Philosophy Talk: The Blog

The Only Mattering Worth Caring About

posted by Ken Taylor

Schopenhauer's view of life certainly seems bleak and pessimistic.  Consider the following description of the life of man (and animals):

Willing and striving are its whole essence, and can be fully compared to an unquenchable thirst.  The basis of all willing, however, is need, lack, and hence pain, and by its very nature and origin it is therefore destined to pain.  If on the other hand, it lacks objects of willing, because it is at once deprived of them again by too easy a satisfaction, a fearful emptiness and boredom comes over it; in other words, its being and its existence become an intolerable burden for it.  Hence its life swings like a pendulum  to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents.  This has been very quaintly expressed by saying that after man had placed all pains and torments in hell, there was nothing left for heaven but boredom

Interestingly,  the pendulum swinging to and fro betwixt the pain of desire and the boredom of attainment pretty much describes the approach taken  to sex by  Phillip,  the Schopenhauer  stand in   in Irv Yalom's novel The Schopenhauer Cure.   Phillip pursues women with a passion and urgency evidently  borne of some kind of emptiness.  But as soon as he makes a sexual conquest,  he experiences not pleasure and fulfillment, but  utter  boredom.  Almost  immediately, he returns to the chase with the same urgency and the whole cycle repeats itself.   Irv, by the way,  will be our guest tomorrow.  I don't doubt we'll spend lots of time talking about The Schopenhauer Cure and what seems to me it's non-Schopenhauerian ultimate message. 

Schopenhauer's pessimism is deeply held and forcefully argued.  He clearly sees it as  integral to his metaphysical, ethical, and aesthetic system.  Notice how he heaps  ridicule and scorn on  the optimist:

...I cannot here withhold the statement that optimism, where it is not merely the thoughtless talk of those who harbor nothing but words under their shallow foreheads, seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really a wicked way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of mankind.  Let no one imagine that the Christian teaching is favorable to optimism: on the contrary, in the Gospels world and evil are used almost as synonymous expressions.

What I want to do briefly in the rest of this post is to  lay out an argument that maybe, just maybe,  Schopenhauer's pessimism is unwarranted and a trifle overblown.  I don't mean so much to suggest that  Schopenhauer is wrong to be a pessimist.  I'm not about to argue that this is the best of all possible worlds, as Leibniz would have us believe.  I'm more concerned to suggest that you could have a metaphysics like Schopenhauer's  and could, in particular, accept  a lot of what he has to say about the nature of the will, and still  not be driven to anything so severe as his pessimism  Or so it seems to me.   What Schopenhauer misses, I think, is the power of creatures like us to create values ex nihilo, in a sense, from the very emptiness of the nature.    He seems to think that if value and meaning don't reside in, as it were, the antecedent universe itself, then they can't reside anywhere.   But that I think is his mistake.  Values exist because we create them.   And the kind of story he tells about the will seems perfectly consistent with such an approach. 

Without plunging deep into Schopenhauer's metaphysics, the argument I want to make is a little hard to state.  But let me try.   Suppose  that we grant Schopenhauer  that human life, indeed all existence,  is the "objectification," as he calls it,  of the ceaseless striving of an aimless, meaningless  will, a will that is the inner essence of all that exists.     Suppose too that this  will 'cares' nothing for the well being of individuals.  As  Schopenhauer puts it:

Nature too, the inner being of which is the will-to-live itself, with all her force, impels both man and the animal to propagate.  After this she has attained her end with the individual, and is quite indifferent to its destruction; for, as the will-to-live, she is concerned only with the preservation of the species; the individual is nothing to her.

So far, so bleak.   But even if we  grant that we as such simply don't matter to the  great scheme of things, that nature is indifferent to us, what exactly  follows from that?   After all, we  matter to ourselves.  Indeed,  our capacity to matter to ourselves is built on the very stuff about which Schopenhauer goes on at such great length.   Think, for example,  about what he has to say about our desires and about our knowledge.    Our desires are  the proximate  source of our own ceaseless striving.  He thinks they are merely  sources of pain and suffering.  But why think that, exactly?   Admittedly,  where there is a desire unsatisfied, there is disquiet and a striving toward fulfillment.  But if my desire can be fulfilled, especially if I can conceive that my desire  can be fulfilled, then the desire sets me a project.   Doesn't the capacity to be set a project in this way make me an entirely new kind of thing.  I am a thing that has and pursues  projects.  I am not just nature's tool.  Nature may have its own uses for me.  But I also have my uses for myself.     Let nature do with me what  it will, let it discard me when I have served the  reproductive needs of the species. Still, there is what I want.  What I strive for.  What projects I give myself.  Those projects  matter to me, whether or not it matters to nature whether I ever get what I want. 

Think of the earth.  The earth is an objectification of the all encompassing will, Schopenhauer would no doubt say.    Though the earth has endured for billions of years,  its existence too is a matter of indifference to nature at large.   If the earth were consumed by the sun tomorrow, nature would go on without a hitch, with no remorse or regret.   But does that mean that earth does not matter to us.    Our  caring is enough to make the earth matter, not to the universe at large, but to us.  Does our caring stand in some need of vindication from nature?  I don't see why it should. 

Schopenhauer would probably say that it's an illusion that your projects are "self-given."   When you learn to see yourself under the aspect of the will, you will see that you are nothing but nature's only temporarily useful tool.   But that's the step that I don't think is inevitable.  We have indeed been constituted  by blind, uncaring nature. And nature is through with us in the blink of an eye.    But we have been constituted by her  as creatures who are capable both of knowing and desiring, by Schopenhauer's own lights.    Merely this, however,   already gives us at least the beginnings of the capacity for  creating values, as it were, out of the nothingness that is nature.   The  values we create  are only  our values and not nature's own.  Nature  doesn't have any values.    It's blind and aimless, just as Schopenhauer alleges.   But that doesn't mean that we have to be.  Does it?

Schopenhauer and Prozac

by John Fischer

I admit it: I've been reading a lot of Schopenhauer, especially his Essays on Pessimism.  They are fascinating, and extremely beautifully (and of course provocatively) written.  Here's a cheery and lovely passage: "Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means.  Nevertheless, every man desires to reach old age; in other words, a state of life of which it may be siad; 'It is bad to-day, and it will be worse to0morrow; and so on till the worst of all."

Hmm.  Later, he says, "... you may look upon life as an unprofitable episode, disturbing the blessed calm of non-existence."  Take that, Lucretius! 

What I'm wondering is this (and it is of course not original with me).  In present times, Schopenhauer would probably see a therapist of some sort, who would give him some kind of anti-depressant medication and "talk-therapy"--perhaps cognitive therapy or psychodynamically informed therapy.  The combination might be "effective"--but then we would lose this brilliant curmudgeon, or at least his delightfully curmudgeonly writing.  Would Schopenhauer have been better off undepressed?  Would the world have been better off?

Mohan's Question

By John Fischer

During the call-in component of the show, Mohan asked a question about the relationship between political freedom and metaphysical freedom.  Although it was a bit off the central topics, it does raise a question that has troubled me.  That is,  I believe that genuinely available metaphysical alternatives or possibilities are not required for moral agency--the forward-looking aspect (practical reasoning) or the backward-looking aspect (moral responsibility).  But then why would I prefer to live in a nation with political liberties, such as freedom of speech, freedom of association, and so forth?  Also, why do I sometimes think that it is "good to have choices", such as when I apply for a job (as I do very occasionally!)?

Can anyone help me here?

I'm inclined to say that "ex ante" I would choose a world with political liberties, since there would be a better chance that I would act freely (sans metaphysical alternatives, of course) in such a world.  But is this plausible?  Can we really expunge metaphysical alternatives and still lead an attractive, recognizably human life?? 

Did I Cheat?

By John Fischer

First, I wish to thank John and Ken for being so kind as to invite me to be a guest on the show; I enjoyed it very, very much.

Ken wondered whether I have "cheated" in the sense that I call something "freedom" which perhaps is not a genuine freedom.  I certaiinly sympathize with the worry that traditional compatibilism is a "cheat" or in Kant's words a "wretched subterfuge."  I love W. I. Matson's fulminations about compatibilism: "The most flabbergasting instance of the fallacy of changing the subject to be encountered anywhere in the complete history of sophistry...  [a ploy that] was intended to take in the vulgar, but which has beguiled the learned in our time." 

Poor compatibilism. It is actually not all that bad, and it is defended by very able philosophers, such as my colleague, Gary Watson. But recall that I am a semicompatibilist. I do not think that freedom to do otherwise (regulative control) is compatible with causal determinism. But I do think that causal determinism is compatible with acting freely (guidance control). The Frankfurt-type examples are supposed to motivate this contention--or at least this is one route to the conclusion.

Modern philosophers seemed to think of the "liberty of spontaneity" as a genuine form of freedom, where this is something like acting freely and doesn't in itself entail "liberty of indifference" (freedom to do otherwise, regulative control). How could one help to justify the idea that such freedom--actual-sequence freedom--is sufficiently robust to ground moral responsibilty?

Well, in the proto-Frankfurt example suggested by Locke, the fact that the door is locked and thus the man could not have done otherwise than stay in the room plays no role in his practical reasoning, decision, or act of staying in the room. So how can it be relevant to his responsibility? I would say that he freely stays in the room and can legitimately be held responsible for staying in the room. Whether or not the door is locked is irrelevant to his responsibility, and thus whether or not the door is locked does not bear on whether the man has whatever sort of control grounds moral responsibility.

After all, God is kind of like a "Frankfurt-style counterfactual intervener." That is, God may well be a condition that obtains and that renders it true that no human can do otherwise, and yet God plays no role in our actual choices and behavior (on certain views of God). So God is like the locked door in Locke's example or Black (the counterfactual intervener) in Frankfurt's story. But presumably factors that play no role in our choices or behavior cannot etiolate our expression of freedom.

In my view, when I act freely I express a genuine and real kind of freedom, sufficient to warrant ascriptions of responsibility. If I lack freedom to do otherwise, I lack some freedom; but I do not lack the freedom required for moral responsibility.

Freedom, Responsibility and Martian Anthropology

posted by Ken Taylor

As John Perry notes in his pre-show post,  some philosophers think that if determinism is true, then there is no freedom, and, consequently, no moral responsibility.     Other philosophers, the compatibilists,  try to find a way to reconcile freedom and determinism.  The goal of such attempted  reconciliations is often to find enough room for freedom to support moral responsibility.  Such philosophers worry a lot about figuring out just what sort of freedom is necessary to support ascriptions of moral responsibility and then they try to show that that kind or degree of freedom is thoroughly compatible with the truth of determinism.    But I want to suggest in this pre-show post  that  just maybe the connection between freedom and  responsibility has been oversold.   Maybe the two John's will talk me out of this view during the episode.  We'll see.

Suppose you are a Martian Anthropologist, on a scientific  expedition to planet Earth.  Your goal is to understand the alien Earthling practice of holding people morally responsible for their actions.  There are no such practices on the planet Mars.  Let's grant for the moment that your advanced Martian Science has once and for all established the truth of determinism or its functional equivalent.  (If the fundamental laws turn out to be indeterministic, the fundamental problem about freedom and responsibility still don't go away.)  There are many things you might want to know.  You might want to know exactly what one human is responding to  in another human being when the first holds the second responsible for an action.  You might want to investigate the things people say to one another to justify their ascriptions of moral responsibility.   You might eventually get around to examining weighty tomes of human philosophy, theology, psychology, anthropology in which humans theorize and investigate their own practices of ascribing moral responsibility to one another.  But because you are really interested in understanding from bottom up what people actually do,  you'll put the trip to the library off until the very end.   You belong out in the field where the practice actually happens, with your observations uncorrupted by centuries of possibly false and misguided theorizing.

So what do you find, when you look in the field, at what people are actually doing when they  make ascriptions of moral responsibility?   To what about an action, or about the will behind the action, are people actually responding when they hold another responsible?   What you  find  is something like the following.  As a first pass,  it appears that  a person holds another responsible for her actions when the person performed the action knowingly and willingly.  You notice pretty early on  that when the actor  is  forced or coerced  into the relevant  action by either  another person or by an external impersonal force,  people typically withhold or withdraw ascriptions of responsibility.  You notice that others just on the occasion of their acting were looking the wrong way, or were trying to do something good that inadvertently went bad somehow in a way that did not depend on their care or lack of care. On such occasions, they are not held responsible, at least not fully.    You  also notice a more systematic set of cases.  Becasue Earthling neuroscience is still so backwards,  some  people are stuck with abnormal or malfunctioning brains.  You notice that earthlings are reticent to hold at least some such people responsible -- though you wonder about their consistency in this regard.  For example,  you find that some people have pathological inabilities to control their impulses.  And you find that others are less likely to hold them responsible when they discover such pathologies.  You find that others who are not  held responsible  are subject to severe delusions and have very limited abilities to make their beliefs track reality.   Finally, you  also find that the very young and immature are often not held fully responsible, though as they mature the extent to which they are held responsible gradually increases.

With this first level data in hand,  you look deeper  into what distinguishes normal  mature "intact" cognizers and agents, who typically are held responsible for their actions from the broken or immature ones that typically  are not.   You develop a rich psychological theory of the workings of the mature  intact human brain, in particular of mature,  intact human cognition and volition.  You think you have a good idea of what distinguishes the responsible from those who are not liable to be held responsible. Your theory, by the way, is entirely consistent with the deterministic fundamental theory of nature that Martian Science has already developed.   Human knowing, willing, deliberating are for you causal processes governed by causal laws and you now understand those laws and processes fully.   But that's unsurprising,  since you have not ever been exposed to the relentless debates among Earthling thinkers.  You are just a good scientist investigating a phenomenon that you come across in the natural world.  Why should you even suspect that there is a question about determinism to be considered here?

Now, finally, just to round out your investigation,  you start to attend to the philosophical, theological, and everyday lore that surrounds ascriptions of moral responsibility.   Much to your amazement,  you find that these earthling philosophers and theologians  have been debating the basis of their own practice of holding people responsible for centuries.  And you find that  they are still in the midst of very divisive debates with no real consensus in sight.  You find, for example, that  many philosophers think that the truth of determinism would undermine all freedom and all responsibility.  You find that others disagree.  What startles you is that in your full theory of mature intact human volition and cognition the question of freedom vs determinism never needed to come up.   You found nothing in the actual practice that seemed to depend on whether human beings are "free" in some metaphysically deep sense.  So you are puzzled.  You investigate a little further.  You find that at least some of the philosophers and theologians seem to be asking a different question from the one you were asking.  They seem not so much to be debating what people actually respond to in their actual practice of holding people responsible but to be asking whether anyone ever "deserves" to be  held responsible, whether we are ever "justified"  in holding another responsible.  And at least some of them  think that the question of whether determinism is true is crucial to answering that question.

So you go back and look again at how people justify, when challenged, their ascriptions of responsibility.  Much to your surprise,  you discover that although they can talk the lingo of the philosophers and theologians,  what they really do when challenged is to point to the exercise of mature in tact cognitive and volitional capacities of the sort you've already developed a rich theory of.  Since the issue of freedom vs determinism played no role there,  you wonder what the issue of freedom vs  determinism really has  got to do with this.  As a good Martian anthropologist, you decide you need more time. You  need to take a much  longer look at the development of human intellectual culture, especially at how these have shaped humans  own reflection on their own natures and their own practices. 

You call to Martian Science Academy for help.  You are going to be at this a lot longer than you ever imagined.   And you need some help.  You begin by tuning into Philosophy Talk

Responsibility and "The Actual Sequence"

by John Fischer

John Locke came up with the original "Frankfurt-type example".  (The examples have been called "Frankfurt-type examples after Harry Frankfurt's ingenious development of them in a 1969 Journal of Philosophy paper, "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility."

Here is Locke's version.  A man is asleep, and while asleep, he is transported into a room.  When he awakens, he thinks about leaving the room, but he decides (based on his own reasons) to stay in the room.  Unbeknownst to him, the room was locked, and thus he could not have left the room.  Locke did not say that the man stayed in the room "freely," because Locke held that acting freely entails freedom to do otheriwse.  But he did say that the man voluntarily stayed in the room, although he could not have left the room.

In Locke's example, the fact that the man could not have left the room plays no role in his practical reasoning or behavior. It thus seems irrelevant to his moral responsibility. I would say that the man can be held morally responsible for staying in the room, even though he could not have left the room.

Now of course the man could have chosen to leave the room, could have tried to leave, and so forth. So (apart from any special assumptions, such as God's omniscience or causal determinism) he did in fact have SOME alternative possibilities. Harry Frankfurt seeks to expunge even these alternatives, envisaging an agent, "Black", who can control even the poor man's brain, anticipating his choices in such a way as to render it true that the man could not even have chosen or tried to do otherwise.

The "Locke/Frankfurt" examples have become a template for testing the relationship between moral responsibility and the sort of freedom or control that involves alternative possibilities. I agree with Locke and Frankfurt; in my view, one can choose and act freely, and thus exhibit the kind of control that grounds moral responsibility, without having freedom to choose or act otherwise. I have thus defended an "actual-sequence" approach to moral responsibility. But this is highly contentious. What do you think?