-Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism

I picked this gem up at Borders’ going out of business sale and am just now getting around to reading it. I am finding Dienstag readable and insightful, and will try and post a review when I’m through. 

Charles Taylor, in his seminal work Sources of the Self, puts forward an argument on the relationship between identity and moral truth using a variety of methods, but most notably that of the transcendental argument. Taylor, belonging to what might roughly be called a Neo-Aristotelian camp of moral philosophers, argues that we can derive moral truth by virtue of a moral ontology intrinsic to us as perceptive and evaluative subjects. While the transcendental argument Taylor employs does not appear to us readily and clearly, it is nonetheless the entire vertebrae of his argument without which we would have no reason to accept his conclusions. D.P. Baker, of the University of Natal in South Africa, has written cogently on this topic. Because it carries such persuasive potential, I feel a devoted exploration of Taylor’s transcendental argument, as well as Baker’s contribution to the discussion, is in order. It is my opinion that Taylor does not successfully prove his claim on morality as the content of his argument is inappropriate to the form in which he carries it.

The primary portion of Baker’s article addresses the schema of Taylor’s moral stance and articulates his position on virtue. Baker draws a distinction between a pragmatic-Aristotelian position and an absolutist-Aristotelian position that he largely takes from Mackie. He reproduces a large and worthwhile discussion, but for the purposes of celerity I will cut to the chase on the distinction:

For them [followers of Aristotle], the fundamental notion is that of the good for man, or the general end or goal of human life… But this approach is open to two radically different interpretations. According to one, to say that something is the good for man… is just to say that this is what men in fact pursue or will find ultimately satisfying… According to the other interpretation, to say that something is the good for man or the general goal of human life is to say that this is man’s proper end, that this is what he ought to be striving after, whether he in fact is or not. On the first interpretation we have a descriptive statement, on the second a normative one.

After some rumination on the plausibility and coherence of the descriptive, or pragmatic, Aristotelian position with regards to Sources of the Self, Baker concludes that Taylor must be taking the absolutist position if for no other reason than Sources is a protracted argument on the premise that some moral sources or frameworks are more valid and justifiable than others, and this argument relies on normative force. Despite his interpretive pluralism, Taylor eventually ceases waffling on moral arbitration and comes down hard on specific intellectual violators of what he considers morally important, namely the committed naturalists. Taylor’s disagreement with whom he considers naturalists – we often are in the dark here about whom he is specifically referring to – is that they are not owning up to their normative, evaluative judgments. The naturalist/utilitarians, say Taylor, are smuggling in strong moral evaluations about the primacy of utility while at the same time asserting they are remaining neutral on the question of normative force. His repeated and sustained assault on the naturalist takeover of morality illustrates his absolutist stance on issues of worth and value.

After this careful discussion on normative principles, Baker then goes on to show that Taylor is essentially making two transcendental arguments for his position on the affirmation on Aristotelian virtue – a general transcendental argument on agency and then a more specific transcendental argument which includes Taylor’s own moral goods reliant on the former. First, though, a brief explanation of the transcendental argument might be fruitful.

A transcendental argument is a specific type of logical argument that finds its genesis in the writings of Kant. Transcendental arguments are made up of chains of deductions that are derived a priori from indispensable premises – or self-evident axioms. Taylor tells us that transcendental arguments “consist of a string of what one could call indispensability claims.” These indispensability claims are the necessary bedrock of the argument; they are supposed to be so self-evidently obvious or necessary that one could not deny it at all. For instance, the claim “all justification is propositional justification” or that subjects have ownership and property rights inherent in themselves cannot be denied for the reason Taylor gives. Rejection of this indispensability claim is therefore tantamount to absurdity or a performative contradiction –Transcendental arguments, if done correctly, lead to logically true conclusions with apodictic certainty. This apodictic certainty is of a different logical category than what we construe as likelihood or probability. Apodictic certainty does not refer to the direction natural laws have on objects; it would be a mistake to refer to the repeated occurrence of some external event as having “apodictic” certainty. It is simply the most ironclad logical proof possible in the realm of intellectual inquiry.

These arguments can be a multi-tiered edifice of many premises resting on multiple conclusions, or they can be short; all transcendental arguments must have at minimum two steps, however. Furthermore, transcendental arguments are logical arguments that do not require experiential confirmation for their validity. They are internally logical and reside in an altogether different realm of inquiry than do empirical claims. Assuming the formulator of a transcendental argument does not err in his deductions, we can be sure his conclusion is true without recourse to observation. Depending on the formulation of the argument, empirical evidence is either unnecessary or totally useless to challenge the claims made. They rest instead on the validity of the premises.

Transcendental arguments are usually given with regards to certain metaphysical or ethical questions, as the form of the argument allows for clarity in these fields. For instance, the claim that “an object cannot be red and green all over at the same time” is an a priori transcendental argument that is derived from the nature of color. Taylor attempts to use this form of argument in the field of ethics and identity. Baker gives Taylor’s “general” transcendental argument thusly:

• We are essentially subjects;
• It is essential to our manner of being as subjects that we perceive the world in moral terms;
• It is essential to a moral outlook that it take a ‘hypergood perspective’;
• It is the nature of a hypergood that it orders and shapes other goods into a framework;
• We are therefore beings whose experience is defined by a moral framework which is dominated by a hypergood.

We can understand Taylor’s argument more coherently now as having argued from the fact that we are subjects to the conclusion that the moral realm is necessarily characterized by a moral framework whose direction is dominated by a hypergood. This general argument however is not sufficient for the more specific claims Taylor wants to make regarding the worthiness of certain types of virtue. While I believe this general transcendental argument is a step in the right direction, it can only get us so far. True, it does present problems for the committed naturalist, who, in Taylor’s conception, wants to deny the reality of deliberating and choosing a normative “side.” If there truly are naturalists as Taylor describes, this argument would present difficulty for them in arguing that no normative “framework” need exist. These alleged naturalists would thus be caught in a quagmire whenever they open their mouths to assert some truth with regard to what is good, proper, right, etc. Without adopting a moral framework, these naturalists would do well to adopt Wittgenstein’s dictum: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Taylor’s general transcendental argument is a legitimate proof that weighing of moral goods requires a certain framework. The vegetarian who sneers at the customers in a steakhouse no less than the most ardent personal busybody make use of respective frameworks to make sense of the moral question: what is proper to do? These frameworks align and arrange values so as to come to a coherent viewpoint on matters. Without a framework to guide our judgments, we could no way of arbitrating between competing claims on moral goods. Without frameworks, we are either wantons or nihilists; ravenously taking and arguing for every position on every topic or conceding that no answer at all exists. If the truth is in-between these extremes, it must be the case that frameworks are necessary to rationally contemplate sources of morality. These frameworks are themselves guided, however. Taylor argues there exists a hypergood – the “highest” good to which all other values and goods are subordinate. My position as a libertarian on various moral questions is directed and dominated by the highest moral virtue, the non-initiation of force. This hypergood is that prime moral value that demonstrates in a coherent fashion the illegitimacy of theft, vandalism, murder, and other breaches of one’s right to property. Just as the Temperance movement of the 20^th century made its assault upon alcohol consumption directed by their hypergood, moderation, so too does my opinion regarding taxation, military conscription, eminent domain, and imprisonment come directly from the aforementioned principle of non-aggression. Taylor’s general argument is thus applicable across a wide range of ethical positions because it only seeks to show the necessary connection between ethical claims and their source from which they are granted evaluative power. This is still a far cry from proving or supporting any specific moral framework or hypergood. This is purportedly done through what Baker calls Taylor’s specific transcendental argument.

This general transcendental argument can be found rather quickly in Part I of Sources, but the elucidation of Taylor’s specific argument lies sprinkled throughout the narrative he gives in the rest of the book and is therefore more difficult to recreate sufficiently. The conclusion of Sources, however, displays a rare succinctness on Taylor’s part. It’s as if the preceding twenty chapters were a long, meandering discussion of various ideas and concepts, but in the conclusion, we see Taylor shift to high gear and race for the finish line to prove his thesis. His affirmation of certain moral goods over others is finally explained by reference to Judeo-Christian theism. His contention is largely that Judeo-Christian theism allows us to adopt the correct framework to interpret moral questions properly. As I did before, I will take Baker’s reproduction as a solid footing to discuss this second argument put forward by Taylor. It runs as follows:

Presupposition: a moral framework, dominated by a hypergood, is an inescapable feature of our moral experience (in other words what I have here called the specific argument relies on the general argument showing what it hopes to show.)

• It is indispensable that our moral framework that it include certain specific goods, which can be orientated to and described in different ways [my emphasis].
• It is the Best Account of these goods that they be understood as part of a theistic account. That is, once the above mentioned goods are clearly articulated, it is indispensable to a Best Account of those goods that they be described in theistic terms.

Baker continues the paragraph with, “Thus by this reading Taylor has presented his account as a transcendental argument in favor of a theistic moral frameworks being the ‘Best Account’ of our moral phenomenology.”

Unfortunately, Sources is not primarily a work elucidating a positive account of what moral frameworks for which men should strive. It is primarily an exposition detailing the winding road of influences that have determined our modern identity. Despite this, Taylor does nod towards the end at the idea that adopting a Judeo-Christian framework is the appropriate conclusion to his argument. As he does not explicitly lay out a positive case for which moral framework we should hold, we are forced to infer his meaning from the various subtleties Taylor introduces in the latter half of his work. I will hereby take his specific transcendental argument to mean that the Judeo-Christian framework is the most proper moral framework to adopt because it satisfies two conditions: 1) The Judeo-Christian framework affirms the teleological nature of man in that Taylor incorporates from his Aristotelianism, and; 2) It is the only contemporary Western moral framework that allows for the role of the “sacred” in our lives, which Taylor believes is necessary to understand meaning and purpose. The Judeo-Christian moral framework also escapes the pitfalls of a naturalistic perspective which denies any necessity of a moral framework. Thus, Taylor writes in the penultimate paragraph of Sources about his “hope” for the Judeo-Christian framework and how it can potentially lead us to where we need to go. His absolutist stance on moral sources goes hand in hand with this conclusion.

While I think there is great merit in adopting the general transcendental argument Taylor gives, his specific argument falls prey to numerous deficiencies. In the first place, it is not at all obvious that only a theistic perspective can lead us to the proper moral framework by which we judge actions. In fact, it was the great merit of the Enlightenment that we created a broader scope for the application of disengaged reason to weigh in on these matters. While certain philosophers, Hume for example, denied that reason can play any role in arbitrating on matters of ethics, the contemporary philosophical community disagrees. There have risen a large and growing number of adherents to the notion that instrumental reason can play a role in deciding justifiable ethical theories. The entire literature on discourse ethics is predicated on what can be ethically justified without entailing performative contradictions.

In the second place, it is not entirely necessary that adopting a naturalistic stance means the complete elimination of evaluative judgments. Naturalism is a broad philosophical trend of which the main tenet is the rejection of supernatural explanations for metaphysical questions. It does not require that we eschew an interpretive framework of the type Taylor employs in his construction of the modern identity. Perhaps if Taylor were referring to strict positivists could there be universal agreement in the impossibility of making evaluative judgments – for only this type of naturalism is committed to the hard epistemological scientistism Taylor so thoroughly rejects. Naturalism is not an epistemic philosophy, but a metaphysical one. I am thus not convinced that to adopt the naturalistic turn is necessarily to adopt the nihilistic turn.

Baker concludes with some general remarks concerning the problems of utilizing transcendental arguments and specifically how Taylor fails to meet these challenges. The remainder of Baker’s article levels charges of circularity against Sources of which I am not equipped to comment, but I think a few short final remarks are in order. I think there is great value in Taylor’s philosophical attempt to give us “the path” of morality – specifically, on how we can arbitrate between competing moral frameworks. The transcendental argument is a uniquely clever attempt to prove this. However, I believe Taylor’s final acceptance of the Judeo-Christian framework is based more on his own personal biases on “epiphany” and “sacredness” that actually have little to do with morality per se. His acceptance of the theistic framework is not defended by any rigorous proof, but instead by what Taylor has referred to almost as an act of faith. While I applaud Taylor for pointing the way to what he considers morally important, he has failed to offer a convincing proof for the specific ethical claims he has made. This does not rule out other possible attempts using the transcendental method described above, however. Such an attempt will surely warrant further investigations into the competition of frameworks, which is a good thing. Perhaps the answer lies more properly in the circumscribed field of Enlightenment thought regarding concepts like duty, obligation, rights, and liberties and less in the ancient notion of “virtue” Taylor so desperately wants to resurrect

From the abstract:

Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases. Four experiments show that the framing effect disappears when choices are presented in a foreign tongue. Whereas people were risk averse for gains and risk seeking for losses when choices were presented in their native tongue, they were not influenced by this framing manipulation in a foreign language. Two additional experiments show that using a foreign language reduces loss aversion, increasing the acceptance of both hypothetical and real bets with positive expected value. We propose that these effects arise because a foreign language provides greater cognitive and emotional distance than a native tongue does.

For those unaware, the framing effect is a cognitive bias in psychology wherein a person’s choice or response to a question changes depending on how the same question is worded. This is often the case when one framing highlights losses and another highlights gains. This article over at Wired describes the above study as well as an experiment in which exemplifies the framing effect.

"Oddly the effect doesn't hold true for grammar and translation..."
(Photo courtesy of www.engrish.com)

Important to note about framing effect experiments is that they most often, and necessarily, compare two identical choices phrased differently. So, where one description frames the decision in terms of  A: a loss and B: a gain, the other will describe an identical scenario with C: a gain and D: a loss. In this way, as the subject study indicates, considering the choice in a  foreign language appears to disable or bypass the aspect of our decision-making process which can lead to inconsistent decision-making or being swayed by phrasing rather than rational deliberation.

The framing effect is, in my mind, akin to a number of other biases which are known to exist. For example, when temperatures are manipulated during experiment conditions, a subject’s perception of others or desire to be generous rather than selfish appears to be influenced. In this set of studies the temperature of an object the subjects were asked to hold correlated with their feelings about other people or their desire to help others. When asked to hold a warm object, subjects were more likely to use positive adjectives to describe others or choose to assist them versus themselves than those holding cold objects.

What these studies highlight is not only the care with which we must conduct studies but also how environmental determinants can lead us to behave differently than we might otherwise.

If you’re a psychologist, the news has to make you a little nervous—particularly if you’re a psychologist who published an article in 2008 in any of these three journals:Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,or the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

Because, if you did, someone is going to check your work. A group of researchers have already begun what they’ve dubbed the Reproducibility Project, which aims to replicate every study from those three journals for that one year. The project is part of Open Science Framework, a group interested in scientific values, and its stated mission is to “estimate the reproducibility of a sample of studies from the scientific literature.” This is a more polite way of saying “We want to see how much of what gets published turns out to be bunk.”

Heard of a study whose findings are now in question? Leave a link in the comment section!

"I don't write about naturalism often, but when I do I write about wheat in California." (Frank Norris)

Lately it is beginning to appear as though Naturalism is experiencing a backlash in certain intellectual circles. Take Timothy Williamson’s recent article in the New York Times regarding, essentially, why he is not a Naturalist. Or the recent discussion, which I wrote about last year, of fMRI studies and the responses from some contemporary philosophers over at Flickers of Freedom. The conclusion of many there was that clearly these studies jumped the gun in claiming to have abolished the possibility of metaphysical freedom (a conclusion with which I agree) and that there are many varied approaches to theory of mind that include both determinist elements as well as new conceptions of the self that mitigate concerns of an absence of freedom.

Naturalism is the promised one – the grandchild of the Enlightenment and the daughter of the scientific method – who might redeem us from mysticism and the unfounded belief in what cannot be scientifically confirmed or tested. And yet, for all of our recent scientific advances and the general attitude with which intellectuals view anti-scientific individuals, as of late it seems some are shutting the door on the science that helped us arrive where we are today, and holds the hope of bringing us further in our intellectual and social development as a species and as a culture.

It may seem pedantic to say so, but science and the scientific method so pervade our understanding of the world that they have permeated into all levels of our social, legal, and moral framework. Watching the movie Contagion reinforces our implicit affirmation of germ and viral theory in understanding the causes of disease and illness. Murder trials that saturate the media depend more and more upon the ability of scientific evidence, such as DNA sequencing, fingerprinting, and various other forensics to arrive at a verdict. And morality is beginning to be seen as a natural and evolutionary development stemming from the social nature of our ancestors. So why is it that even the most contemporary and scientifically minded philosophers are so suspect of Naturalism’s advancing tide?

Williamson gives a number of reasons for the weakness of Naturalism as a worldview. First, it seemingly depends upon the shifting (and perhaps circular) standards and methods of scientific advance and inquiry:

Anyway, the best current scientific theories will probably be superseded by future scientific developments. We might therefore define the natural world as whatever the scientific method eventually discovers. Thus naturalism becomes the belief that there is only whatever the scientific method eventually discovers, and (not surprisingly) the best way to find out about it is by the scientific method. That is no tautology.

But is the answer to the question of how we define the natural world really “Whatever we end up finding out,”? In fact, I find comfort in the fact that Naturalism and the scientific method make no bones about having a shifting worldview. One of the many salient differences between Naturalism and religion is that once we know it is not scientifically possible to turn water into wine, or that events like hurricanes are natural and not the wrath of God, we can amend our understanding of the world to fit our best view of how it operates. Other options for viewing the world to not afford us this opportunity.  Would Williamson, or any like-minded academic, truly be interested in a rigid and unchanging worldview? My intuition says no.

The next reason Williamson gives is that Naturalism has difficulty in incorporating mathematics, physics, and other such strictly non-scientific (though science-related) disciplines:

Which other disciplines count as science? Logic? Linguistics? History? Literary theory? How should we decide? The dilemma for naturalists is this. If they are too inclusive in what they count as science, naturalism loses its bite. Naturalists typically criticize some traditional forms of philosophy as insufficiently scientific, because they ignore experimental tests. How can they maintain such objections unless they restrict scientific method to hypothetico-deductivism? But if they are too exclusive in what they count as science, naturalism loses its credibility, by imposing a method appropriate to natural science on areas where it is inappropriate. Unfortunately, rather than clarify the issue, many naturalists oscillate. When on the attack, they assume an exclusive understanding of science as hypothetico-deductive. When under attack themselves, they fall back on a more inclusive understanding of science that drastically waters down naturalism. Such maneuvering makes naturalism an obscure article of faith.

Nick Byrd over at Critique My Thinking has a great response to this aspect, and so I will defer to his well-written piece rather than say, essentially, the same thing. What I will say, however, is that I am slightly wary of incorporating utilitarianism into a worldview given the implications of such a move. To name a few, utilitarianism commits itself to  the sacrifice of one for all (even the innocent), the difficulty in realizing utiles as a valid form of measuring social utility, the difficulty in offering independent reasons for prioritizing one social good over another, and the potential for sacrificing some social goods in the names of those that are prioritized higher. But that is a discussion for a different day!

Finally, Williamson seeks to draw a distinction between Naturalism as a philosophical theory and the spirit of science that motivates such a move:

Naturalism tries to condense the scientific spirit into a philosophical theory. But no theory can replace that spirit, for any theory can be applied in an unscientific spirit, as a polemical device to reinforce prejudice. Naturalism as dogma is one more enemy of the scientific spirit.

Williamson’s point is that any theory can be motivated by either a scientific spirit or an unscientific spirit of inquiry. I applaud Williamson for seeking to avoid dogma dressed in philosophical garb, but I wonder if he is throwing the baby out with the bath water. Clearly he affirms the use of the scientific method but not as the sole approach for defining our world. The broader scope of his article is certainly one I can agree with – Naturalists must include other worldviews and evaluative systems in their definition of Naturalism, but must do it in such a way as to maintain internal coherence with the motivation scientific spirit, and to avoid equivocating when pressed for clarification. What we mustn’t lose is the need for philosophical inquiry to rely upon and be held accountable to scientific discovery. But where do we draw the line, or even the “no man’s land,” between disciplines? How can we maintain philosophy and science as healthy and robust areas of inquiry which are mutually dependent but also distinct?

A Question of Concepts

I have recently been reading Neuroscience & Philosophy: Brain, Mind, & Language which offers a back-and-forth exchange between Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker on one side and Daniel Dennett and John Searle on the other. One point I believe to be particularly salient with regard to delineating disciplines is made by Bennett/Hacker:

The question we are confronting is a philosophical question, not a scientific one. It calls for conceptual clarification, not for experimental investigation. One cannot investigate experimentally whether brains do or do not think, believe, guess, reason, form hypotheses, etc. until one knows what it would be for a brain to do so. i.e. until we are clear about the meanings of these phrases and know what (if anything) counts as a brain’s doing so and what sort of evidence supports the ascription of such attributes to the brain.

To be sure, naturalism, science, and the scientific method more generally hold incredible promise for allowing us to better understand the world we inhabit, including human beings. But before science can begin helping us answer the question of whether a brain is capable of thought rests upon understanding what we mean when we say “thought” or “thinking.” More to the point, I believe we must settle how we conceive of human identity. For, though we might posit that the brain makes decisions, it does so based upon sense-data available from a body’s particular sense apparatus. When the sense apparatus is damaged, augmented, or otherwise compromised, this affects the decision-making process among other functions. Moreover, if we are to utilize everyday conceptions of the self in our considerations, even if we consider our primary actions to be cognitively based, and the brain to be the cognitive workhorse, I doubt many reduction-friendly laypersons would limit their identity to their brain.

I am hesitant to endorse the use of common-sense conceptions of the self, freedom, moral responsibility, etc. because they so very often are inconsistent and problematic. As Eric Schwitzgebel at Splintered Mind says:

Commonsense opinion is not straightforwardly substance dualist.  Rather, commonsense opinion about the metaphysics of mind is an incoherent mess.  Thus, it’s impossible to develop a detailed, coherent dualist metaphysics that respects all the inclinations of common sense.

Perhaps interesting examples of “double think”, human beings often hold conflicting metaphysical views. Our justice system is also a good example of this – we hold individuals morally and legally responsible for their behavior, sometimes in a retributive manner, for what we deem monstrous actions. Paradoxically, we also consider the inability to have acted otherwise as a mitigating factor for moral or legal guilt – if an individual is mentally incompetent he is not even fit to stand trial, or if he is deemed insane by the court then he is sent to a medical facility rather than prison. While this mitigation is traditionally limited to psychological, medical, or other behavioral circumstances, what about coercion? Joshua Dressler discusses this here.

The “mess” that is the common view of metaphysics cannot be of much use to us directly, but perhaps indirectly. For, the concepts of “thought”, “belief”, “guess” etc. are rooted as much in how we use those terms in common parlance as they are in how professional philosophers and scientists use those terms. This is why I maintain that, despite the existence of some well-reasoned compatibilist theories, we lack the type of freedom most people mean, and most people believe they have. So, perhaps philosophically we can arrive at a congruent and unproblematic compatibilist theory of mind. But often these theories are so far away from what most people mean by freedom or responsibility that they lose practical application.

Ultimately, I agree with Bennett and Hacker that experiments can only take us so far. Yes, recent experiments in neuroscience are incredibly important and useful, but mostly insofar as they provide a wealth of data for philosophers and scientists alike, not because they single-handedly resolve long-standing controversies in philosophy. As philosophers we must temper our theories with scientific findings, but also use advances in philosophy to weigh on how scientists consider the very concept of freedom, action, the will, desire, etc. This is the hope I have for naturalism – that it will offer a mutually beneficial approach to both philosophy and science, one that will allow us to develop our understanding of the world but also our understanding of how human beings view the world and themselves.

Image courtesty of superscholars.org

I recently learned that John Hick has passed away at the age of 90. I have been holding on to this piece for quite some time, as I feel I haven’t quite said what I want to say, or am not saying it quite as succinctly as I would like. Regardless, I would like to post this in memory of John Hick, with whom I have almost always disagreed but always enjoyed reading nevertheless. As always, please feel free to offer your critiques and comments, especially since I view this as a fairly rough piece.

John Hick begins his explication of the Irenaean Theodicy by briefly summarizing and simultaneously discounting the Augustinian approach. I shall not spend much more time than Hick does in defining the Augustinian approach, and the only reason I do so at all is to offer a companion against which Hick’s Irenaean Theodicy might be compared as divergent from traditional Christian theodicy. In short, the Augustinian model follows a traditional Christian viewpoint of creation and the fall of man. It postulates that men (and angels) were created as perfect, free, and finite beings who fell from perfection as a consequence of their misuse of freedom.[1] Hick states that, “the Augustinian approach…hinges upon the idea of the fall as the origin of moral evil, which has in turn brought about the almost universal carnage of nature.”[2] An integral piece of Augustinian Theodicy inherent in thinkers all the way from St. Augustine to Alvin Platinga is the free-will defense against the Problem of Evil. This defense chiefly rests upon the idea that God’s creation was entirely perfect and yet man and angels chose to sin of their own free choice, which resulted in the evil that we now see present in the fallen world.

Hick rejects this view on the account that few contemporary Christians still believe that man was created fully formed and that the Biblical accounts are not factual but rather illustrative.[3] Specifically, the Augustinian account fails to make room for evolution or development of the species, since it assumes that God created man fully formed. In place of the Augustinian model, Hick offers up an Irenaean Theodicy based on the theodicy of St. Irenaeus which avoids these problems rather neatly. In his review of Hick’s theodicy[4], Rowe calls the Irenaean Theodicy a “historically significant, although less dominant, Christian theodicy.”[5] Particularly relevant because it successfully responds to the issue of evolution is the Irenaean Theodicy’s dual stage conception of human development: the first stage as man’s creation in God’s “image” and the second stage as man’s creation in God’s “likeness”.[6]

The Irenaean Alternative

Hick compares the first stage, that of man made in God’s image, with the contemporary idea of the evolution of the homo sapien. In this stage, man is simply another form of life in nature. However, early men for Hick are “intelligent, ethical, and religious animals.”[7] Despite this higher nature, homo sapiens are distinct from the fully-formed man in the Augustinian view. Where Adam and Eve are perfectly whole in all of their capacities upon creation, “Existence “in the image of God” was [in contrast] a potentiality for knowledge of and relationship with one’s maker, rather than such knowledge and relationship as a fully realized state.”[8] Thus this first stage shows man as a yet undeveloped being that nevertheless possesses the raw materials for spiritual and moral maturity. The second stage, that of man’s likeness to God, is the stage in which Hick believes humanity to currently be. Human beings in this stage are brought closer to God’s likeness through their own free actions. An important distinction to note here is that Irenaeus reversed the Augustinian timeline of humanity, shifting from decay to development. For Augustine our origin was our perfection, a state from which we inevitably fell. Contrary to this, Irenaeus saw our perfection as the summit to which we advance and one that lay at the end of our development.[9]

Working off of this developmental image of mankind, Hick asks the pivotal question for the Irenaean Theodicy: why “should humanity have been created as an imperfect and developing creature rather than as the perfect being whom God is intending to create[?]”[10] To this end he introduces two explanations for this: our relationship with God and our relationship with one another. Together these form the basis for his Soul-Making theodicy of human development. Regarding the second relationship, that of the individual to other individuals, Hick articulates a picture that requires suffering in order for human beings to develop compassion for one another. If in our world only the unjust were punished and the just were spared all evils, then if our counterpart experienced suffering we would know that he deserved it. If all evil actions were punished, then “truly moral action, action done because it is right, would be impossible.”[11] Thus indiscriminate evil builds mutual love and caring among humans, because “the righteous as well as the unrighteous are alike struck down by illness and afflicted by misfortune.”[12] In this way we develop love and compassion as individuals and a society, and take one more step towards the perfect end state which God intended for us. In this particular piece, Hick does not address perhaps the greatest evil inherent in this system: that God allows or directly causes widespread suffering on quite literally global and historical scales in order that some humans might develop compassion for one another. Such a trade off seems questionable at best and morally reprehensible at worst.

Regarding our relationship to God, Hick argues that if we were created in perfection with divine knowledge of God, the disparity between our finite nature and God’s infinite nature would make impossible any truly free or autonomous choice. On this Hick asks, “For what freedom could finite beings have in an immediate consciousness of the presence of the one who has created them, who knows them through and through, who is limitlessly powerful as well as limitlessly loving and good, and who claims their total obedience?”[13] To this end, Hick claims that to truly be a person, a creature must be created at an “epistemic distance” from God, and must live in a world where God’s presence is not immediately certain. It is with this point that I turn to my main criticisms of Hick’s Irenaean Theodicy, skipping the obvious moral travesty that would be God’s wholesale blind punishment of humanity in order that some might become more developed souls and be closer to him.

The Problem

The theodicy Hick presents is that he fails to qualify exactly how human beings who are perfectly good as a result of this soul-making process are of a better value than human beings who were created perfectly good from the start, who (freedom aside) are metaphysically possible. He assumes this is intuitive, but I do not think it is. Hick admits that it is logically possible for God to have created a perfectly moral and perfectly free being who, by virtue of her nature, would never be inclined to sin. He likens this state to Newton’s first law of motion, saying that “perfectly good beings would continue in the same moral course forever, with nothing in the environment to throw them off it.” This raises the question of why God would bother with any sort of soul-making process if he could skip all of that and make perfectly free and moral beings. Hick’s response lacks substance and force. On this he says:

The answer, I suggest, appeals to the principle that virtues that have been formed within the agent as a hard-won deposit of right decisions in situations of challenge and temptation are intrinsically more valuable than ready-made virtues created within her without any effort on her own part. This principle expresses a basic value judgment that cannot be established by argument but which one can only present, in the hope that it will be as morally plausible, and indeed compelling, to others as to oneself.[14]

I reject this type of value judgment for a number of reasons. First, this answer begs the question of value itself by asserting that “hard-won” virtues are intrinsically more valuable than those virtues that have always been present. However, it makes no sense to ascribe these types of value judgments to virtues in human beings, which serve as attributes.

Let us take George W. and Abraham L. as an example. George, by way of his upbringing or any number of elements, has always been honest – in fact, he is so honest that he cannot tell a lie and has always been perfectly honest. Abe, on the other hand, did not have the fortune to be born so perfect. He had a normal upbringing, and his parents never scolded him for telling lies. Over a period of time, and after a myriad of negative experiences and hardships caused by his deceit, Abe comes to learn that honesty is the best policy (sorry for being trite.) Now, let us suppose we can narrow down the exact day that Abe has truly earned his honesty and understood that he ought never to tell a lie. And let us also suppose that we can know for certain that he shall never tell another lie as long as he lives. On that day, wouldn’t both George and Abe be equally honest men? True, one has been honest for longer. But they are necessarily equal in their virtue. Hick would have us believe that Abe, due to having “earned” his honesty by trial and error, misstep, pain, and suffering, possesses superior honesty. But this cannot be! For any statement regarding Abe that might qualify his honesty as having more worth than George’s concerns separate attributes, not his honesty itself.

For example, Hick might argue that, because Abe has witnessed the pain that lies can cause loved ones, he can more greatly appreciate the value of being honest. George, on the other hand, is honest because he is honest. While George may be aware of the short-term benefits of deceit, he is not inclined to lie due to his nature and thus, while certainly honest, he does not appreciate or fully understand the gravity of the virtue itself and the stakes of the matter. However, such a scenario hides that the conversation has shifted away from honesty and onto another attribute, in this instance knowledge. In this case, though George and Abe are equally honest, though they may have unequal knowledge of the virtue, as Abe would seem to have more complete knowledge of the importance of being honest than George.

We can see that earned-vs-given does not work in a variety of other situations where attributes are applied and attributes are earned. If Roger is born with the ability to run 9 mph, and Tom is born with the ability to run 6mph but practices for 10 years until he can run 9mph, their ability to run does not differ. We cannot say that Tom is a better runner, because to do so means they are not of equal skill and is tantamount to arguing that, in Hick’s case, God is incapable of creating a human being who is perfectly virtuous. Similarly, if we focus on a virtue other than “goodness”, perhaps determination, it still cannot be that Tom and Roger possesses identical determination but somehow Tom’s determination is more intrinsically valuable.  And even if it did, that is a discussion of determination and not ability to run and we are again discussing a different attribute than the one with which we began.

Lastly, as a throw-away point, if Hick’s argument is truly that virtue gained as a result of development is intrinsically better than that which simply is virtuous, then wouldn’t this necessarily apply to God himself? In this way it is absurd to think that God would somehow be intrinsically better if he had worked for his virtue than if he had had it all along. While apologists will certainly claim that God is the exception, he is fully developed, his nature differs from ours, etc. this would nevertheless seem to follow from Hick’s argument.

Concluding Remarks:

Hick markets the Irenaean theodicy as a viable alternative to the more traditional Augustinian theodicy, chiefly because it does not explicitly conflict with developments in evolutionary biology. But this alternative creates equally problematic situations. At root, the issue lies with an inconsistency in the trend of Hick’s argument. If God is able to create human beings who are perfectly virtuous and never sin, and yet does not do so because he wishes instead to create whole human beings who must work for an even greater level of virtue, then (1) surely God is not omnipotent or (2) these two levels of virtue are not equal. For, if human beings who earn their virtue are intrinsically more virtuous than any who could be created by God, then God’s omnipotence is violated and the entire Christian enterprise is called into question. On the other hand, how could God create perfectly virtuous beings who could be more virtuous if they were instead created at an epistemic distance from him?  At the heart of this last point lies the quite obvious problem that virtues cannot both be equal and unequal; Honesty won cannot be equal to and yet better than honesty given. Either God is incapable of creating us with perfect virtue, or intrinsic virtue is equal to given virtue and there is little palatable reason to posit the Irenaean alternative, since it necessitates God’s indiscriminate punishment of mankind.

"But if nonreduction is true then we would never have Maple Syrup." Photo courtesy of Smittenkitchen.com.

In Part I of this two-part post I introduced an extended dialogue between Timothy O’Connor and Derk Pereboom that spans physicalism, reductionism, agency theory, and quantum physics. O’Connor posits a purely physicalist theory of agency based on the formation of macroproperties which instantiate in sets of microproperties which reach a certain threshold level of complexity. Once this level is reached, an emergent macroproperty, constituted as an agent causal power, can then enact downward causal influence over its microproperties without being subject to upward causation or determination from its constituent microproperties. Pereboom takes O’Connor to task for failing to account for the influence of distal causes, which nevertheless determine the behavior of the agent causal power, but to counter the invocation of an emergent property, Pereboom alleges that even in a statistical model rather than a deterministic one, we are still left with distal causes as the ultimate originator of action. In the comment section of a previous post, Aaron Kenna rightly makes mention of this, viz. that statistical, indeterministic, and deterministic worldviews all fail to provide the freedom required by agency theories/moral responsibility. In a future post I shall discuss this point further, using Strawson’s “basic argument” as an example. But for now, let’s turn to four points of analysis on the conversation between O’Connor and Pereboom to see what we can make of it.

 Four Points of Analysis

I have four points of analysis I would like to center on with regards to the conversation between O’Connor and Pereboom. They are: (I) emergent agent-causal libertarianism is a much simpler theory than others because it does not suffer from the problem of interaction. (II) Regardless of its parsimony in avoiding substance dualism, this agent-causal emergentism necessarily suffers from the issue of the plausibility of an undetermined, emergent macroproperty. (III) O’Connor claims that his thin account of agent causality only waits on developments in neuropsychology and other sciences for further development, but I am not convinced that this is so, nor do I believe many of his opponents should be. (IV) Finally, throughout the conversation it appears as though Pereboom and O’Connor come to a disagreement regarding reductionism that appears to end in stalemate, one which may be insurmountable.

I. One of the greatest strengths I see in O’Connor’s theory is that it successfully avoids the problem of interaction in a relatively novel way. By resisting the common libertarian move of slipping into dualism, as seen in Richard Taylor’s Metaphysics, O’Connor successfully and consistently classifies the human agent as, “a wholly biological organism, whose macroproperties are either constituted by or dependent on the properties of certain elementary physical particles, organized into complex subsystems at a number of levels.”[1] By classifying the agent as purely biological and his causal power as a macroproperty derived from microstructures, his theory is not subject to the question, “Yes…but if not physical then what exactly is the mind/self/soul/agent?” While it avoids this issue, it does face a similar question regarding what exactly constitutes the macroproperty, when it emerges, etc. which I discuss in (III), although this is not nearly as spiny an issue as the Mind-Body problem.

While strict substance dualism may not have many remaining champions in academic halls these days, soul/body dualism has given way to mind/body dualism such that one need not posit the existence of an atomic self (i.e. soul, atman, etc.) over and above an immaterial mind. By couching agent causal powers in terms of physical properties, O’Connor aligns himself on a naturalist-friendly line. And, as mentioned, he believes further scientific advances will only confirm and strengthen his theory. This is head and shoulders better than other theories of mind which may not answer naturalist inquiries as smoothly or consistently. I say this because it seems increasingly more difficult to ignore scientific advances and their possible implications on philosophical theories, from the recent surge in neuroscience studies focusing on free will and action theory, to ongoing discussions of biological reduction, etc. Despite this naturalist-friendly approach to agency theory, emergent agent causation as a theory relies upon the irreducibility of the emergent macroproperty by way of a supervenient relationship.

 II. Despite being slightly more parsimonious than some of its brethren, O’Connor’s theory seems to encounter trouble with the attempt to argue that the macroproperty derives from determined microsystems yet can act as it wills without being bound by similar determinism. As O’Connor describes it, this agent is a “mover not wholly moved.”[2] Though central to his account of agent-causal action, O’Connor spends a puzzlingly small amount of time describing the emergent macroproperty, and simply states that it is a macroproperty emerging from microstructures whose causal role, with respect to the object it arises within, is not reducible to the causes of the microstructure.[3] While this is perhaps a consistent account, it does raise the question of just how this is possible. For this reason, Pereboom’s criticism (represented by (1) in O’Connors reiteration) of this point is warranted. Intuitively it seems far more plausible that, because microsystems can be explained by laws, so too should more complex systems. Indeed, O’Connor bears the burden of proof that such emergent macroproperties can even make sense given that he accepts the determinacy of microstructures[4]. More explanation in way of how exactly these macroproperties sit outside of determinate laws or predictions based on indeterminate probabilities is needed before it becomes plausible.

In other publications (not mentioned in Part I because they were not strictly part of the dialogue itself) O’Connor relies upon a supervenient relationship to get him the irreducibility his theory requires, as well as the downward causal influence that makes the emergent agent causal power worth considering. For a few reasons I am not able to detail my entire argument here as to why the use of a supervenient relationship does not do O’Connor’s theory any favors, but it should suffice to say that a slight modification of Jaegwon Kim’s exclusion argument allows us to demonstrate that such an emergent property as O’Connor posits would result in overdetermination and thus there is no reason to posit the existence of an emergent property over and above the microproperties, as it then has no novelty to offer.

III. The above (II) is not the only aspect of O’Connor’s theory that begs for more explanation. Presenting the idea that some critics may find his representation ‘thin’, O’Connor says:

Taking the agency theory seriously within a basically materialist framework brings for a whole host of theoretical problems and issues such as the following: When does a physical system qualify as an “agent”?…how do event- and agent-causal processes interact? These, however, are obviously empirical matters, requiring extensive advancements within neurobiological science…The answers to such questions will not be shown by philosophical work in action theory.[5]

In the above quotation I have omitted some of the issues he lists, but the two I have left do not seem to be issues that will easily be resolved by vast scientific advances. The question of when a physical system would qualify as an “agent” seems as though it would be plagued by issues similar to deciding how many grains of sand constitute a pile. I do not see how any advance in science would allow us to point to a specific moment when the macroproperty emerges and constitutes an “agent”. Similarly I fail to see how science could explain the interaction between event-causes and O’Connor’s irreducible agent-causes, especially when he does not give any qualification of how event causes and determined microstructures should or would weigh upon or inform an agent’s causal powers. In a previous post I have detailed how recent advances in neuroscience call into question the hope O’Connor has for future advances affirming rather than damaging his theory.

IV. Finally, the question of reductionism looms large throughout this exchange between Pereboom and O’Connor, and in the end it appears as though they are on opposite sides of the fence. O’Connor does not see any issue with the emergent macroproperty being non reducible down to microstructures and microelements. However, Pereboom does not see any issue with the statement that any law governing or explaining microstructures must necessarily govern or explain the macrostructures that build upon them. Similarly, when O’Connor responds to Pereboom’s book he condemns him for falling in line with the common trend of assuming reductionism.[6] While the entire discussion does not turn completely on this one point, large swaths of it do. O’Connor’s theory requires that the macroproperties be irreducible, otherwise they are determined. Pereboom’s criticism requires that the macroproperties be reducible in order to show that they are determined. I do not see either party giving ground, and so it appears as though this aspect of the discussion must end in a stalemate with no clear victor.

 Knowing why reductionism is important for these theories is different from knowing how it is important. The purpose of reductionism, as I understand it, is to reach the lowest common denominator so what we can form a more parsimonious theory that does not posit more than it needs to. Similarly, as can be inferred from both parts of this post, reductionism usually robs agency theory of freedom and moral responsibility. Is reductive analysis beneficial? Well, biologically it would appear to be so. Reduction allows us to strengthen the case for certain mental states being reducible to chemical imbalances, or brain states more generally.  This then allows us to alter the state of the brain via surgery, medication, or other forms of physical therapy, rather than working from a top-down model such as psychology, etc. I am inclined to lean toward reductive explanations, but the divide between the two positions seems to boil down to a disagreement. I would be interested in hearing from readers what they believe might be a possible advance that could provide more definitive evidence for one position over the other.

Conclusion

In the end, the debate over reductionism is not easily settled, but I do believe that Pereboom has effectively pointed to several weaknesses in O’Connor’s theory. By proposing a purely biologically constituted agent O’Connor successfully avoids the traditional issue of interaction. However, he does create and leave unanswered the question of how exactly a macroproperty can emerge from but not be irreducible to the microsystems that give rise to it. Surely this is an issue surrounding reductionism and supervenience, but intuitively I side with Pereboom that this does not seem coherent with regard to the laws of physics or quantum mechanics as we know them. Ultimately, O’Connor’s theory does not seem nearly as problematic as a dualistic theory of agency but, as my analysis shows, O’Connor’s account could stand to be thickened on multiple levels.

"To reduce, or not to reduce - that is the question."

I have recently come to believe that the crux of disagreements in contemporary discussions on physicalism and agency is the seemingly impassable divide between reductionist and non-reductionist positions. Perhaps one of the clearest examples of this disconnect can be seen in a dialogue between Derk Pereboom and Timothy O’Connor regarding the plausibility of a certain type of physicalist agency theory. The conversation is multi-faceted and invokes emergent agent causal powers (which I have mentioned here before, though only in passing) as well as quantum indeterminism. In this post I would like to introduce the reduction/non-reduction divide by unfolding the conversation between Pereboom and O’Connor. Part I will be heavily exegetical, but in Part II I offer up four points of analysis on the dialogue at large and the theories therein.

Agent Causation and Emergent Macroproperties

In Agent Causation, O’Connor seeks to give a robust libertarian account of agent causation as distinct from event causation. He insists that, contrary to traditional objections, this theory is coherent and consistent with what is known currently about the natural world. Of this he says:

I will contend that the commonsense view of ourselves as fundamental causal agents – for which some have used the term “unmoved movers” but which I think might more accurately be expressed as “not wholly moved movers” – is theoretically understandable, internally consistent, and consistent with what we have thus far come to know about the nature and workings of the natural world.[1]

Before treating the emergence of agent causality from event causes, O’Connor iterates the fundamental tenet of the agency theory he espouses, viz. that (1) there are two types of causal properties, and (2) that one such property “applies uniquely to intelligent, purposive agents.”[2] By fleshing out the agent, O’Connor seeks to avoid the pitfalls of substance dualism. In this effort O’Connor qualifies a human agent as, “a wholly biological organism, whose macroproperties are either constituted by or dependent on the properties of certain elementary physical particles, organized into complex subsystems at a number of levels.”[3] Thus he presents the human agent as composed of purely natural substances (biological), with macroproperties that are dependent upon lower level arrangements of particles and structures[4]. In this way he avoids substance dualism and apparently fulfills his original criteria of naming the agent as consistent with what is known about nature.

Prima facie, this agent and his macroproperties would still appear to be determined by “the behavior of microelements” and systems of microelements. So too it would seem that, while the organization O’Connor describes would allow for top-down agent causation as a macroproperty of the biological agent, this causation would only exist because it was caused by these microstructures to begin with.[5] O’Connor’s response to this objection is that it is quite plausible that such an organization of matter could potentially give rise to an emergent macroproperty that can “exert (in certain circumstances) an irreducibly ‘downward’ form of causal influence, or ones that enable the objects that bear them to do so ‘at will’.”[6] O’Connor does not fully describe this emergent property, but he does comment that, “Suffice it to say that an emergent property is a macroproperty that is generated by the properties of an object’s microstructure, but whose role in the causal processes involving that object are not reducible to those of the microproperties.”[7] In effect this emergent macroproperty, specifically agent causation, is derived from microstructures but cannot be reduced down to them. Once this macroproperty emerges it can then exercise top-down causation, and actions following this top-down causation cannot be said to be determined by the microstructures that gave rise to the macroproperty itself.[8] When applied, this macroproperty enables “its possessor directly to effect changes at will.”[9] As we will now see, Derk Pereboom interprets this as an incoherent sense of the macroproperty deriving from but sitting outside of the laws of physics or quantum physics.

Objections to Agent Causal Libertarianism

Pereboom is skeptical that the nonreductive materialist approach towards agent causation, as championed by O’Connor above, can provide libertarians with free decisions that are replete with moral responsibility. His first order of business is to demonstrate this to the libertarians. Even if we posit that nonreductive materialism is true, and that all microsystems are wholly governed by physical laws, this does not provide agent-caused free decisions. As Pereboom says, “as long as the microphysical level is governed by deterministic laws, all of our decisions will be rendered inevitable by virtue of previous states of the universe, just as their microphysical realizations are.”[10] These decisions, then, would be determined by factors beyond the control of the agent, and therefore no decision would constitute an agent-caused free decision. Though adroitly aimed, Pereboom’s first salvo does not knock O’Connor out of the race. Recall that O’Connor deftly rejects this maneuver in his own article, insisting that even though these macroproperties would emerge from determined microsystems, having emerged they would be free from determination.[11]
Knowing this, Pereboom constructs an argument that highlights the empirical implausibility and alleged incoherence of agent causal libertarianism. He begins by asserting that, even if the microsystems are governed by statistical quantum mechanics rather than determined physics, it would still be the case that all microsystems would be determined in the same way: “If everything is wholly constituted of microphysical entities governed by such laws of quantum mechanics, then all of our decisions will be wholly constituted of events on the continuum we discussed earlier [regarding a deterministic system].”[12] In this way, because the microsystems would be governed completely by laws of quantum mechanics, so too would our decisions be overwhelmingly governed by factors outside of the agent. In this way, although it would not be purely determined, statistically the outcomes would seem to be outside of the control of the agent. This quantum picture does not seem to offer agent-caused free decisions either, and emergentism similar to O’Connor’s appears to be one of the few options remaining. [13]

If O’Connor’s emergentism is correct then, despite determined microsystems, the macroproperties would be free from the governance of statistical quantum laws or deterministic laws. If this is this case then agents would need to have the distinct ability to ignore or trump these laws as they will, either in the predictive capacity of quantum mechanics or in the determined capacity of the laws of physics. Of this Pereboom says that, “if agent-causes are to be capable of such free decisions, they would require the power to produce deviations from the physical laws – deviations from what these laws would predict and from what we would expect given these laws.”[14] Over the period of time after these macroproperties emerged, we would expect to see at least a slight pattern of divergence from the outcomes predicted by the physical laws. Pereboom offers the following analogy:

Another way of seeing this is that if we were agents making transcendentally free choices, one would expect, in the long run, that these choices be evident in our bodies as patterns of divergence from the deterministic physical laws. Kant’s proposal that there are no such divergences, although it involves no logical contradiction, would run so sharply counter to what we would expect to occur as to render the proposal incredible.[15]

Here lies the rub for emergent agent causation. If, as O’Connor argues, agent causal power is an emergent macroproperty free from determination or prediction by the laws of physics or quantum mechanics, then some divergence must necessarily be present. But this does not afford with our observations of the laws of nature, since no divergence is apparent. As Pereboom points out above, Kant proposes that there are no divergences and that “every transcendentally free choice ever made dovetails precisely with the way the physical components of actions are causally determined to be.”[16] Though not logically impossible, this alignment would seem incredibly implausible in either a deterministic or a statistical view of the universal laws, and as Pereboom says, “the wild coincidences implied by this proposal make it incredible.”[17] Given this attack, Pereboom shows that agent causal libertarianism derived from emergentism does not accomplish what it sets out to accomplish.

O’Connor’s Rebuttal

In a review of Living Without Free Will, O’Connor responds to Pereboom’s assault on agent causal accounts of free action. Prior to outlining the two weaknesses he sees in Pereboom’s argument, O’Connor gives a brief iteration of Pereboom’s argument. This 5 point summation is reproduced below to both clarify the argument up to this point and set up the weaknesses O’Connor perceives:

(1) the statistical laws of quantum mechanics extend to all complex physical systems, including human organisms, and give complete explanations for the behavior of all such systems.

(2) Hence the physical aspects of all human actions should individually fall within the range of permitted possibilities and collectively converge upon the frequencies of outcome types predicted by these laws [from (1)].

(3) However, if human organisms are agent causes, there is a causal factor that is independent of all statistical physical laws.

(4) So the pattern of outcomes of agent-caused actions would probably diverge, in the long run, from the frequencies predicted by quantum mechanical laws [from (3)].

(5) Therefore human organisms are not agent causes.[18]

This appears to be a faithful account of Pereboom’s argument as presented in LWFW. The first weakness that O’Connor tackles is the truth of point (3) and its implication, point (4).

O’Connor’s first tactic is to play off of the role of indeterminacy in a quantum mechanical view of the universe. He cites (3) as not only vague but questionable as well. Instead of the view presented by Pereboom, he asks us to “Imagine that some conscious reasons-guided systems ‘magnify’ microphysical indeterminacies in such a way that several significantly different outcomes are physically possible. Then further suppose that agent-causal power emerges when conscious reasons-guided systems achieve a requisite threshold of complexity.”[19] This agent-causal power would then be “shaped” by states that reflected these magnified indeterminacies, resulting in the agent-causal action physically correlating with the possible outcomes. This would mean that, contrary to (4), no divergence would be necessary. On this, O’Connor says, “Agent-causal theorists have not typically thought of agent causation as being shaped by determinate probabilities that ultimately stem from impersonal factors, but I do not see why they cannot accept this.”[20] So while this move is a departure from the norm of agent-causal libertarians, O’Connor does not see it as a particularly contentious shift.

O’Connor’s second critique of Pereboom’s argument calls into question the supporting premise (1) of the entire argument, namely that it is wrong to assume that just because laws have a specific effect on microsystems they must have identical effects on systems of increasing complexity. That is to say, O’Connor takes offense at Pereboom’s utilization of:

a reductionist article of faith, blithe acceptance of which is at odds with the cautious skepticism regarding over-generalization that is characteristic of mature physical science. Well established physical theory leaves it an open question whether human mentality and agency involve ontologically emergent capacities that interplay with fundamental physical forces.[21]

For example, simply because the laws of quantum mechanics completely explain microsystems and the relationships between particles and other lower-level elements does not automatically mean that an emergent macroproperty (a far more complex system) must also be explainable by such laws. This contention appears to center chiefly around a reductionist-nonreductionist stalemate. Is O’Connor’s claim that hard line reductionism is not only contrary to a scientific attitude but also an unexamined and arbitrarily entrenched position? In part II of this post I offer four points of analysis on non/reduction as well as on emergent agent causal theory and quantum indeterminism.