A Second Subject for the Blog: Art and Beauty

I am attempting to co-author a book on Enjoyment, Beauty, and Art with Richard Warner and Steven Wagner. Richard has been the primary author of and driving force behind most of the book so far, although Steve and I have contributed a lot of editorial help and thought experimentation, some ideas of our own, and even a little writing here and there. You can see the text in progress here (farther right = more current):

http://www.kentlaw.edu/faculty/rwarner/classes/steven/

I am, however, supposed to be the primary author for a final chapter or two on how our notion of beauty can be related to the concept of art. I hold - even more humiliating than my belief in libertarian free will, perhaps - a beauty theory of art, or at least a 'beauty' theory of 'art'. And since I am teaching philosophy of art this term and talking about some of this work, I thought I would use this blog to facilitate the discussion, and my getting my own work done.

So now it's "Free Will, Agency, Beauty, and Art", but I think we'll just leave the url as it is.

An Unconvincing Argument for Free Will from Indeterminism

This argument is abductive in character. I am tempted to say that it is unconvincing either because the notion of probability it employs, subjective probability, is irrelevant to the strength of abductive arguments, or because in general no philosophical thesis can be convincingly established through abductive reasoning.

The basic datum which supports it is that indeterminism is extremely surprising. In general, historically speaking, almost everyone who thought about how the universe worked seriously was a determinist, or at least thought that every event had a cause, a pretty closely related view.

And pretty much the only reason anyone who thought about it wasn't a determinist was because they believed in libertarian free will. It was a conviction that libertarian free will existed and that at least some indeterminism in the universe was necessary for libertarian free will that was the primary historical driver for belief in some form of indeterminism.

Well, indeterminism is true, as far as we know: quantum mechanics still carries the day in fundamental physics. This theory was and remains surprising to many people's philosophical intuitions. But it is established fact as much as anything in science is - more than most things.

The idea, then, is this: indeterminism was overwhelmingly surprising unless one believed in free will; the subjective probability of determinism approached a certainty when the world was considered from any perspective other than that of our supposed human freedom. Thus we can set up the usual abductive schema:

1. If the free will hypothesis is true, the universe is at least partly indeterministic.
2. If the free will hypothesis is not true, the universe is highly likely to be deterministic.
3. The universe is at least partly indeterministic.
C. Therefore, the free will hypothesis is very likely to be true.

(2) is of course not a statement of logical connection between the absence of free will and determinism, although if incompatibilism is true than the reverse entailment holds. Rather it is an inductive thesis concerning the subjective likelihood of determinism being true reached by an examination of as much pre-20th century philosophical and scientific thought as we care to undertake: smart people who thought about it were generally determinists on the basis of observation and/or thought unless a belief in libertarian free will led them to be otherwise. This thesis might be wrong - I can hardlly claim to have made a systematic study - but for what it is worth I think it is right.

As abductive arguments go in philosophy I consider this better than some. I also consider it totally unpersuasive, but I'm not completely sure why. One might be the contingency of premises (2) and (3) - even if they were right, and indeed even if humans were smart enough that our subjective likelihoods for the truth or falsehood of various metaphysical hypotheses correlated with their actual likelihoods, if there are any, and so we had some genuine reason to give credence to metaphysical hypotheses widely believed by intelligent people, I still would not find an argument for free will based on such premises very useful. What if new science comes in showing that quantum mechanics is false, or that our forebears had systematic cognitive illusions that made them grossly exaggerate the likelihood of a deterministic universe? Well, what if. This might be a matter of taste, but there is a taste according to which the dependence of an argument upon such facts, revisable in the light of new experience, makes it unsuitable for establishing any metaphysical thesis.

Another reason it might be unpersuasive is a sort of Olympian viewpoint with respect to (2), on which the opinions of even the most brilliant and learned count for nothing relative to the facts themselves. This would be a prejudice according to which you can never argue from what people believe or believed about any given thesis to the truth or falsehood of that thesis.


I posted this mostly because I thought the line of reasoning was novel - I hadn't seen it before at any rate. Doesn't mean it's good.

I have a more serious argument for libertarian free will which I am going to try to compose into a paper. I will post the results of that research here if the research fails, or a link to the paper if it succeeds.

Happy new year!

Distant Causation and Compatibilism

The problem that the funny mind control cases illustrate is basically this: compatibilists say that free will is compatible with determinism and/or ultimate outside causation of our inner states. But there are SOME forms of ultimate outside causation/determination of our inner states which are clearly not compatible with free will in any sense; the fantasy/science fiction mind control cases are examples of such.

So the compatibilist has to either offer a distinction between 'legitimate' and 'illegitimate' ultimate outside causation of our mental states to handle these cases or else she has to show that the kind of mind control in question is logically impossible. The latter seems doubtful; what about the former?

The only move the compatibilist seems to be able to make here is some kind of 'proper function' theory of the mind, whereby a properly functioning mind does/can have freedom of the will, whereas a disturbed/broken/stuck one doesn't. We'll talk about these theories in class - there are a few out there already, though I don't know if they are motivated by mind control considerations or not. But the idea is that addiction, compulsion, mind control, etc. interfere with the mind's proper function and in so doing make it un-free.

External Control

The idea that if we identify with something we can't be unfree with respect to it is interesting, but I thought of an example that may show it to not be quite correct.

The Stoic or Spinozist may want to identify with the universe as a whole, and by so doing they may in a certain sense increase their freedom, or even gain freedom, with respect to it. But it seems important even in this case that there is a free individual acquiescence to nature.

Consider the following case: Brakmorn loves the sorceress Xanthippe with all his heart, and she loves him in return; their purposes are intertwinable, and each loves the other so thoroughly that every object of desire of each is an object of desire for the other, reinforced by second-order desires to make the others' desires desires of their own.

Xanthippe wants to gift Brakmorn with a magical sword from an ancient tomb, a sword Brakmorn himself has long coveted. Only Brakmorn's body has the physical strength to loot the tomb, but without Xanthippe's knowledge of sorcery, he won't be able to defuse the ancient lich-king's magical traps.

So, Xanthippe possesses him and uses his body to navigate the tomb's dangers, in the usual science-fantasy way.

Now: Brakmorn wants the sword, wants Xanthippe's help, wants to be mind-controlled by Xanthippe, etc. One may suppose that they are as one in love and unity of will and that there is no respect in which their desires diverge from one another even slightly.

But in spite of all this, Brakmorn does not act freely when he gives himself over to Xanthippe's sorcery to be mind controlled. He gives up his freedom freely and wholeheartedly, but he still gives it up, and thus is not free.


It seems that whatever our theory of freedom involves, we need some kind of condition ruling out external control.

This, in turn, seems like it might be a problem for compatibilism in general, insofar as determinism looks a lot like external control. Why is Xanthippe's sorcery out if physical laws are in?

One way around this which has been explored in the literature is a proper function condition on the brain/mind. (I'll have an article on this for the class a little bit later.) That is, one might hold that a mind appropriately situated in its environment and properly functioning is free, but that OCD, drug addiction, or Xanthippe's sorcery interfere with that proper function, and thus undermine freedom. I don't think proper function is sufficient for even compatibilist free will, but I do think that external control cases might show us that it's a necessary condition that needs to be added on.

Assuming it works to overcome them, which I'm not sure it does.

Another tactic one might take is to argue that 'the idea of mind control' presupposes libertarian free will so that the fantasy/science fiction cases aren't relevant. You never know I guess.

Morality and Libertarian Free Will

This is just a 'how things fit together' note, but I wanted to get it up here.

Here is one dilemma that faces the partisan of free will:

1. If our will is determined by (reasons, beliefs, desires, etc.), then it is not free, because something prior to it determines it.

2. If our will is undetermined by (reasons, beliefs, desires, etc.), then it is not free, because acting on the basis of anything besides (reasons, beliefs, desires, etc.) is senseless/pointless/irrational, and any freedom of will worth wanting requires rationality.

3. Our will is either determined or undetermined by (reasons, beliefs, desires, etc.).

Conclusion, as usual: There is no free will.

Now, one option is simply to deny (1), and say that if the reasons/beliefs/desires etc. are 'ours' in the appropriate sense, acting on their basis is too free action. This response is most easily articulated within a compatibilist framework; it seems to a first degree of approximation anyway to be Frankfurt's answer.

The denial of (2) is also possible, and I take it that this may be where the Kant/Campbell/Wolf idea that morality is a necessary condition of free action comes in. That is, let's say that we have this completely undetermined ability to choose that the libertarian wants. Aren't its movements effectively arbitrary, by definition?

Certain conceptions of morality, particularly deontological ones, seem to provide a possible 'no' answer to this question. You can assess your situation, determine what morality dictates ought to be done in it, and then will that, entirely indepedently of the actual reasons/beliefs/desires you had going into the situation. You subordinate your will to the moral law and act in accordance with it, and in this you show your freedom.

It is actually rather hard to understand this response. First of all, the person who acts this way is effectively sublimating their beliefs and desires to the moral law - they would seem to have to want to do good in order to act on this basis. So aren't they actually just showing that the moral law is for them the kind of reason/belief/desire etc. that it is not always for everyone else? And isn't their will then in this case also fundamentally un-free because it is being determined by prior reasons, etc.?

I think the idea here has to be that, if we do indeed have an undetermined ability to determine what we do irrespective of our own reasons/beliefs/desires/etc., the only way to avoid arbitrariness is to find a principle for action that would apply to everyone in that situation. (Kant uses this kind of formulation all the time, of course.) We may make our action depend on anything we like and of course we may fill it in directly with our actual current beliefs and desires, irrespective of the moral law. Some people arguably never do anything else. But if there are general moral laws which govern our situation, following them is not arbitrary, just because they are the laws that everyone ought to follow in those situations. Thus in following them, I think the thought must go, our hypothesized libertarian free will can be undetermined without being arbitrary or irrational, because there is a rationality beyond that of satisfying our own reasons/beliefs/desires out there upon which we can act.

It is often said that we need free will for morality to make sense. This line of thinking is interesting because it seems to suggest we need morality in order for free will to make sense.

A Note on Wholeheartedness

In “The Faintest Passion”, Harry Frankfurt wrote: “It is a necessary truth about us, then, that we wholeheartedly desire to be wholehearted.”

Wholeheartedness has long been on the list of proposed virtues, with supporters as diverse as Augustine, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. We are more accustomed to being exhorted to it: “Leave off your wretched ambivalence! Put aside distractions! Tend to the one thing needful!”

But if Frankfurt is right these exhortations are in a way beside the point. If we necessarily desire to be wholehearted, then we should not need exhortation. Perhaps the exhortations are merely reminders; but it might nonetheless strike one as odd that some respond to them with ambivalence, or at least seem to. How can we be ambivalent when reminded of our own desires, desires that we cannot fail to possess?

Ambivalence Frankfurt defines as follows:

Ambivalence is constituted by conflicting volitional movements or tendencies, either conscious or unconscious, that meet two conditions. First, they are inherently and hence unavoidably opposed, that is, they do not just happen to conflict on account of contingent circumstances. Second, they are both wholly internal to a person’s will rather than alien to him; that is, he is not passive with respect to them.

The second condition will be trivial if one counts all a person’s desires and beliefs as internal to them; Frankfurt needs it because he does not. It also seems clearly right, though, if we follow Frankfurt in positing an ‘inner’ or ‘true’ self (not his chosen terms) which consists of the beliefs and desires with which one is identified: if there is such a self it is the one whose ambivalence concerns us. So either way this condition should be granted.

The first condition is too weak, however. Consider the following passage from William James’ Principles of Psychology:

With most objects of desire, physical nature restricts our choice to but one of many represented goods, and even so it is here. I am often confronted by the necessity of standing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest. Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a 'tone-poet' and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire's work would run counter to the saint's; the bon-vivant and the philanthropist would trip each other up; the philosopher and the lady-killer could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay. Such different characters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike possible to a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal, but the fortunes of this self are real. Its failures are real failures, its triumphs real triumphs, carrying shame and gladness with them. This is as strong an example as there is of that selective industry of the mind on which I insisted some pages back. Our thought, incessantly deciding, among many things of a kind, which ones for it shall be realities, here chooses one of many possible selves or characters, and forthwith reckons it no shame to fail in any of those not adopted expressly as its own.

Many of these do in fact conflict because of contingent circumstances: the fact that the active part of most human lives is rarely more than 80 years, and very often much less, is in fact the chief driver of the supposed conflict here. There are imaginable cases of genuinely necessary conflicts of this kind in a human life – a person who genuinely desires both to be a lifelong meditative ascetic and to star in pornographic films, say – but these are mostly not the important kinds of ambivalence most of us face. We are ‘forced’ to choose, in whatever sense that word is appropriate in cases like these, not by necessity logical or metaphysical or physical, but simply by the dumb statistical unlikelihood of being able to do something worthwhile along more than one or two lines in the limited amount of time we shall have if we are lucky.

But I want to grant the idea that ambivalence is concerned with desires that necessarily conflict regardless, for the sake of argument, because I think that even with this artificially strong condition in place, Frankfurt’s claim does not follow.

What is the argument? Frankfurt writes: “Is it possible to be satisfied with ambivalence? A person may certainly come to accept the fact that he is ambivalent as unalterable. It seems to me, however, that it is not a fact with which he can possibly be satisfied. No one can be wholeheartedly ambivalent, any more than someone can desire unequivocally to betray himself or to be irrational. That someone accepts his ambivalence can only mean that he is resigned to it; it could not mean that it satisfies him. Perhaps conditions are imaginable in which a person might reasonably regard ambivalence as worthwhile in order to avoid some even more unsatisfactory alternative. But no-one can desire to be ambivalent for its own sake.”

Why not? The idea here seems to be that

-         To be ambivalent is to desire x and desire y even though x and y cannot both be achieved.

What does a person gain and lose by abandoning either the desire for x or the desire for y? Their gain is that they no longer must, of necessity, have at least one desire that will not be satisfied. Their loss, though, is that now there is only one thing which can satisfy them, whereas before they had two, of which either one would have given them at least some satisfaction.

Is having a desire unsatisfied worse than not having the desire at all? I am not sure. If we weight these two things equally, though, it seems as though either one is OK. That is, we have x & ~ y, ~x & y, and ~x & ~y as our three possibilities. The wholehearted person yields satisfaction in the first case and not in the other two; the ambivalent person receives a half-yield of satisfaction in the first two cases and none in the third.

With no information about their concrete circumstances, what can we say about this?

If we value satisfaction and don’t care about frustration, the ambivalent person is actually better off: he has three possible outcomes, two of which pay off and one of which doesn’t, whereas the non-ambivalent person has two outcomes, one of which pays off and one of which doesn’t. The expected yield of ambivalence is 2/3, as opposed to the 1/2 which comes from wholeheartedness.

If we only care about frustration, then Frankfurt is right: the ambivalent person will always feel some frustration, whereas the non-ambivalent person will only feel it half the time.

If we care about both, then the non-ambivalent person is better off, but only slightly so. His average satisfaction-frustration is 0, whereas the ambivalent person’s is -1/3. With no information about the situation at hand, then, I suppose we can conclude that a person who cares both about having desires satisfied and not having them frustrated is better off betting on wholeheartedness than on ambivalence.

Is there some a priori reason to suppose that ambivalence will tend to skew the probabilities here? One could argue, for example, that more desires mean more directions for using energy and therefore less likelihood of getting any of the things one wants. And there would be some truth to such a supposition in many real-world contexts. But not all: for example, young persons, who are unclear about their actual abilities, often learn what things they are good and which experiences they actually value by pursuing a variety of different goals, some of which may be incompatible. For a young person, then, a certain degree of ambivalence might actually make long-term satisfaction more likely, inasmuch as making first stabs at satisfying many different desires might help to teach her which ones she was likely to be able to satisfy and which ones had component acts which were satisfying to her in their own right, as opposed to perhaps painful intermediate steps to a prima facie satisfying long-term goal.

I think there is more to be said about this, and this is all I have time for for today. But it does seem that if we want even necessarily incompatible desires to generate a desire for wholeheartedness, we need to say something about the value of satisfied and unsatisfied desires. For now we can at least say that without that, there is no theorem here.

Naturalized Libertarian Free WIll - What You Need

This is the list from class, reproduced for convenience. If anyone sees things that need to be added or has questions, let me know!

(1) Object-causes which (a) do not reduce to event causes, and (b) which have originating events 'in time'.

(2) An account of objects taking on states which keeps the object which takes on the state as an object-cause of the state. (This might be easy, actually, since an object's taking on a state (e.g. putting your bike into 3rd gear) clearly involves the object, and if you have (1) and (3) and (4) worked out that's probably all you need to get this too. But it seems as though you might need it if you think that human beings aren't 'brute' causes so much as beings that cause things by getting into particular states).

(3) There are 'emergent' objects which satisfy (1) and (2) and which do not 'reduce' to their constituent parts, because they introduce 'new causal powers' into the world that cannot be fully analyzed in terms of the causal powers of their parts.

(4) Persons are objects of type (3).

(5) 'Willings', 'intentions', 'tryings', 'attemptings', or some subset and/or aspect thereof - the agent-component of actions - are among the states of type (2) that persons take on.

It seems as though if you have these five things you have the best an emergentist can do for naturalized free will. Human beings bring new causal powers into the world which do not fully depend on their constitution and only depend on what has come before them in the sense that whatever assembled the persisting emergent physical structure which leads them to emerge was the cause of their coming-to-be, but not (somehow - this is the point pressed earlier) of their actions.

So then, can we get (1)-(5)? And if we do, is this free will, or is there still something missing? What is it?