I got quite a lot of nice comments last week on my review of Just Deserts. The authors of the book—Gregg Caruso and Dan Dennett—both told 3 Quarks Daily that it was a good review so I consider that a real feat to have satisfied both sides in such an argumentative book.
One of the comments I saw was a wish to hear a debate between Dan Dennett and Sam Harris, who recently posted his "Final Thoughts On Free Will." I can't make that happen, but while I'm focused on this topic, I thought I should write a little something about Sam's position.
I'll get to that soon, but first, I just thought I'd share a quick post with a few of the paragraphs that had to get cut from my 2,500-word review. I may want to refer to these later, and they really were darlings I hated to kill. Enjoy! I'll be back soon with more on this topic.
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The fear of determinism is an ancient one, stretching back to early religious questions about whether gods or the fates foresaw and controlled everything we humans do. When the Enlightenment came along, and Newton showed us the mechanical workings of the cosmos, and Darwin showed us the blind nature of natural selection, our fear of control shifted from warm and (hopefully) friendly gods to the cold and calculating inevitability of logic and mathematics. Dostoyevsky wrote a wonderful passage about this in Notes from Underground in 1864:
“You say, science itself will teach man that he never had any caprice or will of his own, and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano key or the stop of an organ, and that there are, besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. … [But I] would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden, a propos of nothing, [a man were to arise and] say to us all: ‘I say, gentlemen, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!’”
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If you’d prefer to just form your own opinion and cast your own vote, go read Just Deserts now. If you want to hear what I think, here goes. But it helps to put my cards on the table first, so you know where I’m coming from. I call myself an evolutionary philosopher. I think paying close attention to the history of evolution gives us new insights into age-old philosophical questions. So, I’m obviously a huge fan of Dan Dennett. But I’ve also seen Gregg debate free will at a local event, and I got to have a few beers with him in the pub afterwards while he continued the debate informally. I found him extremely impressive and persuasive. (He’s also just a very nice guy.) When I found out about Just Deserts, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it and see how the two of these guys got on with things.
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In some sense, both of these are quite radical positions, and both of them are conservative as well. Gregg is simply doing standard analytic philosophy—dissecting definitions and logically analyzing their properties and relationships—while driven by a commonly held desire to reform a prison system we almost all agree is not working. But his conclusions demand that we drop all longstanding usages of free will, desert, responsibility, blame, and punishment. He thinks they are all too tainted and has built an entire replacement for them that he calls a Public Health-Quarantine Model. (There is much more on this in his forthcoming book Rejecting Retributivism.) Dan is never one to shy away from an unpopular opinion (c.f. “consciousness is an illusion”), but he is deeply skeptical of such radicalism here. He maintains that respect for the law “is a foundational requirement of stability in a state” (JD p.164). Instead, he would rather propose deep changes to philosophy “because we cannot do the job right while sequestered in our ivory towers” (JD p.165). He seems to think folk terminology is worth holding onto here, even if their meanings must unavoidably shift.
Ultimately, this may just be a choice in strategy between Dan’s position and Gregg’s. If so, that would mimic a story Dan told in his 2008 essay “Some Observations On the Psychology of Thinking About Free Will.” Regarding Daniel Wegner’s book title The Illusion of Conscious Will, Dan wrote, “Our disagreement was really a matter of expository tactics, not theory. … Should one insist that free, conscious will is real without being magic, without being what people traditionally thought it was (my line)? Or should one concede that traditional free will is an illusion—but not to worry: Life still has meaning, and people can and should be responsible (Wegner's line)? The answer to this question is still not obvious.” Perhaps Dan is still wrestling with this choice, although it’s clear Gregg thinks his choice is the right one judging by the weight of recent books and articles he has put behind it.
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One of the comments I saw was a wish to hear a debate between Dan Dennett and Sam Harris, who recently posted his "Final Thoughts On Free Will." I can't make that happen, but while I'm focused on this topic, I thought I should write a little something about Sam's position.
I'll get to that soon, but first, I just thought I'd share a quick post with a few of the paragraphs that had to get cut from my 2,500-word review. I may want to refer to these later, and they really were darlings I hated to kill. Enjoy! I'll be back soon with more on this topic.
----------
The fear of determinism is an ancient one, stretching back to early religious questions about whether gods or the fates foresaw and controlled everything we humans do. When the Enlightenment came along, and Newton showed us the mechanical workings of the cosmos, and Darwin showed us the blind nature of natural selection, our fear of control shifted from warm and (hopefully) friendly gods to the cold and calculating inevitability of logic and mathematics. Dostoyevsky wrote a wonderful passage about this in Notes from Underground in 1864:
“You say, science itself will teach man that he never had any caprice or will of his own, and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano key or the stop of an organ, and that there are, besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. … [But I] would not be in the least surprised if all of a sudden, a propos of nothing, [a man were to arise and] say to us all: ‘I say, gentlemen, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!’”
----------
If you’d prefer to just form your own opinion and cast your own vote, go read Just Deserts now. If you want to hear what I think, here goes. But it helps to put my cards on the table first, so you know where I’m coming from. I call myself an evolutionary philosopher. I think paying close attention to the history of evolution gives us new insights into age-old philosophical questions. So, I’m obviously a huge fan of Dan Dennett. But I’ve also seen Gregg debate free will at a local event, and I got to have a few beers with him in the pub afterwards while he continued the debate informally. I found him extremely impressive and persuasive. (He’s also just a very nice guy.) When I found out about Just Deserts, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it and see how the two of these guys got on with things.
----------
In some sense, both of these are quite radical positions, and both of them are conservative as well. Gregg is simply doing standard analytic philosophy—dissecting definitions and logically analyzing their properties and relationships—while driven by a commonly held desire to reform a prison system we almost all agree is not working. But his conclusions demand that we drop all longstanding usages of free will, desert, responsibility, blame, and punishment. He thinks they are all too tainted and has built an entire replacement for them that he calls a Public Health-Quarantine Model. (There is much more on this in his forthcoming book Rejecting Retributivism.) Dan is never one to shy away from an unpopular opinion (c.f. “consciousness is an illusion”), but he is deeply skeptical of such radicalism here. He maintains that respect for the law “is a foundational requirement of stability in a state” (JD p.164). Instead, he would rather propose deep changes to philosophy “because we cannot do the job right while sequestered in our ivory towers” (JD p.165). He seems to think folk terminology is worth holding onto here, even if their meanings must unavoidably shift.
Ultimately, this may just be a choice in strategy between Dan’s position and Gregg’s. If so, that would mimic a story Dan told in his 2008 essay “Some Observations On the Psychology of Thinking About Free Will.” Regarding Daniel Wegner’s book title The Illusion of Conscious Will, Dan wrote, “Our disagreement was really a matter of expository tactics, not theory. … Should one insist that free, conscious will is real without being magic, without being what people traditionally thought it was (my line)? Or should one concede that traditional free will is an illusion—but not to worry: Life still has meaning, and people can and should be responsible (Wegner's line)? The answer to this question is still not obvious.” Perhaps Dan is still wrestling with this choice, although it’s clear Gregg thinks his choice is the right one judging by the weight of recent books and articles he has put behind it.
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