A few days ago, I posted a hypothetical used by Eddy Nahmias, et al., to test intuitions about blame in a deterministic universe. (In the hypothetical, “Fred,” a denizen of a determined world, finds and keeps another person’s wallet). I asked readers to look over the hypothetical and say what their own intuitions were. Nearly everyone indicated that they would hold Fred responsible for his bad act. Nahmias, et al., got similar results (from a much larger sample): when they had college students react to the Fred hypothetical, about ¾ of test subjects said that Fred acted “with free will” and could be held “morally responsible” for his act.
Now, at the risk of trying your patience, I want to ask you about another sort of hypothetical that Nahmias, et al., also experimented with. Just to keep everything above board, I will confess that I am asking because I am surprised by the results of these experiments, and curious about the gap between my moral intuitions and the moral intuitions documented by these experiments. (Put another way, are my moral intuitions really weird?). The essence of Hypo #2 is that the actor is “neurally manipulated to deliberate and act in a certain way” by a “brilliant neuroscientist.” Nahmias, et al., do not give us the details of the hypo, but it might look something like this one, from Derk Pereboom’s Living Without Free Will:
[Professor Plum kills Ms. White.] Plum is like an ordinary human being, except that he was created by neuroscientists, who, although they cannot control him directly, have programmed him to weigh reasons for action so that he is often but not exclusively rationally egoistic, with the result that in the circumstances in which he now finds himself, he is causally determined to … possess the … set of … desires that results in his killing Ms. White …. He has the general ability to regulate his behavior by moral reasons, but in these circumstances, the egoistic reasons are very powerful, and accordingly he is causally determined to kill for these reasons.
I’ll post the results from Nahmias, et al., shortly. But I’m curious what readers think: Is Professor Plum morally responsible for killing Ms. White?
Posted by Anders Kaye on January 8, 2007 at 05:23 PM
Comments
Just to fill in the missing piece of the picture, while Nahmias, et al., found that about three quarters of their test subjects considered Fred morally responsible for his bad act in Hypo #1, they also found (in a pilot test) that nearly everyone denied moral responsibility in the Professor Plum-type case (with the caveat that I have taken the Plum hypo from Pereboom, since Nahmias, et al, do not provide the text of the one they used).
I share Paul’s intuition that it is very hard to draw a principled distinction between the Fred case and the Plum case. (Paul is correct that this is one of the points of Pereboom’s manipulation hypos). And since it seems hard to draw a principled distinction, one might expect that people would either find both actors morally responsible, or neither. That’s what makes the Nahmias results so interesting to me: it looks like “most people” treat the cases differently, despite their apparently similarity. And that’s what raises the possibility that my intuitions (and Paul’s — sorry Paul) are a little out of the mainstream.
(Of course, there are plenty of complicating factors here, including the possibility that the test hypos do not effectively test the intuitions they purport to test. Nahmias, et al., discuss this possibility very thoughtfully).
Posted by: Anders Kaye | Jan 11, 2007 2:38:12 PM
No on both hypotheticals, and I deny that “free will” is exhibited in either.
Compatabilism is false for numerous good reasons, although my favorite is that there’s no way to draw a coherent distinction between physical manipulation and mental manipulation, or between manipulation between an agent and manipulation by chance in the universe. Which was the point of Pereboom’s argument surrounding the cited passage, and particularly of Pereboom’s previous case (where the neuroscientist can directly control). It’s also important to notice that we can extend it a stage further back — suppose that rather than having his brain controlled by the neuroscientist, he has the rest of his controlled by a nefarious agent of some sort — perhaps someone installs a motor in his arm that causes the arm to grab the gun and fire it at the victim. Is there really a distinction between that case and the neuroscience case, or between the hard neuroscience case and the soft neuroscience case?
Posted by: Paul Gowder | Jan 11, 2007 1:45:23 PM
As much as anyone ever is.
Your brain is made out of meat. There is no ghost in that machine. So, if concepts like “morally responsible” make any sense at all, then Professor Plum is morally responsible for killing Ms. White.
Posted by: Patrick | Jan 9, 2007 10:09:07 AM
Yes.
Posted by: Stephen Aslett | Jan 8, 2007 6:06:59 PM