“Ultimate Responsibility” is a term introduced by the Naturalistic Libertarian Robert Kane. It, and the thinking behind it, have led to some confusion.”Only a Libertarian account, Kane claims, can provide the features we [...] yearn for, which he calls ultimate Responsibility. Libertarianism begins with a familiar claim: If determinism is true every, then every decision I make, like every breath I take, is an effect, ultimately,, of chains of causes leading back into times before I was born. [...] As many have claimed, then, if my decisions are caused by events leading back before my birth, I can be causally responsible for the results of my deeds in the same way a tree limb falling in a storm can be causally responsible for the results of the death of the person it falls on, but it’s not the limb’s fault that it was only a strong as it was, or that the wind blew so fiercely, or that the tree grew so close to the footpath. To be morally responsible I have to be the ultimate source of my decision and that can be true only if no earlier influences were sufficient to secure the outcome, which was truly “up to me”. Harry Truman used to have a sign on his desk in the Oval office saying the “The Buck Stops Here”. The human mind has a place where the buck stops, Kane says, and only libertarianism can provide this kind of free will, the kind that provides Ultimate Responsibility”.(Daniel Dennett, “Freedom Evolves”, p99Let’s get one confusion out of the way: the libertarian only needs to claim that responsibility stops with the agent, not that there is a single place within the agent where it stops, or a single time at which it stops.Dennett has an eloquent series of arguments against a “single place” within the mind where it “all happens”, a “homunculus”, which he has developed in “Consciousness Explained”, and which he re-deploys in “Freedom Evolves”.If it really matters, as Libertarians think, then we had better shield your process of deliberation from all such externalinfluenceWhy all ? Our definition of free will is “The power or ability to rationally choose and consciously perform actions, at least some of which are not brought about necessarily and inevitably by external circumstances”. “At least some of which” is not “all” there is no need for such “shielding”. The engineering is not required by the specification. (Ultimate) Responsibility belongs to the agent as a whole, not to a subsystem within the agent. We are quite happy to accept Dennett’s distributed model of the mind.Compatibilists and determinists are able to argue that it is undesirable for a “snap” decision to be made randomly, since such decisions need to be reliable — indeed, they may even be “life or death” decisions. This is far from being a smoking-gun refutation of Libertarianism, however. The libertarian only needs to be able to say that her decision could have been different under the same external circumstances at time T. The libertarian’s internal state could have been different under the circumstances prevailing at T (In other words, there are sets of possible worlds where everything outside the libertarian is identical), so the action resulting from the libertarian’s internal state could have been different, even if it was brought about more-or-less deterministically by their state at time T. Thus they could have done otherwise so long as the series of states leading up to the reactive snap decision could have been different. Thus, freedom of the will can, as it were, be stored and used at a later date. (The idea that free decisions occur immediately before action is criticised in section III.1. We also argue for this point in section II.2; and compare what Dennett says about Libet’s work in section II.4)To use another metaphor, it is as though there is a conscious executive which sets “policy” which less conscious sub-systems then follow in making snap decisions. In an organisation, responsibility stops with the executive who sets policy, rather than the junior staff member who implements it. Likewise people are held morally and legally responsible for acts which are snap decisions, because they have trained themselves to react in that particular way.However, this idea of stored inentionality (or deferred responsibility) has some problems, whcih we will now consider.Dennett has a real point against Kane with his accusation that there is a special time at which free will occurs. In Kane’s theory the essence of free will is something called a “self forming action” which occurs at particular times in the life of an individual. This leads to a number of problems
Kate versus Dennett I
“Ultimate Responsibility” is a term introduced by the Naturalistic Libertarian Robert Kane. It, and the thinking behind it, have led to some confusion.”Only a Libertarian account, Kane claims, can provide the features we [...] yearn for, which he calls ultimate Responsibility. Libertarianism begins with a familiar claim: If determinism is true every, then every decision I make, like every breath I take, is an effect, ultimately,, of chains of causes leading back into times before I was born. [...] As many have claimed, then, if my decisions are caused by events leading back before my birth, I can be causally responsible for the results of my deeds in the same way a tree limb falling in a storm can be causally responsible for the results of the death of the person it falls on, but it’s not the limb’s fault that it was only a strong as it was, or that the wind blew so fiercely, or that the tree grew so close to the footpath. To be morally responsible I have to be the ultimate source of my decision and that can be true only if no earlier influences were sufficient to secure the outcome, which was truly “up to me”. Harry Truman used to have a sign on his desk in the Oval office saying the “The Buck Stops Here”. The human mind has a place where the buck stops, Kane says, and only libertarianism can provide this kind of free will, the kind that provides Ultimate Responsibility”.(Daniel Dennett, “Freedom Evolves”, p99Let’s get one confusion out of the way: the libertarian only needs to claim that responsibility stops with the agent, not that there is a single place within the agent where it stops, or a single time at which it stops.Dennett has an eloquent series of arguments against a “single place” within the mind where it “all happens”, a “homunculus”, which he has developed in “Consciousness Explained”, and which he re-deploys in “Freedom Evolves”.If it really matters, as Libertarians think, then we had better shield your process of deliberation from all such externalinfluenceWhy all ? Our definition of free will is “The power or ability to rationally choose and consciously perform actions, at least some of which are not brought about necessarily and inevitably by external circumstances”. “At least some of which” is not “all” there is no need for such “shielding”. The engineering is not required by the specification. (Ultimate) Responsibility belongs to the agent as a whole, not to a subsystem within the agent. We are quite happy to accept Dennett’s distributed model of the mind.Compatibilists and determinists are able to argue that it is undesirable for a “snap” decision to be made randomly, since such decisions need to be reliable — indeed, they may even be “life or death” decisions. This is far from being a smoking-gun refutation of Libertarianism, however. The libertarian only needs to be able to say that her decision could have been different under the same external circumstances at time T. The libertarian’s internal state could have been different under the circumstances prevailing at T (In other words, there are sets of possible worlds where everything outside the libertarian is identical), so the action resulting from the libertarian’s internal state could have been different, even if it was brought about more-or-less deterministically by their state at time T. Thus they could have done otherwise so long as the series of states leading up to the reactive snap decision could have been different. Thus, freedom of the will can, as it were, be stored and used at a later date. (The idea that free decisions occur immediately before action is criticised in section III.1. We also argue for this point in section II.2; and compare what Dennett says about Libet’s work in section II.4)To use another metaphor, it is as though there is a conscious executive which sets “policy” which less conscious sub-systems then follow in making snap decisions. In an organisation, responsibility stops with the executive who sets policy, rather than the junior staff member who implements it. Likewise people are held morally and legally responsible for acts which are snap decisions, because they have trained themselves to react in that particular way.However, this idea of stored inentionality (or deferred responsibility) has some problems, whcih we will now consider.Dennett has a real point against Kane with his accusation that there is a special time at which free will occurs. In Kane’s theory the essence of free will is something called a “self forming action” which occurs at particular times in the life of an individual. This leads to a number of problems