VI-Freedom and Indoctrination

Abstract

It has been alleged that compatibilists are committed to the view that agents act freely and responsibly even when subject to certain forms of radical manipulation. In this paper I identify and elucidate a form of compatibilist freedom, social autonomy, that is essential to understanding what is wrong with ordinary indoctrination and argue that it also holds the key to understanding what goes wrong in more fanciful manipulation cases. I. THE MANIPULATION ARGUMENTImagine a causally predetermined action that meets all of the standard compatibilist requirements on freedom and responsibility, such as relevant knowledge, reasonsresponsiveness, higher-order endorsement, non-coercion, and so on. Then suppose that the distant causal chains inevitably leading to this action's performance were in fact initiated by some sinister manipulator. Since this further supposition is not precluded by any of the standard compatibilist requirements, the compatibilist looks committed to the implausible view that agents insidiously controlled by unwelcome manipulators may nevertheless be paragons of freedom and responsibility. Moreover, the root source of the compatibilist's problem seems to be her very claim that freedom and responsibility are compatible with determinism. For this is, after all, just the claim that freedom and responsibility are compatible with 'manipulation' by natural forces-and once it is allowed that agents may be free and responsible despite being no more than marionettes, what can it matter who or what is pulling the strings? This is the incompatibilist's Manipulation Argument (Kane 1985, Ch. 3; 1996, Ch. 5;Kapitan 2000; Pereboom 2001, pp. 110-26; Mele 1995, pp. 190-1; 2006, pp. 188-90). Alfred Mele motivates one version of it with a widely-discussed case in which a 'supremely intelligent being', Diana, creates a zygote in a woman, Mary. Diana combines [the zygote] Z's atoms as she does because she wants a certain event E to occur thirty years later. From her knowledge of the state of the universe just prior to her creating Z and the laws of nature of her deterministic universe, she deduces that a zygote with precisely Z's constitution located in Mary will develop into an ideally self-controlled agent [Ernie] 2 who, in thirty years, will judge, on the basis of rational deliberation, that it is best to A and will A on the basis of that judgement, thereby bringing about E. (2006, p. 188) Many are reluctant to concede that, when Ernie As, he does so with full freedom and moral responsibility. Yet this is precisely the claim to which the compatibilist seems unavoidably committed.Although the Manipulation Argument is generally taken to target compatibilist accounts of both freedom and responsibility, to date the focus has mostly been on the latter (indeed, the reference to freedom is frequently redundant, insofar as it is restricted to freedom 'in the sense required for moral responsibility'). Yet the argument also poses a formidable challenge to compatibilist attempts to understand human freedom in its own rig...

Intelligent machines, collectives, and moral responsibility

“…Hence, although the collective is animated by its human members and supervenes on them, its concept of harm, the evaluation of different actions to understand what harms might follow, as well as the procedure for choosing between them based on that evaluation, belong to the collective itself. 10…”

“…French's notion of a corporation as a "Davidsonian agent"[9] includes intending to act as well as intentionality as I use it here, so would meet both the control and the intentionality condition 9. Hess[12] 10. Pettit makes a similar point (Pettit, ibid., Section III) about group agents satisfying his value judgement condition for moral responsibility, and the interaction between a group's organisation and its animation by human members who satisfy the condition in their own lives.…”

Determination from Above

“…And insofar as it seems to involve having certain socially accepted beliefs foisted onto us (often before we are capable of rationally reflecting on them), we may reasonably wonder whether it leaves us less free. Yaffe (2003) and Garnett (2015) both take indoctrination to challenge our freedom in different ways, and more needs to be said to consider how indoctrination shapes our options, presuppositions, and dispositions in ways that threatens freedom.…”