I’ve been philosophically opposed to retribution for a good while, largely as a result of thinking about free will. I’ve come to see the urge for retribution as thinly veiled vengefulness. And I like to think of urge for revenge as a kind of after the fact fight or flight response. To quote the immigrant Russian Armenian tile-setter who helped me remodel my bathroom many years ago “When the fight is over, you stop swinging your arms.” I’ll explain the free will line shortly, but first a less involved line of argument.
The Socratic line
Thanks to Agnes Callard’s wonderful new book, Open Socrates, I’ve recently taken to the Socratic argument against vengeance and retribution. While the free will line of argument is metaphysical, the Socratic line is epistemic. Socrates thinks that retribution presumes a degree of ethical knowledge that people generally lack. Socrates is well known for the idea that “to know the good is to do the good.” On this view, bad action is always grounded in ignorance. This view is frequently dismissed with apparent cases of people doing bad when they know better. Callard explains these cases in terms of wavering conviction. So, when I eat that extra slice of pizza and earn myself a night of heartburn, this is because I temporarily judged the slice of pizza to be the better good. My unstable judgment is itself an indicator of ignorance. In this instance I haven’t fully come around to well-established knowledge about what is best for me. First, under the influence of appetites, I think I know the extra slice is best, then I later come to a contrary conviction.
To varying degrees, most of us shuttle back and forth between conflicting convictions and embrace varying levels of self-deception to paper over our inconsistencies. So, in the heat of indignation over some injustice I’ve suffered, I may abandon charitable understanding of others in favor of settling a score. Charitable understanding and score settling don’t really go together, but it is easy to temporarily forget this under the influence of what Callard calls our internal “savage commands.” The root of evil, on this view, is abandoning the inquisitive Socratic stance in favor of arrogantly and ignorantly taking ourselves to know more than we do about what is best.
None of this is to say we should give up on pursuing justice. Rather, intellectual humility counsels that we should pursue justice first through inquisitively trying to understand people (including ourselves), and then persuading (or being persuaded, which is often the kicker).
The Free Will line
A very common but poorly justified conviction has it that we are in control of our actions and that this is what it means to have free will. This view of free will that takes us to be in control in the sense that we could have willed for or against an action regardless of causal influences is known as the “libertarian” conception of free will (no connection to libertarianism as a political philosophy). The justification for retributive punishment has always been predicated on the libertarian conception of free will. It is hard to see people deserve blame (or praise) for the things that they do if they don’t have the sort of control libertarian free will supposes.
The libertarian conception of free will has been a bone of philosophical contention since Descartes, who unsuccessfully argued in favor of libertarian free will by cleaving us in two, a fully determined material body and an undetermined spiritual mind (thus, Cartesian dualism). Descartes was grappling with the emerging mechanistic understanding of the world, one that continues to dominate our thinking. The successes of science, even 400 years ago, were suggesting that all physical events are the result of prior causes. This is the metaphysical view known as causal determinism. Since our bodily movements are physical events, the worry is that these too are ultimately causally determined beyond our control, since the causal chains of determining factors for the things we do extends back prior to our own deliberation and willing.
Newton’s physics was causally deterministic. Of course, Newton has been superseded by quantum physics which is indeterministic. Some have latched onto this as opening space for libertarian free will. However, quantum indeterminacies don’t put us in the driver’s seat, in firm control of our actions through libertarian free will. They merely render us governed mainly by causal factors along with some the random influence of quantum indeterminacies. Quantum indeterminacies just introduce undetermined elements to the causal matrix of the world. And the causal matrix remains barren ground for the sort of control we like to think free will can afford.
Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky has recently popularized the scientific case against libertarian free will in his book Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will. Philosophers around the world have been shaking their heads in dismay over this newfound “discovery” by philosophically untrained scientists. Sapolsky has nicely documented the contemporary scientific case for rejecting libertarian free will. The philosophical conversation, however, moved beyond this as far back as Hume, who outlined a different way to understand free will, one that is compatible with causal determinism. The reigning view among philosophers today is “compatibilism,” the view that we do have free will, but it’s probably not what you think it is. And properly understood, free will is compatible with causal determinism.
Compatibilism in the philosophy of free will is a very active area of research today. I won’t canvas the varying approaches and views in any detail here. But we can get a general idea of what many compatibilist approaches to free will aim to do by thinking about bicycle drive trains. My bike’s drive train is a fully causally determined system. The wheels of my bike are determined to turn or not based on my peddling or braking. Still, the wheels will turn freely, or not, depending on how the drive train is functioning. If the gears, bearings and chain are clean, well lubricated and free of corrosion, the mechanism will function freely, and the bike will roll smoothly. If the crank or wheel bearings are corroded, or if the chain is grimy or rusted, the bike’s drive train will not turn freely, and it will be a bear to ride. Most compatibilist conceptions of free will operate with this this notion of “free” as something like freely functioning. Compatibilist philosophers of free will then aim to explain just what it means for our minds to function freely in formulating our wills.
The notion of freedom at work here is not at odds with causation. But it is also not exactly a causal notion. The notion of freely functioning is not itself a causal factor. Rather it is a concept concerned with what it is for a causal process to function well in achieving certain ends. That is, free will belongs to the realm of normative, teleological concepts. Normative concepts are not concerned with how things are, for instance how they are caused. They are concerned with evaluative standards of how things should be. Moral concepts like right or wrong are normative. So are epistemic notions of rational belief and knowledge. Normativity can’t be analyzed in descriptive terms like causal explanations. The normative is teleological, or ends oriented. Teleological explanation doesn’t look back to prior causes, but forwards to ends and goals. Your reasons for acting are about the ends you aim to achieve. A broad range of concepts dealt with in philosophy are normative or teleological.
A short list of indispensable teleological concepts includes belief, desire, action (as opposed to mere behavior), reasons (for acting or for believing), rationality (again concerning action or belief), moral categories of right and wrong, all other sorts of goodness and badness, beauty, love, personhood, agency and meaning. Over the past century and a half or so, many philosophers have attempted to either reject these and other teleological concepts or reduce them to the causal. The attempt to reduce everything to what can be explained scientifically in causal terms is to try to get along without all of these; love meaning, morality, beauty, and even rationality.
It is only over the past few decades that philosophers have broadly begun to appreciate the untenably high cost of abandoning the teleological and the normative. Of course, there are plenty of notable philosophers who never fell for the 20th century scientistic fashion of relegating philosophy to the janitorial task of cleaning up the language of science. The Oxford philosophers, Elizabeth Anscombe, Phillipa Foote, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch come to mind as early holdouts (See Metaphysical Animals by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman). But a broad revitalization of serious philosophical inquiry into the teleological and normative has unfolded just over the course of my own lifetime. Ethics and metaphysics are serious business again, and philosophers are far better at illuminating the teleological and the normative now than in earlier centuries, perhaps going all the way back to ancient Greece. I’d even go so far as to say that we are catching up with Aristotle, who recognized teleological explanation as its own thing distinct from causal explanation.
We have multiple ways of understanding the world and ourselves. Causal explanation is one, and progress on this front has been wildly successful over the past few centuries. It has been so successful that many intelligent people have been led to believe that the world as revealed by science is all there is to discover. But really? And as soon as we ask that question, we are back in the philosophical realm of metaphysics.
In spite of its recent dominance, the scientific/causal paradigm is just one of the indispensable frameworks we have for making sense of our world and ourselves. The teleological is another and it needs to be engaged on its own terms. Compatibilist free will belongs in the teleological realm. Our attempts to ignore the teleological and normative haven’t made these realms of understanding any less crucial and relevant to leading becoming human lives. Rejection of the teleological and normative has led some into nihilism and despair and others into relativism and narcissism, though I suspect these to be just different ways of falling into the same philosophical and spiritual holes. Alternatively, perhaps, love and beauty are as real as truth after all.
At least as far back as Descartes, we have made the mistake of intermingling the causal and teleological paradigms in the notion of Libertarian free will. But the causal and the teleological paradigms are incommensurable. The rationale for retributive punishment is based on the untenable attempt to straddle the teleological and causal. In this confused attempt to merge the causal and the teleological paradigms, we have deceived ourselves into thinking that we can do good by doing bad. In retribution we “hold each other accountable” as if we were god-like unmoved movers, originating causes of things that we will. And we relish this grandiose sense of power, at least when are not being judged for our shortcomings. But then things can get pretty ugly when we would-be gods sit in judgement of each other. We can quickly lose sight of the preciousness of the fragile light of consciousness we all bear through the flux of forces beyond our control.