The worry about debates over free will is that they degenerate into semantics -- what do you mean by "free will," really? But there are important substantive issues that shouldn't be ignored. Do people deserve blame for doing wrong things? Can we make choices that create meaning for our lives? Philosopher Gregg Caruso denies the reality of free will, but is in favor of making good choices, as he discusses in his new book How to Live Well Without Free Will.
Listen or watch Rolex Planet Visionaries wherever you get your podcasts. #ad
Support Mindscape on Patreon.
Gregg Caruso received a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the City University of New York. He is currently Professor of Applied Ethics and Management and Director of the Patrick J. Waide Center for Applied Ethics at Fairfield University, and Scientific Advisor, Center for Justice and Mental Well-Being, Nova Institute for Health. Among his awards are the Joseph B. Gittler Award from the American Philosophical Association.
Click to Show Episode Transcript
0:00:00.2 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I want you all to appreciate how much I care about what the people want when it comes to podcast topics. The people love talking about free will. I don't always love talking about free will. I sort of feel like I get dragged into it a little bit. I appreciate that the topic is important, but I appreciate that it's important in a very particular way. There are a whole bunch of things that can be said and argued about concerning free will, which really just come down to disagreements about definitions about what things mean. And to me, that's extremely tedious. Again, it's important. We should have definitions for our words, but you don't want to spend hours talking about them. But there's also a substantive side, which is why it is actually important to talk about, because there might be implications for believing that you have free will or you don't. Where do you locate moral responsibility? How do you arrange systems in society to put praise or blame on people for doing things? That might matter if you believe that people have free will or don't.
0:01:11.0 SC: So even though I kind of sometimes roll my eyes, sometimes we have to have these conversations. We had Christian List, who is one of the leading compatibilists out there, on the podcast recently. A compatibilist is someone who believes in free will and also determinism underneath the surface. One way you can tell that someone is not giving you a very sophisticated discussion of free will is if they keep talking about determinism. Determinism and free will are two completely different questions. You can believe in determinism or not and believe in free will. And you can also believe in determinism or not and not believe in free will. So if you want to talk about free will, talk about free will. Don't talk about determinism. So Christian gave us the sales pitch for believing in determinism if you want to, but still believing in free will. That's the compatibilist line.
0:02:02.4 SC: Today we have Gregg Caruso, who's a philosopher who is an advocate for the hard incompatibilist line, as he calls it. This is a point of view that says that... Again, Gregg is smart enough to know that the argument is not about determinism. He wants to say that it doesn't matter whether it's determinism or not determinism. In either case, you don't have free will in the real world, is the argument that he wants to make. And I think that he actually does a very good job in this discussion of explaining exactly what those consequentialist implications are of believing in free will. It becomes very, very clear that the reason why he wants to reject free will is because of the consequences of talking that way. In particular, the idea that people might deserve punishment for doing bad things. It's not that he's against enforcing the law or whatever, but the reason why you enforce the law in certain ways and the ways in which you enforce the laws might matter depending on how you think about people's conscious choices to do the wrong things.
0:03:11.5 SC: So Gregg has a new book out called 'How to Live Well Without Free Will.' And this is focusing on the idea that some people, some skeptics... And by the way, Gregg has participated in debates and discussions and back and forth with people like Daniel Dennett and Christian List, the people who are the most out there compatibilists, out there in the sense not that they're crazy, but that they're fighting the fight for compatibilism, making the case for it. And so he's engaged with those people. He knows exactly what the arguments are. And his most recent book is about, okay, let's imagine you don't have free will. How do you nevertheless have love and friendship and making good choices in your life? He doesn't think you can't make choices. Honestly, I think that we're very... Not very far apart, let's put it that way, Gregg and myself. We disagree about some nomenclature, some ways to call certain things, but on the substance, we're really not that far apart at all. We're less far apart than I might have thought. I'd interacted with Gregg before, but never sat down for a long conversation with him. So this was very useful in that way. Hopefully it'll bring some clarity to these debates we all love to have. So let's go.
[music]
0:04:42.5 SC: Gregg Caruso, welcome to the Mindscape podcast.
0:04:44.2 Gregg Caruso: Thank you for having me.
0:04:45.8 SC: This is something where... We've talked about free will before. I have on the podcast, you and I have, although not recorded as far as I know. So, but let's start with obvious, easy questions. Like, what do you mean by free will? What's the definition here that you like to use?
0:05:03.0 GC: Yeah, obviously every debate on free will should start with some kind of definition, because I think a lot of the debate is about people talking past each other. So I have a really precise definition of free will that I use. I define free will as the control in action that's required for a particular type of moral responsibility. And it's the kind of moral responsibility that philosophers like myself call basic desert moral responsibility. It's the kind of moral responsibility that would make you truly deserving of praise and blame for your actions in a, what I call purely backward-looking sense, without reference to forward-looking goods. Like, I'm not blaming you because it'll have positive effects in the future or it will deter crime. I'm blaming or punishing you or praising or rewarding you because you deserve it in some fundamental sense.
0:05:58.2 SC: And so we did talk to Christian List just a little while ago, and he's a compatibilist, so he's pro-free will, you're anti-free will, but you actually collaborated together, right?
0:06:08.7 GC: Well, we've had debates and we've printed...
0:06:11.2 SC: Debates.
0:06:11.8 GC: Yeah, we've had a couple exchanges in print and in person. And I think we both admire each other's work, but we come at it from different perspectives.
0:06:19.9 SC: Of course. And I just want to... I bring that up because you use the word control, and he has control as a big part of what counts as free will. But I get the impression that the emphasis in the definition you just gave is not so much on the control. I mean, that's there and that's important, but it's the basic moral desert that is really doing a lot of the lifting.
0:06:43.3 GC: Yeah, because for me, if the debate about free will isn't grounded in things that matter, like it doesn't have an effect on our practical policies or interpersonal relationships, I'm not exactly sure what the debate is about. So, yes, moral responsibility typically among the philosophical literature has two key conditions. There's kind of an epistemic condition that says the wrongdoer has to know what they're doing is wrong. Like, you have to have certain knowledge of the moral nature of your actions. Right?
0:07:18.3 SC: Right.
0:07:19.1 GC: Then there's a control condition that is usually what people equate with free will, that for an agent to be held morally responsible in the sense I just defined, they have to have some kind of control over that outcome. And that's where the free will notion gets tied to the notion of moral responsibility.
0:07:38.2 SC: So I remember in my book 'The Big Picture,' I bring up the, I guess, famous case of, there was a guy in Texas who had some brain tumor that sort of turned on and off whether he had pedophilic tendencies or something like that.
0:07:52.6 GC: Yeah, it's a classic case, sure.
0:07:53.6 SC: So could you tell us about that case if it's a classic?
0:07:56.1 GC: Yeah. So there was this gentleman who I think he was remarried, so he was in a second marriage. He had a stepdaughter. And he seemed to be like a normal individual, very social. If I'm remembering the case correctly, he might have even been a teacher. And all of a sudden started to exhibit pedophilic desires or tendencies. And it included things like his proclivity for pornography and what he was looking up and watching and things like that. So eventually the new wife was uncomfortable about some of the behavior he was exhibiting toward his stepdaughter, and it got into a legal issue. And the court ruled that he should attend or should, I think, undergo some sort of treatment for his pedophilic desires. The day before he was supposed to show up, he collapsed. He was rushed to the emergency room. They discovered a large tumor. When they removed the tumor, the behavior and the desires went away. But two or three years later, the behavior came back. He was rushed to the hospital again, and it revealed that the tumor had returned. And this is one of these kind of classic cases where the brain tumor seems to be causally involved in this change in behavior.
0:09:26.3 SC: Right.
0:09:27.1 GC: And in this case, we have a standard kind of baseline behavior that we could look back for many years and see how this person behaved in the past, what their character was like, what their predispositions were. And this tumor seems to be correlated with this change in behavior pretty clearly.
0:09:43.4 SC: And this would seem to be a pretty good example for the anti-free will people to bring up in the sense that here's something that this person had no control over, but it had a big impact on their actions.
0:09:57.3 GC: Yeah. I mean, I think this is a kind of very intuitive case, very powerful with students. I use this case and similar cases with brain tumors. But one of the things I would stress in my view is that it doesn't have to be just cases where there's abnormal behavior caused by a brain abnormality. I think what this case may reveal in a sort of deeper sense is that all of our behavior is grounded in neurology.
0:10:21.1 SC: Exactly.
0:10:21.7 GC: And all of our behavior is grounded in what's happening in our brain, our serotonin levels, our neurological states. And the question then is whether or not one could find free will in that kind of causal picture.
0:10:37.3 SC: Yeah, that's why I brought it up in my book, because I'm pitching the compatibilist side and I'm trying to say, sure, there are cases where you would not call it free will, like if you have a brain tumor that is basically forcing you to do something. And then it's my burden to say, well, there's also more complicated cases where we would call it. And for someone like you, I take it, it's just an example of if you take this seriously, even when it's not so obvious, there's other causal forces that are making us do things.
0:11:07.0 GC: Yeah. So, I mean, just to back up a second, so I'm a free will skeptic.
0:11:11.0 SC: Yup.
0:11:11.6 GC: I maintain that who we are and what we do is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control. And we could talk about what those factors might be because they may not just be determinism. I think whether determinism is true or indeterminism is true, the outcomes would in either case be beyond the control of the agent because we don't control determined events any more than we control indeterminate events. And because of this, we lack the kind of control in action that I just defined as necessary for this kind of moral responsibility, and particularly the kind that would ground attitudes like resentment and indignation and moral anger all the way up to retributive punishment.
0:11:55.8 SC: So you just said it very clearly, but I kind of am going to ask you to repeat it because it's such an important point about determinism versus indeterminism. And how I've often tried to make the case it has nothing to do with free will. Like, it's not determinism versus compatibilism or whatever. That makes no sense. And I thought what you just said makes perfect sense. So could you, from the free will skeptic side, make the case as strongly as you can that the determinism versus indeterminism debate is not where the interest lies?
0:12:29.3 GC: Yeah. So determinism, if I were to define it, you're a physicist, you might have a slightly different definition, but it's the thesis that events in the remote past in conjunction with laws of nature entail as only one unique future. And so this was kind of like the standard view in the Newtonian physics picture, and it was very popular among certain scientists and philosophers during that age where the idea was, well, determinism is true and it excludes free will because it either excludes the ability to do otherwise or it means the agent isn't the ultimate source of their actions. It could drain back to antecedent events going all the way back perhaps to the Big Bang. Right.
0:13:14.8 SC: Yeah.
0:13:15.7 GC: So then you might say, well, then quantum indeterminacy, doesn't that change the picture because it introduces some fundamental randomness, some indeterminacy maybe at the level of events? And the argument there is that that wouldn't seem to help any more than the determinist framework would seem to help in preserving this kind of free will because agents aren't in control of indeterminate events or probabilistic events any more than they are in control of determined events. And this could go back all the way to ancient Greece. There was a philosopher named Lucretius who was confronted with this same sort of problem. I mean, the ancient Greeks knew about atoms, or at least they had the word "atom."
0:13:59.6 SC: Yeah, they had the idea.
0:14:01.1 GC: And they had a very faulty theory of physics, but like that atoms fall in straight lines and all of this was sort of very deterministic. And Lucretius worried, well, if it's all just atoms in the void, where's free will? And he introduced these random swervings, which have become known as the Lucretian swerve.
0:14:21.2 SC: Yeah, I love that.
0:14:22.3 GC: So sometimes when these atoms are falling, they just randomly behave in ways that are undetermined. And he thought this would save free will. And a lot of people are making this same move nowadays with quantum mechanics, but it doesn't seem like it would change the game at all because it's a question of whether or not agents have any say in the outcome, whether they could settle their behavior if there's some sort of indeterminacy in the causal chain just prior to the outcome.
0:14:51.4 SC: Which is very weird to me because there are people on the anti-free will side, free will skeptics, who I can tell don't want to admit that quantum mechanics implies indeterminacy. And I try to tell them, like, this is my job, I'm a physicist.
0:15:08.4 GC: Yeah.
0:15:09.0 SC: Because it doesn't matter. Like, that's not even an argument for their side. But anyway, I'm glad that you put it so clearly. Thank you for that.
0:15:15.5 GC: Yeah, I'm officially agnostic about the truth of determinism. And I'm what I call a hard incompatibilist. So both determinism and indeterminism would be incompatible with the kind of free will that I'm defining. And so whether the universe is deterministic or indeterministic, we still would lack it.
0:15:35.2 SC: We probably should have done this earlier, but why don't you just give us the high-level lay of the land for those who have not listened to me talk about free will on many podcasts. What is compatibilism, incompatibilism, libertarianism, et cetera?
0:15:48.9 GC: Yeah, sure. So let's take the standard problem in the form of determinism, because that's kind of where the debate started.
0:15:58.1 SC: Sure, that's fine.
0:15:59.3 GC: And so the hard determinist was a view that said determinism is true and we lack free will because, again, as I just said, either determinism is incompatible with agents having this ability to do something different than what they did, or it's incompatible with them having the appropriate kind of sourcehood. Libertarians, not political libertarians, metaphysical libertarians, agree with that and say, well, determinism would be incompatible with free will, but determinism isn't true or isn't universally true when it comes to human agency. And there are different kinds of libertarians. Some try to introduce indeterminacy simply at the level of events. So simply at the level of causal events, there's some indeterminacy. And that's where I would kind of go with the argument I just gave against why I don't think that view succeeds, because I don't think agents have the ability to settle their behavior on that view. And we could talk about why if you want. There's another kind of libertarianism called agent-causal libertarianism, which tries to say that, no, agents can settle outcomes. Agents are the cause of their actions, but they themselves are causally undetermined. But this view requires a really robust metaphysical notion of agency. Basically, you have to be mini-gods, mini uncaused causes.
0:17:35.9 SC: Yeah.
0:17:37.0 GC: And so usually on the agent-causal view, agents have a kind of status that can't be just simply reduced down to physical events. You could either have a Cartesian soul, or they appeal sometimes to radically emergent substances, not just the emergence of properties. Like, H2O, when they're combined, you could have emergent properties and things like that, but you would have to have emergent substances. And the agent would be this substance that's the cause of their own actions, but themselves not causally determined. And my reason for rejecting that view would just be it's hard to understand that picture within our best philosophical and scientific accounts of the world. It's really hard to see how it would account for mental causation, like how could agents have the ability to cause these outcomes without violating physical causal closure and some other really kind of widely shared assumptions that philosophers and naturalists have about the world. And then there's compatibilism, which says, well, look, if determinism were true, it wouldn't rule out free will because the kind of control agents need is compatible or consistent with determinism. And usually, when there's many different stripes of compatibilists, I should just say.
0:19:00.4 SC: Sure. We don't need to list all of them.
0:19:01.8 GC: They appeal to different kinds of conditions that agents might need to satisfy. So some of the more popular ones are just that they act voluntarily or that they approve of their own motivational states. So they act on based on wants and desires and they endorse those wants and desires. Or perhaps the most popular one now is that agents are reasons-responsive. They have reasons for actions and they're responsive to those reasons. Even if determinism is true, as long as they're acting on those reasons that they self-identify with and that those reasons can have an impact on the outcome, that's all that's needed for free will. And I have reasons, but we could talk about that, for rejecting that view.
0:19:49.1 SC: And... Well, you have reasons, that's the thing, right? So, I don't know, a compatibilist is perfectly happy with that. Do you want to... Is it even fair to ask you what are the rough proportions of compatibilists, libertarians, skeptics in the philosophy community among the professional philosophers?
0:20:05.6 GC: Yeah, that's a good... So there is this survey that PhilPapers does, which is a website run, I think David Chalmers and others kind of run this website, and they engaged in these surveys just asking professional philosophers what their views are on different issues. And I'm not sure when the last one was done, and I don't know if I know the direct proportions, but compatibilism is by far the most popular view among professional philosophers. Probably libertarianism beats out skepticism, I think.
0:20:41.3 SC: Really?
0:20:42.7 GC: And there seems to be a kind of resurgence of libertarianism in an odd way.
0:20:48.6 SC: Oh, no.
0:20:49.2 GC: There could be multiple reasons for that, I'm not sure. I think if you think about philosophy, metaphysics for a long time was viewed as a bundle of pseudo-problems and not things to be talked about. And I think we've taken a turn away from philosophy of language and pragmatism and the Vienna Circle's notion of verification. And so I think it's become a little safer to engage in speculative metaphysics. And so maybe that's part of the reason why there's a kind of resurgence in that. And then lastly, I think, would be free will skeptics. But I would just say I think we're on the rise. It has become more popular. If you went back a decade or so, there'd be very few, I think. And I think now there's quite a few.
0:21:41.0 SC: Look, I mean, that's the best position to be in, a minority but a growing one, right? You feel virtuous and maybe you're winning. I'll mention, I don't know if you have anything to say about this or not, but I'll mention that a lot of times when I'm talking about the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, especially with non-experts, they will sometimes say, "Isn't it just depressing? Doesn't it undermine free will to think that other things... There's other versions of you in other branches of the wave function doing other things?" And I try to make the point that that shouldn't be any different than what you would have said in Newtonian mechanics or single-world quantum mechanics. It's still a matter of do I conceptualize myself as making these choices.
0:22:23.9 GC: Yeah, I don't think that... I mean, it'd be great to know that there's some possible world in which I'm a president or a millionaire or a billionaire for that matter, but has very little relevance to the me in this particular instantiation of the universe. And the question would be, in any of these possible worlds, what level of control do I have to determine those outcomes?
0:22:47.7 SC: I will... This is another thing I'll just mention, and it's not even a question, but you can comment on it. I often in the discussions about determinism go right to physics, like I just did with quantum mechanics or classical mechanics or whatever. My impression is a lot of people in the free will debate go right to neuroscience or biology, and they want to locate the lack of control there. Is that fair?
0:23:16.2 GC: Yeah, I think that... So my experience has been there's like two main avenues to free will skepticism, and they've kind of emerged in two different communities. One is very popular in the scientific community, and that's where they give kind of neurophysiological or neuroscientific arguments against free will. And those tend to appeal to findings like Benjamin Libet and these other kinds of neuroscientific discoveries that seem to indicate that there are these causal antecedents to conscious decision-making that set the ball rolling and come prior to the individual even becoming aware that they've made a choice. Then I think in the philosophical community, and this is where I'm coming, tend to at least say that agents can't... Individuals can be agents, that we don't have to buy into epiphenomenalism or the notion that one's mental states are not causally efficacious or some radical form of reductionism, and nonetheless there are still good arguments for rejecting free will. And so I'm kind of... I used to be more of a proponent of the Libet-type concerns. I've become less concerned with those findings and think that they don't really settle the ultimate debate either way. And so I think inevitably you gotta do a little philosophy.
0:24:49.3 SC: That's a point of common ground for us because whenever I hear about the Libet stuff, I'm like, did... Were you worried that the laws of physics are not running the engine underneath us? Like, what have you learned by that? Anyway, okay, good. I do want to get into the details of basic desert responsibility, et cetera, but maybe just before we get there, let's just bring up and knock down the sort of obvious compatibilist worries about a perspective like yours. Like, I make decisions all the time. I invited you on the podcast. That was a decision I made. Surely you're not telling me that I'm not allowed to make those decisions.
0:25:28.9 GC: Yeah. So good, good. So I may be pushing a rock up a hill with this kind of view, but in my work I've tried to argue that as a free will skeptic, I don't have to deny most of what compatibilists have worked hard to identify. That is, like, compatibilist work over the last few decades has done a great job, for example, distinguishing between different levels of control or different levels of agency. So there's no denying there's a difference between a kleptomaniac or an addict and a person who acts on desires and motivations that they endorse, right? There's no denying there's a difference between having an eye twitch and choosing to make a cup of coffee. So what I would say, how I define it, is that we could still preserve the distinction between voluntary and involuntary if we define voluntary actions as actions who have as their proximate cause internal psychological states of the agent, like beliefs, desires. So I believe there's coffee in the kitchen, I desire coffee, I go and I choose to make myself a cup of coffee. And that's different than, say, having an eye twitch or sneezing when I'm sick or what's happening at the various states of my liver right now.
0:26:54.3 SC: Yeah.
0:26:54.9 GC: Like, those are not voluntary actions because they're caused by what you might call either subpersonal events, that is, like, unconscious events or events that can't even rise to the level of conscious awareness, or they're external events. Like, if you throw me out the window, the proximate cause for me leaving the room is external, right? I don't see why we can't accept that distinction and then still say, but there's an open question about whether the voluntary actions themselves are enough to ground these kinds of judgments, treatments, attitudes like resentment, indignation, moral anger, on the assumption that individuals have some sort of ultimate control that grounds what I call basic desert. And my reason would be something like, well, do you control those internal psychological states or are those states themselves causally determined by antecedent events? And so the argument I think that succeeds or is the easiest one to run, because there's multiple arguments that philosophers give against compatibilism, is what I call the manipulation argument.
0:28:08.3 SC: Okay.
0:28:08.4 GC: So there's different ways of running it. Derk Pereboom, for example, has this four-case version where there's four different types of manipulation, each more like natural determinism. And then he argues that you can't point to a relevant difference between any of these cases. So if you think agents aren't free in the first, you shouldn't think they're free in the last. So I'll give you the most extreme version is, you know, you have some device implanted in your brain and some team of neuroscientists externally through some remote signaling triggering in you this egoistic desire that causes you to act on that egoistic desire and kill this individual for personal gain, right?
0:28:53.6 SC: Okay.
0:28:54.6 GC: Well, you did it because you wanted to. You did it because you had a certain set of beliefs and desires. You believed that killing this individual would lead to some personal gain, maybe an inheritance or something. You desired that for egoistic reasons. You could give all the compatibilist requirements and you could say this case, this you, this individual, satisfy them. That is, you approve of your desire to act on this desire. You're responsive to reasons, like if you had a stronger reason against doing this, or if you had believed more strongly that if you did this you might get caught and you would go to prison, you wouldn't have killed this individual. But this was the psychological state you were in. They were causally determined. Is this agent morally responsible? A lot of people's intuition is no, because they were manipulated to have those states.
0:29:52.4 SC: Yeah.
0:29:53.3 GC: And then the question is, well, what's different between those external cases of manipulation and just natural determinism? Because in the case of natural determinism, you don't control whether your egoistic desires are at 10 or 9 or what level of convincingness or impact they have on your reasoning. You don't control whether you have this hierarchical set of beliefs and desires, whether you approve or disapprove acting on them. You're in that state. And according to the compatibilist definition, if you act based on those proximate causes, you're doing it freely. And yet in the case of manipulation, it doesn't seem so free. And you could then go to a second case where the team of neuroscientists, or there's a case that Al Mele comes up with... Where, like, a team of angels sets up from the beginning of time since the Big Bang in a deterministic universe, just so on your 21st birthday you would have this desire to rob a liquor store. And just as they had planned, they're very wise and insightful angels who know how to read the tea leaves of determinism. And so they set the conditions up such that, as they had anticipated during the Big Bang, you rob this liquor store on your 21st birthday. And you do so because you want to. But your wanting to has been determined since the beginning of time. Right? Like, who you went to first grade with, who your second grade teacher was, what influences you had throughout your life. Think of, like, The Truman Show. Like, all the... Not only are the conditions from the Big Bang on determined, but, like, all the actors on the stage of your life were introduced by these...
0:31:44.8 SC: I see where this is going. Yeah.
0:31:46.5 GC: Yeah. But then the argument would be, well, what's different between that and the natural case of determinism? Because you don't get to choose who your first grade teacher was or who your best friend was in third grade, or whether you grew up in a supportive home or loving home. So the argument is that if these cases of manipulation are indistinguishable from the cases of natural determinism and we believe that agents are not free and morally responsible in the cases of manipulation, then you would have to point to a morally relevant distinction between these cases and the case of natural determinism. And if you can't, the argument is that compatibilism fails.
0:32:27.9 SC: But I guess... I think you said it, but I want to make it very clear, you're not against the concept that human beings make choices.
0:32:37.1 GC: Yeah, right. So there's where I think everyone agrees, or I would agree with compatibilists, that there's an important distinction again between certain types of actions, certain levels of control. I mean, there's a difference between a willing addict and a non-compliant addict. That is, there's a difference between someone who has a pedophilic desire and is okay with that desire and an agent who has a desire they wish they could be rid of. Right? So there's a diminished sense of control in that latter case. I think those are all relevant, and in my account they're relevant for forward-looking reasons, like they would license different interventions, different types of treatment, maybe even different types of sanctions, but they wouldn't be sufficient enough to ground basic desert in my account. And again, just basic desert is the concept of just deserts, you know?
0:33:35.8 SC: Right, yeah.
0:33:36.5 GC: An individual justly deserves to be praised or blamed, punished or rewarded simply because they committed that act.
0:33:42.2 SC: I mean, I'm dwelling on it because I do think that there are people who are very hardcore incompatibilists who just don't think that there are such thing as choices. When I went on Sam Harris's podcast, he wanted to talk about free will and he started by saying, "Do you really think that you've ever made a choice in your life?" And so it sounds like there's room open for being skeptical about free will and compatibilism, but still letting us use the language of making choices and rational deliberation.
0:34:15.0 GC: Yeah, and I think it's actually important for free will skeptics to make that distinction because I think otherwise the view sounds a bit ridiculous, but also I think you want to be able to appeal to the agency individuals have or the ability for people to reason without making them feel, I think, as if it's hopeless. Because I do think there's a difference between fatalism and free will skepticism. Fatalism for me is sort of the view that no matter what happens, these events are going to happen regardless of causation. That is, no matter what JFK tried to do, he was fated to die on that day in Dallas. And like Oedipus, even if you do everything possible, it's inevitable. Causation has no role. It's fated. And I don't think that that's what free will skeptics have to say. Free will skeptics say, no, these future events will happen because of causality. You don't jump in front of the train and say, "If I'm fated to die today, I'll die, and if I'm not, I'll survive." No, because the decision to jump in front of the train is going to be the cause of your death. The question is just whether the desire that caused you to make that decision was itself within the control of the agent.
0:35:33.4 SC: I think it's a super important distinction because people often have that worry about determinism, like doesn't determinism mean the future is settled and I can't make any choices? But they conceptualize that like Oedipus or like a prophecy with Macbeth or whatever. But in the real world, maybe the future is determined, but you don't know what it is. There's no prophet out there telling you what it is.
0:35:59.8 GC: Yeah. I mean, there's epistemic openness, right? You might suffer from stage fright, and so you don't know... But you're also a gifted pianist, let's say, and you want to give this recital. You don't know whether you're going to succumb to your stage fright or not. It's epistemically open to you because you still have to choose, you can't predict. But the idea, I think, is that that openness is probably sufficient enough for us to be motivated and for us and other agents to introduce reasons for you to give it a try. Right? This might be good for your career. Maybe this is a competition and the financial reward would be life-changing for you. It doesn't necessarily mean you're going to succeed, but it also doesn't mean you're going to fail. And ultimately life is uncertain in that way. Right? Like, we don't know, and we can't predict these outcomes, so we still have to make choices. The challenge is just whether or not there's enough control in that. So I give this weird example with my students sometimes, like, I wear black a lot.
0:37:07.4 SC: We're both wearing black, by the way, audience.
0:37:08.8 GC: Yeah, we're both wearing black. Good. So I sometimes use the choice of whatever I'm wearing that day, and it's usually black. But you could even go back to the being in the store and purchasing the shirt. And I ask my students, "Okay, think of this case, right? So I'm in the dressing room, but my wife says, 'You know, you need some colorful clothes.' So she hands me a yellow shirt, a red shirt." And I try them all on. I try on the black shirt, the red shirt, the yellow shirt, and I look at myself in the mirror. And here's what I ask my students: "Do I control that reaction I have when I see myself in the mirror?" Right? So I try on the red shirt, and I feel uncomfortable. I don't like the way I look. It's unappealing to me. And then I try on the black shirt and I go, "Yeah, that's cool. I'm gonna buy that." So I have desires, I have preferences, I have likes, I have dislikes. And in that moment of deliberation, I'm appealing to all of these psychological, habitual traits of my character. But then the question is, where did those come from? And can I flip a switch in that moment? And I think if people really reflect, they realize they can't.
0:38:15.5 SC: Right.
0:38:16.2 GC: Like, my wife doesn't like mushrooms, and I say, "Just like mushrooms." And she gets mad because she can't just flip a switch and like mushrooms, right? Now, why does she not like mushrooms and why do I like black shirts? That's your whole life story, right? It's where you were raised, how you were raised, what influences you had. It might have something to do with your psychological nature. I do notice people with different personality traits gravitate toward different colors. But if I was even geographically, like, if I was raised in Hawaii, I probably wouldn't have worn black. But I grew up in the Northeast, in New York, and black was like a staple. I'm also lazy, and it reduces the effort I have to make, what I choose to wear every day. So you factor in all those psychological predispositions and the scales, let's say, in that deliberation and how they're weighed, you're reacting to those scales and the strengths of those various competing psychological traits. You're not necessarily controlling it; you're reacting to it. And so if the outcome of my actions is a byproduct of these antecedent causes, then ultimately I say the choice is an outcome of these antecedent causes, if determinism, for example, were true. But to me, that doesn't ground the kind of control that would be necessary for holding people eternally responsible for these outcomes.
0:39:44.8 SC: Well, but we do want to hold them somewhat responsible. And here's where we're going to get a little more sophisticated, right? I mean, you also, just like you don't want to completely abandon the idea that we make choices, you also don't want to completely abandon the idea that there are good and bad choices to make in certain conditions.
0:40:03.6 GC: Yeah. Yeah. So again, in my work... I'm an optimistic free will skeptic, by the way. So I'm optimistic about the implications of free will skepticism. And I've gone through and tried to make the world safe in various domains, morality, love, creativity, friendship, arguing we could preserve most of what we care about. But with responsibility, I'll just say this, I believe in responsibility. And it sounds weird for a free will skeptic, but I don't believe in basic desert moral responsibility. So following Dirk Pereboom, I endorse this what I call a forward-looking account of moral responsibility. And it's grounded not in the notion of desert, it's grounded in forward-looking factors like safety, reconciliation, moral formation, recovery and restitution for victims. So for example, I have a stake in wrongdoers who harm me, right? So I can engage in what I call moral protest if you perform some kind of interpersonal harm in an intimate relationship, let's say, or with my daughter, my daughter comes home, she did something bad in school, I engage her in a kind of moral exchange. But the reason on this forward-looking account is not to blame her in a desert sense, it's to basically engage in a process that leads to moral formation in a forward-looking sense. Like a parent... And most parents feel this way, I think retribution is counterproductive often as a parent. It just elicits pushback usually from children. And instead, I think what's more successful in guidance is a kind of moral exchange that's not emotionally charged with what I call moral anger or resentment or indignation. And so you could say, "Why did you make those choices? What do those choices reveal about yourself? What could you do different moving forward that maybe leads you to make different choices?" And then engage in a process where that person tries to change that aspect of themselves that they think was responsible for that outcome. And the goal of that exchange, in my view, is forward-looking. It's to make better moral beings. It's moral formation. You don't have to appeal to free will or desert, I think, to license that kind of a moral exchange.
0:42:39.5 SC: So in criminal justice terms, people do in criminal justice discussions talk about different goals of the whole criminal justice system. One would be deterrence, stopping people from doing bad things. One is rehabilitation, making people better. But another one is just punishment. Like, "No, you're bad, you deserve to be punished." And you're for number one and number two and you're against number three.
0:43:06.0 GC: A little bit more nuanced than that, but close. So I definitely reject what's called retributivism, which is that last one. Right? So retributive punishment, which plays a big role in the United States criminal justice system, is the idea that absent any excusing conditions like insanity defenses or something, individuals are free and morally responsible and therefore deserve to suffer for the wrongs they've done. And there are biblical notions of retributivism with eternal judgment, but in the criminal justice system, this is a purely backward-looking justification for punishment. You deserve to suffer for the wrongs you've done. Deterrence is a forward-looking notion. So we're gonna punish you to deter either you from doing future bad behavior or, if we lock you up and you can't commit any more crimes, it's to deter someone else to do some forward-looking behavior in the future. That second one is perfectly consistent with the rejection of free will, but I personally reject it for other moral reasons. I think deterrence has the tendency to treat individuals as a means to an end. Like if I punish you, Sean Carroll, to deter Susie James or whatever, I'm using you as a tool to elicit some change in behavior for someone else. There's potential moral problems there. Also, sometimes people forget this about the criminal justice system, we have an excessively punitive system. I think everyone...
0:44:46.1 SC: We do.
0:44:46.3 GC: No matter what your views, can generally agree it's broken. We have 4.5% of the world's population in the United States but house 25% of the world's prisoners. It's the highest rate of incarceration ever.
0:44:53.5 SC: Yeah. It's crazy.
0:44:58.2 GC: Yeah. But a lot of that, some of it's retributive and some of it was actually based in deterrence policies, like three-strikes-you're-out laws and truth in sentencing where, if you commit a certain crime, a judge has to give you a certain sentence. There's no flexibility from the judge's perspective. That was initially put in place on the grounds not of retributivism, but that it would help deter crime if people knew what the rules were and they were not flexible and they couldn't be revised. You committed three felonies, you go to jail for life. This will deter felons. But in my book, 'Rejecting Retributivism,' I give a case of a guy who got life in prison in California. And I try to explain this in neutral terms so people don't know what the crimes were. It sounds like a crime spree. So he hits this one Walmart on June 1st and then six days later he hits another Walmart. And it turned out he was stealing VHS tapes.
0:46:05.5 SC: Not even the recorders. Just the tapes.
0:46:07.5 GC: No, no, just the tapes. And one of the movies was Free Willy, which is ironic, right? And I think it totaled $13 in financial loss. But he got life in prison because he had a prior felony. And because of these prior convictions, California had no flexibility in the sentencing. Now, I don't know what your view on justice is, but I don't think even a consequentialist or utilitarian could say that that produces good outcomes. So here's my view. I have what I call the public health quarantine model. And so it runs like this. Let's say I come to meet you in person and I fly to you and I contract Ebola. And so when I get out of the plane, I test positive at the airport. I think everyone would agree the state is justified in quarantining me. That is, the state is justified in restricting my liberty. And the justification, at least on my account, is grounded in the right of self-defense and prevention of harm to others.
0:47:14.3 SC: Right.
0:47:15.5 GC: So you could justify quarantine in the case of communicable diseases without appealing to free will or basic desert or retribution. And then what I argue is, by analogy, we could justify incapacitating seriously dangerous criminals on the grounds of the right of self-defense and prevention of harm to others, what I call the protective rights. But there's a couple really important things that come with this view. You can't justify dehumanizing the individual. We have no right... The state has no right to dehumanize the Ebola patient, right? In fact, in this case, they haven't done anything that deserves bad treatment, right? And I would also say that you have to adopt the principle of least restriction. That is, the state should adopt the least restrictive measure that's consistent with protecting public health and safety. So a lot of things we currently incarcerate people for in our current system, I argue maybe we shouldn't. So it's consistent with decriminalizing a lot of non-violent crime. And then second, you have a duty, or the state... Some organization has a duty to treat the individual and then release them the minute they're no longer a threat to public health. And so on my account, the purpose of criminal justice should be reoriented toward rehabilitation and reintegration. So instead of a punitive system of criminal justice where we're distributing punishment in accordance with desert, we should be attempting to rehabilitate wrongdoers and reintegrate them back into society as quickly as possible. And then lastly, the state has a right to restrict liberty, but on my account, it doesn't have the right to strip other basic human rights.
0:49:12.7 SC: Okay.
0:49:13.8 GC: So it sounds hard for an American to grasp this, but Norway, for example, has this official policy, in Norway, it's called the principle of normality. And it says, this is an official policy in their criminal justice system, that the conditions inside prison should resemble the conditions outside prison as much as possible. And prisoners have the right to vote still while incarcerated. So not only in the United States do many states strip you of the right while incarcerated, you can't get the right back even after you've been released. Lots of former felons in the United States are prohibited from public housing. They're disenfranchised in a number of different institutions. So on my account, you should never be stripped of those other rights. And I'll add one last thing, I know I'm going on long here, but... Okay, I owe you an account of what to do with the serial killer and the child molester, and I just kind of gave an account of what we could do to incapacitate them. But the really important aspect of my theory is that it shifts from a reactive approach to crime to a preventative approach. And that's where the public health framework is even more helpful. Not only is the public health framework helpful in the case of justifying quarantine, it's helpful in that it's been around for a long time, and one of its main features has been to identify the social determinants of health, to prioritize them, and then try to come up with best practices to address those social determinants to produce better health outcomes. So, for example, you might look at infant mortality rates in India and say, "Well, why are they so poor?" And you might realize it has to do with everything from literacy to sexist norms. And to address that outcome, you have to deal with social injustices, structural features of society. And you can see this in morbidity rates, Type 2 diabetes are higher in poorer communities, et cetera. I would argue the social determinants of crime are essentially analogous to the social determinants of health. That is, when you look deep into the statistics, the people who are incarcerated have lived lives of hardship.
0:51:32.1 SC: Yeah.
0:51:32.7 GC: Very large percentage of them are suffering from mental illnesses, high levels of addiction. If you look at things like adverse childhood experience scales, which measure everything from poverty to sexual assault to have you had a parent incarcerated, every tick up on that scale, like every point you get that raises that scale increases the likelihood of antisocial behavior like violent crime by 35%. And so it's hard to look at it from the perspective of the white cowboy hat and the black cowboy hat, there are victims and perpetrators, because most of the perpetrators were previously victims.
0:52:15.8 SC: I have a friend who is a teacher in eighth grade in a rough neighborhood, and the scuttlebutt among his teacher friends is that they know which of their students 20 years from now is going to be in jail.
0:52:35.8 GC: Yeah, no, it's sad. And again, you don't want to say one thing is gonna determine your whole life because there are other causes and hopefully there could be intervention somewhere. But it is very sad to see how settled things are often from a very early age. And when you look at things like low socioeconomic status, poverty, abuse, here's just one statistic. I mean, this is one... And maybe, I don't know, you're a compatibilist. I think even this one example sometimes raises a challenge for those that want to justify retributive policy. Almost 90%, I think it's 89% of women who are incarcerated in the United States have been previously victims of violence. I mean, you almost can't get a higher correlation than 90%, right? If it were 100, okay, but...
0:53:22.2 SC: In the social sciences, it's hard.
0:53:23.6 GC: This is pretty high. And that means they were either previously victims of sexual assault, child molestation, domestic violence, right? And the explanation is usually something like either the crimes they've committed are in retaliation to their abusers, or it goes in a relationship of addiction and abuse and they commit crimes to feed their addiction or are forced to by their abuser. Or even on a more general level, people who have been sexually assaulted or victims of violence have a hard time holding down jobs because of the psychological effects, and they resort to petty crime as a byproduct of economic necessity. Now, you could blame these women. You could say they deserve punishment, that they should be harshly treated because they committed some act freely and are therefore morally responsible. Or you could say it's unfortunate these women end up in these circumstances and they've committed these crimes because of these causal antecedents. Maybe we should adopt public policies that try to either prevent the abuse or intervene earlier in the sequence so as to try to cut off these poor outcomes. And so I think actually this issue of free will has really important public policy implications.
0:54:46.0 SC: Well, I think this is the most important moment in the podcast because this is what I've been looking forward to getting to. I agree with everything you've said about retributive justice, basic moral desert. I mean, I think that there are people who commit crimes and that doesn't make them intrinsically unworthy of respect or anything like that, or I want to just punish them for the sake of punishing them. I want to make the world a better place. I want to be forward-looking. I'm not sure what that has to do with my compatibilism. Isn't that compatible with compatibilism? Or at what point are we just arguing over what labels to apply to things here?
0:55:27.1 GC: That's good. Yeah. So I've had compatibilist friends say, "I actually like your stuff on the criminal justice system. Isn't it open for me to endorse as well?" And I think on a purely theoretical level, yes, you could say retributivism just doesn't work, let's say on the public policy level. And there's actually a well-known compatibilist, I won't name him because I don't know if he wants to be associated with this view because he never published it, but he presented a paper at a conference I helped organize. And he said on the interpersonal level, he's sort of like a compatibilist because he thinks we could ascribe blame in the interpersonal... In a retributive form of blame at that. But when you go to the public policy level, the evolutionary guardrails that have emerged that keep interpersonal relationships honed in a certain way lose their traction on a massive scale, and so we end up with excessively punitive criminal policy. And so the first thing that I'll say is I'll take what I can get. So if I can convince people that we should reject retributivism at a public policy level, then I think that's a good thing. But to make it a little harder, I do think holding on to a notion of free will that at least grounds the notion of just deserts still could be a stumbling block to accepting the kinds of changes that I think would be necessary to produce these better outcomes. And again, maybe this is a little too high level, but I think you could see these debates about free will playing out at the level of criminal justice, but even at the level of politics and public policy on everything from attitudes toward poverty. So in my new book, I talk about how there's studies that show that the stronger the belief in free will, the more accepting people are of economic inequality.
0:57:37.4 SC: Okay. Yeah, good. I was gonna get to that. I wanted to give you a chance to elaborate on the dark side of believing in free will.
0:57:44.5 GC: Yeah, so that's one of the dark sides. So the idea is that inequality on, again, I don't want to overly simplify, but maybe more on the right is this view that I lift myself up from the bootstraps, I'm a causa sui, which is Latin for self-made individual, and as a result, I'm... I deserve to be praised when I succeed, and individuals who are in poverty or fail to succeed in business are responsible for their own failures. So they don't deserve handouts, they don't deserve my support, they should have worked harder. And you see this. You see this in that realm. A friend of mine wrote about the context of public health, where obesity is still judged as a personal moral failure in a lot of contexts, and there are punitive policies within medicine sometimes that are focused, like organ donors who had addiction issues. Well, they caused it, they're responsible, they don't deserve any of our assistance. And you could go across the board. So I like to use this analogy of President Obama when he was president, gave this speech in front of, I think, a body of successful business people, and he said, if you succeed in business, you didn't do it alone.
0:59:07.4 SC: Right. I remember that.
0:59:08.9 GC: And the Republicans, conservatives went crazy. And in fact, the Republican National Convention that year was built, at least one of the days was built around the slogan, "Yes, we did." Yeah, we did. It was all my doing, right? But if you listen to his next sentence, I just think it's innocuously true. He's like, "Well, you either had an encouraging teacher, a supportive parent, maybe you shipped your goods on roads paid by taxpayers." Like all of these various... It takes a village, right? I think that mentality is grounded in this cluster of views that I call the just desert cluster that is very much at the core of this free will debate. Issues of merit and desert that get carried out on public policy levels that seem really far removed from the free will debate, but I think are grounded in beliefs about free will, that I think if we keep that notion alive, it prevents people from really adopting the policies that we need to adopt to reduce recidivism, to make the world safer, to rehabilitate criminals. Like, there was a movement to ban books in prison.
1:00:22.8 SC: Yeah.
1:00:24.4 GC: And the argument was something like, they don't deserve the luxury of reading books, right? They should just stew in... Well, just for your own self-interest, don't you want to rehabilitate these people? Do you think depriving them of any opportunity is going to make them any safer when they get released? I just think that those attitudes of them somehow deserving this outcome... Like, here's another part of the dark side of the belief in free will. The belief in free will has been shown to correlate pretty directly with what's called just world belief. So this is a notion in social psychology. There's a scale that they use to measure it. It goes back a number of decades, and it sounds innocent enough. The belief in a just world is that the world is just. Good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people. But there's different ways you could give them statements and on a Likert scale of one to seven, they judge how much they agree with the statement. And the stronger you get in this just world belief, what you find is that it ends up resulting in a higher tendency to blame victims for their own circumstances. So take a classic example of a rape victim. Rape is a horrific thing. In a just world, such a thing wouldn't happen to someone who didn't deserve it. So in an unconscious way, to preserve the belief in a just world, you have to somehow say the victim deserved it. And in court cases, you see this. They question the victim like, "Well, you were drinking. You were walking where you shouldn't have been walking. You were dressed provocatively." And these are all tendency... Defense attorneys do this because it works, and it works because people unconsciously want to preserve the belief in a just world. And so what you end up with is this idea that if you fail in life, or you end up in prison, if you're poor, even educational inequity is somehow deserving. Like, you failed, you did something that brought this upon yourself. And it's very closely tied to this notions of free will and desert. And so my fear is that that cluster of views produces more, on the whole, more negative outcomes than positive, and that if we could strip away notions of autonomy and control and voluntariness and appeal just directly to those while rejecting this underlying notion of just deserts, we would be in a better off place.
1:03:03.1 SC: Yeah, but again, I guess I'm with you on rejecting the notion of just deserts. It just seems very funny to me because our mutual friend Daniel Dennett, who passed away, he would argue that you need to believe in free will to make society better, to give people skin in the game, to make things matter. And I argued against him on that also...
1:03:28.4 GC: Oh good. Good to hear. Good to hear. Yeah.
1:03:30.0 SC: Because to me is not the point. To me, whether we... There is a lot of debate over nomenclature and what words we should attach to things. And I completely agree that there's a nuanced, substantive debate about where we say people made a decision versus it was inevitable somehow. And I just don't see why I can't reject these notions of just deserts, et cetera, people being intrinsically bad, they're not worthy anymore, with all of the baggage, all of the superstructure of, "Okay, but they make decisions on the basis of good reasons, and that's what I call free will."
1:04:10.7 GC: Yeah. Well, then I think I don't want it to be just a semantic issue. I think then it is a question of what we should call it. I say we have other words that are more accurate for that, which is like autonomy, degrees of control. And this may just be because in our language game, free will has been so closely associated with moral responsibility and desert and retribution that maybe it's not worth resurrecting it free of all of those things. And so it sounds odd for someone who's written many books and articles on free will. I don't really care that much about the term.
1:04:52.6 SC: Good.
1:04:53.6 GC: I care more about the set of practices.
1:04:54.9 SC: Of course.
1:04:55.6 GC: And I would... In certain ways, it might be best to just go through a checklist of various practices. Like, what do you think about angry blame and resentment and indignation and moral anger, and when is it justified? And are these policies really the best policies? But because they've been so closely associated with free will, and because most compatibilists, maybe you're not one of them, wants to preserve free will to preserve a certain type of blame that would be justified on desert, that I still target the notion of free will.
1:05:31.6 SC: I will once again mention that Sam Harris podcast because before we started it, I made a suggestion. I said, "Look, I think we could probably have a much more productive conversation if we just both agreed not to use the term free will."
1:05:38.7 GC: Yeah, yeah.
1:05:45.7 SC: And he rejected that. No, he chose not to go down that road. So he wanted to talk about that, but...
1:05:50.5 GC: Well, I mean, I have a debate book with Dan Dennett.
1:05:53.0 SC: Yes, I know. Right, right, we'll link to it. Yeah.
1:05:56.5 GC: And he... Sometimes it was like wrestling an eel because he's also not a standard compatibilist in the traditional sense, because he is appealing a lot to what he thinks the good... The forward-looking good of this set of practices is for society. And I think that's a legitimate grounds to debate because I don't think the desert system has the benefits that Dan thought. But this is another argument I ran with Dennett, and I'm just curious what you think. It has to do with just luck. So first, there's the luck of what philosophers call constitutive luck, the luck that made you the kind of person you are. So there's the luck of just the lottery of life, of who your parents were, how you were raised, did you have a loving home, an abusive home, were you raised in poverty? None of us have any say over the initial lottery of life. It's a matter of luck. But then there's also what I call present luck, luck around the time of action. So if there was any indeterminacy in the universe, that would be an example of present luck. You sprinkle in this randomness right before the outcome. Or it could also be the kind of luck of what thoughts pop into your head at that moment, what reasons become most salient, weigh most heavily in your deliberation.
1:07:20.1 GC: And I would say that all of our actions are a byproduct of constitutive luck, present luck, or both. And luck is another factor that's beyond the control of the agent. That's why it's luck. And Dennett gave this analogy in the book, and I love Dan and he's one of the smartest people I've ever met, but I felt like this is just such a bad example. He says, "Well, imagine a footrace, and someone's given a head start based on when they were born, the month they were born in." So it's a matter of luck whether you're born in July or December. You have no control over that. Would that be fundamentally unfair? And Dan says no, because life is not a sprint, it's more like a marathon. And over the course of the race, luck equals out. And this is such a folksy example, which Dan was great at, but I think it's just demonstrably false. Those initial inequalities of life, like poverty and abuse in the household, do not equal out over time, and often they just compound themselves more and more over time. There's a great example from Malcolm Gladwell that... I think it's in 'Outliers,' the book 'Outliers.' And it's such a weird example. He found this weird anomaly where the months of the hockey players that made it to the professional hockey league, the NHL, all clustered in these two months, way beyond statistical chance, 60, 80% of them. And let's just say it's January, December. Yeah, okay, if you're a July birth, you might make it, but the chances are very low statistically. It's a much harder achievement.
1:09:15.2 GC: And so how could this possibly be? And what he did is he traced it back to the Pee Wee leagues in Canada primarily, 'cause these kids, many of them come from Canada.
1:09:25.3 SC: Canadian, yeah.
1:09:26.0 GC: And they're born with hockey sticks. And so when they're entered into the Pee Wee leagues, the cutoff for whether you were the oldest or the youngest was based on what month you were born in. And if you were born in one of these two months, you were the oldest. So it's not about grit or work ethic. The initial inequality is that you're 11 months developmentally superior to the kid next to you on skates. And at ages four or five, that almost year developmental difference is monumental. Right? Like you have more hand-eye coordination, you're better on the skates, you're larger physically, you're a year older almost than the kid next to you. So you do better. And so the next level up, you get put on a better team, maybe eventually better coaching, maybe you eventually get better facilities, maybe you're put in a whole elite league. And that initial inequality doesn't equal out. It snowballs over time to the point where you have an 80% better chance of making it into the professional leagues simply because of a contingency of birth. And if you look at educational inequities, a lot of this is very similar. Kids that are the youngest in the class tend to have a harder time. Boys that are youngest in their class are diagnosed with attention deficit disorder at a much higher rate than the oldest. And it may just be that you're not ready to sit still for six or seven hours a day because you're almost a year developmentally behind compared to your classmates.
1:11:06.2 SC: Yeah. And I absolutely can't even imagine arguing against the fact that there is luck in... I'm completely 100% on your side there. In fact, it may... But again, like I said before, my argument for compatibilism is sort of not to do with it makes society a better place or even desert or anything like that, but just that in understanding the process of human choice making, I think all of the conditions for what we would like to call free will exist. I don't know what the answer is gonna be. I have reasons for doing it. I think about it. Given all of my macroscopic knowledge, I could choose different possibilities. So I think that's where it's very, very close. I think that we've shown over the course of the hour that some terminological differences aside, there's not a lot of room between where we're coming from.
1:12:02.5 GC: Yeah, yeah. And so I would just maybe suggest there's maybe a better term for what that is that we care about.
1:12:10.3 SC: Well, I don't want to let it go. It's gonna seem like a leap here, but a little while ago you were talking about in the criminal justice system, not treating people like means rather than ends. And that sounds very Kantian to be... You know, it's past an hour in the podcast, we can get technical now. But of course, Kant was the primary champion of free will. So am I mishearing it or is there a twist there?
1:12:39.6 GC: No. So this is another rock that I'm pushing up a hill that is a little hard to convince people about, but I think... So I'm not purely Kantian, just in my own views, morality, I'm more of a virtue ethicist. But I think you could be Kantian without Kant's particular commitments about free will.
1:12:59.7 SC: Yeah.
1:13:01.8 GC: So Kant thought agents had free will and it imparted them with a certain type of dignity, and so you had to treat them with a certain level of respect. And I think that you could also agree, if you're a skeptic, that persons, people have a certain kind of moral standing that entail a certain treatment that we should impart to them. But you don't necessarily need to have what he calls free will to do that. It may be just that you're reasons-responsive or that different philosophers... You're an experiencing subject of a life, different people have tried to cash out moral standing in different criteria over time, some of it cognitive. You have a certain ability to set your own ends and achieve those ends by a certain means. I think you can make sense of that. Now, there is an important kind of nuance here. So it might be that... Well, then doesn't it sound like people deserve to be treated? And you said desert... So there's a philosopher, Benjamin Vilhauer, and I just follow him here, where he makes a distinction between what he calls action-based desert claims and person-based desert claims. Action-based desert claims, he says, require the kind of free will we're debating. So are you responsible for this action? Do you deserve to be blamed or punished or rewarded or praised? And so that kind of desert, to punish someone for a bad deed, praise them for a good deed, requires maybe the kind of free will we're arguing about. Personhood desert is just the kind of treatment or desert or standing an individual should be afforded simply by being a person. Okay. And I would say that that kind of desert doesn't require free will and is independent of this debate. All that's required there is that you be free from maybe... Not that you're free from the powers of determinism or influences of determinism, but that you're free from external or control by other agents, that you have a certain degree of autonomy. And so if an agent is capable of acting on their own reasons, then we have a duty to treat them in a certain way. And yes, they shouldn't be treated as a means to an end. They should be treated as ends in themselves because they deserve to be treated with respect because of just being a person qua person. And I would just say that kind of desert, personhood desert, doesn't require free will, where action-based desert does.
1:15:55.4 SC: Okay, maybe that clears something up because this was actually gonna be the last topic I wanted to ask about. Desert and responsibility are closely intertwined, I think, at least in the popular imagination. And do you... By the way, maybe we've never mentioned, but we should for the people out there who are not professional philosophers, we're not talking about the sweet food you eat at the end of dinner.
1:16:17.9 GC: No.
1:16:18.3 SC: We're talking about what you deserve.
1:16:20.8 GC: Or those places filled with sand.
1:16:22.6 SC: No, not those either, the deserts. But what... So in your view, what kinds of responsibilities come with being human? Not just like I'm responsible for... Maybe this is in tune with your distinction that you were drawing there about action versus personhood. Not just responsibility for doing something, but just responsibility to other people. Like if you're a wealthy person, do you have a responsibility to give to charity or to generally try to make the world a better place? Is that okay in your view?
1:16:58.6 GC: Yeah, so a lot of this is what I deal with in the new book, 'How to Live Well Without Free Will.' And I try to preserve not just the forward-looking kind of moral responsibility I articulated earlier, like my daughter does something wrong and I engage her in an exchange for moral formation. I'm a philosopher here, so it's always more complicated. But there's seven, eight different kinds of conceptions of responsibility that people have. And really only one of them is the kind of one that's under debate in the free will literature. Like an easy one that I think we all agree, causal responsibility. That's completely... Like Hurricane Katrina could be causally responsible for the destruction of New Orleans. It doesn't have to be an agent or have free will.
1:17:46.0 SC: Right.
1:17:48.5 GC: But then there's, I think, take-charge responsibility, which is what you're getting after, or what sometimes is close to that called role responsibility. That in various roles that we have in our lives, like as parents, as planners of a party, you take a certain role that comes with a certain set of duties. So you take charge. Like if I take charge of the search committee, that entails I have to deal with the applicants, I have to correspond with the finalists, I have to set up the campus visits, right? And those types of responsibilities I think are unproblematic. They're just part of a role that an agent plays in lieu of their position. And you don't need free will for that either, I don't think, because think of like an AI that has the role of setting off detonation devices in war zones, or an AI that is programmed to anything, be a bot that answers healthcare questions. It has a role, so it has responsibilities in that role or in that capacity. I think that's fine. I would even say attributability responsibility and answerability responsibility can be preserved. So attributability is just I could attribute to you, Sean, various traits about yourself even if they're not self-made. So I could say of Einstein, he was creative, he was brilliant. I could... Whatever the properties you want to attribute. Even... And I, interestingly, I don't know, you probably know this, Einstein was a hard determinist who thought the universe was deterministic, but also didn't believe in free will. And I often quote this article, I think it's... I forget what newspaper it was in where he talks about general relativity and says he doesn't deserve praise for having proposed it. And it's one of these things where I think I could still, even if he doesn't deserve praise, I could still say he was creative, I could still say he had a certain kind of work ethic, that he was different from his contemporaries in terms of the connections he could draw and the insights that he had without necessarily having to say he's praiseworthy for those features of himself.
1:20:13.4 GC: So attributability responsibility is simply the traits that an individual is responsible for in the sense that they're part of who they are. Okay, that seems fair and easy enough. And then answerability, I would say, is the kind that you as an agent open yourself up to being questioned about why you make the decisions you make. But as long as we ground that in these forward-looking practices, I don't find that problematic. And so what I want to try to do is say even if you're a free will skeptic, we really need to stress take-charge responsibility.
1:20:50.7 SC: Right.
1:20:51.8 GC: And role responsibility and forward-looking answerability, because those are really still important for preserving, even if we get rid of these pernicious notions of just desert.
1:21:02.8 SC: Well, I will mention it in the intro, but I should have given you a chance earlier in the actual podcast. What is your new book? What is the title? What's it about?
1:21:12.0 GC: Thank you. So, yeah, the new book is 'How to Live Well Without Free Will.' It brings together a lot of my writing and work on this over the last decade or so. And it's got chapters about all of the stuff we've discussed, but also about love, friendship, creativity, morality. And part of the argument is to try to make the world safe for this view of mine by saying we could preserve most of what we care about in these various domains. And not only can we live without the belief in free will, we could live better without the belief in free will.
1:21:49.6 SC: So you're not against love?
1:21:51.7 GC: No, I'm for love. In fact, I think free will skepticism can help bring about a certain kind of agape love or loving kindness that comes from understanding people's circumstances and maybe is beneficial even on a kind of social policy level, like the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King embraced this kind of notion, which is very hard for people to embrace when they still want to say that these wrongdoers deserve hatred or blame. Whereas Martin Luther King said that will never achieve the societal change you want to achieve because it's only gonna foster more resentment. You have to love your enemy. And in a weird way, I think adopting the skeptical perspective may make that easier for us to do and may even be better for our highly polarizing society that we're in right now.
1:22:54.6 SC: We're not really in a loving our enemy moment right now in our world, but maybe your book will push us in that direction. So, Gregg Caruso, thanks very much for being on the Mindscape podcast.
1:23:04.3 GC: Yeah, thank you, Sean. It's been wonderful.
[music]