Can a libertarian account deal with worries about manipulation?
(See also my previous post, with a link to a paper by Roger Clarke.)
Posted by David Hodgson at The Garden of Forking Paths
Can a libertarian account deal with worries about manipulation? -
I want to take up the libertarian cause by responding to two points made by Joe Campbell in his comments on Haji’s “The Manipulation Argument”. First, he says “no libertarian account has successfully illustrated the key to free human action,” and suggests that a libertarian response to worries about manipulation can be no better than a compatibilist response; and he criticises agent causation as being a “primitive unanalyzable concept”.
I’ve been trying to develop a libertarian account that does focus on how and why human action is free and that can deal with manipulation worries, as well as with Galen Strawson’s responsibility argument. One article, an edited version of which was published in Times Literary Supplement last year, was the subject of some discussion on this website, but this discussion tended to skate over the main arguments. (The article was written in part as an answer to Galen Strawson’s argument, and since he as philosophy editor for TLS okayed it for publication, I was encouraged to hope he saw it as having some merit.) I also published an article (“Making our own luck”) to similar effect in Ratio in September last (which I can’t put on the internet until next September), and another on the role of consciousness in Philosophy Now in Jan/Feb this year.
The (bare) gist of my position is that, given our circumstances and laws of nature, the way we are provides available alternatives, inconclusive reasons (and how they appeal), and unconscious tendencies, and also the capacity to decide between the alternatives on the basis of the reasons; and what we do is what we decide in exercise of that capacity. The constraining effect of the way we are is limited to determining alternatives, reasons and unconscious tendencies, and our decisions are not otherwise constrained by any distinguishing features of the way we are (we are all alike in respect of our capacity to decide): to this extent, we are truly responsible for our decisions. That applies whether the way we are is due to manipulation and/or natural causes and/or prior decisions.
I support this by arguing (1) that conscious experiences can make a positive contribution to decision-making; (2) that this contribution is not one wholly determined by rule-based processes; (3) that we can respond to whole feature-rich gestalt experiences that cannot engage as wholes with rules or laws of any kind; and (4) that the role of consciousness (and its advantage) is to enable us to contribute this response to decision-making.
This may be seen as a kind of agent causation, but I would suggest it is far from being primitive and unanalysable.
The focus in the free will debate at present is so much on compatibilism and incompatibilism that there seems to be little concern about what I see as of central importance, namely the role of consciousness in decision-making, and especially in plausible reasoning. So I would really appreciate comments that squarely address the arguments of these articles, particularly the four points listed above. And if anyone would like to investigate my arguments further, they could look also at an in Philosophy in 2001 which first introduced my gestalt argument, and another in Journal of Consciousness Studies in 2002 which has the fullest exposition of it.