Free Will and Ethics
Tuesday April 8, 2008
Not that long ago, I read Dan Wegner’s wonderful The Illusion of Conscious Will
Regular visitors will know that I have tackled the question of free will before on thinkBuddha (see the posts here and here), but for those without the stomach to plough through those posts, let alone all the proper literature on the subject, the central problem was admirably summed up over two centuries ago by Samuel Johnson, who wrote that “All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it”.
Johnson is perceptive: we cannot deny the experience of free will. But our theories cannot seem to account for it. Wegner is interesting here, because he takes the lead from Hume to claim that will is, in fact, a feeling, rather than the source of action. The problem is not that free will is entirely ruled out by theory, but that in theorising free will we are looking to theorise something with causal efficiency, rather than looking to account for this feeling of authorship. And Wegner shows convincingly that in experimental situations it is possible for us to have the feeling of willed authorship without having any causal efficacy whatsoever. Conversely, it is possible to be causally efficacious without the feeling of will (for example, in the use of Ouija boards which, disappointingly, are not controlled by forces beyond the grave but by simple human shoving). So whilst we think that the causality is from conscious thought to action, instead Wegner proposes more complex causality whereby action and conscious thought are both unconsciously caused, leaving us to infer that the action is caused by the conscious thought when it isn’t.
The idea that will is a feeling is convincing, and certainly, without the feeling of will (sleepwalking, for example, or under hypnosis), it is not at all clear what it would mean to say that we willed something. Yet the problem many people have with all this, in the end, is ethics. Last weekend, I was talking about all this with a friend of mine, and he agreed that whilst this model made sense of experience, nevertheless, he was reluctant to give up on free will for ethical reasons. Free will, he said, seems necessary for ethics. And here, if we are talking about seeming, I cannot but agree. It does indeed seem to us that free will is necessary for ethics. But is it?
Wegner thinks it is. Towards the end of his book, he talks about the experience of (illusory) free will as ‘the mind’s compass’, claiming that this ‘emotion of authorship serves key functions in the domains of achievement and morality’ (318). In this sense, the illusion is a positive illusion. Susan Blackmore disagrees, however. There is a good article on her website where she writes as follows:
I have long assumed that free will is an illusion and have worked hard to live without it, but doing this provokes a simple fear – what if I behave terribly badly? What if I give up all moral values and do terrible things? What indeed are moral values and how can I make moral decisions if there’s no one inside who is responsible? I’m sure I don’t need to go on. I suspect that this natural fear is the main reason why so few people sincerely try to live without free will.
These are serious questions, but I myself wonder if the fear of moral chaos on giving up the idea of a legislating free will is the same as the fear that some have of moral chaos on giving up the idea of legislating God, but writ small. Without this legislating power, we fear, things will go to the dogs. But is this the case? One could also put the opposite view: that the idea of oneself as an autonomous subject who wills and who has the freedom to act in response to the dictates of this will may not be such a good thing after all, either for our own welfare or for the welfare of others. I’m not sure that our sense of ourselves as moral agents is necessarily the source of the kindness that makes the world a worthwhile place to live in. And when we start to assert ourselves in our capacity as moral agents, that is usually when the trouble begins…
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Putting Shantideva to the Test
Wednesday March 26, 2008
Last week was the final session of my philosophy of happiness class at the Botanical Gardens here in Birmingham, and we were considering the relationship between happiness and concern for others.
It seems a long time ago now that I first read the Bodhicaryavatara of Shantideva, one of the masterpieces of Buddhist literature, but the even now, having had the book to hand for the last ten years or so, the following assertion from chapter eight of the Tibetan text (the translation I’m referring to on this occasion is that by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso) has the power to provoke:
All the happiness there is in this world
Arises from wishing others to be happy,
And all the suffering there is in this world
Arises from wishing ourself to be happy.
As rhetoric, it is powerful, but the question is this: is it true? After all, this is a very strong claim (all the happiness… all the suffering…), and claims this strong are worth evaluating.
So I took the opportunity to put this idea to the test in my class last Friday with a simple experiment. The experiment was a little ad hoc, and I would not want to claim that it proves anything, but the results were highly suggestive nonetheless.
The experiment went like this. I divided the class into two halves, and before they started the experiment, asked all participants to rate, fairly roughly, their immediate experience of happiness on a scale of one to ten. Then I set one half (team A) the task of writing for ten minutes about those things that they wished exclusively for themselves, whilst the other half of the group (team B) wrote for ten minutes about what they wished exclusively for others. At the end of the experiment, I asked the participants to rate their happiness levels again.
Whilst a few participants reported unchanged levels of happiness, or bemusement at the idea of rating happiness (which is, when you think of it, a curious thing to be asked), the results were instructive, seeming to strongly suggest that wishing for one’s own welfare exclusively leads to a marked diminishing of happiness, whilst wishing for the welfare of others leads to a marked increase: the average change was approximately one point up for those in team B who were asked to be other-regarding, and one point down for those in team A who were asked to be self-regarding.
If there is anything in these results, then it begins to look as if there is indeed something in what Shantideva says (although I’m still not sure that he is right when he says ‘all happiness… arises from wishing others to be happy’ – the ‘all’ here seems too categorical, and smacks of rhetoric). We often fall into thinking that happiness and ethics are mutually exclusive: you can either be happy or you can be good. On the one hand, we think that happiness is something that we have to secure for ourselves, even at the expense of others. And on the other hand, we snuggle up at night with Kant and read that, should you derive pleasure from an act of duty, then the act is, to that extent, rather less than worthy. But it seems that this is out of kilter. Happiness and ethics are not separate. Shantideva, I think, is worth listening to; for if he is right, then this suggests that many of the ways that we go about securing happiness for ourselves, and many of our ideas about ethics as well, need to be reconsidered.
Image: HimalayanArt.org
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Kindness and Philosophy
Monday March 10, 2008
The philosopher Mary Midgley says somewhere that the history of ethical reflection clearly demonstrates how much of our thinking is shaped by what our sages omit to mention. This is a thought that I have been turning over in my mind for several weeks now, whilst I have been teaching my latest ethics course at Staffordshire University. Because one thing that has struck me is how, in the history of philosophy in the West, there has been very little consideration given to the practice of kindness. Ethical philosophers like to talk about duties and rights, they like to talk about utility and consequence, they like to talk about virtue and vice, good and evil, responsibility and obligation. These are big and impressive sounding things. But the amount of ink spent writing about kindness is, as far as I can see, rather slight. That is not to say that philosophers have entirely ignored the subject, of course. Aristotle, for example, tackles the subject in his Rhetoric, where he writes that “Kindness – under the influence of which a man is said to “be kind” – may be defined as helpfulness towards some one in need, not in return for anything, nor for the advantage of the helper himself, but for that of the person helped” – perhaps a rather more minimal definition than I myself might favour. However, it would be possible to scour the indexes of a substantial library shelf full of books on ethics, and not come across the word “kindness” mentioned even once.
And yet, when it comes to our everyday lives, kindness is something that we seem to care about a great deal. Indeed, for many of us, I suspect, kindness is a more fundamental aspect of ethical reflection than the ideas of duty, rights, consequence and so on. So the question that has been perplexing me is this: why have philosophers had so little to say on the subject?
Part of the answer, I suspect, is that philosophers are frequently drawn to a kind of rhetorical and conceptual grandeur. The idea of duty sounds impressive and slightly overbearing. You can stub your toe on duty. Similarly with consequence, or with responsibility, or with good and evil. These kinds of terms seem – and I’m not sure why this is – to lend to our ethical language an air of cosmic weightiness that is hard to argue with. But kindness does not seem to be like this. The term itself suggests a kind of small-scale intimacy that simply does not have the same kind of grandeur. You can’t stub your toe on kindness. At least, I don’t think that you can.
To find more systematic approaches to kindness, it is necessary to look elsewhere. The various traditions of Buddhism have given more attention to the idea of kindness. There is a rich vocabulary of love and kindness within Buddhist approaches to ethics – anukampa or “being moved in accordance with others”; muducittata or “the state of having a tender mind”; anuddaya or “tender care” – which bespeaks just this kind of intimacy with others and with the world as a foundation for ethics. The emphasis on tenderness is both interesting and important: much of Western philosophical ethics seems to relish precisely the opposite. We must be tough-minded, we must drive out every trace of tenderness, we must follow our reasoning through to its conclusions, whatever they may be.
But such approaches seem to lead to a diminished view of ethics. No doubt reflection and clarity are both necessary and important. But ethics needs kindness as well. It needs to recognise the small-scale, intimate dimensions of life, the everyday care and solicitude, the nuance of our interactions with each other and with the world, lest it betrays the very thing that it sets out to guard.
If anybody out there knows any recent ethical philosophers who have seriously engaged with the idea of kindness (Martha Nussbaum may be an exception to the general rule here, but I’d like to hear about any others), I’d be delighted to know.
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Nutters?
Wednesday November 28, 2007
In a recent interview on BBC1, former prime minister, Tony Blair, confessed what we all already knew – that his vision whilst in government was strongly underpinned by his religious faith. And yet, during his term as prime minister, he was more than a little coy about admitting these religious underpinnings. As Alasdair Campbell famously said, “We don’t do God.”
This mixture of conviction and coyness says a lot about the attitude to religion in the UK. Many of the faithful complain that we are a society that is anti-religion, but I do not think that the evidence supports this. We still live in a society in which the Anglican church and the state are tethered together and in which Anglican bishops have the automatic right to sit in the house of Lords. Those who hold high office are expected to be seen trooping in and out of the churches on Sunday: stolidly religious, but not demonstratively so. That seems to be how we like our politicians.
The attitude we hold with respect to religion in public life seems rather similar to our attitude to what are often called “family values”. Political commentators everywhere extol the virtues of the family as the fundamental moral unit (in this, echoing Margaret Thatcher’s famous claim that “There is no such thing as society, there are only individuals and families”), and as a result, we like our politicians married. We like it even more if they have children that they can pose with for photographs. But we don’t like to think of our politicians actually having sex. It is the exactly same with religion. On the one hand, we like our politicians, it seems, to be stolidly, institutionally religious. Yet at the same time, we don’t like to think of them manifesting any degree of unseemly enthusiasm for their religion. Religion, like sex, is something to be done in private, preferably with one’s socks still on.
This double attitude is unhelpful. Although there are many ideologues who claim that religion should be driven out of public life, I am not sure I agree that this is either possible or desirable. Certainly, I see no good argument for giving religion any kind of privileged place in public life, and there are no doubt good arguments for disestablishment of church and state, and for resisting any attempt to grant privileges and protections in law for those ideas and practices specifically judged to be religious. As I have argued before on this site, what needs to be protected is not religion, but people. I can see no reason why religious groups should be guaranteed any more protection or a priori influence in public life than any other group bound together by mutual interest – ornithologists, trainspotters and philosophers, for example.
Having said this, we need to allow that religion will – whether we like it or not – have a role to play in public life. Public life must be rooted in the lives of the public, and religion (like trainspotting, ornithology and philosophy) is just something that many people are bound up in – to use the old, and probably bogus, etymology of “religion” as rooted in the Latin religare, “to bind fast”. We may think religion is good for people, or we may not, and this question should be open to public debate and to investigation, but we should neither exclude it from public life nor should we grant it any kind of privileged role.
This public debate concerning religion cannot occur as long as we maintain a dual attitude by virtue of which we both want a role for religion, and at the same time we think it is inappropriate to discuss it. This tension is one that can drive the religiously motivated aspects of political life underground, and this means that the true reasons and motivations for action are no longer available to public scrutiny.
What is needed, I think, is the kind of honesty and courage that is so often lacking. Let those who hold public office and make decisions rooted in their religious convictions admit to the sources of their inspiration and account for themselves. And let those who lack religious convictions at last honestly admit to the fact (after all, how many openly atheist or agnostic politicians can you name?) Then, when we can see clearly and in the light of day the ideas, aspirations and motivations of those who are in power, and we can begin to have a more serious debate than is permitted by the pantomime of respectability we are accustomed to.
Had Mr. Blair been possessed of this degree of staightforwardness with respect to this issue, openly admitting to the extent to which he was influenced by his faith, explaining the nature of what was clearly a vitally important influence upon him, not attempting to disguise the issue, then it would have been up to the rest of us to have decided whether, in the end, the decisions he was making and the motivations that underpinned them were those of a man of some wisdom, whether they were, in his own words, those of a “nutter”, or whether the truth was somewhere in between. And this, in a democracy, seems to be only appropriate.
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More on the Transhumanist Debate
Friday November 23, 2007
Several weeks ago, I posted here about a New Scientist article written by Danielle Egan on the subject of Transhumanism. Transhumanism is a broad-based movement that sets its sights upon the enhancement of human capacities by technological means. This, of course, is something that technology has always done ever since the first of our distant ancestors started poking at things with sticks; but arguably the possibilities for extending human existence (either in terms of human capacities or in terms of longevity) by technological means are greater than they have ever been. In my original article, I echoed some of the concerns raised in the New Scientist concerning the aspirations and ideals of at least some of the Transhumanists, in particular those voiced by Marvin Minsky. The original article can be found here.
No sooner had I published this article than I received a comment on the site from Marvin Minsky, claiming that the New Scientist article had substantially misrepresented his position. It was a tricky call, but claims to misrepresentation are something that it is worth taking seriously, and so I temporarily unpublished the first article, whilst waiting to see if there was any more substantial response to the article in the letter pages of the New Scientist – surely the most obvious place for such a response. Given that I rarely unpublish anything once written, I also published a second article (see here) explaining my decision. This second article reiterated some of my concerns regarding both the nature of some of the aspirations within Transhumanism and questions ethical responsibility that the original article posed.
The story, however, did not end there. Not long afterwards, Danielle Egan, the writer of the original article, got in touch to tell me that she stood by what she had written. She also sent me an extract from the unedited transcript that seemed to support her original claims.
As no further comment has been forthcoming in the letters pages of the New Scientist, a week or two ago I contacted both Marvin Minsky and Danielle Egan to let them know that I would be republishing the earlier article, and that I would be adding a further post to the site to explain the background to some of this. I am adding a rider to the two earlier posts to suggest that they, and this present post, should be read together. This, I believe, should give a fair overview of the issues at stake as the content of these posts must, I think, be necessarily understood in the context of this on-going discussion.
I welcome considered responses to any of these three posts, although I would ask anyone who wishes to comment to read all three articles before doing so.
Original article can be found here.
My subsequent post is here.
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Mobile Phone Providers (An Ethical Survey)
Monday November 5, 2007
Recently I decided to change my UK mobile phone provider. My usage of my mobile is fairly minimal, but nevertheless I thought that it made sense to look for a provider who could demonstrate a degree of social and environmental responsibility. Therefore I set about trying to discover which mobile phone providers have any form of ethical policy, and if they do, what their policies actually are. The results have been instructive, so I thought it worthwhile giving an overview here.
I was surprised how difficult it was to come by information relating to the ethical stances taken by mobile phone service providers. Gooshing, the ethical shopping site (http://www.gooshing.com), has plenty of information about mobile phones, but as yet has no information concerning providers. Searching online did not come up with anything substantial. As a result, I decided to contact six major mobile phone providers myself. I wrote a brief email to all six companies as follows:
I am currently considering changing mobile phone providers for my Pay as You Go phone. As I am concerned about the wider effects of my actions as a consumer, I would like to use a company as my provider with the best possible ethical policies.
Therefore, I am getting in touch to ask if you could let me know whether you have any form of ethical policy for your mobile phone service provision, and if so, whether you could provide me with details.
All six providers that I contacted – 3, O2, Orange, T-Mobile, Virgin Mobile, and Vodafone – responded within a few days; but only one took the trouble to actually answer the question, and demonstrated even the most cursory sense of what it might be to have an ethical policy..
Question? What Question? Orange Mobile, O2
Of the providers, the shoddiest were Orange Mobile and O2 whose apparently automated responses gave no indication that my email had even been read. The email from Orange read as follows.
I am sorry to hear of the problems that you have mentioned in your mail.
All of the mobile networks have established and agreed a process so that you can transfer your existing number if you wish to do so […]
The email went on to describe how I could transfer to their service, but did not even acknowledge my specific request for details on ethical policies. O2 did not fare any better. Their response ran like this:
Thanks for emailing us and showing your interest in our products and services. Please view our online mobile terms and conditions before placing an order by clicking on the link below […]
Even leaving on one side questions of ethics, it seems that neither Orange nor O2 are willing to take the trouble to respond to the specific questions put to them by their customers or potential customers, demonstrating a level of indifference for their customers bordering on contempt.
Ethics? What Ethics? T-Mobile, 3 Mobile, Vodafone
Four other providers at least attempted to give some indication that they had read the initial email, although perplexingly none of them seemed to have any idea of what an ethical policy might be. T-Mobile replied as follows, acknowledging my request but failing to respond to it an anything like an adequate fashion:
Thanks for your email enquiring about our ethical policy before you decide to join us.
It’s great to know that you’re considering to join us. I look forward to serve you as one of our esteemed customer.
I’d like to inform that like all service provider we do have certain policies that we abide to.
Once you get a pay as you go SIM connection with us we’d advise you to make a chargeable activity once in every 180 days. A chargeable activity would be:
- making a chargeable outbound call
- sending a text message
- topping up your account
- making a payment for a service.
And so on… Meanwhile 3 Mobile telephoned to speak to me in person – the only company that did so. Whilst I appreciated the person-to-person contact, once again, there was no indication that the person I spoke to had any idea of what an ethical policy might be. The very friendly individual on the other end of the phone referred me to 3 Mobile’s terms and conditions on their website, but when I pressed them on questions of environmental reporting or how 3 Mobile ethically screens its investments, I was told that such information was unavailable.
The most entertaining response in this category, however, was that provided by Vodafone.
I understand you wish to know if we have any ethical policy for taking a new PAYT phone.
We don’t have any ethical policy for PAYT phone as such anybody can take up a PAYT phone. There are some policies if you wish to take up a new contract with us.
To get a new PAYT phone, you can visit your nearest Vodafone Retail Store and my colleague at the store will be happy to help you further.
This news is no doubt reassuring to dictators, murderers and other ne’er-do-wells who are interested in signing up for a pay as you go mobile phone account. Meanwhile the rest of us – who are interested in wider issues relating to Vodafone’s attitudes to the environment, social justice and so on – are left in the dark.
Signs of Hope? Virgin Mobile
Of all the providers, only Virgin managed to give anything like a considered response to my request.
As a company Virgin Mobile sponsors and helps as many local and international charities as we can. For an example every year we provide staff and time for calls to be taken for donations made to Children in Need.
We also have our recycling scheme which provides funds for The Red Cross. This will also help with providing better and more affordable communication to developing countries […]
We hope this helps with your decision.
In many ways this response is far from adequate. It is not unreasonable to expect companies of this size to have comprehensively documented information on their ethical policies made available to the public on request. Nevertheless, it is a start.
Conclusion.
The results of this brief survey have admittedly been somewhat dispiriting. Out of all six major providers, five failed to go any way towards addressing the question I put to them. Of these, two ignored the question entirely (Orange and O2), two acknowledged the question but did not respond adequately (T-mobile and 3 Mobile), whilst one (Vodafone) seemed to get the wrong end of the stick entirely.
Only Virgin Mobile comes anywhere close to beginning to address the ethical issues. In the face the abject failure of its peers, O2, 3 Mobile, Vodafone, Orange and T-Mobile, for anyone with an interest in the ethics of the companies upon whom they rely, Virgin Mobile, although far from outstanding, seems at present to be the only reasonable choice. As a result, I’ll be switching from my previous provider today.
Have your say! [4]
New Review: The Sutras of Abu Ghraib
Tuesday October 30, 2007
I have not written a review for this site for a long time, so I’m very pleased to be posting a new review to the review section. The book under discussion is Aidan Delgado’s account of Buddhism, Iraq and life in the US Army, The Sutras of Abu Ghraib
Click the following link to go to the review: Sutras of Abu Ghraib Review
