what Sam claims, what i believe, is that IF you desire wellbeing, then you should strive to improve it. which is admittedly a completely obvious point. — PeterPants

It certainly is quite obvious and there indeed is little reason for anyone to deny it. What is questionable is Harris's use of this commonplace assertions as a unique ground for building up an all encompassing moral theory. Just because pleasure is more fun than pain hardly proves utilitarianism right. Likewise, just because it's better to get your own stuff rather than steal it from someone else hardly means that Ayn Rand's libertarianism is right. This is another theory that is hopelessly simplistic because it strives to reduce all of morality to one single moral consideration.

I still entirely think your distinction between practical and theoretical reasoning is a distinction without a difference. or at least i fail to see how this argument about morality is diminished in the least due to this seemingly bizarre distinction. — PeterPants

If someone tells you that she believes the weather will be rainy tomorrow, you can ask her why she believes it. If she tells you that she intents to spend her next vacations in Pyongyang you can ask her why she intends to do so. Although in both cases you are expecting her do provide you with some reason, those reasons also are expected to have different forms. In the first case you expect to be given some form of evidence for her beliefs while in the second case you expect, in addition to evidence, to learn something about her values, preferences or prior commitments, and/or her abilities and opportunities. Those latter practical considerations, though, are generally irrelevant to the rasons why someone believes something. If she would tell you that she believes that the weather will be rainy tomorrow because she is fed up with the recent sunny weather, that would be irrational.

The distinction between practical and theoretical reasoning is very commonplace in philosophy (since, at least, Aristotle who has done much to articulate the distinctive forms of practical and theoretical syllogisms), as well as social sciences, economic modelling, mathematical game theory, rational choice theory, cognitive science etc. It is quite uncontroversial that there is such a distinction although the specific manner in which both forms of reasoning are related is a topic of great interest and controversy. I think the onus is on you to explain why you think there is no difference.

i STILL dont see the difference...

obviously no one has a perfect model of another human being, we certainly dont have that capacity yet.
so what? i dont see your point. — PeterPants

I just argued that *even if* you had a perfect predictive/causal model of the behavior of a human being, that still would not tell you how it is that you ought to behave towards her. And that's because knowing how your interactions with (or manipulations of) that human being will affect her doesn't tell you whether you should do it. To gain knowledge of the potential effects of your actions is a matter of theoretical reasoning. To arrive at a decision regarding what it is that you ought to do is a matter of practical reasoning.

You have read The Moral Landscape, right? In that book Harris takes as an unquestionable premise that it is morally better that every sentient creature experience well-being rather than that every sentient creature feel crappy. From this unique premise, Harris purports to derive his "moral landscape" utilitarian theory. But the premise can't be supported by empirical scientific investigation. Harris is the first to admit this. In fact he pretends that only intuition can support it and that he doesn't know how to respond to someone who would deny it. So, Harris himself recognizes that his utilitarian theory can not rest entirely on a predictive/causal model of the behavior of human beings (and other sentient creatures). You need, in addition to any such model, however perfect or imperfect it might be, some premise or principle about what it is best to do. But deciding what is best to do, or arguing for the validity of moral principles is traditionally regarded to be a topic for practical reason. Harris rather regards it as a matter of faith in his own intuition and he simply voices astonishment that anyone else's intuition could be different.

He does insist, though, that any moral system requires some unquestioned premise. But this is merely to assume moral foundationalism. Principles of morality need not be structured similarly to a mathematical axiomatic system. Practical reason need not rest on rules of deductive inference at all.

so, im really confused about this practical / theoretical understanding thing. Id appreciate if you could explain further.
The way i see it (this should help you set me straight) is that we all create models of other peoples behaviors in our minds (theoretical models) these models are based on our real world experiences of people (derived practically)...
I dont see the difference, practical reasoning seems to just be intuition? surely not... you surely are not appealing to intuition over reasoning. — PeterPants

Even if you could somehow acquire a perfect "model" of a fellow human being and thereby know exactly how different "interventions" on them would "produce" different behaviors and emotional responses, you would still not know what to do since this theoretical knowledge would not speak to the reasons why you should intervene in a way that produces such results. The aim of practical reason is to decide what to do and this is governed just as much by the evaluation of the desirability of the ends as it is with the effectiveness of the means (or their permissiveness). Theoretical reason is completely silent regarding both permissiveness (duties, commitments, responsibilities, etc.) and the valuation of ends.

reason is reason, there is no theoretical/practical reasoning, what are you talking about? — PeterPants

Deciding what to believe isn't the same as deciding what to do. Of course, both of those abilities rest on rational abilities, broadly construed, but they are still distinctive ways of making use of them.

if someone harms me, i hold them responsible, i expect them to apologize if they are a moral agent, i ask for them to make amends, all for pragmatic reasons, but i dont blame them, i blame their environment, their imperfect genes, the whole multitude of variables that led them to their current situation. — PeterPants

This is strange, and I doubt if you can really live up to this lofty (however misguided) ideal. Your pragmatism seems to be grounded on an utilitarian reconstruction of the pont of ordinary reactive attitudes. But you are claiming (as Harris does) some sort of detached, emotionally withdrawn, purely theoretical stance on your own daily social intercourses, rather on the likeness of Star Trek's Mr Spock.

It seems to me that Sam Harris often fails to distinguish practical from theoretical reason and thereby seeks to substitute to our practical understanding of our interactions with our fellow human beings a theoretical understanding of the causes of our behaviors. He wants us to treat each other like we were dogs. Hence, his utilitarianism, combined with this theoretical-instrumentalist stance, yields an understanding of the point of morality rather similar to what is depicted (critically) in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and (uncritically) in B. F. Skinner's Walden Two. (A Clockwork Orange also comes to mind)

Just because aliens have landed doesn't mean it's an "invasion". Endorse multiculturalism (and multispeciesm) and don't spoil your interstellar vacations.

my argument is more about blame, the only place i see a lack of free will having an effect on how we think, is in blame.
i dont blame anymore, i recognize that peoples flaws have reasons, reasons beyond their control. 'bad' people are sick people, they need help not hatred. — PeterPants

To praise and blame people just is to hold them responsible. When you are holding someone responsible for having acted badly, because in this instance her having acted badly wasn't purely accidental but rather reflects badly on her character, then you are blaming her. If the blame is merited, then it ought to be met by that person with some sense of shame or regret. Feeling ashamed or regretful just is for one to recognize that the blame is merited, and being on that account motivated in making amends and trying to do better in the future. The social configuration of those emotions and "reactive attitudes" (as Peter Strawson calls them) not only enable people to make progress on the path towards greater rational and moral autonomy, it is also in part constitutive of those rational and social abilities. She can't be rational who doesn't hold herself responsible (i.e. isn't happy or unhappy about herself) for her successes or mistakes in reasoning. She can't either display moral awareness who wouldn't feel any shame for her own misdeeds.

Rewards and punishments likewise can be social practices that scaffold autonomous abilities and partially constitute them. Parking tickets punish people who park illegally while respecting their autonomous choices to do so in some circumstances. (Sam Harris would probably see this as a second best solution to some form of brainwashing or brain surgery that would entirely remove people's abilities to park illegally in any circumstance.) And, of course, rewards and punishments are effective with dogs who can't be reasoned with, or with children who can't reason yet. But in the latter case, they also instill in them the more mature reactive attitudes that lead them on the path towards greater rational and moral autonomy.

what if we make a computer that changes its own program, put it in a robot and it ends up killing people, it it then personally responsible for its actions? was it not an unfortunate series of events originating in a lack of foresight on whoever originally made the robot? — PeterPants

Daniel Dennett says that we are "wet robots". He may be called a mechanicist-compatibilist since he endorses a view of the universe (and all the living things in it) being a set of complicated mechanisms. I don't personally endorse this metaphysical picture, but I think he has a point. The neural circuits inside of our brains (and inside of an intelligent robot's computer) could perfectly well run deterministic algorithms and this fact alone would not have any incidence on our freedom and responsibility. If a robot would become a killer robot then maybe its creators would share some of the blame. That would not necessarily absolve the robot. Likewise, if you hire a hit man to kill someone, then you are responsible for the murder just as much as the hit man is. Responsibility isn't a buck that must stop in just one single place. It is more a matter of social, moral and political decision to decide how responsibilities for rational actions must spread out among multiple agents (where some of the agents -- parents for instances -- hold some responsibility for raising or supervising other agents on their way to the acquisition of greater rational and moral autonomy).

People's being responsible for what they do therefore isn't independent of the way they are being held responsible according to (sometimes freely endorsed) social norms. But just because those two things are being created together doesn't mean that responsibility isn't real. It just means that it only exists withing a determinate social context. (And, analogously, it can also hold withing the practical perspective of a single rational agent -- on a desert island, say -- who choses to lead a rationally integrated life and to hold herself responsible for her own past shortcomings).

great then you agree with me, so why are you arguing against me?
wait... but you DID defend that sophomoric and ridiculous conception just before.. didnt you?
You implied that we could do multiple different things, based on our decisions entirely abstracted from determined reality... didnt you? — PeterPants

You misunderstand. I argued the exact opposite: that you ought not to construe the free human agent as an entity that can control the unfolding of the universe from some ethereal standpoint outside of it (and from outside of her own body and brain). It is from within the universe, as an integral part of it, that the embodied human agent exerts control over her own future. And you have not shown how the deterministic laws that govern physical systems (while abstracting away most of their significant functional features) preclude human beings from having such abilities to freely and responsibly determine their own futures.

No... straw man alert straw man alert! :P
no no, its just the choices bit, of course our actions are influenced by morality and rationality, just like a computers actions are influenced by energy states, logic circuitry etc. its a wonderful and beautiful phenomena. — PeterPants

Those are two rather different sorts of influences. The deterministic computer isn't responsible for the inputs that are provided to it and those inputs determine the outputs. Hence, we don't hold the computer responsible for having had any choice in churning out those outputs, given the inputs that it didn't have any choice being provided with.

The case where humans are being influenced by principles of rationality or morality is quite different. The principles of rationality are not part of the initial state of the universe or the laws of physics. Both the laws, or the initial state, could have been different and this might not have had any relevant impact on what the principles of rationality are. They would remain the same. If you are asked to evaluate whether modus ponens is a valid rule of inference, for instance (or whether its application to some specific bit of practical reasoning is relevant) then it is absolutely no use to inquire about the initial state of the universe or the laws of physics. It is also quite irrelevant to inquire about the causal impacts of the "inputs" to your brain. The principles of rationality aren't inputs to people's brains. This is not where to look for in order to understand why people make the choices that they make, in the case where they are acting rationally or morally.

In the specific case of morality, looking for its source in our evolutionary past, for instance, leads one straight to the commission of the naturalistic fallacy. What makes something worthy of being valued can not be reduced to any sort of causal explanation as to why you actually came to value it.

of course, but why would you assume thats the case, i see no evidence of this ability and thus see no reason to come up with explanations for it... — PeterPants

What ability don't you see any evidence of? The ability to make justified rational decisions or enlightened moral choices?

on your Sam Harris comments, i disagree, i dont think he is as ignorant of the more nuanced views as you think, i think he is arguing (as i am) against the only concept of free will worth arguing over, i see no reason to argue against more nuanced philosophical views of free will.
If you dont support this idea of free will, then whats the problem? so basically i dont understand this criticism you gave.

But the conception of free will you are arguing against just is sophomoric and ridiculous. No philosopher who I know endorses it. (And I've read papers by well over one hundred philosophers who have published on the topic). Maybe "ordinary people" who are being probed into coming up with explanations regarding the source of their abilities to act responsibly in a universe that is allegedly governed by impersonal forces come up with funny explanations. But just because the explanations aren't very good, or are overly simplistic, doesn't entail that what is explained doesn't exist!

quantum systems are not deterministic, they simply have variables that seem to be determined by randomness. :P

but none of that is here nor their, to claim that something on the scale of a human brain acts in an indeterministic way is absurd and baseless. — PeterPants

You ignored the second part of my comment. Even if human brains can be construed as deterministic systems, that doesn't mean that their functions, let alone the functions of the distributed systems that they are integral parts of (including human bodies, their environments and their cultures) are governed by principles that are reducible to the laws that deterministically govern the behaviors of neurons.

what IM saying, is that if you go to any MOMENT, a single moment, not a period of time, a single instant in time, and everything in the whole universe is a particular way, every atom, every quantum state, all of it (obviosly including your body and brain) then the thing that happens next is determined by the current setup, and we as agents have NO INFLUENCE over that whatsoever. and that is precicely what most people believe free will is, the capacity to overcome determanism, to break it, to do something outside of what is determined by the universe. — PeterPants

I am unsure if this is really what "most people" believe free will is. Sam Harris for sure seems to believe that this is the conception of free will that must be refuted. He seems to hold to this naive conception very dearly because that saves him the trouble of refuting (or of learning anything about) less philosophically naive conceptions of our ordinary concepts of agency freedom and moral or rational responsibility.

determinism is not an assumption, its all there is evidence for, to assume there is anything outside of determinism is the magical doctrinal assumption. — PeterPants

There are both deterministic and indeterministic systems in the world. From a quantum mechanical perspective, most physical systems are indeterministic although for some practical purposes the indeterminism can be abstracted away (e.g. as is the case for many macroscopic, non-chaotic systems). Maybe more importantly, for purpose of understanding the behavior of rational agents and other animals, the principles that govern them need not reduce to or be explained by the deterministic laws that govern their material constituents. It's usually more a matter of form and function: how those parts normally function together.

i fully understand that, and actually thought i had basically said it..
My point was that this rules out the notion that at a specific instance in time, any given person could do one thing OR another. Its simply not true, in a given situation (the situation includes your brain state etc) you can and will do one thing. — PeterPants

This is precisely what I think is a bit nonsensical. You yourself are not part of the practical situation where you are called to act. That would only make sense if you would picture yourself floating like a ghost alongside yourself at the time of acting and trying to figure out how to pull the strings that animate your own body. What rather constitutes your practical situation, at the time when you must make a responsible decision, are the opportunities open to you, the set of your practical abilities, and the rational considerations that may tell, by your own lights, what it is that it would make sense for you to do.

According to it, there is no source of action that is not an "external coercion" or "external impediment"; whether it is "felt" or not is really a matter of indifference. — John

Yes, I think most compatibilists, because of the metaphysical picture that comes bundled up with the uncritically accepted doctrine of universal determinism, generally have a hard time distinguishing what it is in the aetiology of human action that constitutes external constraint to our freedom from what it is that is a constitutive part of (internal to) our power of free agency. It is just very hard for them to see how it is that free agency comes to be constituted, what its biological and social/cultural "determinants" (or enabling conditions) really are.

'To say that you could have done otherwise, is simply to say that the universe could have been different at that exact point in time' — PeterPants

This claim seems to rest on a misconception regarding the way human beings, qua responsible agents, relate to "the universe". The universe simply is everything there is, including you. You are a flesh and blood animal; you are not a disembodied Cartesian ego: the mere passive spectator of epiphenomena being generated by your brain. So, of course, if you had done something else than you actually did, then the universe would have been different. That doesn't mean the "rest" of the universe would have made you do it or that you didn't have the opportunity and freedom to do it in the actual case where you didn't.

In my understanding of compatibilism, a compatibilist admits that all our actions are ultimately determined by factors over which we have no control but he also claims that we have control and thus free will in the sense that we can do what we want to do or what we intend to do without feeling coerced to do it. Thus a compatibilist denies ultimate free will and ultimate responsibility but accepts free will and responsibility in a limited sense. Yeah, it is a utilitarian and pragmatic approach but it does appeal to an important sense of the idea of freedom - freedom to do what we want. — litewave

Most contemporary compatibilists (I say "most", but I don't actually know of any actual exception) defend a view of compatibilist freedom and responsibility that requires more from an agent than her simply being free from the feeling of coercion when she acts. One of the main points of contention between compatibilists and hard determinists concerns the source or our desires, or of our wanting what we want, when we are indeed "doing what we want". Pretty much everyone agrees that, in cases where we don't have any sort of control over our own desires (or on our desires' effectiveness in making us acting on them) then we aren't free even if we don't feel being coerced.

The classical example concerns the nicotine addict who wishes that she would not desire to smoke but can't help but acting on this desire. If we imagine that she indeed is powerless in getting rid of her addiction (and may be blameless for her having acquired it, let us suppose) then, in a clear sense, her addiction constitutes a restriction on her freedom. And that is the case even if whenever that person lights up a cigarette nobody else is coercing her and she is doing what she most wants to do at that time.

Harry Frankfurt has famously developed a "Second Order Desire" theory of free will in order to deal with cases such as addiction. This theory ran into new problems so Frankfurt later patched it up into his more recent "Deep Self" view. You can looks those up; there is an abundant literature about them. (Many other compatibilists such as John Martin Fisher, Michael Smith, Susan Wolf and Kadri Vihvelin hold roughly similar views). I don't think any one of those compatibilist views is entirely successful, but the main point is that the mere absence of a feeling that one is being coerced by an external agent, or from external circumstances (e.g. from being locked up in a room) isn't sufficient for guaranteeing the sort of freedom that grounds rational and/or moral responsibility. And that this is the case is a point that compatibilist philosopher generally grant to the hard compatibilist.

Let me also mention another related reason why the simple form of compatibilism that would equate freedom of the will with the absence of felt external coercion, or of external impediments, is unsatisfactory: On such a simple account, mature human beings wouldn't be anymore or any less free than dogs and cows are. However, we don't hold dogs and cows morally responsible for what they do (although we may reward or punish then when this is effective). So, there ought to be something more to our own freedom on account of which we can hold ourselves responsible for what we do than merely being uncoerced by external agents or circumstances.

Well, your reasons include the information you have. A person who acts for wrong (detrimental) reasons should be corrected, through advice, education, therapy, blame or punishment, or his freedom to act should be restrained.

I'll come back to this at a later time.

Ultimately, we can't choose anything (because everything we do is ultimately determined by factors over which we have no control). If we have more time or opportunities to do something then there may be a greater probability that we will do it, but ultimately we can't choose it. — litewave

This sounds more like a hard determinist line than a compatibilist line. The sort of thing that a compatibilist might say -- someone like Daniel Dennett, for instance -- is that people can chose to perform specific actions, and avoid performing other actions, even though whenever they make such choices there wasn't any possibility for them to have done anything else. It is rather hard determinists who claim that the lack or an ability "to have done otherwise" precludes the ability to chose at all. (Although some compatibilists also assert that possession of the general ability to have done otherwise is consistent with the impossibility of its being exercised in the specific situation).

Hard determinists such as Galen Strawson or Derk Pereboom deny that free will and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism (and also with indeterminism!) but they maintain that praise and blame, reward and punishment, can nevertheless be justified on utilitarian grounds, which seems to be your position. Your position therefore seems to be identical with the position that philosophers who defend it qualify as hard determinism (or hard incompatibilism) but you would rather call it "compatibilism" for some reason.

Another option is to maintain that free will and responsibility don't require "ultimate responsibility". In order to defend such an option, you still need to contend with Strawson's Basic Argument, it seems to me. It would seem especially important that you would do so on account of the fact that your own regress argument is similar to Strawson's.

I say that the regress of intentions must be blocked at some point. If the first intention is caused by values, so be it.

Sure, this "blocks" the regress. (Rather: it terminates the regress at some point in the past where the agent wasn't responsible). But it block the regress in favor of the hard determinist, and not in favor of the the compatibilist. The compatibilist wishes to block the regress in such a manner that the agent's responsibility for her own actions isn't removed!

But reasons are causal factors too. Acting for a reason means being influenced by the reason

For sure. Whenever an agent acts intentionally in a context where she might be held (or hold herself) to be responsible for what she did, then her behavior is a manifestation of her being sensitive to some rational consideration or other. When the reason was bad, we may blame her and when the reason was good we may sometimes praise her (if there is some point in doing so). We blame her (or she feels remorse or expresses regrets) when her having had a bad reason for acting reflects badly on her character.

However, reasons thus construed as abstract features of the agent's practical situation that she might rightly or wrongly take to be justifying her behavior aren't antecedent causes of her action in the same way mental states such as beliefs and desires might be. It makes sense to say, retrospectively, that wrong beliefs or questionable motivations might have "caused" you to act badly and that they might, in some circumstances, absolve you in part of your responsibility. (You were not free to do the right thing on account of a lack of knowledge that you couldn't have had, or because of an addiction that clouds your judgement, say). But in the case where you are well informed and don't suffer (through no fault of your own) from some addiction, say, then to say that you had no choice in doing what you did because you were "influenced" by you reason for doing so doesn't seem to make sense. Freedom from rationality isn't freedom at all. It's just being unmoored.

I agree that the fact that the agent has been repeatedly engaged in an action says something about her character (her relatively stable properties) but it still doesn't give her ultimate control or responsibility for the action. We engage in the activity of breathing all the time and it doesn't give us ultimate control of our breaths even after many years of breathing. But it says something about our nature (namely that we are breathing creatures), which we cannot freely choose. — litewave

We can't choose not to breathe but we can chose not to lie or steal, for instance; at any rate, we can chose not to do those things unless we have some good overriding reasons not to refrain in specific instances. But although it might be begging the question against the ultimate-responsibility skeptic to say so, my only intent here was to dislodge the picture of responsible action according to which the responsibility of the agent only attaches to her momentary choice -- in the instant when she deliberates and act -- to behave badly and to yield to her bad impulse. We also typically are blaming her for having acquired the bad character that accounts for her having such bad impulses, and that also accounts for her lack of control over them. And this means that we also hold that she was free to choose a different path in the past and not indulge in the behaviors that molded her character in this fashion. That she was thus free to choose a better path in the past must also be argued for separately, of course. But it is important not to assume without argument that acting freely just means being able to make choices regardless of one's present character and motivations.

Of course we have different kinds of desires - for carnal pleasures, for compassionate love, for duty, etc. - but they are all motivators for the formation of our intentions and the performing of our actions, and all of those desires (and consequently intentions and actions) are ultimately determined by factors over which we have no control.

Yes, but I would argue that what normally terminates the chain of "why?" explanations of rational behavior need not be construed as a mental state that one had prior to deciding what to do, but rather one's ultimate reason for doing so. Hence, imagine that the house is burning and, as you escape, you have the opportunity to grab your sleeping child in her bed. If you are doing so it's because you are valuing her life, say. That would be a reasonable explanation of your action. Your intentional life-saving action is grounded on the value that you ascribe to your child's life. In order to start a regress argument, you would have to argue that you were only thus sensitive to this rational consideration because you are a person who values your children's lives. And you would also have to argue that your being such a person isn't something that you have any "ultimate" controls over.

It may be true that you don't have any such "ultimate" control over this in the sense that you were indeed lucky enough not to be raised in circumstances that would have turned you into some sort of a sociopath. A sociopath might be someone who suffers from some form of moral blindness. But it wouldn't make you any freer if you could have, in the past "freely" chosen evenhandedly between becoming a normal compassionate person or a sociopath. Hence, in order to block the regress, it is sufficient to point to the values that motivate you in acting and challenge the proponent of the regress argument to show you why your endorsing such values isn't a rational act.

If the skeptic about ultimate responsibility would rather argue that you weren't free to become such as to be motivated by those values, you can simply reply that you now are free to endorse them, or revise them, on the condition that good reasons might be offered for your doing so. And it is this ability to reassess your own values at each moment of your life (from the time when you became morally and rationally mature) that makes you free and ultimately responsible for your actions.

Sure, the questioner obviously assumes that the neighbor's action is intentional, so he is not interested to hear that the neighbor intended to perform the action. He is interested to hear what were the factors that caused/influenced the formation of the intention and consequently the performance of the action.

I was arguing that she wanted to hear the reasons why her neighbor was trimming her hedge. The question of the causal factors that were implicated in her becoming aware of those reasons is a different question. It may relate to the explanation of her having the ability to act intentionally, but not to the explanation why she exercised this ability in the present circumstances. When you ask someone why she is doing something, you don't normally mean to inquire why she had an ability to behave rationally. (That's just because she is a normal human being). You rather are assuming that she is rational and are inquiring about the specific reasons she may have in the present circumstances.

The article is behind a paywall, but honestly I don't see how the so-called agent causation can save libertarian free will. — litewave

That's unfortunate. However, if you google the four separate words: "Galen Strawson basic argument "(without quotes), then the top two results are (1) a link to The Information Philosopher's page on Galen Strawson, where his "Basic Argument" is summarized, and (2) a link to Strawson's own paper The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility where one version of his argument is developed. The reason why I am pointing you to Strawson's argument is because it seems to express the same worry that you are trying to express (in the form of a regress argument) but it doesn't suffer from the same flaw. It doesn't misconstrue an intentional action as a sort of action that must be controlled by a prior intention in order for it to be intentional. And also, as I mentioned already, if you accept Strawson's argument, then it threatens compatibilist free will just as much as it threatens libertarian free will, which is instructive and may motivate you in trying to figure out what's wrong with it.

(...) Incidentally I did participate in a debate on the topic of Free Will on the Dharmawheel forum not long back, and I maintained the view that Buddhism basically supports the idea of free will - it has to, because it defines 'karma' in terms of 'intentional action', so I can't see how it could possibly not. But, interestingly, there was quite a bit of dissent from other contributors. — Wayfarer

Thanks for those useful explanations. So, Harris's Buddhism really amounts to Pop Buddhism sprinkled with a fair amount of Cartesian prejudice.

Incase you haven't missed it, it can't be claimed to be who you are because YOU have no OWNERSHIP over it. I mean, sure you can influence it's decisions but you can influence your girlfriend/boyfriends decisions too, does that mean that they are part of who you are? I think not, just a part of your life.

And so by definition, anything that you are unaware of and can not control is therefore not you. Like your heart, or your cells, they form part of your body but they are not you. All YOU are is an awareness, an observer riding around in a body that you so naively and arrogantly call your own. The driver of the car is not the car, remember that. — intrapersona

I'm not sure why it should be regarded as arrogance to claim your body as your own. (Who else would more rightfully claim ownership over it?) In any case, the body and the brain that you allegedly are "riding in" are causally involved in the exercise of your capacities to perceive the world, to gain knowledge about it, and to act. The proper way to characterize those involvements, in my view, is as enabling conditions for the possession of your mental powers and their exercises. Likewise, your eyes enable you to see but they are not doing the seeing for you, your legs enable you to walk but aren't doing the walking for you, and your brain enables you to think but isn't doing the thinking for you.

P.S. Meditation is perhaps the clearest sense of attaining insight on the matter is it is primary. You can't claim physical activity anymore valuable in determining free will over self-observation. Self-observation is primary and comes before decision making. In anycase, it has already been observed by neurological studies that the unconscious mind makes the decisions.

I think you alluded to Libet's experiment earlier. The interpretation of this experiment has been widely criticized, and even Libet himself later came to temper his own conclusions. I commented on it just a few days ago.

Thanks, so has anyone ever asked him how something can be epiphenomenal and yet cause him to still generate an entire philosophy based around it? I'm sure he must have considered it at least once. — JupiterJess

Harris simply bites the bullet and acknowledges that he can't claim any responsibility for his own intellectual achievements. He is even handed about that. If people can't be held morally responsible for their bad deeds -- since they're mere puppets being moved around by the impersonal forces of the universe -- then they can't either be given any real credit for their positive accomplishments.

Of course, Harris's philosophy of powerlessness and irresponsibility is unstable and he attempts to patch it up with the caveat that although people are powerless to make choice among real alternatives, and although they can't be given any real credit for their actions, it still is useful to pretend that they are responsible, and praise and reward them accordingly, in order to manipulate them. People are powerless puppets but you can still use praise and blame (and rewards and punishment) as mere psychological tools for pulling on their strings. Harris is quick to add, though, that blaming or punishing someone who has intentionally done a very bad deed (a murderer, say) is terribly unfair to the criminal since he isn't responsible at all. Blaming or punishing the criminal can justifiably be done only if that's the only means for controlling him, but it would be much better, if possible, to tie him up and hack into his brain in order to remove the source of the criminal impulse.

Yep. But wouldn't this require a person/self to suffer to be correct? — JupiterJess

That's right, but Harris isn't arguing that the self is an illusion. It's rather the self's sense of her own freedom that is an illusion according to Harris. He believes that the mental phenomena that are being experienced by the self (including the sense of one's own power of free agency) are epiphenomena. They are not unreal but they don't have any causal efficacy according to him.

So, Harris's ethics (as expounded in The Moral Landscape) boils down to the affirmation of the intuition -- which he believes to be a self-evident a priori truth -- that it would be ethically good if all of the epiphenomenal "selves" being generated by biological brains in the universe were somehow being caused to have happy thoughts and pleasurable feelings. This is quite sophomoric, really.

EDIT: Free will and choice making ability are not connected in any real sense. — TheMadFool

You seem to be connecting, or equating, the very idea of "free will" with libertarian (incompatibilist) free will. This is the ability for agents to settle between various options that are metaphysically open, in a sense, prior to the time of action or decision. Also, what you are calling "choice making" seems to be an instance of the sort of ability that compatibilists deem to be sufficient for free will (or merely for moral responsibility). But you are not very explicit about that.

Hence, your thesis seems to boil down to the claim that compatibilist free will is possible even if libertarian free will isn't. This is rather common place, though not unworthy of discussion.

"What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind."
(Attributed to George Berkeley)

Ok cool thanks for breaking down that analogy further. So, what does Dennett have to say about unconscious choices dominating our free-will? Harris' has come from a background in buddhist meditation where it is observed through meditative practices that your sense of identity is basically an illusion. Tie this in with the neurological findings of unconscious decision making and it looks pretty solid, so how is Dennet refuting these findings with compatibilism?

Well, from my perspective it seems that the only way would be to say that you ARE your unconscious mind which makes decisions. Which, correct me if I am wrong, Dennett does. Well if you ARE your unconscious mind then why can't you account for why you chose one decision over another? Or why can't you just fall asleep at anytime in one second as you wish? This does not mean to say that people's actions shouldn't go unpunished or that they are not to blame, just that the observer is not to blame. Because the observer and the actor are somewhat segregated. — intrapersona

Your unconscious mind is a part of who you are, for sure. This includes most of your cognitive habits and abilities as well as the source of most of your "raw" motivations. Harris indeed has been, as you note, influenced by his Buddhist meditation practice in viewing the "self" from the stance of a passive observer who introspects her own states of mind and ponders over the origins of her random "thoughts". This is just about the worst possible stance for inquiring about free agency (or about knowledge, for that matter), which involves active involvement of an agent in the world (including the social world) and not a voluntary retreat from it.

Freedom is not to be found in the passive contemplation of one's own navel. The observer and the actor aren't two different entities. They are two different stances taken up alternatively (and oftentimes simultaneously within the normal flow of life) by the very same embodied human being. Also, the observer no more than the actor can be absolved from responsibility for what she comes to believe since she can reflect critically about the deliveries of her senses and memory. Harris often seems to think that the role of the epistemic "observer" (which he equates with the "self") is limited to her passively witnessing random thoughts popping up in her conscious mind as a result of automatic "free" association.

The main thing most would agree on is that humans have the right of self-determination to a degree we don't let that right detract upon that same right we grant others. — Gooseone

According to Harris the very foundation of this right -- the possibility of self-determination -- is illusory. This is why he also is pushing an utilitarian theory that has as its sole foundation the imperative to increase human "well being" regardless of the values people may endorse.

Incidentally, we had a discussion 10 months ago about this topic and Harris's view also was brought up.

Also worth noting, a couple years after Harris replied to Dennett's review of his book, Harris and Dennett had another conversation about free will in a podcast. This the the most recent episode of their dispute that I know of.

Yeah, of which Harris' has replied and showed how Dennett has misunderstood and misconstrued his statements. This is a great one: — intrapersona

Harris is painting himself into a corner here. In his analogy, Atlantis stands for the crudest from of "contra-causal" libertarianism, which very few philosophers endorse; while Sicily stands for compatibilism, which a majority of philosophers endorse in one form of another. Harris then complains that it's as if Dennett were accusing him of denying the existence of Sicily. But arguing that compatibilism is incoherent and not worthy of any serious consideration also is something that Harris attempts to do in his book. So, in the analogy, it's as if Harris was arguing that there really isn't any such place as Sicily and that it is a mythical place as well. Dennett complaint therefore is on target.

In his review of Harris's book, Dennett also argues convincingly that a view akin to compatibilist free will can ground our reactive attitudes (praise and blame) just as well as the crude form of libertarianism that Harris ascribes to ordinary people. There is a debate regarding whether ordinary people's intuitions about free will are more in line with libertarian or compatibilist theories. There is inconclusive evidence in the "experimental philosophy" literature on this topic. But Dennett also argues successfully, in my view, that it is of little significance how ordinary people *theorize* about the source of free will when pressed to do so. So long as they ascribe to each other abilities to freely chose among ranges of options in a manner that reflects well or badly on their characters there is no reason to charge them with irrationality just because they may have a tendency to come up with bad theories regarding the way human beings make choices. In fact, Harris himself is guiltier than most in producing flawed theories about the source of our sense of freedom and responsibility.

But how could we falsify "Free will is an illusion"? — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Short from showing that free will isn't an illusion, you can show that Harris's argument are unsound, inconsistent, and also that his conception of free will is some sort of a strawman. Daniel Dennett has written a devastating review of Harris's Free Will. (And Harris has replied here.) Although I don't endorse fully Dennett's own brand of compatibilism, myself, I think his view is much more sensible and sophisticated than Harris's. And also, he is fairly successful in pointing out the most glaring flaws in Harris's arguments.

"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana" -- Confucius (or maybe Buddha or Groucho Marx)

“When I came home I expected a surprise and there was no surprise for me, so of course, I was surprised.” -- Ludwig Wittgenstein

By the way, I just finished reading a nice short paper by Chris Tucker: Agent Causation and the Alleged Impossibility of Rational Free Action. It's just 11 pages long and quite on topic for this thread.

The account of agent-causation that Tucker develops is a little thin on my view, but, to be fair, it's only presented in order to highlight some shortcomings of Galen Strawon's "Basic Argument" against free will and responsibility. Strawson is of course a hard-compatibilist while you yourself are a compatibilist. But Strawson's argument is similar to your own regress argument. It is useful to see how Strawson wields his argument against both compatibilist and incompatibilist accounts of free will. If you attempt to expose flaws in this argument such that compatibilist free will can emerge unscathed, then you may find out that you also open the door to some forms of libertarian free will. And if, on the other hand, you attempts to strenghten the regress argument just enough to rule out agent-causal accounts of free will, you may find out that compatibilists accounts don't escape unscathed either.

And the acquisition of the habit was completely determined by factors that the agent has not freely chosen, whether those factors were intentions or whatever else. — litewave

I would rather say that the relevant factors -- in this case: the fact that the agent isn't engaging in the bad habit for the first time in her life but rather has a history of doing so -- is a manifestation of her free agency that is spread over time.

My main point was to question the picture according to which acts of the human will are decisions that occur in an instant or, at any rate, over a very short period of time when the agent was deliberating. Consider the case of a criminal who plots her crime over a period of months. It is not a good defense for her to say that after having gone to such great lengths to prepare her crime she wasn't emotionally free anymore to refrain from pulling the trigger when the time came. She is not just being blamed for not having changed her mind at the last moment but also for the whole sequence of events -- the premeditation -- that shows what the orientation of her will has been during the protracted period when she was in charge of laying down her own path, as it were, and mustering up the resolve to eventually perform the deed. The very idea that the agent's own character works behind her back, as it were, from moment to moment, to compel her into performing all of her habit forming actions precisely relies on the dubious picture of instantaneous decisions that is shared by many compatibilists and libertarians alike. The picture is dubious because it is separates the agent from the very features of her mind (i.e. her character and habits) that are constitutive of her power of agency. And to operate this separation is incoherent.

One does not always act merely on the strength of one's "strongest" antecedent desire, whatever that might mean.
— Pierre-Normand

Why else would he act then?

As I explained, she acts on the basis of reasons. That doesn't mean that she acts apathetically, as it were, as Mr. Spock maybe would. Rather, the specific desire she choses to act on, among many competing desires, need not be the desire that is the "strongest" when considered in isolation, but rather the desire that she judges to be the one that it is reasonable to be acting upon in the circumstances. And such a choice is a act of practical reason. This is why when you ask someone why they did something, they seldom simply respond trough mentioning a desire except in the case where nothing more than the satisfaction of subjective personal preference hinges in the balance (e.g. why did you choose this particular flavor of ice-cream?) It is not unusual to hear as a response: "I would have much preferred doing ..., but...". What figures in the place of the first ellipse might be what the agent desired most at the time of acting (because it is an intrinsically appealing act to her) and what figures in the place of the second ellipse is something that the agent "desires" to do because she *judges* it to be best to act in this way in the light of her duties, values, commitments, etc.

Rather, one acts on desires, values or considerations that one takes to highlight specific features of one's practical situation that are salient on rational and/or moral grounds.
— Pierre-Normand

Why would he do that? If he does it intentionally then he does it because of an intention to do so and that intention controls that action.

It is no *because* of an intention that an agent acts. The reason why someone acts often is, precisely, the reason. An action shows up as intentional when it is done for some reason or another. This is why when you ask someone why it is that she is doing something, she doesn't usually answer that she intended to do it. This is an example provided by Bede Rundle in Mind in Action, if I remember: Someone asks her neighbor why she is trimming some part of her hedge. The neighbor replies "because I intended to do so". The reason why the answer isn't satisfactory is because the fact that she was doing it intentionally was assumed by the questioner. What the questioner wants to know isn't what sort of thing (e.g. and intention or neural event or something else) causes the action but rather what is the reason the agent has to do what she did. It's only though the disclosure of this reason that the actions will show up intelligibly as the intentional action that it is.

Fafner had usefully explained in an earlier post why actions and the intentions that they manifest are internally (conceptually) connected rather than them being externally (causally) connected through contingent laws of nature that we don't control.

And I agree that disjunctivist could possibly respond by giving some sort of contextualist account - but this was my point, it doesn't look that the disjunctivist has any inherent advantage over other accounts simply by virtue of being a disjunctivist. — Fafner

Well, you had suggested rather more strongly that barn facades are "particularly problematic" for disjunctivist accounts of the fallibility of knowledge. And I agree that it might look, at first blush, that they are. On my view, disjunctivism recommends itself quite appart from the way it deals with Gettier cases since it is an account that jettisons the old empiricist conception of beliefs and justifications qua internal representational items the epistemic subject can be fully acquainted with irrespective of the "external" world doing her any favor. It just so happens that, on my view, disjunctivism *also* deals rather elegantly with barn facades through distinguishing much better than empiricism does between (1) the conditions where epistemic powers can be ascribed to subjects from (2) the conditions when those powers are successfully exercised.

I can grant you for the sake of argument that epistemic contextualism could also be made use of by an epistemologist who doesn't endorse disjunctivism in order to deal with Gettier examples. But I am unsure how successfully such an epistemologist would deal with the barn facade case. I haven't done a literature search for this and I have rather produced my own account from scratch in order to bring disjunctivism to bear on issues that were puzzling me. And I have found out that it throws light on the contextualism/invariantism debate regarding knowledge attributions. I also don't think this account produces explanations any more complicated than is warranted by the contrivance of the cases it is brought to bear on. But since this discussion about epistemological disjunctivism is veering off from the topic of this thread (my fault), I may start a new one regarding contextualism and barn facades.

So how would you describe the famous fake barn facades case? You are standing in front of a real barn, and therefore you are directly aware of the barn, and so it seems that your are maximally warranted to believe that there's a barn in front of you; but you don't know that there's a barn in front of you (since it is the only real barn in that place, and you found it by mere chance). It seems to me that the disjunctivist will also have to admit as well that it's a case of a true justified believe that isn't knowledge. — Fafner

Thanks for bringing that up. This is a problem that I have thought long and hard about. I have imagined lots of puzzling scenarios where commandos are being unknowingly parachuted in Barn Facade County in the vicinity of a real barn, in an area within Barn Facade County where most barns are real, etc.

I think most of the problems that arise in such cases stem from presuppositions that are intimately connected with "highest common factor" theories. And those are presuppositions that epistemic powers of human beings aren't merely supervenient on their "internal" constitutions *and* actual favorable epistemic circumstances, but are independent of the range of counterfactual circumstances where those powers might be expected to be realized. What is peculiar about those ranges, properly defined, is that they always must be relativized to a specific practical context. This is in line with contextualist theories of knowledge according to which what counts as possession of knowledge by an agent whose epistemic powers are fallible is the practical considerations on which the possibility of failure are practically significant (and not merely probable in a statistical sense). Hence, for instance, you may count as knowing that your wife is home while you don't count as knowing that the lottery ticket that you bought is a losing one even though the probability of the former belief being mistaken is much higher than the probability of the latter being mistaken.

And the reason that I think this case is particularly problematic for the disjunctivist because in this case your evidence consists in precisely the fact itself that you believe to be true, so we are not assuming here anything like the 'highest common factor' view of evidence, or anything of this kind.

When the ineliminable contextualist constraints on ascriptions of epistemic powers to individuals are taken into account, then, it seems to me that disjunctivism deals correctly with barn facades. That's Because what is "taken in" as evidence isn't merely the actual object of cognition (a real barn, say) but also relies for its status as good warrant on one's epistemic powers not being suppressed by a contextually relevant range of possible (countrafactual) errors. Since those context can vary according to the perspectives of agents that are differently positioned, this means that the belief expressed by an agent as "there is a (real) barn in front of me" may count as a case of knowledge relativized to one practical context and not to another.

Here is an example. Suppose you are traveling with a friend to Barn Facade County (where most "barns" are actually mere decoy facades) and she knows this to be the case whereas you don't. Suppose then, that you stop by a real barn. The barn thus appear to both of you to be a real barn but only your friend knows that she doesn't know it to be a real barn (since she knows the probability for this to be quite low). According to the standard accounts of such situations, you don't know either that this is a barn since your "justified" true belief that this is a real barn isn't actually justified. And this is because you are mistaken about the objective probability of your experience being an experience of a real barn.

The problem faced by disjunctivim, it would seem, it that it wrongly would conclude in your having knowledge on the ground that circumstances are favorable, in this particular case, for your epistemic abilities being exercized. All that would be required (seemingly) is that this particular barn is real.

However, when suitably conjoined with a contextualist account of knowlege, disjunctivism would not render a unique verdict in this case, as it indeed shouldn't. The mistake that must be avoided is the idea that there is a unique objective probability of the perceptual experience being an experience of a real barn independent of the characterization of the epistemic power being exercized. How might this probability rather to be evaluated? What contextual range of counterfactual circumstances is it that might relevantly be taken into consideration for purpose of determining whether or not your belief that there is a barn counts as knowledge? I'll let you think about it a little before I propose my own suggestion.

Sorry, but I don't really see how disjunctivism helps here. How does a theory on perception address Gettier's original two formulations of justified true belief that can't reasonably be considered knowledge? — Michael

Disjunctivism isn't merely a theory about perception. Disjunctive theories of perception and epistemological disjunctivism are two separate topics, though they are very intimately related since they have the same general structure and are animated by the same motivation to root out some of the resilient Cartesian presuppositions that infect both theories of perception and traditional theories of knowledge.

And, of course, disjunctivists agree with Gettier that the JTB account of knowledge can't be correct. It goes further in pointing out how many attempts to buttress the JTB analysis with the addition of supplementary conditions are doomed to fail.