PPPS: Freedom: Morality and Folk Intuitions

Jonathan,

These experimental studies are fascinating, and I think they really shed new light on questions about the folk concept of freedom.

I was curious, though, about your claim that people’s moral judgments play a special role in their intuitions about freedom. This hypothesis is certainly consistent with the pattern of data in your studies, but it seems that it would also be possible to explain your results with the hypothesis that people think that an agent’s freedom has not been substantially reduced when she is prevented from performing any action that is so bad that she was not truly free to perform it in the first place. (On this latter hypothesis, people would say that an agent’s freedom would not be greatly reduced if we prevented her from performing immoral actions but also if we prevented her from performing actions that were, e.g., astoundingly imprudent.)

I was curious to hear more about what you thought about these issues. Is there something about morality in particular that makes it play a key role in people’s intuitions, or is it that moral wrongness is just one of the possible ways in which an action can be very, very bad?

Interesting stuff, Jonathan. Here are a few thoughts:

1- Something might go by the name ‘folk theory’ while capturing (probably among others) any of the following: just the folk’s initial reactions on a topic, just folk’s well-considered views on a topic, some mix of the folk’s initial reactions and well-considered views on a topic. I suspect that how we should weigh the importance of any folk theory, qua folk theory, depends in part on just what amongst these options any particular folk theory captures - with the least weight given to theories that just or primarily capture the folk’s initial reactions on a topic.

One worry I have is that your theory - based as it is on brief survey results - seems to fall into this less weighty category. If the prospect remains undefeated that survey respondents would give notably different responses if they were to think on the relevant issues and compare passages over night or over a week, then it’s not clear that survey results capture more than mere initial reactions. Even if we think we should give some creedence to the folk’s views (in philosophical work on freedom or elsewhere), it doesn’t follow that we should creed the folk’s initial reactions. It might be useful, e.g., for sociological reasons, to know what the folk’s initial reactions on a topic will look like. But this is distinct from the folk’s initial reactions being philosophically notable.

2- You indicate that your respondents were undergrad philosophy students. This is very different, of course, from a natural reading of ‘the folk’ on which we might take the term to refer to a random person on the street. I recall a paper of Jesse Prinz’s where he notes a survey on which undergrad philosophy students gave markedly different responses to a philosophically interesting survey than did any other sub-population who was given the survey. This sort of result seems to raise a worry about whether the theory you parse out should really be called (or reliably captures) a theory of ‘the folk’.

3- You write:

“[I]f it is the case that the folk view of freedom is abandoned for a value-neutral theory or a value-dependent theory, then this should be done only after serious consideration, for either theory can only be promoted at the expense of departing from ordinary intuitions.”

This conditional seems problematic. One reading of it seems obviously true. If a theory of freedom is interestingly well worked out, then of course we shouldn’t abandon it until after serious consideration. That’s just required by being philosophically perspicuous. But a second reading of the conditional - the one that makes the conditional an interesting claim - seems dubious to me. On this reading the fact that some theory of freedom is the folk’s theory is a fact that adds to it being the case that that theory merits serious consideration before abandonment.

Here is a reason to think that the conditional is unjustified if read in this way. The purpose of theories of freedom is (prima facie) to solve a broad swatch of problems in moral, political, and/or legal philosophy - e.g., to resolve what moral rights we have, what legal rights we should have, what the appropriate role of government is in the lives of its citizens. But it’s not clear that a criterion for (or even a positive trait of) any theory of freedom would be that it gives solutions to these problems that accord with folk intuitions. The analogous point seems obviously true of, e.g., theories in physics. As you point out, some appeal to intuitions may be unavoidable in a theory of freedom - whereas such appeals may always be avoidable in physics. But this disanalogy isn’t sufficient to undermine to point at hand. Even if we must rely on some intuitions, it doesn’t follow that it’s a merit to be in line with the folk’s intuitons - even if by ‘the folk’s intuitions’ here we mean ‘the folk’s well-considered views’. Even if it would be a good thing for a theory to rely on a broader swatch of intuitions than those of a single philosopher, there are lots of ways to subdivide the population to get a swatch of intuitions that is bigger than those of a single philosopher but smaller than those of the folk. It’s not clear why the merit comes with cutting the swatch so broadly as to include all the folk.

Jonathan,

Thanks for this very helpful response. It certainly would be interesting to have the results of the new study you are proposing.

In any case, the idea I had in mind was that we normally make people unfree to perform certain actions by imposing strong prudential costs on performing those actions. So, for example, we might make people unfree to read certain books by creating a law whereby anyone who read such a book would have his or her hands cut off.

But this implies that the threat of having one’s hands cut off makes one unfree, hence that the high prudential cost here is itself associated with unfreedom.

So suppose we simply made a law that prevented people from cutting off their own hands. Would such a law involve a reduction in their freedom? If one assumes that people were already unfree to cut off their hands, the reduction in freedom here should be minimal.

Glad to hear about the sample populations. Here’s something more re my 1:

I’m not saying, of course, that the mere fact that more time is taken to arrive at view x than view y is a philosophically notable point in favour of x over y. That the later Wittgenstein came later than the early Wittgenstein isn’t a good reason to think that the later Wittgenstein was any closer to getting things right.

The worry I was pointing to is that it seems commonsensical that it’s easy to have several changes in mind during just short periods of considering a proposition in detail for the first time. It’s the easiness of this change occurring that contributes to our often being apt to say, e.g., ‘Let me think about that and then get back to you’ in these sorts of situations. In very few cases are we pausing for time because we want to submit the proposition to long, extended philosophical analysis. Generally, I take it, we just want to step away from and come back to a proposition a couple times to see if, e.g., any examples or analogies cross our minds that might weigh our views.

What the (undefeated) scope for easy change seems to reveal here is that what crops up as ‘the folk’s view’ in a survey that tracks initial reactions might be very different from what crops up as ‘the folk’s view’ in a survey that tracks more considered reactions. If this possibility is undefeated, then it questions our justification for believing that the first survey truly tracks the folk’s view. More generally it questions whether it’s justified to talk atemporally of ‘the folk’s view’ at all. It may be more apt to talk in temporally qualified ways of ‘the folk’s initial view’, ‘the folk’s view after t+1′, etc.

Some philosophical upshots of this are the following. First: If view x captures the folk’s initial reactions but it seems reasonable that the folk may easily change from their initial reactions by their own resources in short course, then x has less of a claim to capture the folk’s view than it may have initially seemed. Second: To the extent that it really is a plus for a theory to be able to say ‘I capture the folk’s view’, it seems (prima facie) that the theory with better claim to doing so is the theory that can justifiably assert that it captures the folk’s more considered view. This is what we would do in the case of persons, after all. If Joe’s initial reaction was to vote Republican but once he thought about it for a bit he decided to vote Democrat, it would be odd of the Republicans to claim to capture Joe’s political views. It seems that the Democrats probably have the better claim to capturing ‘Joe’s views’ whereas the Republican’s have the better claim to capturing ‘Joe’s initial reaction’.

Now this is all beside the point, of course, if it’s no plus for a theory to capture the folk’s views in any sense of ‘the folk’s views’. But that’s a different topic (from my 3 before). The main worry for here is just that what you propose as the folk theory of freedom may be vulnerable to both the upshots I’ve just mentioned. These worries seem to generalize for folk theories constructed around the folk’s initial reactions - hence my initial comment that folk theories based on initial reactions may be less weighty in their standing as folk theories than folk theories based on more considered reactions. The issue doesn’t so much concern the truth value of these sorts of folk theories. It concerns in what sense of ‘folk theories’ these theories merit the name - and so to what extent these theories might be in position to draw weight from their link with the folk.

Jonathan, those are useful points. Here are a couple of brief points in response:

“Historically we have often used a commonsense, ordinary view of liberty to judge when a particular philosophical theory of freedom has gone astray or has unacceptable conclusions. The reason for this is probably that we think the concept of freedom is actually capturing something about the way in which humans actually interact with the world, but freedom (more than mathematics) has its essential element tied to our experience of the world. The point here is that folk experience the phenomenon of freedom just like philosophers do. Thus if the general folk experience freedom in a way that drastically contrasts with the conclusions of a philosophical theory, we would want to have some justification for assuming that they are mistakenly experiencing the phenomenon before discounting them.”

I generally agree here. But talk of ‘how the folk experience phenomenon x’ is distinct from talk of ‘how the folk briefly theorize phenomenon x’. That is to say, it doesn’t follow that in order to capture the ordinary experience of freedom we must capture the results that are produced when ordinary folk theorize (or think analytically) about that phenomenon. Without argument, it’s not clear we have good justification for believing that the folk’s intuitive theorizings accurately capture their ordinary experience. To assume as such would seem to be to assume that the folk’s intuitive, merely briefly reflective theorizings manage to swiftly bring into relief their ordinary experience. But doing such a thing - especially in such brief order - is very difficult. It seems very reasonable that an open wonder should be whether the folk’s briefly reflective thinkings mightn’t accurately capture their ordinary experience (in some or several crucial ways).

“This should be especially true when a very large swath of the folk all have the same intuition. It would be a mistake to simply disregard all the the interesting data that they provide, as (I would argue) we would no longer be coming up with a theory that captures freedom, but offering conclusions that are only philosophically interesting.
Further, it seems very pragmatically problematic to adhere to a theory of freedom which concludes that people are free when they do not share that experience. I think this is a point that has been very well made by history.”

The ‘folk experience vs. folk theory’ point backs up here too. A philosophical theory of freedom might be ‘merely’ philosophically interesting if it has no connection with the ordinary experience of freedom. But nothing follows here about the importance of the folk’s theorizings about that experience. Similarly the issue with politics that try to impose a concept of freedom that ordinary folk don’t recognize doesn’t seem to be that the concept imposed doesn’t match with the folk’s brief unreflective thinkings about the concept. It seems to be that the concept imposed doesn’t match with the ordinary experience of the concept. There’s plenty of space for the folk to allow that even though a particular theory of freedom doesn’t accord with their initial thinkings about freedom, it actually accords better with their actual experience of freedom.

…so I’m still unconvinced that (from my earlier comment) “the fact that some theory of freedom is the folk’s theory is a fact that adds to it being the case that that theory merits serious consideration before abandonment”.