The Relationship: Moral Responsibility without Free-Will

Moral Responsibility without Free-Will: A Microessay.

Herein I shall endeavor to answer the following question: What has free-will got to do with moral responsibility, and why would anyone want the latter without the former? The question is subtler than it seems, and requires a bit of groundwork before being approached directly.

1.I am a strict determinist. A strict determinist is someone who believes that all aspects of human behavior – including thought, language and mental states, in addition to overt or voluntary actions – are the products of causal influences over which humans have no control, and, for the most part, no knowledge. The causes of human behavior are not only physical in the billiard-ball sense of causation, but also involve social, linguistic, financial, and other influences, including the chemical processes within the brain itself. You, dear reader, have absolutely no idea of what you will be thinking ten minutes from now. What would lead you to believe that you can control it?

The concept of “free-will” is generally regarded as incoherent by strict determinists; it requires humans (“agents”) to act without any prior causation. It is as if the agent were capable of summoning uncaused voluntary actions from nothing (ex nihilo). There are three problems with a metaphysical “power” or “force” of this nature: 1. It violates the claim, largely universal among naturalistic ideologies, that everything has a cause. 2. It violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which claims that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. 3. It makes of humans “first causes” (causa sui), prime movers, creators from nothing (creatio ex nihilo), exactly like God in the Book of Genesis.

If such “free-will” exists, then it appears that every voluntary action undertaken by any agent is little less than a miracle; it falls outside the bounds of nature and is not subject to causal or natural laws or explanation. I reject such claims as plainly incoherent, especially since a great deal of cognitive research has already been undertaken on the subject of human voluntary action, and it has revealed a number of interesting facts. For example, all voluntary actions are rehearsed within the brain before the action itself ever rises to the level of consciousness.[1] In effect, voluntary actions are subject to causes beyond our awareness or control. Why does this matter?

The causation of voluntary actions matters because, in accordance with the existing concepts of moral and legal responsibility, an individual is responsible only for actions that are under his/her control. Since a great deal can hinge on questions of moral and legal responsibility, it seems that the concept of such “control” should be a bit more carefully formulated, especially if it tends to involve supernatural intervention and “miracles” on a routine basis. If it is a “miracle” that Q did or did not choose to perform action X, then it appears to me that (at least from Q’s point of view) the performance or non-performance of X was little more than a matter of moral luck, i.e., the notion that our moral status depends on the good or bad luck of our circumstances.

2.Strict determinists are inclined to deny the existence of moral responsibility because such “responsibility” seems to hinge on the notion of free-will. Strict determinists deny the existence of free-will because the conditions for free-will, mentioned in the preceding section, seem absolutely absurd to them. Hence, no free-will, no moral responsibility. I, too, deny the existence of free-will (except in the legalistic sense outlined by Hume and others; i.e., my will is “free” as long as I am not physically bound, confined, or coerced by threats to myself or my loved ones). However, I think it a bit irresponsible to dismiss moral responsibility because we dismiss a metaphysical unicorn which could never have supported the concept in the first place.

I will first explain why I think it is important to preserve the concept of moral responsibility; I will also argue that the reasoning which renders moral responsibility logically dependent on the existence of free-will is fatally flawed, and that free-will can be denied on stronger grounds than it can be defended. However, I will also argue that the denial of free-will has no bearing on the existence of moral responsibility, because the nature of moral responsibility has been vastly, and almost universally, misunderstood. In short, “free-will” is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for moral responsibility; the latter has nothing to do with the former.

My argument for the justification of moral responsibility is not moral, but evolutionary. Every human culture known to me – and as far back as that culture’s history reaches – has had a concept of moral responsibility, i.e., some kind of connection between the doer and the deed, over and above being merely the natural cause of it. (Natural causes are not morally blame or credit-worthy; a bolt of lighting is not morally accountable for the house that it causes to burn down.) Could this cultural ubiquity of moral responsibility be a mere coincidence? Given the chasm of differences between many cultures, I think that such a coincidence may be possible, but extremely unlikely.

What is far more likely, and consistent with evolutionary theory, is that moral responsibility has survived these thousands of generations because it is an adaptive form of behavior; it has furthered the survival of those cultures which adopted it, and furthered the demise of those cultures that did not adopt it (if such cultures there were, and I am not claiming that there were). If, therefore, moral responsibility is an evolutionarily adaptive behavior, I think it is foolish of anyone to believe that moral responsibility is dispensable in any social situation. Perhaps a man stranded alone in the wilderness may not need to concern himself with it, but we do.

3.Moral responsibility is a matter of holding Q accountable for X, and there are situations (e.g., extensive harm to another individual, or to the public at large) in which accountability matters. That is the full extent of my argument for the importance, the function, and the retention of moral responsibility. Of course, this argument could stand some unpacking; I have not said – and here I will not say – anything about how moral responsibility might function as an evolutionarily adaptive behavior; however, the present cursory treatment will do for immediate purposes. Even if moral responsibility should somehow turn out to be disposable, I suggest we think long and hard before disposing of it.

The traditional role of free-will in assigning responsibility is a matter of cause-and-effect reasoning; if Q is responsible for X, then Q must somehow have caused X. This much is obvious. But if a bolt of lightning causes a house-fire, we say that the lighting is “responsible” for the fire in a way that has nothing to do with morality. The strict determinist maintains that the causes of human actions can no more account for moral responsibility than the causes of lightning bolts. In fact, looking to causes for the source of moral responsibility is looking in the wrong place. Causation has absolutely nothing to do with moral responsibility – that role falls to knowledge, not to causes.

4.Moral responsibility is not a metaphysical concept; indeed, metaphysics does more to explain moral responsibility away than to explain it. Moral responsibility is a moral concept, obviously, but many moral concepts are also epistemic, and I will argue that this is exactly the case with moral responsibility. Moral responsibility is less a question of what the “agent” (“one who acts”) did or caused to happen than it is a question of what the agent knew at the moment of the action. The causal mechanics (or metaphysics) behind the action are irrelevant to understanding moral responsibility, or to attributing moral responsibility to an actor or agent

Imagine playing a game – say, chess – and assume that you know how to play the game. You may not be a world-class expert, but you know what you’re doing. Suppose that your opponent makes several illegal moves which you are quick to point out and correct. Is your opponent cheating or merely making mistakes? How do you tell?

Mistake-makers and cheaters are different. We know that they are different and, at some level, we know how to tell the difference between them (although we might not be able to explain how we do this). We also feel that mistake-makers and cheaters should be treated differently. Mistake-makers and cheaters may indeed be different in naturalistic terms (different causal influences, etc.), but this plays no role in moral assessment. When I am determining whether my opponent is a novice or a cheater, at no time does the question of “causation” ever arise. How, then, do we assess such matters?

The attribution of moral responsibility does not involve suspect metaphysical notions of causation (or non-causation); it involves finding out what the agent knew, and when he/she knew it. Did the agent know that he/she was acting in violation of moral or civil law? Did the agent know of the harm likely to result from his/her actions? Did the agent know, to a reasonable probability, what the outcome would be? We find out if our chess partner is a cheater or a mistake-maker by, inter alia, finding out what our partner knows about the game of chess. If he/she is a novice, they were mistakes; if he/she is an initiate to the game, it was cheating.

These are the kinds of questions we consider when actually weighing the attribution of responsibility, and the epistemic nature of the questions seems self-evident. If moral responsibility is an epistemic issue when we are assessing it, maybe it should also be an epistemic issue when we are explaining it. And it seems to me that such an account of moral responsibility does not have to fall back on suspect and rather shaky metaphysical concepts like “free-will.”

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