Tibor R. Machan | June 19, 2007, 5:41pm | #
Applied Ethics and Free Will:
Some Untoward Results of Independence
Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 10 (1993), pp. 59-72.
Tibor R. Machan
Inconsistencies in Applied Ethics?
Is a theory of free will a luxury or a necessity for applied ethics? I will argue that it is a necessity. Moreover, in the context of widespread social scientism, silence on the issue amounts to acquiescence or at least tolerance of the deterministic view of human behavior, one in terms of which individual moral responsibility, thus applied ethics, is precluded from human affairs, private or public.
On the one hand, there is no end of blaming and praising going on in both the academic and the non-academic world in our time. In applied ethics, in particular, persons in the professions of medi¬cine, law, business, science and education are said to have certain responsibilities to conduct themselves in various ways as well as to abstain from various kinds of conduct. These claims are made in textbooks, treatises, and academic journals. Furthermore, during well publicized Congressional hearings there is no end of blaming and praising, at first by the politicians associated with the var¬ious sides, but later by commentators and policy analysts. In the case of such issues as AIDS research, gun control, civil rights bills, entitlement programs, and so forth, we find that numerous academicians enter the fray, by means of radio and television ap¬pearances and newspaper columns, as well as articles in prestigious magazines. This is especially so during political elections.
Among both groups we often find philosophers writing for popular as well as scholarly publications. This is especially so when cases involving what are called ethical dilemmas make front page news - e.g., assisted suicides, surrogate mothering, euthanasia, testing for the AIDS virus, accidents attributed to drug abuse, racially motivated violence, etc. Some other such cases in our time that draw evaluative comments include the Keating Five affair, the Sav¬ings and Loan fiasco, U.S. government dealings with the likes of Manuel Noriega or Sadam Hussein, the devastating factory fire in North Carolina, air and other types of pollution associated with the operation of businesses, recycling of renewable resources, alcohol consumption prior to using their vehicles, safe sex campaigns, elections campaigns by former KKK members, and so on.
On the other hand, we also find that many in our culture identify their own misbehavior in terms that do not fit the idea of moral responsibility, in other words, blaming and praising. I already noted that in academic social science human behavior is treated primarily as if it were caused by factors over which individuals have no control - their upbringing, genetic make-up, their economic class membership, cultural background, etc. In the fields of psy¬chology, economics, sociology, anthropology, and political science many of the prominent modes of analysis and explanation subscribe to some version of the nature/nurture deterministic framework, with no theoretical room left for individual self-determination that is not reducible to some outside or built in forces. Furthermore, talk shows abound with different types of addicts, so that some of the most lamentable conduct by people is deemed to be a result of an affliction or a disease. There are no drunks but merely victims of alcoholism; there are no philanderers or adulterers, only the sexual addicted; drug abusers are classified as suffering from addiction; those overweight or undernourished or abusive toward their children or their spouses, and many others, are identified as suffering from some condition that is supposed to explain this behavior in full.
Confusion and Injustice Based on Inconsistency
The practical consequences of such a divided outlook, whereby much of the discussion in the culture both condemns and exonerates individuals when it comes to their lamentable conduct, may well be confusion as well as injustice. If in order to act effectively - including establishing institutions guiding long range behavior and policies - people must have ideas by which to be guided, and if these ideas imply conflicting, even contradictory, courses of ac¬tion, it seems reasonable to expect much confusion and even injus¬tice to arise. We come to understand ourselves as (a) capable of being and often in fact individually responsible for many problems in our lives and as (b) unable to act by our own judgment, formulate plans of action that counter influences upon us from the environment, our past, genes, or whatnot. We cannot but see ourselves as divided in a rather fundamental way. There is also the serious vulnerability this engenders in many in our culture to opportunistic moralistic attacks which are themselves excused by appealing to environmental or related forms of determinism. Outbursts, denunciations, etc., are often discussed in this fashion, for example, on talk shows as well as in more serious social commentaries. And it seems that philosophers contribute amply to this problematic situation. Are they responsible? Should they - can they - alter their ways? But those questions are just the sort in need of greater attention.
All this has, of course, been dismissed along lines heard from the late psychologist B. F. Skinner, namely, as so much "pre scientific" talk based on folk psychology or little more than myth and by now eclipsed by he findings of modern science. Nevertheless, we can easily move away from cases involving the remarks and conduct of lay people and draw our material from the forums where professional philosophers sound off and where we find that praising and blaming (and its cognates ) are as frequent therein as anywhere else. In our time applied ethics is a flourishing field, so that philosophers make claims about how doctors, lawyers, politicians, soldiers, business manag¬ers, personnel directors, teachers, parents, and men and women fulfilling innumerable other roles in life ought to or ought not to act. Journals abound in business, medical, environmental, legal and other varieties of applied ethics - as well as the broader fields of social and political philosophy and of public policy - and many of the papers featured pertain to what people in these fields ought or ought not do, or, alternatively, what laws or rules legislators or regulators ought to enact so as to force those in these fields to behave properly.
The Philosophers' Role
In the face of all such moralizing from professional philosophers , it is curious if not outright scandalous that so little attention is paid, by those doing work in applied ethics, to whether human beings are equipped to direct or guide themselves so that they can be held responsible for how they act, whether they do what is right or what is wrong in their various roles being so valiantly scrutinized. In other words, given the widely admitted philosophical idea that "ought implies can," especially in circum¬stances not fraught with paradox , it seems odd that philosophers are not eager to reconcile all their moralizing with their view of human nature and motivation. Let us explore here why it may be that no great effort is being made to draw together the normative and ontological aspects of substantive moral or ethical theorizing in our time.
I should note that there isn't total silence on the relationship between ethics and human nature, specifically whether human individ¬uals can be original causes or initiators of their actions. But these discussions are not conducted in those forums where most of the substantive applied ethical analysis is carried out, nor by those who focus most intensely on substantive ethics. Indeed, it is these same applied ethicists who seem not to touch on the issue of individual responsibility so that we may assess how they square their moral exhortations with some compatible view of human nature.
The Genesis of Disjointedness
To begin with, let us make note of the fact that much of the energy and activity in moral philosophy in public policy was started with the work of John Rawls, whose book A Theory of Justice cer¬tainly launched renewal of political philosophy as well as a good deal of moral philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition. (Robert Nozick's work didn't seriously challenge this approach, nor did earlier works in this gerne ).
Yet, this resurrection came with an expensive proviso attached. This proviso was put explicitly by John Rawls in his presidential address of 1974 to the American Philosophical Association called "The Independ¬ence of Moral Theory." Rawls's thesis was that we need to forget about the grand, systematic philosophical projects and attend only to questions of morality. As Rawls put it, a "relation of methodological priority does not hold, I believe, between the theory of meaning, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind on the one hand and moral philosophy on the other. To the contrary: a central part of moral philosophy is what I have called moral theory; it consists in the comparative study of moral conceptions, which is, in large part, independent." Ethics, morality, public policy were to be approached without what used to be called any "philosophical foundations".
In a way, Rawls's thesis echoed several decades of ordinary language and analytic philosophy which had been antagonistic toward system-building. It was, furthermore, just another turn away from the kind of moral theorizing that had been attacked by David Hume, in his A Treatise of Human Nature, several centuries ago. System- building was once more declared to be useless and philosophically unjustified. Philosophy was supposed to scale down its scope and become more piece meal. We were to look at various issues that had been the province of philosophy in isolation from philosophical thinking. Exactly how the recategorization of such traditional philosophical issues was to happen was a matter of the different methodologies and theories of the various competing schools, but these competing schools had tended to agree on one fundamental principle and that is that philosophy was pretty much impotent when it came to such questions as "What is the nature of knowledge and moral knowledge?", "What's the nature of the good and the moral good?" Even such questions as "Do human being possess freedom of will?", "Is there a God?", etc., were deemed by many to be out of bounds for philosophical investigations.
We may fairly associate these attitudes with subschools of empir¬icism, logical positivism, linguistic analysis, ordinary language philosophy, pragmatism, existentialism, etc. Rawls's independence of moral theory thesis was another way of putting essentially the same point: Ethics, philosophy of law, political philosophy, public policy issues and the like were all to be handled on the basis of impressions, intuitions, what seems to make the best sense under ordinary circumstances and in ordinary terms, etc., placed, of course, in a "reflective equilibrium." Following Rawls's own work, as well as Nozick's partial endorsement of its methodology - since Nozick, too, used ordinary intuitions to test the feasibility of his assumed natural rights - a great number of articles began to appear in journals such as Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs and Social Theory and Practice, in which this independence of moral theory thesis was assumed to be correct and moral discussions were conducted accordingly.
Starting with Intuitions
Evidence for this point may be gleaned from the fact that these articles usually began with an assertion concerning "our considered moral judgments" or "moral intuitions" and then proceeded to sketch out some kind of a derivation as it applies to some area of public policy, morality, law, and politics. It is arguable, however, that this tact is misguided. One consideration that had to be neglect¬ed, in consequence of such "independence," is whether any of this moral and political exhortation had a realistic base in human na¬ture, in the nature of the being that is the intended audience of such discussions - especially when it comes to readers of textbooks and collections of case analyses. How might it be possible that we ought to engage in redistribution of wealth, why ought we to engage in the equal treatment of everyone in a society, why should we abstain from sexual discrimination and harassment, insider trading, tax evasion, exploitative or imperialistic foreign trade or poli¬cies, greedy financial scheming if, in fact, we can't help what we do, if we are moved by forces over which we have no control?
Philosophers may not have outright endorsed the view B. F. Skin¬ner placed on record - although John Rawls himself came extremely close to doing just that when he wrote that a person's "character depends in large part upon fortunate family and social circumstances for which he can claim no credit". However, their colleagues within academe in the social sciences, including economists, sociol¬ogists, psychologists, anthropologists and the rest, have mostly formulated theories that discount free human agency as regards our conduct, institutions and laws.
Assume it turns out that there is no way for us to do anything but what we must do, as determined by the neural powers, the mechan¬ics of our brain, the socio-economic conditions that have surrounded us during our "formative" years or some similar candidate. Assume, in other words, that the deterministic conception of human nature is correct. Assume, furthermore, that no fundamental challenge to this essentially mechanistic model of the human mind and consciousness has been prominently advanced - and there certainly hasn't been such a challenge in much of 19th and 20th century philosophy. If all this is accepted, especially by those engaged in the promulgation of moral and political ideals, one can certainly wonder how anyone is to make any sense of the claim that people ought to do, and abstain from doing, all the myriads of things that moral philosophers, public policy analysts and political philosophers maintain?
The Importance of having Free Will
Let me briefly argue that there is indeed free will. There is nothing odd about the supposition that we have it. I'm going to defend the position that free will means that human beings can cause some of what they do, on their own; in other words, what they do is not explainable solely by references to factors that have influenced them, though, of course, their range of options is clearly circumscribed by the world in which they live, by their particular circumstances, capacities, options, talents, etc. My thesis, in other words, is that human beings are able to cause their actions and they are therefore responsible for some of them. In a basic sense we are all are original actors capable of making novel moves in the world. We are, in other words, initiators of some of our behavior. I will later indicate why this makes a dif¬ference in applied ethics and public affairs discussion, contrary to the impression left by the numerous discussions in these fields that do not touch on the topic.
The first matter to be noted is that the suggestion that free will exists in no way contradicts science. Free will could well be a natural phenomenon, something that emerged in nature with the emergence of human beings, with their kind of minds, namely, minds that can think and be aware of their own thinking. In other words, that some animals might be facilitated to be original and creative, rather than largely reflexive, responsive or reactive, is not ipso facto a violation of the laws of nature.
Nature is complicated and multifaceted. It includes many differ¬ent sorts of things and one of these is human beings. Such beings may well exhibit one unique yet natural attribute that other beings apparently do not exhibit, namely, free will.
I am going to offer eight reasons why a belief in free will makes very good sense. Four of these explain why there can be free will - i.e., why nature does not preclude it. But these do not yet demon¬strate that free will exists. That will be the job of the other four reasons, which will establish that free will actually exists; it's not just a possibility but an actuality.
Nature's Laws versus Free Will
First, one of the major objections against free will is that nature is governed by a set of laws, mainly the laws of physics. Everything is controlled by these laws and we human beings are basically more complicated versions of material substances and that therefore whatever governs any other material substance in the universe must also govern human life. Basically, we are subject to the same kind of causation everything else is. Since nothing else exhib¬its free will but conforms to causal laws, so must we be. Social science is merely looking into the particulars of those causes, but we all know that we are subject to them in any case. The only difference is that we are complicated things, not that we are not governed by the same principles or laws of nature.
Now, in response I want to point out that nature exhibits innu¬merable different domains, distinct not only in their complexity but also in the kinds of beings they include. So it is not possible to rule out ahead of time that there might be something in nature that exhibits agent causation. This is the phenomenon whereby a thing causes some of its own behavior. So there might be in nature a form of existence that exhibits free will. Whether there is or is not is something to be discovered, not ruled out by a narrow metaphysics that restricts everything to being just a variation on just one kind of thing. Thus, taking account of what nature is composed of does not at all rule out free will. Yet, simply because of the possibil¬ity that there is free will, there may still not be. We shall consider that a bit later.
Can we Know of Free Will?
Another reason why some think that free will is not possible is that the dominant mode of studying, inspecting or examining nature is what we call "empiricism." In other words, many believe that the only way we know about nature is we observe it with our various sensory organs. But since the sensory organs do not give us direct evidence of such a thing as free will, there really isn't any such thing. Since no observable evidence for free will exists, therefore free will does not exist.
But the doctrine that empiricism captures all forms of knowing is wrong. Many things that we know, we know not simply through observation but through a combination of observation, inferences, and theory con¬struction. (Consider, even the purported knowledge that empiricism is our form of knowledge is not "known" empirically!)
For one, many features of the universe, including criminal guilt, are detected without eyewitnesses but by way of theories which serve the purpose of best explaining what we do have before us to observe. This is true, also, even in the natural sciences. Many of the phenomena or facts in biology, astrophysics, subatomic physics, botany, chemistry - not to mention psychology - consist of not what we see or detect by observation but that is inferred by way of a theory. And the theory that explains things best - most completely and most consistently - is the best answer to the question as to what is going on.
Free will may well turn out to be in this category. In other words, free will may not be something that we can see directly, but what best explains what we do see in human life. This may include, for example, the many mistakes that human beings make in contrast to the few mistakes that other animals make. We also notice that human beings do all kinds of odd things that cannot be accounted for in terms of mechanical causation, the type associated with physics. We can examine a person's background and find that some people with bad childhoods turn out to be decent, while others turn out to be crooks. And free will comes as a very helpful explanation. For now all we need to consider is that this may well be so, and if empiricism does not allow for it, so much the worse for empiricism. One could know something because it explains something else better than any alternative. And that is not strict empirical knowledge.
Is Free Will Weird?
Another matter that very often counts against free will is that the rest beings in nature do not exhibit it. Dogs, cats, lizards, fish, frogs, etc., have no free will and therefore it appears arbi¬trary to impute it to human beings. Why should we be free to do things when in the rest of nature lacks any such capacity? It would be an impossible aberration.
The answer here is similar to what I gave earlier. To wit, there is enough variety in nature - some things swim, some fly, some just lie there, some breathe, some grow, while others do not; so there is plenty of evidence of plurality of types and kinds of things in nature. Discovering that something has free will could be yet another addition to all the varieties of nature.
Let us now consider whether free will actually does exist. I'm going to offer four arguments in support of an affirmative answer.
Are We Determined to be Determinists - or not?
There is an argument against determinism to the effect that, if we are fully determined in what we think, believe, and do, then of course the belief that determinism is true is also a result of this determinism. But the same holds for the belief that there deter¬minism is false. There is nothing you can do about whatever you believe - you had to believe it. There is no way to take an inde¬pendent stance and consider the arguments unprejudiced because all various forces making us assimilate the evidence in the world just the way we do. One either turns out to be a determinist or not and in neither case can we appraise the issue objectively because we are predetermined to have a view on the matter one way or the other.
But then, paradoxically, we'll never be able to resolve this debate, since there is no way of obtaining an objective assessment. Indeed, the very idea of scientific or judicial objectivity, as well as of ever reaching philosophical truth, has to do with being free. Thus, if we're engaged in this enterprise of learning about truth and distinguishing it from falsehood, we are committed to the idea that human beings have some measure of mental freedom.
Should We Become Determinists?
There's another dilemma of determinism. The determinist wants us to believe in determinism. In fact, he believes we ought to be determinists rather than believe in this myth called "free will". But, as the saying goes in philosophy, "ought" implies "can". That is, if one ought to believe in or do something, this implies that one has a choice in the matter; it implies that we can make a choice as to whether determinism or the free will is a better doctrine. That, then, presupposes that we are free. In other words, even arguing for determinism assumes that we are not determined to be¬lieve in free will, but that it is a matter of our making certain choices about arguments, evidence, and thinking itself.
We Often Know We Are Free
In many contexts of our lives introspective knowledge is taken very seriously. When you go to a doctor and he asks you, "Are you in pain?" and you say, "Yes," and he says "Where is the pain?" and you say, "It's in my knee," the doctor doesn't say, "Why, you can't know; this is not public evidence; I will now get verifiable, direct evidence whether and where you hurt." In fact your evidence is very good evi¬dence. Witnesses at trials give evidence as they report about what they have seen, which is introspective evidence: "This indeed is what I have seen or heard." Even in the various sciences people report on what they've read on surveys or seen on gauges or instru¬ments. Thus they are giving us introspective evidence.
Introspection is one source of evidence that we take as reasona¬bly reliable. So what should we make of the fact that a lot of people do say things like, "Damn it, I didn't make the right choice," or "I neglected to do something." They report to us that they have made various choices, decisions, etc., that they intended this or that but not another thing. And they often blame themselves for not having done something, thus they report that they are taking responsibility for what they have or haven't done.
In short, there is a lot of evidence from people all around us of the existence of free choice.
Modern Science Discovers Free Will
Finally, there is also the evidence of the fact that we do seem to have the capacity for self-monitoring. The human brain has a kind of structure that allows us to, so to speak, govern our¬selves. We can inspect our lives, we can detect where we're going, and we can, therefore, change course. And the human brain itself makes it possible. The brain, because of its structure, can monitor itself and as a result we can decide whether to continue in a cer¬tain pattern or to change that pattern and go in a different direc¬tion. That is the sort of free will that is demonstrable. At least some scientists, for example Roger W. Sperry, maintain that there's evidence for free will in this sense. This view depends on a number of points I have already mentioned. It assumes that there can be different kind of causes in nature, so that the functioning of the brain would be a kind of self-causation, or, rather, initiation. The brain as a system would have to be able to cause some things about the organism's behavior and that depends, of course, on the possibility of there being various kinds of causes.
Precisely the sort of thing Sperry thinks possible is evident in our lives. We make plans and revise them. We explore alternatives and decide to follow one of these. We change a course of conduct we have embarked upon, or continue with it. In other words, there is a locus of individual self responsibility that is evident in the way in which we look upon ourselves, and the way in which we in fact behave.
The Best Theory is True.
Finally, there what I have alluded to earlier, namely, that when we put all of this together we get a more sensible understanding of the complexities of human life than otherwise - we get a better understanding, for example, of why social engineering and government regulation and regimentation do not work, why there are so many individual and cultural differences, why people can be wrong, why they can disagree with each other, etc. It is because they are free to do so, because they are not set in some pattern the way cats and dogs and orangutans and birds tend to be.
Most of the behavior of these creatures around us can be predict¬ed. With human beings we can make some predictions because we often have our minds made up and from that we can estimate what we are going to do. But even then we do not get a certain prediction. Very often people change their minds and surprise or annoy us. And, if we go to different cultures, they'll surprise us even more. This complexity, diversity, and individuation about human beings is best explained if human beings are free than if they are determined.
We have Good Reason to Trust Free Will.
So these several reasons provide a kind of argumentative collage in support of the free will position. Can anyone do better with this issue? I don't know. I think it's best to ask only for what is the best of the various competing theories. Are human beings behaving solely in response to forces impinging on them? Or do they have the capacity to take charge of their lives, often neglect to do so properly or effectively, make stupid choices, etc.? Which suppo¬sition explains the human world and its complexities around us?
I think the latter makes much better sense. It explains, much better than do deterministic theories, how it is possible that human life involves such wide range of possibilities, accomplishments as well as defeats, joys as well as sorrows, creation as well as de¬struction. It explains, also, why in human life there is so much change - in language, custom, style, art, and science. Unlike other living beings, for which what is possible is pretty much fixed by instincts and reflexes - even if some extraordinary behavior may be elicited, by way of experiments in laboratories or, at times, in the face of unusual natural developments - people initiate much of what they do, for better and for worse. From their most distinctive capacity of forming ideas and theories, to those of artistic and athletic inventiveness, human beings remake the world without having to do so! And this can make good sense if we under¬stand them to have the distinctive capacity for initiating their own conduct rather than relying on mere stimulation and reaction. It also poses for them certain very difficult tasks, not the least of them is that they cannot expect that any kind of formula or system is going to predictably manage the future of human affairs, such as some of social science seems to hope it will. Social engineering is, thus, not a genuine prospect for solving human problems - only education and individual initiative can do that.
Problems with the "As If" Thesis
There are those, of course, who hold that there is room both for causal determinism and for praise/blame because, even if there were no free will, still treating people as if they were free agents conducive to positive results (i.e., results we ourselves - all or most of us - [are causally destined to] deem as positive). Yet this tack capitalizes on a conceptual differences between being convinced about something and being fooled into believing it, a distinction that itself assumes free will. Those who are fooled are deemed, generally, to have the capacity to watch out against that eventuali¬ty - unless, of course, they were made to be fooled. Furthermore, underlying this thesis we still find several questions that raise the issue of genuine free will.
For example, should those who are on to the illusion keep people in the dark about their belief in free will? Are we free or deter¬mined to make that decision? Is it right to fool people about such matters? If not, is it up to us to desist?
Also, if the free will matter is a case of as if, what if most people discover it? Surely, if philosophers and psychologists can learn that it is mere a matter of treating us as if we had free will, so can others. In which case there is no point in continuing the subterfuge.
Finally, in fact praise/blame do not make sense if there is no factual base for them. When we praise or blame dogs or horses, it may be praise or blame to us, but for them it is nothing of the sort - at most it is a kind of reinforcement or encouragement, something that makes them feel good and induces repetition. To repeat, in order to play the as if game, there must be some possibility of genuine praise/blame. Barring that, it cannot do its job, namely, of inducing bona fide pride or guilt. The language of ethics would be discovered to be no different from that of demonology or witch¬craft, resting on nothing but error or myth.
Public Policy and Free Will
We can now return to the initial topic of this paper. Why is the free will subject matter a proper one to raise in connection with our understanding of applied ethics and public policies?
To start with, one might do well to remember Kant's contribution to this issue with his now famous philosophical motto, "ought im¬plies can"- i.e., if we ought or ought not to act various ways, it must be possible for us to choose such acts and their alternatives. In other words, one cannot be said to have the responsibility to do or abstain from doing an action if the action is not something one can initiate. This initiation may be very well hidden when the action actually occurs, so that one may simply attribute its origin to character. But in the case one would have to be able to make sense of the idea that the character traits that prompted the action were somehow cultivated by the individual who has them.
Based on the insight expressed in Kant's motto - one evidenced, also, in Aristotle's observation that "the virtues are modes of choice or involve choice" and "it is in our power to be virtuous or vicious" - we can see that any effort to credit or discredit persons for good or bad behavior, including the support of good or bad public policies, institutions, etc., would amount to a meaning¬less gesture without free will. Indeed, in an intellectual climate in which free will is denied (as, for example, it seems clearly to be when most misconduct is attributed to addiction or other afflic¬tions), the idea that someone has the power to initiate a change in his conduct - if only in whether and how he or she thinks about the issues involved - would make no sense. This is just what we witness when someone is being urged to stop smoking and answers, "Well, I just can't stop." If all evaluations of human behavior could be met with, "Well, I just cannot do otherwise," this surely would have something of an impact on how we view ourselves and whether there is a chance to make improvements in our lives and societies. Moral advice, exhortation, criticism, praise, reward, and the like would be robbed of their meaning, just as the idea that someone is a witch or inhabited by demons is largely looked upon as meaningless these days.
Accordingly, there seems to be a drastic gap between the idea of human nature that is circulating and is tacitly pretty much accepted by most philosophers and the persistent moralizing that goes on in philosophy journals. Perhaps this is of no concern to some people, but there is at least one moral reason - one might even construe it as belonging in the framework of applied ethics, namely, the ethics of philosophical scholarship - to think of it as a serious issue. That has to do with integrity. Presumably what integrity means is to have the various facets of one's ideas, values and policies in life, including one's professional pronouncements, placed in some sort of a consistent, coherent - integrated - framework. If, in fact, one can live with both a deterministic conception of human action and extensive moralizing, maybe integrity is not a necessary part of human life and certainly not of the life of a philosopher who dabbles in these issues. But then this could also have an impact on how we should view politicians and others whose lack of integrity is so often the topic of applied ethics discussions.
If, however, we affirm the reality of free will - in some sensible form, never mind the details for now - we might also have to adjust some of our moral claims. In business ethics, for exam¬ple, the doctrine of consumer sovereignty is commonly challenged on grounds advanced by John Kenneth Galbraith, namely, that consumers are easily manipulated by advertisements to purchase goods and services they do not actually need or want. If, however, some version of free will is construed as necessarily presupposed by business ethics as such, it may well require construing consumer sovereignty as something more reasonable than Galbraith claims. Other examples of issues that may be influenced by a thorough discussion of the free will issue involve such often dismissed notions as "caveat emptor" ("let the buyer beware") or "unconscionable con¬tract," and certain ways of understanding surrogate mothering or sexual exploitation or domination. In the area of sexual harass¬ment, molestation, and assault problems, the idea is often advanced that some people are incapable of resisting their urges to make advances toward - even at times to rape - others who appear very attractive or provocative to them. Here, too, the free will stance would, if sound, pretty much discredit this way of understanding and open the way to assign responsibility to individuals who sexually harass, molest, or rape. Finally, there are those who attribute racist, sexist and other kinds of unjust sentiments entirely to their upbringing, claiming that given how or where they were brought up, it is impossible for them to feel and act differently from how they do. They should not be made to pay for something they cannot help - it is, after all, a mere accident that they are the way they are.
It seems to me that these ways of looking at misconduct by human beings are undermined by the free will thesis, provided it is sound. But if it is not sound, these ways of thinking seem to be quite feasible and possibly sound. In any case, without a direct examina¬tion of the connection between applied ethics and the free will issue, we should be candid that the field of applied ethics is fundamentally disintegrated and that questions of morality, politics, and public policy are going to be left in disarray.26
Endnotes:
(1) I have explored a number of crucial works in this area and found either no mention or barely a hint concerning whether human beings are the kind that possess free will. See, for example, Alan Goldman, The Moral Foundations of Professional Ethics (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), Albert Flores, ed., Professional Ideals (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publ. Co., 1988), Nicholas Fotion and Gerard Elfstrom, Military Ethics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), Lloyd J. Matthews & Dale E. Brown, eds., The Parameters of Military Ethics (New York: Pergamon-Brassey's, Inc., 1989), and Darrell Reeck, Ethics for the Professions: A Christian Perspective (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publ. House, 1982). The same holds in both the general and specialized applied ethics works, as well as journal papers.
(2) The injustice would arise only if the confusion were a result of culpable negligence. Yet, of course, the problem we are exploring is itself whether the very idea of injustice can be made sense of within the widespread confusion that abounds.
(3) It is interesting to observe that already at this point of our discussion what has been termed "the determinist's dilemma" confronts us, namely, could such lamentations even make sense concerning human behavior, including forming a belief in certain propositions, unless individuals had the capacity and power to undertake to change their conduct of their own accord. See James N. Jordan, "Determinism's Dilemma," The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 23 (September 1969), pp. 48-66.
(4) B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Bantam Books, 1972). I have discussed Skinner's views in Tibor R. Machan, The Pseudo-Science of B. F. Skinner (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1974).
(5) Arguably philosophers express their praise and blame somewhat subtly, not always using the most direct terms to signify blaming or praising. (Consider when philosophers criticize one another on grounds of logic alone - that kind of comment, too, invokes certain norms that presumably the target of criticism ought to heed!) Moreover, we may without any distortion, include within our class of beliefs and utterances various proclamation concerning what people ought or ought not to do, what sort of conduct and practices by persons and human organizations or institutions should or should not be carried out.
(6) Not just journals but text books, conferences and university courses proliferate featuring claims as to what various professionals ought or ought not to do. And, of course, philosophers are active in the various controversies about multiculturalism, feminism, freedom of expression, etc., which abound on university campuses, so here, too, they immerse themselves in ethics and need to be clear about whether they are addressing themselves to human beings who can make free choices or who are being moved about by forces over which they cannot exert any independent, original control.
(7) Some, such as John Kekes, argue that there can be exceptions to this idea. See John Kekes, "'Ought Implies Can' and Kinds of Morality," Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 34 (1984), pp. 460-467. See, also, his Facing Evil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), which includes the bulk of the discussion from the aforementioned paper as well as others, such as "Freedom," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 61 (1980), pp. 368-385.
First, even Kekes does not deny that it holds on most cases when we claim that someone ought or ought not to do something. Second, when Kekes argues that there are exceptions of "ought implies can" in such cases as when someone regrets (not) having done something even if there is no way he or she could (not) have done it, a problem arises. The point rests too much weight on a given understanding of what could be at issue. Instead of denying "ought implies can" on the basis of such rare cases, we might explain them as cases of confused thinking, of which surely is ample evidence. False guilt is clearly the material of a great deal of psychoanalysis. Indeed, there would be no point in identifying such false guilt if there were not instances of genuine guilt. Kekes attempts, of course, to develop an alternative analysis, based on his contrast between choice and character morality, claiming the latter makes better sense of our moral experiences. I would dispute this but this isn't the place for that.
One may view Kekes's analysis as making more of ordinary language materials than may be warranted. Indeed, a bit of philosophy may help those caught in such confusions - something that may well be provided by psychotherapists in their somewhat indirect ways, compared to how philosophers would probably make the point to those who may need it but may have to be approached somewhat gingerly.
It is also to be noted that in Kekes's discussion "choice" is ambiguous: it could mean selection" as well as "initiation," yet the free will thesis requires the latter sense; the former is fully compatible with determinism - animals, as well as anything in motion, may be said to be involved in making selections. Indeed, Kekes, in his paper "Freedom," as well as in discussions at the 1981 Summer Liberty Fund Seminar, In Santa Barbara, California, argues for a conception of freedom as involving not being made to do what one does by others, doing things on one's own. In other words, when one makes one's selections oneself, one is free. But that one initiates the actions one takes, including the mental processes that selection presupposes, is denied by Kekes, who thinks modern science renders this incongruous. I argue, below, as well as in my books, op. cit., The Pseudo-Science of B. F. Skinner and Individuals and Their Rights (La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Co., Inc., 1989), that science does not preclude the initiation of our behavior. I return to this point later in this discussion.
(8) Not that some philosophers do not worry about the matter. But they are not among those who contribute to the various burgeoning sub-fields of applied ethics.
(9) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.
(10) New York: Basic Books, 1974.
(11) Brian Barry, Political Arguments (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), Nicholas Rescher, Distributive Justice (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966).
(12) Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. XLVII (Newark, DE: American Philosophical Association, 1975), pp. 5-22.
(13) Ibid., p. 21.
(14) Of course, these general schools divide into many subsections based on innumerable refinements on the main features of these broadly characterized schools. Some of them may not agree with the position I ascribe to them above. Yet there need be little argument about this here, for in their central claims these views do find it unlikely, if not outright impossible, philosophy proper to handle normative, especially ethical and political, problems.
(15) One may suppose that this provision is part of the process so as to avoid total arbitrariness which intuitionism per se wouldentail. Yet there is reason to think that introducing the proviso robs the method of its independence. See, Tibor R. Machan, "A Note on Independence," Philosophical Studies, Vol. 30 (1976), pp. 419-421.
(16) These are only the most prestigious of the ethics and public affairs journals. We can also include The Journal of Value Inquiry, Business and Professional Ethics Journal, The Journal of Business Ethics, and Environmental Ethics, where this practices still pre vails. Obviously, there have also been exceptions. But the connection between substantive ethical claims and the free will topic is rarely explored, as indicated by the works listed in Note 1.
(17) I did, in fact, so argue in op. cit., Machan, "A Note on Independence."
(18) Rawls, op. cit., A Theory of Justice, p. 104. Incidentally, if this view isn't a kind of meta-ethical position, not much else would qualify. In light of Rawls's "independence" thesis it is difficult to see why he can rest any beliefs on it. Furthermore, once the topic is broached, it would be instructive to see what exactly Rawls's view on this topic is - to wit, if it is only "largely," what little bit of self-responsibility can we expect human beings to have and how is to be accounted for in understanding ethics and public policy matters?
(19) I discuss some of this in greater detail in Tibor R. Machan, "Rescuing Victims - from Social Theory," in Diane Sank and David I. Caplan, eds., To Be a Victim, Encounters with Crime and Injustice (New York: Plenum Press, 1991), pp. 101-116. See, also, Tibor R. Machan, Capitalism and Individualism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), for a discussion of the impact of the social scientistic position of economist on their explorations of which of the various live competing political economic options has the greatest merit as system of human community life.
(20) The mechanistic model allows for nuanced differences based on highly technical amendments to the broad framework contributed by, say, quantum physics. Yet, that will not change the basic result, namely, that self-responsibility is disallowed and, thus, ethics rendered impossible.
Of course, challenges exist - e.g., those advanced by Karl Popper and John C. Eccles, The Self and its Brain (New York: Springer International, 1977) and John C. Eccles, Evolution of the brain: Creation of the self (London: Routledge, 1989). Popper and Eccles argue that quantum mechanics makes room for free will in some fashion, although they seem to adopt a new dualism, reminiscent of Kant's project. The effort has not resonated with much approval within the community of philosophers, let alone moral and public policy theorists. Part of the problem is that quantum mechanics, especially the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, does not provide ethics with a metaphysical but only a pseudo-epistemological grounding, leading to the possible result that randomness is part of the universe. This is not at all the same as self-responsibility.
In social scientific circles, too, there have been dissenters - e.g., Isidor Chein, The Science of Behavior and the Image of Man (New York: Basic Books, 1972) and Nathaniel Branden, The Psychology of Self-Esteem (New York: Bantam Books, 1969). It is fair to note, however, that these did not make an impact in applied ethics.
(21) One may argue that all the determinist is saying is that it would be better to believe in determinism than not to, not that one ought to. Yet the "ought" is implicit in our addressing ourselves with the idea, since that only make sense with the expectation that we may change our minds. Some of this is discussed in Joseph Boyle, G. Grisez and O. Tollefsen, Free Choice (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976). See, also, op. cit., Jordan, "Determinism's Dilemma."
(22) Roger W. Sperry, Science and Moral Priority (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) and his numerous technical papers in such journals as Perspectives in Biology and Medicine.
(23) Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. II: ch. 5 1106a2, 1113b13. It is interesting that Kekes, in op. cit., Facing Evil, classifies his own views as akin to those of Aristotle, in virtue of their being on the side of character as distinct from (Kantian) choice moralities. Yet, Aristotle connects moral virtue with choice and ties being vicious and virtuous to our power to be one or the other. These feature's of Aristotle's ethics - or rather metaethics - appear to place Aristotle's version of character morality within the class of choice moralities.
Indeed, it is arguable that Kekes's "ethics" is only a theory of value, with little to say about morality as such, which is a very special category of value, namely, value the realization of loss of which the agent can bring about on his or her own (within, of course, the requisite setting in the world). When Kekes explains morality, he in fact describes only a theory of values based on the enhancement of human life. Yet many factors enhance or damage human life, some of them brough about by persons, some of them not, so it is important for the cogency of any bona fide morality that personal initiative be explained.
(24) To pick just one topic, what is "lack of fairness" if not a lack of integrity as applied in a certain domain of one's conduct?
(25) John Kenneth Galbraith, "The Dependence Effect," reprinted in numerous business ethics texts and collections, from his work The Affluent Society. See, for example, Thomas L. Beauchamp and Norman E. Bowie, Ethical Theory and Business (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1983). See a discussion of this issue in Douglas J. Den Uyl's essay on advertising in Tibor R. Machan, Commerce and Morality (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988). See, also, F. A. Hayek's essay, "The Non-Sequitor of `The Dependence Effect'," in a few business ethics collections - e.g., ibid., Beauchamp and Bowie.
(26) I wish to thank Greg Johnson and the editors of the Journal of Applied Philosophy for their suggestions for improving this paper.
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*Tibor R. Machan is Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University, Alabama, 36849 U.S.A. During the academic year of 1992-93 he was visiting professor of philosophy at the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York 10996 U.S.A.
