Offerings, Plans, Reflections

Black Dignity, A Social Conception of Reality, Free Will and Blame

Dear all,

Thanks as always for reading this! Your thoughts, comments, and feedback are greatly appreciated - either publicly at the bottom of this newsletter or privately via email to thephilosopher1923@gmail.com

Offerings

This week, we are just hosting one event (thank goodness - I am so behind with editing the five we have hosted these past couple of weeks!). It promises to be a corker:

“Black Dignity”: We are excited to be hosting Vincent Lloyd, one of the leading young scholars of Black thought. in conversation with South African philosopher Motsamai Molefe, Professor Lloyd will be discussing his new book, Black Dignity: The Struggle against Domination. The book makes two provocative claims: 1) Black dignity is the paradigm of all dignity, and 2) Black philosophy is the starting point of all philosophy. Tune in tomorrow to find out why!

Your Sunday Read:
“Reality: The New Basics”: Over the course of the 20th century, reality achieved a bit of a bad press. It was considered passé, oppressive, nonexistent, or at least not the kind of thing one could have a useful or interesting theory about. Yet, by the 21st, it was back with a vengeance. In this fascinating and authoritative overview of the status of philosophy’s ultimate concept, our beloved contributing editor Jana Bacevic draws on her immense range of learning to help us get a sense of where we are when we are thinking about reality these days.

"A border is never just a border, a gate to be opened or closed at will." Earlier this week, we also uploaded “Borders: The New Basics”, an essay by the brilliant German critical theorist Robin Celikates.

Finally, we just uploaded some recordings from the superb “Grief Worlds” event we hosted on Tuesday 17th, featuring Matthew Ratcliffe and Kathleen Higgins.
“Grief Worlds: An Overview”: Matthew Ratcliffe gives a short overview of the key themes in his new book.
“Grief Worlds”: a recording of Matthew and Kathleen’s conversation.
“Can Philosophy Help People Who are Grieving?”: a short clip from the event.

Plans

We are delighted that Alexis Papazoglou will be resuming his brilliant podcast, “The Philosopher and the News”, after the birth of his son and a well-earned six-month hiatus. We are less delighted that the topic of the forthcoming episode is such a sombre one: the ongoing gun crisis in the United States. Alexis will be joined by Suzanne Schneider of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. We will also be uploading a written transcript of a conversation Alexis had with the never-short-of-a-word Slavoj Žižek on the Ukraine war. Welcome back, Alexis!

Our spring series of events in collaboration with Boston Review are shaping up great. On Tuesday 28th March, Josh Simons and Lily Hu will be discussing “The Political Theory of Algorithms”, while on Monday 22nd May, Bernard Harcourt and Amna Akbar will be looking at the role of cooperation in shaping the future of democratic politics. More events with BR to be confirmed shortly…

Reflections

In this short reflection, Ian Craib offers an overview of some key questions in the free will/determinism debate, arguing that it is time to move beyond outmoded models of blame and moral responsibility:

One of the oldest philosophical debates concerns whether we freely choose our actions or whether they are predetermined by prior events. Our experience of consciousness tells us that we make our own decisions. However, other events in the world seem to always be caused by previous events. Why, then, should human actions be any different?  But if all actions are predetermined, does it really make sense to hold people responsible for them?

Ever fewer philosophers or scientists are arguing against the causal determination of human actions, but the general public seems to believe that they act with free will, and our legal systems appear to assume so as well. But the case for determinism is strong. It is not simply more impersonal phenomena like physical causation (the relationship between a cause and its effect) or genetic determination (hard-wiring through DNA).  Even within the realm of consciousness and subjectivity itself, desires and emotion influence how we think: ideas sometimes appear spontaneously in our minds; the way we perceive and interpret experience is affected by external social and cultural influences, personal history, memory limitations, and what we know – and do not know – about the world.  In a very real sense, then, our thoughts and actions are fully determined – we could not have thought or acted differently under the same circumstances. 

Philosophical positions on determinism and free will can be classified as compatibilist or incompatibilist. The compatibilist, or “soft determinist” view, maintains that moral responsibility is in fact compatible with determinism. One influential compatibilist is Daniel Dennett. He argues that even though human action is fully determined, it still makes sense hold responsible those capable of rational decision-making and understanding the social and legal rules (he refers to this as “the sense of free will worth wanting”). For Dennett, those who break the law are deserving of any blame, sanctions or punishments that follow, even if they could not have behaved differently under the circumstances. Dennett makes analogy to organized sport: a player who breaks a rule is responsible, guilty, and deserves to be penalized even if the transgression was accidental or unavoidable, because he/she accepts the rules governing the game.   

Incompatibilists, by contrast, believe that determinism is incompatible with free will and moral responsibility (prominent advocates of this position include Gregg Caruso and Sam Harris). For these thinkers, compatibilist attempts to accommodate determinism in a framework of moral responsibility succeed only by changing the common sense meaning of moral responsibility to something completely different. For example, Dennett’s concept of “free will worth wanting” accepts that a person’s reasoning and actions are fully determined by external factors, and that no other choice is possible under the same circumstances, while still holding such a person to be blameworthy when they transgress. This is far from what we normally mean by declaring someone guilty of a crime and deserving of punishment due to a decision made “of their own free will.” Dennett’s analogy to game rules is also seriously flawed, as no one is given the choice to play the “game” of life. In reality, these notions of guilt and desert are relics of an age-old desire for vengeance rooted in religious dogma and pre-scientific folk ignorance. Contemporary compatibilists are grasping at straws in their attempt to salvage moral justification for the rule of law and convention. 

There are better ways for us to understand and deal with undesirable behaviour. We do not need the notions of responsibility and guilt, because society can justify the control and influence of bad behaviour on grounds of self-protection. We can still have laws and social expectations, and apply sanctions to those who break them, but we would justify this based on the socially desirable consequences of deterrence, rehabilitation, and removal of threat. Wrongful acts can be fairly attributed to the person who committed them, even if they are not “morally responsible” in the common sense. Furthermore, we can still distinguish between those who function rationally and intentionally, and are therefore potentially responsive to the deterrent effects of punishment and/or rehabilitation, and those who are experiencing a severe of mental incapacity, who must be treated clinically or, if that is not possible, kept in seclusion for the protection of everyone else.

Ian Craib is a retired public servant living in Ottawa, Canada. He studied Philosophy back in the day (MA Carleton University 1982), and has recently been getting back into it. His primary interests are currently in the areas of individual and collective moral philosophy, and he can be reached at iancraib2@yahoo.ca

Ending

Thanks for reading this. If you would like to write one of the reflections in future, please email something over to us at: thephilosopher1923@gmail.com. Ideally no more than 500 words.

Comments and feedback about any of this always welcome.

Wishing you all a great week ahead!

Anthony Morgan
Editor