We Have It Backwards: Liberal Arts Should Guide Science and Technology

Before going into my qualms with Daniel Dennett’s
capability/evitibility-based free will, I want to point out that most
supporters of Daniel Dennett’s brand of free will don’t realize that he
agrees that we don’t have my brand of free will. What brand is that you ask?
The absolute kind. The kind where people are free to step outside of a deterministic world
and do something other than what follows from the inputs (which they don’t
control).

Dennett knows this is impossible. The image above is from
a talk he did in Edinburgh
where he was very clear about this. He accepts the world to be effectively
deterministic (meaning we gain no freedom from quantum randomness) and he
has an elegant way of illustrating it through the slide below.

Here he cleanly captures the fact that the main type of free will that
people have been talking about for centuries is simply not real, and
goes on to say that the one that is real–the one we experience each day–is
actually not real. He even goes on to say in the lecture that, “the fake
stuff is actually pretty good”, or something to that effect.

So that’s one point: that he’s agreeing with we incompatibilists on
our type of free will. But that’s not the part that bothers me. What
bothers me is his claim that his species of free will is useful in
some way that matters, i.e. from a blame and praise standpoint. To state
this another way, if he accepts that the universe is deterministic, and that
all outcomes are the result of inputs and laws, then I fail to see how he
makes room for moral responsibility.

In my view, his talk of evolutionary biology, competence, evitability, and
future creation are all handwaving. Surely these things are true, and surely
we’re more evolved in these ways than other animals, but he fails to explain
how they provide an escape from physics.

These things ride on top of physics–not below. They are products of it. They
are outcomes. And once he has accepted that the physics itself is determined
then he must know that all actions we make are determined as well. And he
does know this. In fact he embraces it — that’s why he’s a compatibilist.

How then does he salvage moral responsibility from this? Let’s assume one
being is more or less “capable” to predict future, or to make a proper
decision. He claims this will determine its ability to avoid things, and
thus as we evolve we get better at doing so.

Great. Well done. So what?

One’s capabilities are a function of inputs that he did not control. One’s
ability to predict future is precisely the same. None of the components that
make up the agent were in the control of the agent. So when a decision is
made using one’s “capabilities” they are simply doing what they can with
with what they have.

Someone. Anyone. Please explain to me how we get moral responsibility from
this. I simply cannot see how he could conjure that interpretation.

I throw myself at the feet of the Internet. Show me what I’m missing.

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