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Notes
Michael S. Moore, Mechanical Choices: The Responsibility of the Human Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
Longer responses to each author individually may be found in Moore, “Responses to Six Interlocutors on Neuroscience and Responsibility,” Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues, forthcoming.
I chose the latter mode of organization for my longer responses cited in note 2 supra.
Two of my commentators, List and Sifferd, also engage me on my retributivist theory of punishment. Mechanical Choices makes no defense of retributivism as such, albeit it does seek to rebut any criticism of retributivism that is based on skepticism about agency and responsibility (a skepticism that neither List nor Sifferd shares). Because I have defended retributivism elsewhere (Moore, Placing Blame: A General Theory of the Criminal Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)), and did not do so in my present book, I shall forgo addressing that issue here. See, however, Moore, “Response to Six Interlocuters,” supra, for my response to these criticisms of retributivism by Sifferd and List.
Christian List, “Mechanical Choices: A Compatibilist-Libertarian Response,” this journal. Much of List’s response here is best understood in light of his own recent book, Why Free Will Is Real (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019), a book I only recently allowed myself the pleasure of reading in preparation for this response.
Michael S. Moore, “Responsible Choices, Desert-Based Legal Institutions, and the Challenges of Contemporary Neuroscience,” Social Philosophy and Policy, Vol. 29 (2012), pp. 233–279, modified and reprinted in Moore, Mechanical Choices, supra, ch. 7.
This clump of suppositions included here as one are more finely individuated in Moore, Mechanical Choices, supra, pp. 178–186, 204.
List, “Response,” this Issue.
Michael S. Moore, Causation and Responsibility: An Essay in Law, Morals, and Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 361 − 64, 472-3.
Moore, Mechanical Choices, supra, pp. 245–246.
List seemingly adopts a token identity view (List, Why Free Will Is Real, supra, pp. 72–73) but elsewhere betrays some sympathy for the alternative, “grounding” view of how minds depend on brains.
Terence Horgan, “Nonreductive Physicalism and the Explanatory Autonomy of Psychology,” in S. Wagner and R. Warner, eds., Naturalism: A Critical Appraisal (South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), pp. 295–320. I discuss and reject Horgan’s views in Moore, Mechanical Choices, supra, p. 445.
An implication that List sees as inevitable elsewhere in science and probably welcome as well in psychology. List, Why Free Will Is Real, supra, p. 71.
Such an interpretation is belied by List’s sometime reliance on Quine’s principle of substitutability salva veritate to explicate the relation between variables in different levels of explanatory statements (Id., p. 66); for that principle uses the notion of identity (and indeed, is one of Leibnitz’s laws of identity).
List might be happy with the pluralist label, since he at least flirts with the idea that there are many levels not only of descriptions but of the world which such descriptions describe. List, “Levels,” supra. On this construal, List is not a physicalist because then his differently levelled descriptions would not be describing the same things (but only their own, level-specific things); the physical level would then in no sense be basic or fundamental.
Moore, Mechanical Choices, supra, pp. 448–449.
List, Why Free Will Is Real, supra, pp. 141–147.
Id., at pp. 124–140.
Id.
Moore, Mechanical Choices, supra, ch. 11 (“The Limited Compatibilism of Epiphenomenalism with Responsibility”).
List might also seem to urge that his broader conceptualization of free will more basically depends on the hidden unity to the three challenges; so that it is the unity of the question(s) that demands his unity of answer(s). Thus, he concludes his book by saying: Although the challenges are quite different, there is one feature they all have in common. Each of them seeks to be looking for free will and its prerequisites at the level of the human brain and body…The challenge in each case lies in the fact that the relevant property [making up each of the three challenges] – intentional agency, alternative possibilities, or mental causation – is nowhere to be found at that level. List, Why Free Will Is Real, supra, p. 150. Notice that the supposed unity of the questions asked wholly depends for List on the unity of his style of answer; not the other way around. I thus in the text pursue the alleged unity demanding the broader conceptualization of free will in terms of the unity of List’s answers, not the unity of the challenges to which those answers are given.
List, “Response,” supra, at p. 16.
Moore, Mechanical Choices, supra, p. 444.
Paul Oppenheim and Hilary Putnam, “Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis,” in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 2 (1958), pp. 3–16.
Carl G. Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965); Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science (New York: Random House, 1961). Nagel and Hempel were two more of my mentors in the philosophy of science, along with Hilary Putnam and Adolf Grunbaum.
For a summary, see Raphael von Riel and Robert van Gulik, “Scientific Reduction,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I thank van Gulik in the acknowledgments to Mechanical Choices for being one of those kind enough to revisit with me these old issues in the philosophy of science in the preparation of this book. See id., pp. 441–443.
See id., p. 442, and von Riel and van Gulik, “Scientific Reduction,” supra, pp. 52–54, for elucidation of these labels.
I was unable to locate any explicit discussion of functionalism as a philosophy of mind in List, but perhaps I have missed the reference.
Moore, Mechanical Choices, supra, p. 445.
Sofia Jeppsson, “Review of Michael Moore’s Mechanical Choices,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Vol. 25 (2022), pp. 499–502.
My twenty years’ triad of essays defending these views in meta-ethics – Michael Moore, “Moral Reality,” Wisconsin Law Review, Vol. [1982], pp. 1061–1156; Moore, “Moral Reality Revisited,” Michigan Law Review, Vol. 90 (1992), pp. 2424–2533; Moore, “Legal Reality: A Naturalist Approach to Legal Ontology,” Law and Philosophy, Vol. 21 (2002), pp. 619–705 – are collected in Moore, Objectivity in Law and Ethics (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Pub., 2004).
Jeremy Waldron has a go at my explanationist defense of moral realism in his “Just No Damn Good,” in Kimberly Ferzan and Stephen Morse, eds., Legal, Moral, and Metaphysical Truths: The Philosophy of Michael S. Moore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), and my retrenching is in my “Responses and Appreciations,” in the same volume, pp. 343–425.
In my response to Waldron, “Responses and Appreciations,” supra, pp. 405–412, I also expressed some doubts about how one sorts the explanations fit for expressing our ontological commitments from those not so fit. Quine once remarked (Ontological Relativity and Other Essays) that our theories “want some dusting up when our thoughts turn seriously ontological.” I understand Quine’s thought to be that we cannot take seriously all the things that figure as the value of a variable within the scope of the existential quantifiers of statements idiomatically called “explanations,” for the ordinary use of that term is too promiscuous. I have only started the daunting task of culling “non-serious” explanations from the herd of statements historians call explanations (Moore, “Hang the Kaiser: Philosophically Mediated Explanations of Why World War One Happened in Terms of the Decisions and Actions of Those Responsible for the War,” Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues, Vol. 23 (2022), pp. 543–607), but I am far from having a general criterion satisfactory to answer my doubts here.
Harry Frankfurt, “Alternative Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 66 (1969), pp. 829–839. I discuss source compatibilism briefly in Moore, Mechanical Choices, supra, pp. 307–310.
List is admirably clear in his exposition of how this is supposed to work. See List, Why Free Will Is Real, supra, pp. 91–97; repeated in List, “Response,” this Issue.
Frankfurt, “Alternative Possibilities,” supra.
Moore, “Relating Neuroscience to Responsibility,” supra.
Id.
Sifferd and Fagan, “Authors’ Reply,” supra.
John-Dylan Haynes, et al., “Reading Hidden Intentions in the Brain,” Current Biology, Vol. 17 (2007), pp. 323–328.
Todd Hare, Colin Camerer, and Antonio Rangel, “Self-Control in Decision-Making Involves Modulation of the vmPFC Valuation System,” Science, Vol. 324 (2009), pp. 646–648.
Alexander Kaiserman, “Moore on Degrees of Responsibility,” this volume.
Proportioning degree of punishment to degree of desert requires some very fine-grained individuation of these and other variables. See Hurd and Moore, “The Ethical Implications of Proportioning Punishment to Deontological Desert,” supra.
This, because of my uncertainty about the robustness of the distinction between changes from the actual world that are explicitly described in the antecedents of the relevant counterfactuals and changes that are implicit only.
Burns and Sverdlow, “Right Orbitofrontal Tumor,” supra.
Moore, Mechanical Choices, supra, at pp. 295–296, 299, 302.
Id., pp. 548–549.
Id., pp. 499–510.
Id., p. 509.
Id., pp. 497–510.
See Moore, “Causation and the Excuses,” California Law Review, Vol. 73 (1985), pp. 1091–1149, reprinted as Chap. 12 of Moore, Placing Blame, supra.
A point with which I believe Kaiserman agrees. In his footnote10 he observes that even though on his contribution account “being responsible for one’s action is a matter of it having the right kinds of causes,” it is “not a matter of avoiding the wrong kinds of causes.” I interpret this to mean that Kaiserman like me rejects the theory of excuse according to which either causation (of choice and action) as such, or causation by certain kinds of “excusing” causes, is the essence of excuse. Kaiserman’s theory of excuse appears to turn on the absence of the right kind of source of choice and action, not the existence of some other kinds of causal sources.
Kaiserman, “Moore on Degrees of Responsibility,” this Issue.
Moore, Mechanical Choices, supra, at p. 310.
I leave for another occasion the interesting questions arising when one specifies how these two scalarized desert-bases interact, as they must on the many occasions where both are in play.
Notice that this conclusion does not require that I take a position on the interesting question of whether intrinsic finks and masks actually exist. Surely at some point objects and events are too far removed in their natures to in any sense possess the dispositions masked or finked; a brick (to use Shoemaker’s old example) does not have a masked disposition of fragility (the mask is the replacement of its glass molecules with baked earthen molecules) – it has no disposition of fragility. At some point masks and finks too radically change the nature of that which they allegedly mask or fink for that thing to exist. My point in the text avoids taking a position on this general question; the only point of the text is that even if a finkish mechanism is conceded to exist, when it is realized in a way that does not allow distinction between it and that which it finks, there is no ability to be finked by it.
One of the central theses of my book, Moore, Causation and Responsibility, supra.
Tadros, “Craving and Control,” supra, p. 19.
Tadros tells us that he thinks that I am “not completely clear about the right modal test.” Id., p. 10. But he never graces us with any other test to which I am supposed to subscribe other than the one stated in the text.
Id., p. 13. Tadros likewise tells us at the end of his essay that “A better modal test just involves considering how the person would have performed if they had tried to exercise self-control over their addictive conduct.” Id., p. 22. It may be that Tadros is a closet primitivist about powers and abilities because he expresses “doubts about” all counterfactual accounts of ability (Id., pp. 13, 21); nonetheless when push comes to shove the quoted bits constitute his stated (counterfactual) test.
Id., p. 11.
Id., p. 10 (emphasis added).
Id., p. 17.
Id., p. 23 (punctuation added).
Id., p. 21.
List, Why Free Will Is Real, supra. pp. 103–107.
Id., p. 83 (talk of kinds of possibilities).
Moore, Mechanical Choices, p. 288.
List, Why Free Will Is Real, supra, p. 85.
List, “Response,” supra, p. 8.
List, Why Free Will Is Real, supra, p. 82.
List, “Response,” supra, p. 6.
List, Why Free Will Is Real, supra, p. 85.
List, “Response,” supra, p. 9 n. 19.
Michael Moore, “Causation and the Excuses,” California Law Review, Vol. 73 (1985), pp. 1091–1149, revised and reprinted in Michael Moore, Placing Blame, supra.
Carolina Sartorio, “Causalism Without Causation,” this volume, p. 1.
Carolina Sartorio, Causalism: Unifying Action and Free Action, Oxford University Press, forthcoming, p. 56. (The page references are to the manuscript version with which Carolina was kind enough to supply me.)
Id., pp. 56–57.
Sartorio, “Causalism Without Causation,” supra, p. 2.
Sartorio, Causalism, supra, pp. 62–63.
Sartorio, “Causalism Without Causation,” supra, Sect. 5.
In Moore, Causation and Responsibility, supra, ch. 16, I adapted such cases from Jaegwon Kim’s discussion of them to observe (along with Kim) that there are many instances of counterfactual dependencies where there is no causation. In Moore, Act and Crime, supra, ch. 8, I analogously urged that there are many types of action (such as castling a king in chess) that add non-causal complexities to basic actions.
See Moore, Act and Crime, supra, ch. 8, for discussion and references.
Moore, Causation and Responsibility, supra, ch. 18.
I have recently had occasion to revisit the causal/non-causal status of double prevention cases, exploring the possibility that some of them are in fact causal. Michael Moore, “Singular Causation and Double Prevention Cases,” Zeitschrift fur Internationale Strafrechtswissenschaft, www.zfistw.de (Nov., 2022), pp. 113–124. I don’t believe that my amended views affect the present discussion because when putative double prevention cases are in reality causal, they are also for that reason not double prevention cases.
A label that Sartorio adopts from my fellow singularist-physicalist about causation, Phil Dowe. I have long urged that when another theorist goes “quasi” we should feel queasy (leading Simon Blackburn, for example, to on occasion call his “quasi-realism” in meta-ethics, a “queasy realism”). With a bow to Clemenceau on military music, quasi-causation stands to real causation as military music stands to real music, i.e., it is not causation at all. It turns out that it is not just lawyers who are attracted to legal fictions; it is apparently widely tempting to non-lawyers too to attach a label to some phenomenon that does not fit the criteria for correct application of the label but the user of the fiction wants to appropriate the consequences of its application that would be true if it did fit.
Explored in depth in Moore, Causation and Responsibility, supra, ch. 12.
For example, within my commentators here, Alexander Kaiserman. Sartorio, however, is not among those. See Sartorio, “More of a Cause?,” Journal of Applied Philosophy, Vol. 37 (2019), pp. 346–363, written in the context of causal responsibility for wars. In the same context compare my “‘Hang the Kaiser’: Philosophically Mediated Explanations for Why World War One Happened in Terms of the Decisions and Actions of those Responsible for the War,” supra, at pp. 598–607.
Most famously, of course, both David Lewis in philosophy and Anglo-American law’s general notion of “cause-in-fact.” See David Lewis, “Causation,” Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 70 (1973), pp. 556–567; Peter Menzies, “Counterfactual Theories of Causation,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2001); Michael Moore, “Causation in the Law,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2023).
Moore, Causation and Responsibility, supra, ch. 17.
See references supra, footnote 83.
The necessary involvement of counterfactual dependence in reaching all of these conclusions is defended by me at length in Moore, Causation and Responsibility, supra, ch. 18.
Id., ch. 12.
Id., ch. 18.
Moore, Mechanical Choices, supra, ch. 11.
Sartorio, Causalism, supra, p. 53.
That Dowe’s notion of “quasi-causation” is simply counterfactual dependence with a bad label should be clear. See the discussion in Moore, Causation and Responsibility, supra, pp. 454–455. The causal label occurs to Dowe because the content of the counterfactuals (on which the relevant explanations are based) relies on causal laws for their truth conditions. But that reliance on causal laws is ubiquitous for counterfactuals; indeed, in Nelson Goodman’s older view of the matter, the possibilia making true counterfactual statements are just the projections of causal laws. Yet we don’t generally call counterfactual dependence “causal,” “quasi-causal,” “queasy causal,” or anything like that, so why here?
Moore, Mechanical Choices, supra, ch. 10.
Sartorio, “Causalism,” supra, p. 8 n. 2.
See Haynes, et al., “Hidden Intentions,” supra. I was the commentator on Haynes’ work at the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind, UC-Santa Barbara, 2009.
One might think that the hypothesized planning intention could cause the readiness potential without that potential then causing the intent to move to exist. Yet even if this were possible (which it is not, because readiness potentials and intents to move are too closely connected) still it would not be PP’s action or his responsibility if there were no intent to move executing his distal, planning intention.
As a last ditch defense Sartorio does seem willing to give up these intuitions if forced to do so. It is surely a cost to a theory to have implications running rough shod over such firm intuitions, however.
I discuss Davidson’s generosity here in Moore, Act and Crime, supra, pp. 106–108; and Moore, Mechanical Choices, supra, pp. 64–65.
Philip Swenson, “Compatibilism and Control Over the Past: A New Argument Against Compatibilism,” this volume.
Moore, Mechanical Choices, supra, ch. 11.
Martin Gardner, Column, Scientific American (July, 1973; March, 1974).
Swenson, “Compatibilism and Control over the Past,” supra, particularly his responses to his Objections 5 and 6 in part III of his essay. Swenson’s intuition is not quite the same as mine, for his line is between a 100% probability that a connection holds and a less-than-certainty probability that that connection holds, not between weak and strong necessity that the connection holds. I suspect that manipulating what one means by “objective probability” might more closely align these intuitions nonetheless.
Acknowledgements
These responses were first given by me orally at the Rutgers University Law and Philosophy Institute’s “Conference on Michael Moore’s Mechanical Choices: The Responsibility of the Human Machine,” New Brunswick, New Jersey, May 13–14, 2022; and then as a lecture at the National Autonomous University of Chile, Santiago, Chile, April 19, 2023. My thanks to my commentators on both occasions for their many helpful comments.
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Moore, M. Responses and Appreciations. Criminal Law, Philosophy 18, 217–252 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-023-09707-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-023-09707-2