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41 mins by The Free Will Show


[Music] welcome to the free will show i'm one of your hosts taylor seer and i'm
your other host matt plummer in a previous episode we discussed the problem of
luck for libertarians in this episode we discussed the problem of moral luck
which is a problem for every view of freedom and responsibility our guest in
this episode is dana k nelkin and as always if you have questions for us that
you'd like us to address in our q a episode which is coming up next feel free
to get in touch with us via social media at the free will show or through our
website freewheelshow.com thanks for listening enjoy well i'm happy to
introduce our guest today who is dana k milken dana is professor of philosophy
at the university of california san diego and an affiliate professor at the
university of san diego school of law she's written many articles on free will
and moral responsibility as well as on other issues in moral psychology and the
philosophy of law she's the author of a book called making sense of freedom and
responsibility published in 2011 by oxford university press and she's the
co-editor of three books the ethics of law the ethics and law of omissions the
oxford handbook of moral responsibility and forgiveness new essays all
published or forthcoming with oxford university press so thanks so much for
joining us dana would you start by telling us and our audience a little bit
about yourself your work and how you came to be interested in working on free
will sure so first thanks so much to both of you for having me and for that
really nice introduction um so as as you mentioned taylor i i work in a set of
interrelated areas moral psychology ethics philosophy of law metaphysics
epistemology and bioethics and i think actually my interest in free will
largely explains how i came to work in all these different areas working on
free will just takes you into a whole range of human concerns and i've felt
very fortunate to have the chance to pursue all these different kinds of
questions um let's see the the short story of how i became interested in
working on free will starts in graduate school and i was reading a bunch of
books and articles thinking about what i wanted to write my dissertation on i
got very taken with the idea that we have this strong conception of ourselves
as free and responsible beings so when we make a decision to take a job to join
the military to attend a protest it feels to us as though we're free and the
question that really grabbed me was what gives rise to this feeling is it
because we're beings who make decisions is it because we think about the
reasons for and against our options that we somehow have to see ourselves as
free and i i guess i got i got pretty obsessed with this question i wrote my my
dissertation about it and the ultimate motivation i think was to vindicate the
idea that this sense of ourselves as free beings is not an illusion that we
really are free and i guess i i've been in one form or another working on that
ever since awesome thanks yeah thank you sure so we've already devoted an
episode to the problem of luck for libertarian views of response uh freedom and
responsibility but moral luck seems to pose a different kind of problem that is
a problem for all different kinds of views of responsibility so could you
explain a little bit about what moral luck is sure so moral luck happens when
the extent to which a person is morally blameworthy or praiseworthy or
deserving of good or bad things when when how how blame were they appraised
where they are depends in large part on factors outside the control of the
person or in other words when that's a matter of luck so that's that's what
moral luck is and maybe it's best to illustrate it with an example so consider
two people who try to commit a murder um they're equally skilled and they both
take aim with a gun from a similar distance from their targets one hits the
target and kills the the victim the other one fails but only because at the
moment that he shoots a bird flies into the path of the bullet taking it off
course so in this situation i think a lot of people blame the one who succeeds
more than the one who fails we tend to blame people more when they actually
cause harm than when they don't a lot of people blame the one who succeeds more
than the one who fails we very often blame people more when they cause harm
than when they don't but but if that differential blame accurately reflects
that they're really blameworthy to different degrees then that would be a case
of moral luck and that's because it was just a matter of luck it's not in the
control of these people whether the world cooperates in their schemes so for
all that they had control over they did the same things it's just that luckily
or unluckily depending on your point of view one person succeeds and one person
fails um so that that would be moral luck if in fact uh these two people really
are differentially blameworthy even though the the only difference between them
seems to be a matter of something not in their control and the reason that
there's a so-called problem of moral luck um and you're absolutely right i
think this applies to everyone compatible as incompatible alike the reason that
it's a problem is because on the one hand it just seems that people can only be
responsible or accountable for what's in their control that's sometimes this
idea is sometimes known as the control principle and that just seems like a
really strong kind of principle but on the other hand we often don't seem to
stick to that principle when we react to particular cases like we do tend to
blame murderers more than those who merely attempt it um and and so on uh yeah
so that's the that's that's one way of seeing the the problem of moral luck is
just that you have this apparent conflict between something very intuitive this
idea that you can only be accountable or praiseworthy or blameworthy for your
what's in your control and on the other hand we seem not to stick to that
principle in particular cases yeah interesting so the case of the attempted
murder and the in that the successful murder is very interesting thomas nagle
famously distinguished between several different kinds of moral luck he called
them resultant circumstantial constitutive and causal moral luck would you want
to explain some of these other types of moral luck and give some examples along
the way sure sure so that that first one is a is an example of resultant moral
luck because it looks like it's the result of what you've intended to do that
somehow makes a difference to the moral judgment we make and i should just note
that one other case if that's okay of resultant luck they don't all have to be
cases where people are intending to do something so negligence cases also pose
this a similar problem to take one that maybe is kind of timely consider take
two people who in the in our current era of covet 19 two people don't wear
masks while they're at a party or while they're shopping at a store and they
don't intend to hurt anyone but they're not wearing masks when they know what
the risks are suppose and now suppose one of these people happens to have
crossed paths with someone infected earlier and so they are themselves
contagious and the other one is not and so one passes along the virus to some
vulnerable people and one doesn't in these kinds of cases if we think that the
one who causes harm is more blameworthy then there too we would be accepting a
kind of moral resultant luck so that's just to say resultant luck can happen
when you intend harm or but it can also happen when you just take risks through
negligence for example um okay so those so that's resultant or outcome uh luck
those would be that cases of that kind but right there are these others as well
so as nagel pointed out their luck comes into our lives everywhere it really
permeates our life um so that's what makes this such a gripping and hard
problem i think um so there's also what's known as circumstantial luck so what
circumstances we find ourselves in also has a profound effect on whether we're
rightly blamed or praised it seems so just to take one example i mean two
drivers might pass the same spot on the highway a few minutes apart both of
them you know they're well disposed they would stop if if there was an accident
and people needed help but one of them just passes the spot nothing is going on
they get home after this uneventful drive home but the other passes a few
minutes later right after a crash and heroically saves a victim it looks like
the timing of the crash wasn't in their control at all but we praise one and
the other we don't praise at all and if that's if that's reflective of greater
praiseworthiness it seems like luck has come into it just by what opportunities
um we have to act well or badly so that would be circumstantial luck and this
could go the other way too and similar people in different circumstances and
instead of being praiseworthy one of them is blameworthy exactly right right
some of us have the opportunity to act really badly and others don't and in
fact nagel's nagel's example was of that kind or what one powerful example he
gives is of a um you know two two two people born in germany um one of them uh
uh one of them stays in germany during the rise of the nazis and does horrible
things turns in his neighbors you know and they're knowing they're going to the
death camps and somebody else very similarly disposed um uh his company happens
to transfer him to argentina you know 10 years before so he misses the whole
the whole thing he misses the opportunity to act so badly um he has this nice
really uneventful life in argentina um but he would have done the same thing in
the same circumstances he just didn't have that opportunity attacked so badly
so yeah it's it can go both ways so that's those are cases of circumstantial
luck um and if we again if we think of them as differentially blameworthy or
praiseworthy then we seem to be accepting that kind of moral luck um there's
also as nagel pointed out constitutive luck that's when um it's a matter of
luck just even who we are in many ways so the circumstances we're born into um
what sorts of resources are available to us you know who who raises us who
educates us what sorts of traits we develop when we're very young um all these
sorts of things are things you know just uncontroversially not in our control
um and so and yet they seem um you know incredibly important in contributing to
who we are and in turn who we are and these sorts of um traits that we start
out with have profound effects on what situations we find ourselves in and what
sorts of choices we make um so so that that's uh that's a case of constitutive
luck and then you you mentioned also uh causal luck i think the the idea there
is just that very generally we don't have control over the causes of our
actions you might think causal luck in some way kind of absorbs both the
situation or circumstantial and uh constitutive luck um they're you know the
causes of how we come to you know be at a moment of choice for example are
multifarious but they um it looks like if especially if you think that
determinism true is true but maybe even if indetermination is true frankly um
but it looks like then you just weren't in control of any any of the factors
that you know brought you to this moment and and caused your your choice so um
so there too you you would be if you were morally accessible one way or the
other but everything leading up to your choice was something you weren't in
control of then um that would also be a case of of moral luck or a kind of
moral luck so i think nagel even says in the article something like oh this is
the problem of free will we finally got there yeah yeah so nice all right so
before we ask you to discuss some proposed solutions to the the problem of
moral luck um could you say a little bit more about just what the implications
are of moral luck and and what rests on you know coming to an answer to this
problem sure sure so some so i mean probably the first things you think of are
just um our interpersonal relations the way we relate to each other the the
extent to which we blame and praise each other um is dependent on what sorts of
answers we give whether we think people are in fact more praiseworthy when they
cause harm then when they don't for example if we decide that's not true it
looks like maybe that will require quite a lot of revision in the way that we
actually treat people um the kind of emotions we feel the degree of resentment
all kinds of things might be at stake there but it also has implications um in
the law uh both criminal and tort law i think um though i think it's been more
discussed in the in the criminal law so many people take it i think this is
right that the criminal law and criminal responsibility have at the very least
significant parallels with moral responsibility um on some views you can only
be criminally responsible if you're morally responsible though that's somewhat
more controversial but i think here too we just get the parallel problem so
it's sometimes called a problem of legal luck but in the law typically i think
this is true in all united in all the states in the u.s um attempted murder
gets a lower sentence than murder even when everything else is the same for
example um but a number of legal theorists think that that's not right actually
and interestingly the model penal code which was this it's a model set of laws
that were written by a a committee of the american bar association and it's
updated every now and then but in this model that they've given to states to
look to when they are going to revise their laws um they they actually
recommend that these different sentences between successful and attempted
crimes be eliminated for for many crimes so that's fascinating yeah yeah yeah
it's really it's really interesting um so so that would be a huge potentially
huge revision and in the way that the way that the criminal law operates um and
then i think there are also implications for distributive justice so the debate
about moral luck um uh has a place there too so the question of distributive
justice is really the question of how resources and opportunities goods if you
like should be distributed across society and according to a libertarian
conception of distributive justice for example what the government should be
doing is working to protect what people have or what's been passed down to them
through inheritance um and as long as there's no deception or coercion in the
process of people acquiring what they have the government's job is just to help
them to keep it um but some notably so-called luck egalitarians have replied to
this kind of view by appealing to the control principle itself and what they
say is that they point out people aren't in control of their starting points in
life whether they are advantaged or disadvantaged and so they don't deserve
what they have whether good or bad so there's nothing wrong goes this argument
with redistributing in an egalitarian way so that everybody has equal
opportunities so that's an interesting debate i think that where you see the
appeal to the control principle and to the idea that um you know you can't you
can't be deserving of these good things that you have or deserving of the the
bad um things that you have um if you have no control that that plays a key
part in this kind of argument for for egalitarianism thanks that's very
interesting it's it's very interesting to see how many practical things depend
on this seemingly theoretical problem right right yeah so i meant to mention it
earlier but forgot to uh you have written a very helpful entry in the stanford
encyclopedia of philosophy on the topic of moral luck and we'll link that in
the show notes but there you talk about three different types of response to
moral luck you call them denial acceptance and incoherence so i was hoping if
it's all right with you that you could talk through these one at a time and
maybe say what they have going for them or whether you think they're plausible
or not sure yeah glad to so um so one response is to deny that there really is
moral luck and i should say before i even go any further that um i think these
strategies can be applied to some kinds they can either you know you can just
deny that there's any kind of moral luck or you could just deny that there's
one kind of moral luck but the other kinds will go ahead will accept so um so
the the landscape is actually more complicated um but the the denial strategy i
think that's the most commonly applied in the case of outcome luck um like the
cases we started out talking about the cases of the successful murder and the
attempted murder and the k the two negligence cases and there there are various
strategies here one is to point out that in many real real-life cases we
actually in in real life things are a lot messier than the kind of cases i was
giving you just now where we kind of we we had the chance to stipulate
everything's the same and they were both equally skilled shooters and they had
you know equal distance from their targets and everything um and in in real
life um things are much messier usually and so i think it's understandable
maybe even in some cases reasonable to take the outcome to be evidence of a
kind of intent or wholeheartedness or something like that at least in the case
of intentional harm so i think often people read back from a successful murder
and think well they were really trying whereas in the case of attempted murder
often people might think well gosh you didn't try hard enough or you weren't
really trying so that's actually you know in in in a sort of good way that's
like oh well that's good you didn't have such a bad um i didn't have such a bad
intent anyway and so maybe that's why we sort of typically think these are
different the typical successful murder is worse than the typical or sorry is
more blameworthy than typical attempted murder if it's more wholehearted say um
but once you really you know keep everything the same in the two cases when we
really imagine clear cases which of course you know philosophers are good at
doing trying to really you know stipulate everything else is the same the only
thing that's different is something not in your control um you know like the
bird swooping in once we really really imagine that case um i think the the
temptation to blame them differentially really starts to disappear it does for
me i will say and i think it's true for a lot of people not everyone and then
and in the negligence cases too i mean once you start thinking god it's just a
matter of luck you know whether somebody uh you know caused a set of infections
and another person didn't it's they both start to seem equally blameworthy um
at least to me um so so one strategy is to try to point out that you know um in
real life cases um there may be another explanation of our differential lame
blaming practices then that we really are um letting something that's not in
one's control of affect the degree of blameworthiness um so so that so one sort
of strategy is just this strategy to try to say how real-life cases might be
explained in different ways and that once we really fix on the the right cases
that the apparent conflict between the control principle and our reactions to
the cases will dissolve so that's that's one kind of strategy on the denial of
outcome luck we can try to do the the same things with other kinds of luck and
deny that moral luck exists i i'm like probably showing my cards here but i
think it's more difficult difficult to do it in in the other in when it comes
to the other kinds of moral luck so you know if we go back to nagel's example
of the the the two people um the person who you know turns in his neighbors in
nazi germany and the person who doesn't it gets it it does become more
difficult to think um or that intuition may be less strong i mean it is very
disturbing i'll admit um to think about oh gosh maybe we all in those
circumstances and not maybe not we all but many of us would have acted really
really badly um yeah yeah so it's it's it's the grace of god go eye yeah
exactly this is kind of a little side note but have you seen the man in the
high castle no so it's a tv show on netflix and the main character is this guy
named smith and the story is that we lost world war ii and the nazis took over
the eastern half of the united states and he was a soldier in the united states
army and once the nazis took over they gave all of the officers a chance to
come over to the nazi side and become officers in the nazi army and he took
that chance and part of the story is there's this alternate universe in which
the nazis didn't take over and his character his counterpart and that other
universe is just like a normal person who works in nine to five loves his
family and never commits any atrocities but in the universe in the story he
becomes a nazi and commits lots of atrocities so it's kind of like a i don't
know if the writers had read an angle it really sounds like example yeah it's
based on a novel by the sci-fi writer philip k dick who has a lot of
philosophical themes in his writing so i wouldn't be surprised if he was
familiar with the puzzle here yeah i don't know how how accurate the show is to
the book but yeah i'm sure yeah i know that writer that's really cool thank you
for the recommendation um yeah that's a that's the perfect illustration of this
um so so it is disturbing which of course makes it a really good tv show um
but it's a good premise certainly um but i think it really does that we're
sort of stretching now to think that they're equally blameworthy but but
one can make this case as some people have michael zimmerman has a really
creative wonderful paper called taking luck seriously i think that's the
title um in which he sort of takes us step by step well if you're gonna if
you're gonna deny moral luck and treat the attempted murder and the
successful murderer the same you should do the same you know you should you
should also treat these two um characters uh similarly you should blame
them equally as well um so uh so yeah so this this is i think this is a
very live strategy there are certainly folks who uh argue that um we should
deny moral luck in all of these cases i think even even zimmerman says this
might not work or might not work for all all kinds of luck it might not
work in the constitutive case because there might be um uh it might be that
it's it's not the case that we can really make sense of the idea that um uh
you would have done you would have done this bad thing if you had had
different traits altogether maybe it wouldn't have been you in that case so
the the kind of counterfactual doesn't make sense um but uh but so i think
it's a really interesting question how far can this denial strategy go um
so um so there are certainly ways to ways to do it um let's see the then
there are folks who accept all kinds of moral luck they're really kind this
is kind of recategorizing things from the way you ask the question but
there are those who accept all kinds of moral luck there are those who deny
all kinds of moral luck or as much as you can get and then there are ones
who try to kind of accept some and deny others and interestingly i think
the two more extreme views um uh they sort of have arguments that are mere
images or flip sides of each other so for the the the argument i was just
um offering that takes the denial strategy to its to its extreme and denies
all kinds of moral luck um ends up with a really radical conclusion namely
that we're all equally blameworthy and praiseworthy because we all would
have done the bad thing or the good thing in the you know had things been
different had the world been different in some way that was not in our
control um so so that's that's a super interesting cool argument the the
mirror image of that is um it's sorry just to go back for a second so one
way of getting to that conclusion is just to say well there's no real
principled place to stop once you deny outcome luck you should also deny
circumstantial luck and so you should deny every kind of luck but the flip
side of that argument is to say well there's luck everywhere um there's
that you can get rid of all of it no you know very few people think you can
get rid of all of it because we can't no person can create themselves um so
uh fully from nothing so um so there's got to be luck somewhere so luck is
going to influence what we do in some way or other and then why you know
again where would you where why should you stop so maybe these original um
intuitions that we started with you know that well it does matter whether
you've caused harm or not to how blameworthy you are uh maybe we should
just accept that um so the the mirror image argument is just to say well if
you're gonna allow certain kinds of luck why stop why you know why stop
there why not also allow outcome luck um to play a role so so there you
have a kind of mirror image of that argument um and and i think it is a
challenge i mean i guess my own view is that we should accept some and not
others but i take the point and the really hard challenge to be to explain
why um why we should resist accepting certain kinds and not others yeah so
so i have one question um to what extent does this debate depend on um
different senses or kinds of moral responsibilities uh like i have the like
here's one way of framing the question some people say that we're only
responsible for like the consequences of our actions or states of affairs
or something like that and other people say that we're responsible for
maybe like the quality of our will or our character so does the debate
depend on a distinction like that that's that's a great question i think
that it certainly can and i think that what answers you give to your
questions can inform answers about moral luck for sure it's also possible i
think that in some cases you might be able to abstract for some from some
of those questions but but yes i think i think that's absolutely right so
for example i mean on my own view um the sort of the the uh the focus of
what we're responsible for is what we do or don't do with our opportunities and
so that having that view um that one can be blameworthy for acting badly when
you have a decent opportunity to act well having that view can lead to a
certain view about what sorts of moral luck is allowable and what's not so on
this view there can be lots of luck in what gets you to your opportunities but
then if you really do have a decent opportunity one or a good enough quality
opportunity what you do with that or don't do with it can make you praiseworthy
or blameworthy so there can be constitutive luck and circumstantial luck as
long as it leaves you um with a good enough opportunity then how you act you
will determine your blameworthiness or praiseworthiness um but i think that
doesn't make you accept outcome luck um because that's that's not that's not
about what you're in control of and taking your opportunities or not so yeah
absolutely i think that makes a huge your position about what free or
responsible action is about or requires or what the object of it is can lead to
one or another view on this question i've talked to a lot of people who think
that the problem of moral luck just sort of can't be solved without giving up
the conception of ourselves as morally responsible for what we do i guess would
this fit into your denial category where you say yeah moral luck doesn't affect
praise with innocent blameworthiness just because we're never praise worthy or
worthy um yeah yeah that's yeah that's got i guess i guess that's right i guess
i think about that is that a denial case yes i think that would be a denial
case but sometimes when you deny something you're you're implying that it made
sense to ask or something um in in a way that the uh the skeptic about
responsibility might say well if you say something like you know uh is this
person more responsible than that person and then we say no um that's cons it's
consistent with the idea that nobody's responsible at all but it might it might
kind of suggest that there is such a thing that we can compare people along um
that that dimension but yeah i think that's right right it would be a very
different response than just saying that uh we are responsible but uh not yeah
luck doesn't affect our degree of responsibility that's right that's right
that's right but it is true that i mean one way of reading nagel is that he
sort of talks himself into a kind of skepticism at one point um because he he
just can't see he said he it's very it's a it's a very sort of dark article he
says i just there may be no solution to this problem and um and he seems to he
seems to go there of course i should say some people think this is a great
thing um i'm sure you'll talk to skeptics about free will and more
responsibility but um you're talking to them but um but of course some people
like me think that would be really bad but other people other people think that
that would be great or that's or or it's not so bad as we think [Music] uh
could you say a little bit about the the other option the incoherence response
to moral luck sure so this one i think is best targeted at constitutive luck um
so actually this goes back to something we were just talking about a little bit
ago so some have argued that it just doesn't even make sense in a way where
it's incoherent to ask whether it's a matter of luck who you are because you
couldn't have been anything else you wouldn't be you if you um if you were so
different um but at the end of the day i think this may really sort of be a
species of the acceptance view and disguise because especially if we sort of
translate the idea that something being a matter of luck is something not in
your control then i think it is in a way to say yeah we don't control a lot
about who we are at least early on and yet on this view we can still be
responsible for lots of things so so i think that the the incoherence idea is
an interesting one but in a way i think it it might really be a species of the
acceptance view in at the end of the day yeah does that make sense yeah well
thank you so much for being with us this was so interesting i love talking
about moral luck where can listeners go to follow your work and and read more
about this um so one place is uh the article that taylor mentioned which is the
stanford encyclopedia of philosophy site it's um it's a great resource um
everything's free on the internet and you can just type in stanford
encyclopedia philosophy moral luck for that um and then my website is dana
danakanelkin.com perfect and we'll link both those things in the show notes
we've referred to a few different um stanford encyclopedia philosophy entries
before very helpful thanks again dana for being on the show this is this was
awesome um our next episode this was the the last interview can i sorry can i
thank you can i thank you all too sorry you could cut you can cut that little
part out but um i i do just want to thank the two of you so much for having me
on that was that was really fun and i really appreciate it this is a great show
oh thanks so much dana that means a lot yeah uh so stay tuned for our next and
final episode of season one uh we won't have a guest being interviewed but
we'll have a q a with listener questions so if you're listening to this around
the time that the episode drops uh send us a question as soon as you can either
through the website or through social media and stay tuned for that q a episode
you