soul could influence physical events.
It doesn't fit with our understanding of evolution, right? Given that we are evolved animals, the idea that some immaterial souls suddenly came in,
you know, five million years ago or something from nowhere seems rather peculiar.
It's also very odd if we got new material soul that's doing all our thinking that nature invests so much in giving us large brains,
large brains that consume huge amounts of calories to develop, and large brains that notoriously make human childbirth very perilous for the mother.
Why would nature do that if there's an immaterial soul that's doing the thinking?
And it's very hard to see any solid, objective evidence for the view.
We are embodied evolved animals who act in the world as part of the physical causal nexus.
And got a nice cartoon here. This was done by Vladimir, one of my students.
We've got the the Cartesian immaterial soul floating above, and it's got a controller to the pineal gland in the middle of the brain.
I mean, this is a crazy picture, right? It's crazy the idea that somehow the real US is outside our brain, somehow controlling what goes on inside.
That's a false picture.
A better picture, though, again, slightly misleading, is to think in terms of, you know, the mechanisms of our brains here represented as cold wheels,
but in fact, representing them maybe as a computer system would be would be kind of more realistic.
But it's not as though we've got processes going on inside our brain, which are indifferent to the circumstances in which we find ourselves.
Our brains have evolved such that the mechanisms in them are extremely good at solving
the problems which we identify using our senses and on which we operate using.
For example, our hands. So there's the the book about to be moved.
So, you know, this picture is a crazy one, it doesn't make scientific sense, and if you think about it, it's completely cockeyed.
We have to get rid of this idea that there is some self sitting above the causal nexus, you know,
on any plausible picture of reality that can't be right, whether your determined historian determines.
So if if the push towards in determinism comes from this sort of picture, then that's quite wrong.
I don't think that's the only pull towards in determinism, as I'll explain, but I think that's quite a significant one.
I love this quote from Kent. The light of cleaving in free flight, the thin air whose resistance, it feels,
might imagine that her movements would be far more free and rapid in airless space.
The dive thinks that the air is constraining its movement actually without the air.
The dive couldn't fly at all.
So the idea that, you know, oh, if only, you know, I could think freely without having to worry about what the mechanisms going on in my brain.
No, actually, without those mechanisms in your brain, you would not be able to think at all.
That's what makes thinking possible. So it's very implausible to insist on a distinction between what they do and
the actions that result from the workings of my mental and bodily faculties.
Those are the same things and compare some. Imagine somebody saying, Well, the crane, you got a crane.
It did. It itself didn't lift that weight. It was the cranes hook that lifted it, supported by the Cranes Tower, powered by the Cranes engine.
So it wasn't an action of the crane itself. That's crazy.
Lifting things that way, using the tower on the hook and so on. That's what a crane lifting something is.
My playing, moving up, it's making a move in chess just is my hand moving in response to the calculations that are
going on in my brain and those calculations are impacted by things going on in the neurones.
It's not like there's any need to make the decision independently of those processes.
But as I've said, I think there is another pull towards incompatible ism.
And I think that that deserves a separate treatment.
So imagine that the incompatible list admits all this OK,
insofar as we are pulled towards incompatible is incompatible ism by this picture of a Cartesian soul.
Yes, that's wrong.
That there is really only, you know, our brains are making decisions through the processes, through the causal processes in our brains.
Let's admit that they are not an obstacle to our freedom.
They are the way in which we act freely. Nevertheless,
there is a temptation to say that if the prior situation said the situation of the
world a thousand years ago and the laws of nature causally determine how I behave,
then I can't be genuinely responsible for what I've done.
If someone a thousand years ago, you know, Laplace is omniscient, being looking down and saying,
Oh, I foresee that in a thousand years, Milliken will do this, but how can I be held responsible?
There is a feeling here that I'm not ultimately responsible. I'm just a pawn in the hands of nature.
Now, Galen Stralsund has argued along these lines, he thinks this is indeed an important part of how we think about freedom.
But it has the unfortunate implication. That nothing can be morally responsible.
Moral responsibility becomes impossible if I can only genuinely be morally responsible, morally free if I am,
because in the sense of the ultimate cause of the way I behave such that it could,
I am bringing about the circumstances in the causal circumstances which lead me to act the way I do.
Then it turns out moral responsibility is just going to be an illusion.
Actually, Straus and embraces that conclusion, he thinks yes, indeed, it is an illusion.
So it looks like we might be in danger of undermining the theoretical basis of morality.
Perhaps the incompatible list is right if everything is determined. Morality is bunk.
And everything is determined. Maybe that's the case.
Or maybe incompatibilities AM is correct that there is a conflict between determinism and genuine moral responsibility,
but maybe the only non deterministic aspects of the universe are quantum events,
and they don't have any relevance to moral responsibility, so that's not going to help.
And maybe the entire notion of moral responsibility is hopelessly incoherent, whether the universe is determined or not,
because in fact, the only way we could be morally responsible genuinely is if we are causes of ourselves.
And that's just not possible on any account. Well, I don't think we have to go that way.
I think we can follow David Hume here, I'm going to defend this part of his account because humans account of morality,
as we saw in the last lecture, is based on a broadly evolutionary picture.
Morality is an institution that enables us to get along with each other.
It's very important in human society, it plays a crucial role and.
As we evolve, as we evolved towards morality, we develop natural emotional tendencies.
So a very important part of morality, for example, is feeling empathy for other people.
That helps us to cooperate. That is evolutionarily a valuable thing.
We developed a capacity for trusting and for being trustworthy.
And that is one of the most important characteristics of humans.
People who are untrustworthy, people who are found not to be trustworthy fatally compromised their prospects for the future.
All right. One of the most important characteristics you can have in life is to be trustworthy and to be known to be trustworthy.
And your prospects will be hugely better if you are. Now, that may seem counterintuitive.
You know, we may think the person who's self-interested is going to be always looking out
for the chance to do the best for themselves and ignore any commitments to others.
But actually, if you live in a social world, one of the most valuable things that you have is your reputation.
And the best way to be thought of as trustworthy is to actually be trustworthy.
So there are all sorts of reasons why our emotions have developed in such a way as to conform to a moral outlook on things,
both in terms of how we judge other people and how we judge ourselves.
And if we have such emotional responses, if our emotions are attuned to morality, then that's pretty much hardwired in us, right?
We've evolved that way. That's not going to change from discovering some metaphysical truth.
So suppose we somehow discovered that determinism was true.
Would that change our moral sentiments? Well, according to him, know a man who is robbed of a considerable sum,
does he find his fixation for the loss any wise diminished by these sublime reflections?
No, I mean, it's not exactly determinism, it's to do with God and Providence and all the rest.
But in the same way, having these sublime reflections about the metaphysics of the Universe,
that doesn't change the fact that when somebody beats you up and steals your purse, you feel cross.
Why, then, should his moral resentment against the crime be supposed incompatible with them if morality is a natural,
evolved human tendency that engages our emotions?
There's no reason to suppose that suddenly discovering or contemplating some
metaphysical fact about the universe is going to change the way we think morally.
You simply wouldn't expect that to happen. And moreover, in the last lecture, we saw a model of the iterated prisoner's dilemma.
And I made the point there that it has been discovered that nice strategies generally win those that are never the first to defect.
They tend to do much better. You can easily explain why strategies like [INAUDIBLE] for tat which start off cooperating,
but then reciprocate they if they if they are, if another strategy defect against them, they defect back.
That's kind of punishment. And these sorts of computer simulations have shown pretty clearly that one of the best ways of
evolving towards an effective moral structure moral structure within these agents is retribution.
It's having systems which punish others for defecting keeps them in order.
And again, it's not surprising that in society, therefore, with the evolution of society,
with morality and cooperation playing such a crucial role within society that we
have evolved to have natural retributive emotions both positive and negative.
If someone's nice to me, I feel gratitude. If someone does something horrid to me, I feel resentment.
If someone harms my child, I feel very angry.
It's absolutely to be expected that these sorts of emotions would have evolved because they helped to establish and maintain moral behaviour,
cooperative behaviour in society.
Now, if that really is the foundation of morality, if morality is founded on evolved sentiments, there is no reason to worry.
The metaphysical reflections about determinism are going to undermine it.
It has a quite different foundation, and we should probably feel quite grateful as it does.
Thank you.