Here are some word/concept clouds:
Each of these clouds expresses roughly/approximately/more-or-less a single idea. As you get further into the details of these issues, you’ll see theorists start to propose distinctions between some of the concepts I’ve grouped here into a single cloud. But at the start of our thinking, we can take each cloud to be capturing a single, perhaps broad and fuzzy idea.
That means that it won’t be satisfying to try to explain one of the concepts with other ideas from the same cloud. For instance, if someone defines “free will” as “having the power to do what you want to do,” this is not very informative. The idea of “having the power to do something” is too similar to the concept we’re trying to explain. If someone had philophical perplexities about what free will was, they’d also have perplexities about what it is to have the power to do something. We want to get a more informative account of what free will involves than that.
Here is how these clouds relate to each other. Cloud-1 and Cloud-2 stand opposed to each other. Also Cloud-1 and Cloud-3 seem to be closely intertwined.
Some notes:
In Cloud-3, we’re after more than just the idea of your being causally responsible for what happened. If someone pushes you off a bridge, and you fall into the river and splash mud on a bystander, you wouldn’t be accountable or criticizable, or “bear responsibility” in the sense we’ll be focusing on for making the bystander muddy. But it may be true that you’re causally responsible, and so in that sense it’s “your fault” they got muddy.
When it comes to legal and institutional responsibility, you may sometimes be responsible for things that weren’t under your control. You may be expected/required to fix, or redress, or apologize for some harm, even though is was a case of Cloud-2 not Cloud-1. (Or even if it wasn’t you who created the harm.) But our discussions will focus on moral and interpersonal responsibility, and institutions like criminal law, where we start off expecting that Cloud-3 does require Cloud-1. You won’t be morally accountable, or answerable, or blameworthy for doing something unless you did it freely and voluntarily.
The kinds of deserved reactions described in Cloud-3 include ways we treat and interact with each other: praising and rewarding agents, criticizing and scolding them, punishing them. It includes institutional forms of these practices, like criminal law. It also includes emotions and other attitudes we form towards each other. Positive attitudes like being grateful, crediting, and admiring. And negative attitudes like blaming, resenting, taking insult, feeling betrayed, and personal anger. The idea is that when someone helps or harms me, none of these reactions “make sense” if what they did lacks the Cloud-1 features: they’d be inappropriate or unjustified. Cloud-1 is a necessary condition for those concepts in Cloud-3. <!–
really performed the act / caused the harm
acted freely, weren’t forced
chose to do it, not an accident
(complications with negligence) –>
Some of these reactive attitudes we have not just when agents help or harm us, but also on behalf of others. Some reactive attitudes we can even have to ourselves (pride, guilt).
There are two ideas associated with words like “choosing.” This could mean the psychological process of deliberating and making a choice. Or it could mean that you had a choice: that there were several options available to you, and it was up to you which to pick. Often these ideas go together, but they don’t have to. There might be cases where you go through the mental exercise of making a choice, but really there was only a single option open, namely the one you actually picked. (Perhaps you didn’t know that.) Going in the other direction, there may be cases where you have multiple options available, but you picked one of them without thinking about it or considering any of the alternatives.
In our discussions, the concept of having a choice will be more central. Skeptics about free will argue we never really have any choices — though processes still happen in our minds that feel like we’re deliberating and making choices.
In addition to the kinds of freedom discussed in Cloud-1, there’s also a concept of political freedom. And there’s also the idea of being free of bias or certain kinds of influence. On their face, these seem to be different ideas than the concepts in Cloud-1. A person might have free will but be politically imprisoned or enslaved or oppressed. Our discussions aren’t going to try to figure out how exactly these different ideas are related.
Our main anchor for how to understand the concepts in Cloud-1 will be through their being requirements for the “deserved reactions” in Cloud-3. On the face of it, if it turns out no one ever does anything freely and voluntarily, then all those concepts in Cloud-3 seem to be undermined. Maybe we won’t ever be justified in blaming or resenting or punishing people for anything they do. (Or being grateful or admiring them.) As we’ll see in upcoming readings and discussions, though, some philosophers argue that some of these social practices and attitudes can be justified in other ways, not tied to the idea that agents acted freely and so are accountable and deserve those reactions.
In some discussions, free will is also anchored in other ideas, separate from the Cloud-3 of “deserved reactions” and notions like accountability and so on. These other anchors include: love, acting for reasons, values like creativity, honesty, courage, and resisting temptation. But our discussions will focus on the relation to Cloud-3.