Fetal and our potentiality

Consider this standard story:

Whatever value fetuses have derives from their potentiality (and here various distinctions matter) to grow into humans that actually have various valuable features, features that are not simply potentialities. Typical human adults actually have the valuable features that ground their moral status, while fetuses only potentially have these features. The question of the moral status of the fetus, then, is the question of how far their potentiality makes it possible to extend to them the moral status that typical human adults have (and, likewise, to extend the moral status of typical human adults to atypical ones).

I have argued in earlier posts that the kind of potentiality fetuses have does call for the extension of moral status. But I now wonder if this whole line of thought doesn't presuppose a mistaken view, namely that the moral status of typical human adults is grounded in the actual possession of valuable non-potentiality features. Specifically, I worry that this line of thought has too optimistic a view of the human race.

The feature of human beings that matters most centrally seems to be the moral life. But in practice our moral life just isn't all that good. We are full of self-deceit, akrasia and dollops of malice, in different combinations. Is it really the case that typical human beings are morally good in such a way that their actual moral goodness gives them the kind of moral status we are thinking about?

And in any case, even if, say, 70% of adult human beings do have such moral goodness, what about those of us who are in the other 30%? They, too, have moral status. No matter how many crimes one has committed previously, no matter how wicked one is, one has the moral and legal right to a fair trial, to a punishment that does not exceed the gravity of the offense.

What I said about the moral life also goes for the intellectual life: the typical human's intellectual life just isn't much to be proud of. Just think of all the fallacious forms of reasoning we engage in. Plus, I do not know how central the intellectual life is to moral status. Suppose there was a race of super-intelligent mathematicians who had no drive but to prove interesting theorems and no moral life to speak of. Would they have the kind of moral status humans have? I don't know. (It could be that they would have to have the rudiments of a moral life, in that they would have to be attuned at least to the values of truth and beauty to practice mathematics well. So it could be that the thought experiment is impossible.)

Now, it may well be that the above thoughts are too pessimistic. The George MacDonad quote here seems quite significant. But I still think this is worth thinking about, and I think there is something to the idea that the moral status of typical adult humans comes not so much from actual valuable properties, but from their innate potentiality for the good moral life. It is what we should (eventually?) be, not what we are, that is central to our dignity on this suggestion.

Telescope making instructable

My instructable for making a small (6") Dobsonian telescope got posted on the front page of Instructables. Yay! I built the scope with one of my colleagues at Baylor--we've got quite a nice little group of amateur astronomers in the Philosophy Department. (I also entered this project in their space-related contest.)

Fetal potentiality

Jarrett Cooper raised an important and interesting question about the potentiality of fetuses to become adults in a comment, and I thought I'd make a post with a response. The center of the question is:

There are those who dislike the use of the potential verbiage that is used for pro-life arguments. Namely, to ground the moral worth of fetuses in that they have the potential (albeit undeveloped) to become beings with consciousnesses, intellect, language, etc. They argue that the word "potential" has a very broad scope and therefore defending the use of potential with regards to fetuses becomes arbitrary.
What I gather is that their concern is there are many things have potential to be such and such. After all, it is said that we are star dust, but yet we don't view exploding stars nor the mere star dust remnants themselves as human beings. This is because even if we are just star dust, there's a whole bunch of processes that have to occur to get a human being.

I think we can identify two relevant distinctions between how an F (say, a fetus, a bit of star dust, or some clay) becomes a G, and corresponding to these two distinctions there are relevant distinctions as to F's potentiality to become a G.

The first distinction is implicit in the rest of Mr. Cooper's comment and may be on a continuum. This is the distinction between F's changing itself into a G and F's being changed into a G.

For instance, an acorn changes or transforms into an oak tree, but an oak tree is changed or transformed into a canoe. In both cases there is both internal and external causal agency. The acorn needs water, soil and sunlight to become an oak tree. The oak tree needs cutting and joining to become a boat. Note, however, that the second of these two sentences, while having an interpretation on which it is true, sounds odd. For while the acorn seems to be primary agent when it becomes the oak tree, the boat-builder is the primary agent when the oak tree becomes a boat. The water, soil and sunlight have a supportive role in the transformation, and the acorn, driven by its DNA, has a primary active role. In the case of the boat, however, the boat-builder does not merely have a supportive role in the process. Either she is the primary agent, or else she and the oak tree are jointly primary agents.

Corresponding to this distinction there is a distinction between an F's potentiality to change itself into a G, and an F's potentiality to be changed into a G. Neither the human ovum nor star dust have the potentiality to change themselves themselves into an adult. In the case of the human ovum, that is because a genetically equal or almost equal input from the sperm is required (almost, since DNA may not be the sum total of the genetic code; cytological context matters, for instance). And a fortiori star dust can't change itself into an adult human.

There is a second distinction, perhaps more principled. There are three ways in which we can say that an F changes into a G. First, we have accidental change, where the entity that is initially identical with an F is eventually identical with a G. Thus, the child becomes the adult: the same individual that was the change is later the adult. Second, we have substantial change, where the entity that is an F perishes an a G comes into existence. For instance, this happens when a book burns into smoke and ashes. There is no one entity that once was a book and later is smoke and ashes (though there may be particles that once constituted a book and later constitute smoke and ashes). Third, we have what we might call constitutional change, where the F comes to constitute a G. In this case, the "be" in "F comes to be a G" is the "to be" of constitution rather than of identity. For instance, sticks become a house. But it is never literally true that the sticks are identical with a house. To be more precise, we should say that the sticks come to constitute the house.

It is never true to say that the entity that was identical with star dust is now identical with a human. What we can say, depending on difficult metaphysical questions, is at most that the star dust comes to constitute a human (or, better, a human's body) or that the particles that constituted star dust now constitute the human. Likewise, the ovum is not identical with the adult human. It changes substantially into a human adult: the ovum perishes, by merging with the sperm, and a human comes into existence from its death, like smoke and ashes come into existence from a book.

On the other hand, a fetus's change into an adult is an accidental change: the same entity that was identical with a fetus comes to be identical with an adult.

A potential to change oneself accidentally into an adult human is a much more morally significant potential than a potential to be changed substantially or constitutively into an adult human.

It may sound strange to say that a potential for an accidental change would give rise to a more important status than a potential for a substantial change. But the reason for that is that the fact that the fetus's change into an adults is an accidental change means that there is only an accidental difference between the fetus and an adult.

Choices, no-brainers and heavenly joy

Aquinas distinguishes between choices and no-brainers, though not in those terms. In a choice between options A and B, there is something that each of these options has subjectively going for it that the other option does not. But if A is a no-brainer over B, A has something subjectively going for it that B does not, but B has nothing subjectively going for it that A does not. In other words, A subjectively dominates B. And we can say that A is a no-brainer provided that A is a no-brainer over all the subjectively available options.

The famous example is that for the souls in heaven, heavenly beatitude is a no-brainer: heavenly beatitude beats every alternative in every respect. Thus, for a soul in heaven, there is never a choice between heavenly beatitude and another option.

For us, on the other hand, heaven is not a no-brainer. One might choose between heavenly beatitude and being Attorney General of Wales. There are at least two ways in which this can happen. First, due to cognitive deficiences, we may not fully perceive heavenly beatitude as containing within itself all that is worth having in being Attorney General of Wales. We may mouth the words "heaven is better", but not really perceive it (i.e., the intellect may fail to present all the advantages of heaven to the will), or we might not even mouth the words. Note that there is also a difference between:

1. x perceives that: for all r, A is better than B in respect of r,

and:

2. For all r, x perceives that A is better than B in respect of r.

It is, I think, (2) that is required for no-brainers in the above sense. But perhaps all we have with respect of heaven is (1). Second, being Attorney General of Wales presents the following advantage: it comes sooner than the heavenly joy. But neither cognitive limitations nor delays of heavenly beatitude are present in heaven.

I think Aquinas would want to say that if determinism is true, there are no choices, only no-brainers. But I am having trouble making this argument.

epub Summa Theologica

Here is my epub version of Aquinas's Summa Theologica.
[Edit: Fixed bad link.]

My search for an Android ebook reader

[Edit: I edited the Moon+ review to take into account the latest version as of January 5, 2012. -ARP]

Every couple of weeks, my Palm TX stops working, and the only way to get it working again is to short out its battery quickly in order to clear out the RAM (disconnecting the battery would work, too, but then I'd have to unsolder it and resolder it; hmm, maybe I could solder in a tiny switch?).  So I need a new home for my large ebook collection.  It looks like the current options are iOS and Android.  But iOS development requires a Mac, plus iOS is notoriously closed.  So Android.

I acquired an Archos 43.  I don't particularly recommend the device, but it has the advantage for me of not being a phone (so I don't have to switch from my grandfathered-in phone plan that gives me unlimited Internet on my Treo at a ridiculously low rate), plus a manufacturer who has a very open attitude.  A happy thing: PDF readers for Android are an order of magnitude better than PalmPDF (though PalmPDF was a great step forward from Adobe's reader for Palm), and the higher resolution screen is quite helpful.

But what about non-PDF ebooks?  It looks like the standard format of the future is epub.  So I converted my Plucker version of Aquinas's Summa Theologica to html.  This generated 626 html files (about one per article), total size 25 mb.  These html files use very simple formatting, which should make them easily convertible.  I then converted the html to epub with Calibre.  Options: 260K segments, don't split on page breaks.  Result: a 6.9mb epub file (the Plucker file was 5.6mb).  This is quite large as epubs go, since most epubs are novel-length, rather than Summa-length.

What would I like in an ebook reader?

1. Speed (I don't want to wait 30 seconds to open the Summa at a conference to look something up prior to asking a question). 
2. Good searching at a decent speed through large texts.
3. Multiple bookmarks/annotations.  
4. Good use of a small screen.
5. Scrolling rather than paging (this is a taste preference, but I think paging is a left-over from dead-tree technology;  why should one have to flip back and forth to see a difficult passage that is broken between pages--one should just be able to scroll to locate the passage conveniently).
6. Open source.

Item (1) and (2) are essential.  Item (3) is close to essential, but I find I don't use Plucker's bookmarks/annotations quite as much as I thought I would.

I tried: Moon+, FBReader, CoolReader, Aldiko, the Nook app, StarBooks, Foliant Beta, Mantano Trial and the Kindle app.  FBReaderJ and CoolReader are open source.  I don't know about Foliant and StarBooks.  The others are closed source.  All are free or have free or trial versions which is what I tested.

Summary: None of the readers was 100% satisfactory for my purposes.  Moon+ and Mantano are the best choices.  Moreover, both have very responsive developers who are interested in working with me on large text issues.  If you care more about searching than opening large documents very quickly, Moon+ is the choice.  If you care more about opening large documents very quickly, Mantano is the choice.  But this may change with future versions.

My main tests were just opening the Summa and searching through it for the nonsense word "trubbli".  As background for the speed tests, the Summa opens in two or three seconds in Plucker on my PalmTX, which is underclocked to 208mhz, and a search through the Summa takes 41 seconds.

The Archos has a 1000mhz CPU.  The epub format is basically zipped html files, each at most 260K long, with some additional meta-data.  It should be possible to extract a single file from an epub zip just about instantly, to open an epub file it shouldn't be necessary to do more than open some meta-data files and then load the correct html segment.  It takes the Archos 0.05seconds to unzip a 200K file (unrepresentatively large) from my summa2.epub file using busybox's unzip.  Unzipping all of the files in the Summa takes 17 seconds on the device, and then searching them with grep takes less than two seconds.

Moon+: This was the first reader I tried, after hearing really good things about it. This mini-review is edited as of January 5, 2012, and is of the version downloaded from the developer's site. It takes 10 seconds to load the document. That is slightly disappointing--I thought it would be like Plucker, namely almost instant.  Display options are great, scrolling is great.  I haven't tried the annotation features, but I've been told they're good.  Search took about 22 seconds, which is close to the best that one can expect given how long unzipping the epub takes.
The developer is great and responsive. For instance, the version I tried in the summer took an unacceptable 20 seconds to open the document, and the developer has worked on reducing this. Moreover, the summer's release had an annoying dialog each time you clicked on an intra-document link, but it's now gone.

Apart from the imperfect 10 second load time, Moon+ is great. You can scroll, you have a ton of display options, etc. It is the best choice right now for large ebooks as far as I can tell. And the 10 second load time is decent given some of the competition.

FBReader: This is open source, which means a lot to me as I don't expect any reader to have all the features I want, and so I expect to have to add features myself.  It took about 40 seconds to load the document, which is unacceptable.  Search time was a creditable 20 seconds.  Since the opening time was utterly unacceptable, further tests were unnecessary.

Coolreader: Another open source offering.  Took a minute to load.  Took three seconds to flip a page.  I couldn't click on any of the links.  Didn't try any more as it was not usable.

Aldiko: A pretty popular closed-source reader.  It loaded the file instantly, thereby showing that there is nothing intrinsic to the epub file structure that makes that impossible.  But the search was unacceptably slow at  about 74 seconds.  Moreover, it pages rather than scrolls, which is annoying.  I didn't try any more as the search speed killed it as an option.

Nook: Annoyingly, it wants epubs in its own directory, and doesn't let you browse the file system to get to them, like other readers let you.  It also loaded the file instantly.  However, it had really annoying large margins, showing too little text per screen.  Maybe it's optimized for larger screens (the Archos has a 4.3" screen), but such large margins should be adjustable in the app, and I couldn't find an adjustment for them.  The deal-killer was the search.  After two minutes it wasn't done, and I gave up and uninstalled it.

Starbooks: After about 20 seconds of first-time importing, it loads instantly.  Page-based model.  But no search!  So, that's that.

Foliant Beta: It took a while to scan the Summa, but it cached the scan, so next time it started instantly.  Developers whose model requires the epub to be all scanned (which I am guessing is what is behind the unacceptable startup times on otherwise good apps, such as Moon+ and FBReader) should take note.  Search speed was marginal at 35 seconds, too, and it scrolled fine.  The killer was that I couldn't click on intra-document links, and I couldn't change the absurdly large font size.  The inability to click on links makes books like the Summa which seem to have been written with hyperlinks in mind (wasn't St Thomas ahead of his time?) unusable.  However, it is a beta version, so it may improve.

Mantano: Starts the Summa instantly.  Unfortunately, like many readers, it's page based rather than allowing for continuous scrolling (why pages? most page breaks are an accidental division with no semantic value).  And as with a number of other readers that started the book instantly, searching the Summa was slow, about 80 seconds.  I was using the free seven day trial.  Unlike the other apps, Mantano has no permanent free version.  However, Mantano has an extremely responsive development team that collects suggestions, and it looks like they are quite interested in working on these issues.

Kindle: Unlike the other apps, this doesn't have epub support as far as I know.  Fortunately, Calibre can convert to Mobipocket format, too, so I put a Mobipocket conversion of the Summa, based on the same html files, in the Kindle directory (like some of the other apps, it only reads books in a special directory; my beloved Plucker on PalmOS does that, so I don't complain too much).  It opened in a second or less.  However, it is page-based, with no scrolling.  More seriously, the search.  The good news is that unlike most other apps, it has a progress bar for the search.  The other apps mostly just show you a spinner and so you don't know what percentage has been searched.  The bad news is that I started the search around the time I started writing this paragraph, and it's still going.  It's now about 3/4 done, and my timer says that it took 4 minutes to get there.  It's definitely one of the slower searchers.  Since Kindle is the big name in ebooks, I'm going to let the time get to the end.  Almost there.  Finally: "0 results for 'trubbli'."  I missed the exact time of finishing, but it was around 6 minutes.  Wow!  How did they manage it to be so slow? There is also a subpixel rendering bug, at least as January 5, 2012.

Conclusions: I have yet to find anything that works as well for my purposes as Plucker on my 5+ year old Palm TX, though the faster search speed of Moon+ almost compensates for the slower document opening speed.  Perhaps I should try readers that use other formats than epub, like Mobi.  Or perhaps I should just take Coolreader or FBReader and bang on the source until it does what I want it to do.  Or perhaps I should just wait until something comes along that is compelling better than Plucker on Palm.

Or maybe I should just keep on downloading epub apps.  I'll post comments with test results on other epub readers or update the post.

A disjunction about wronging

Suppose Merlin believes there is a parallel universe containing infinitely many people and that by scratching both ears simultaneously he can cause horribly painful deaths to each of them. And suppose that Merlin scratches both ears simultaneously in order to cause that horrible suffering and death. He has done something infinitely wrong—infinitely-multiple attempted murder—whether or not there are any people in a parallel universe. But whom have he wronged if there is no one in a parallel universe?

I think the only plausible answers are:

1. God
2. Merlin
3. nobody and nothing.

If these are the only answers, and if we generalize from this case, it seems that we have to hold that:

4. (a) God exists and is wronged by every wrong action, or (b) all wrong actions wrong their agent, or (c) it is possible for an action to be infinitely wrong without anybody or anything being wronged (or two or more of the above options hold).

Each disjunct in (4) is controversial. I embrace both (a) and (b).

Infinite promises

Suppose I promise x that I will do whatever I promise y, and I promised y that I will do whatever I promise x.  I then promise x to bring ice cream to the party.  In so doing, I have violated my promise to x to bring ice cream to the party.  My violating my promise to x to bring ice cream violated my promise to y to do whatever I promise x.  My violating my promise to y to do whatever I promise x then violated my promise to x to do whatever I promised to y.  And so on.

It looks like by the simple neglect of bringing ice cream to the party, I have violated three promises in infinitely many ways.

But this action doesn't seem to be infinitely wrong, or if it is infinitely wrong, it is such because of the offense against God implicit in the promise-breaking, and not because of the infinite sequence of violations.

But why isn't it infinitely wrong (at least bracketing the theological significance)?

Is it because it's just one action?  No: for a single action can be infinitely wrong, as when someone utters a spell to make infinitely many people miserable while believing that the spell will be efficacious (it doesn't matter whether the spell is efficacious and whether there are infinitely many people).

Is it because only a finite number of promises are broken?  No: for a single promise can be broken infinitely often (given an infinite future, or a future dense interval of events if that's possible) with the demerit adding up.  (Imagine that I promise never to do something, and then I do it daily for eternity.)

Maybe one will bite the bullet and say that the action is infinitely wrong.  What's the harm in saying that?  Answer: incorrect moral priorities.  Keeping oneself from infinitely wrong actions is a much higher priority than keeping oneself from finitely wrong actions.  But it doesn't seem that one should greatly, if at all, prioritize being the sort of person who brings ice cream to parties in the above circumstances over, say, refraining from finitely but seriously hurting people's feelings.

Puzzling, isn't it?

The above generated a puzzle by infinite reflection.  But one can generate puzzling cases without such reflection.  Suppose x loves y, and I harm y.  I therefore also harm x, since as we learn from Aristotle, Aquinas and Nozick, the interests of the beloved are interests of the lover.  Now suppose infinitely many people love y.  (If a simultaneous infinity is impossible, assume eternalism and imagine an infinite future sequence of people who love y.  Or just suppose I falsely believe that infinitely many people love y.)  It seems that by imposing a minor harm on y, I impose a minor (perhaps very minor) harm on each of infinitely many people, and thereby an infinite harm.  Now, suppose that I have a choice whether to impose a minor harm on y, who is loved by infinitely many persons, or a major harm on z, who is loved by only finitely many.  As long as the major harm is only finitely greater than the minor harm, it seems that it is infinitely worse to impose the minor harm on y than the major harm on z.  But that surely is mistaken (and isn't it particularly bad to harm those who have fewer friends?).

One might try to bring God in.  Everyone is loved by God, and God is infinite, and so the major harm to z goes against the interests of God, and God's interests count infinitely (not that God is worse off "internally"), so the major harm to z multiplied by the importance of God's interests will outweigh the minor harm to y, even if one takes into account the infinitely many people who love y, since divine infinity trumps all other infinities.  But this neglects the fact that God also loves all the infinitely many people who love y, and hence the harm to the infinitely many lovers of y also gets multiplied by a divine infinity.

Nor is infinity needed to generate the puzzle.  Suppose that N people love y and only ten people love z, and my choice is whether to impose one hour of pain on y or fifty years of pain on z.  No matter how little the badness of x's suffering to x's lovers, it seems that if you make N large enough, it seems it will overshadow the disvalue of the fifty years of pain to z.

I think the right answer to all this is that wrongs, benefits and harms can't be arithmetized in a very general way.  There is, perhaps, pervasive incommensurability, so that the harms to y's lovers are incommensurable with the harms to y.

But I don't know that incommensurability is the whole story.  It is a benefit to one if a non-evil project one identifies with is successful.  Now imagine two sport teams, one that has a million fans and the other of which has a thousand.  Is it really the case that members of the less popular team have a strong moral reason to bring it about that the other team wins because of the benefit to the greater number of fans, even if it is a moral reason overridden by their duties of integrity and special duties to their fans?  (Likewise, is it really the case that the interests of Americans qua Americans morally count for about ten times as much as the interests of Canadians qua Canadians?)

Yet some harms and benefits do arithmetize fairly well.  It does seem about equally bad to impose two hours of suffering on ten people as one hour of suffering on twenty.

So whatever function combines values and disvalues is very complicated, and depends on the kind of values and disvalues being combined.  The only way a simple additivity can be assured is if we close our eyes to the vast universe of types of values, say restricting ourselves to pleasure and suffering as hedonistic utilitarians do.

PDF Viewer for Android

I acquired an Android device, but haven't been too happy with any of the free PDF viewers I tried for ebook reading. E.g., some don't keep your place in the document when you exit. Anyway, the closest I found was the APV project, and it being open source, I joined and added most of the features I wanted. In case anybody else wants an acceptable and free PDF Viewer for Android, a pre-release version with a whole bunch of enhancements by me is here. Send me bug reports.

More on chance and compatibilism

This is another attempt at defending the main point of this post, that the randomness objection is also problematic for compatibilists.

Compatibilism is of merely academic interest unless the freedom or responsibility whose compatibility with determinism is being defended is close enough to the kind of freedom we have. For instance, a freedom or responsibility whose compatibility with determinism is assured by supposing time travel or backwards causation is not close enough to ours to be of great interest, except academically.

Now consider this thesis:

1. Many of the actions that we are responsible for are significantly causally affected by factors that have little to do with the ingredients in a compatibilist decision theory.

Consider, for instance, the fact that surely in the ordinary course of things, judges are responsible for their decisions. But a fairly recent study found that judges have a 65% chance of granting parole shortly after a food break, and a close to zero chance at the end of a period of not eating. Yet, except in extreme cases (e.g., a judge who had been starving for days), we would surely hold judges responsible for their decisions at both times. Effects like this are, I suspect, not at all uncommon.

But a decision to a significant extent determined by such causal factors is no less "a matter of chance" than a libertarian-free indeterministic choice is. This suggests that compatibilists cannot afford to wield the randomness objection against libertarians, unless they want to say that freedom is much more rare than we normally think.

What can compatibilists say? Well, they can go agent-causal and say that, nonetheless, the action is caused by the agent, and that makes it free. Or they can say that the desires of the agent play a significant part in the decision, and that that is enough to make the action be an action of the agent, rather than a mere matter of chance. But the libertarian can make either move.

Producing a character

Suppose I act in a way that contributes to Bob's having a vicious character that deterministically produces wrong actions under a wide variety of circumstances. Am I responsible for these wrong actions of Bob's? Maybe and maybe not. I might have completely inculpably acted in such a way as produced this character in Bob. Perhaps my action caused Bob to undergo some minor temptation that he simply did not withstand. Perhaps I was brainwashed into brainwashing Bob. On the other hand, if with full responsibility I produced Bob's vicious character, and produced it so that it would deterministically produce such wrong actions, then I am fully responsible for those wrong actions of Bob's. The following seems right:

1. x is responsible for the actions determined by y's character precisely to the extent that x is responsible for y's having a character that determines such actions.

Now, I will apply principle (1) in the special case where x=y. You might wonder if (1) is applicable in that case. But consider cases where I act so to induce a vicious character in some individual under some description and it turns out that that individual is me. For instance, I pay a brainwasher to kidnap a random person and brainwash that person into being a bank robber, and I turn out to be the random person. In those cases, (1) seems exactly right, too. It is plausible that (1) holds in general. (I think I am thinking about N-responsibility here.)

In the special case where x=y, we get the claim that one is responsible for the actions determined by one's character precisely to the extent that one is responsible for having such a character. And now add this:

2. x is responsible for a state of affairs S only if S depends (causally or constitutively or by a chain of causal and/or constitutive relations) on or is identical with one or more of x's choices or actions that x is responsible for.

One could probably formulate this in terms of degrees of responsibility, but there may be some difficulties. The idea is that one is responsible for S to the extent that x is responsible, under that description, for choices or actions on which S depends or with which S is identical. Maybe that's exactly right or maybe it needs to be tweaked. But I'll only need (2).

Now, in the case of someone all of whose actions are determined by her character, given (1) (in the special case x=y) and (2), if the individual is responsible for any action, we generate an infinite regress, as in Galen Strawson's argument against responsibility.

I think the compatibilist has to either deny (2), and insist that we can be responsible for a character that does not depend on any responsible choices or actions, or else has to distinguish in (1) between the case where x is non-identical with y and normal cases where x is identical with y (cases like the one where I hire the random brainwasher being abnormal).

As a libertarian, I also think the above arguments conflate derivative and non-derivative responsibility, but I do not think the compatibilist can really make much use of that distinction.

A puzzle about prayer

Consider x's faithful Christian prayer that y would always avoid some sin. (Perhaps x=y, and perhaps they are distinct.) Such prayers are indeed offered, and yet it does indeed happen that sometimes y does commit that sin. This is more puzzling than cases where x prays that y be healed of some physical ailment, because sin is much worse, perhaps "incomparably worse", than any physical ailment.

Libertarians have the beginning of a story about cases like that. For God to ensure the literal fulfillment of such a prayer would require God either to take away from y the opportunity to commit the sin or to take away y's freedom, and in both cases God would be depriving y of a good. God won't give us a serpent when we ask for a fish, and he may well not give us a serpent even if we ask for a serpent. I am inclined to think that God always gives us a gift that is in some sense at least as worth getting as the one we asked for, and it may well be that it is better to get the opportunity and freedom to sin, together with the grace to resist temptation if one rejects not the grace, than to get none of these, but avoid the risk of sin.

Compatibilists have a little bit more difficulty with the puzzle, I think. I think they will say a story about how God is glorified by y's punishment and/or redemption after the sin. I think this works better if one is a universalist (I really think that in the end a Calvinist view of grace forces one into universalism), since the universalist can at least say that there is always redemption, and hence while x doesn't get exactly what x prayed for, y's redemption, which is what x presumably really wanted most of all, is still assured by other means. But it is tougher if one is not a universalist.

"I swear to tell the truth..."

In court, witnesses swear to tell the truth. That's interesting. Let's consider the consequences of taking this literally. Then, witnesses do not swear to tell what they believe, but to tell the truth. This means that even if they tell their honest opinion, they can be in violation of their oath, if their honest opinion is incorrect. This ups the ante. An oath to tell the truth imposes a particular responsibility on the speaker: not only to say what one thinks, but to make sure that what one thinks is true. Of course, if one has fulfilled one's epistemic responsibilities and one is still wrong, then one's violation of the oath is not culpable. But it is a violation of the oath nonetheless. So swearing to tell the truth, and not merely to be sincere, ups the ante. When we make a promise or a vow, it is not only our duty to refrain from consciously going against it, but it is our positive duty to take reasonable steps to ensure that we do not violate it. In the case of a promise to tell the truth, these steps will involve ensuring that there is a high probability of truth, and hence fulfilling one's epistemic responsibilities.

Interestingly, too, if we take the oath literally, then a person cannot be held to have violated her oath if she spoke contrary to what she believed but accidentally asserted the truth. At the same time, such speech is morally just as corrupt and deserving of punishment as when what is asserted is in fact false. If I have vowed never to eat meat, and I eat a veggie burger in the false belief that it is beef, while I have not broken my vow, my moral corruption is exactly like that of a vow-breaker (just as the moral corruption in attempted murder is the same as in successful murder, all other things being equal).

I don't know if the oath is to be taken literally in regard to the promise to tell the truth, but I like the idea that it is. This would also dovetail neatly with the idea that in ordinary assertion it is our moral duty to refrain from asserting the false (and not merely to refrain from insincerity).

Two types of degrees of responsibility

I've been thinking about comparing degrees of reponsibility, and then it hit me that there are two kinds of degrees of responsibility. Start by dividing responsibility first by the kinds of norms that are being brought to bear on the evaluation. So we have moral, aesthetic, legal, epistemic, etc. responsibility. Within each of these "normative types" of responsibility we may wish to evaluate the degree to which one is responsible. And it is here that there are the two interesting types that I have been thinking about.

Consider what one might call "merely causal responsibility." This is not a normative notion, and it is not a kind of responsibility in the above sense. But it will be suggestive to think about it. There are two dimensions along which we may measure merely causal responsibility: necessity (N) and sufficiency (S). Degrees of necessary causal responsibility (causal N-responsibility) measure just how necessary the cause was to the effect—how much of a difference the cause made to the effect. Degrees of sufficient causal responsibility (causal S-responsibility) measure how much of the effect was accomplished by the cause. Roughly, a substance cause is N-responsible to the degree that it could have easily prevent the effect, that it made a large difference to its being the case that the effect, rather than some relevant alternative, occurred. And a substance cause has S-responsibility to the degree that it is difficult for other cause to prevent the effect, that other things made a small difference to its being the case that the effect, rather than some relevant alternative, occurred.

There is a suggestive, though rough, formal relationship between S- and N-responsibiity. Thus, x's S-responsibility for E inversely covaries with other things' N-responsibility for E, and x's N-responsibility for E inversely covaries with other things' S-responsibility for E. Thus, it is not possible that x has maximal S-responsibility for E while y, distinct from x, has maximal N-responsibility for E. But it is possible that both x and y has maximal N-responsibility for E—think of how each parent has close to maximal, or maybe even maximal, causal N-responsibility for the child's existence. And likewise it is possible that both x and y has maximal S-responsibility for E—think of two sharpshooters each of whom hits the victim in the heart.

Roughly, N-responsibility goes with preventability and S-responsibility goes with achievement.

Now, there are similar such types of degrees of normative responsibility. The degree of one's S-responsibility for E measures how much E counts an achievement of one's own, how much one's name can be inscribed on E, in respect of the relevant norms, how little others have N-responsibility for E. The degree of one's N-responsibility for E measures how much one is to be treated as having made a difference in respect of E, how little others have S-responsibility for E. These aren't definitions—I am simply sketching some suggestive ideas that I don't have fleshed out.

Among the following, I am inclined to think the claims about moral N-responsibility are true, perhaps given some provisos about knowledge, but I am not sure about the ones about moral S-responsibility:

• One's moral N-responsibility for a conjunctive state of affairs is at least as great as one's moral N-responsibility for the conjunct that one is most morally N-responsible for.
• One's moral N-responsibility for a disjunctive state of affairs is at most as great as one's moral N-responsibility for the disjunct that one is least N-responsible for.
• One's moral S-responsibility for a conjunctive state of affairs is at most as great as one's moral S-responsibility for the conjunct that one is least morally S-responsible for. (?)
• One's moral S-responsibility for a disjunctive state of affairs is at least as great as one's moral S-responsibility for the disjunct that one is most morally S-responsible for. (?)

Working out a logic of N- and S-responsibility would be a very useful thing.

Here is an interesting thing. In the case of moral responsibility for evil, N-responsibility counts for a lot. Being an essential cog in the production of an evil is really bad. But in the case of moral responsibility for good, N-responsibility counts for much less, though S-responsibility counts for a lot. Being an essential cog in the production of a good is not as good as it is bad to be an essential cog in the production of an evil.

Next, here is an interesting question: When compatibilists and incompatibilists are talking about what one is responsible for, are they perhaps confusing N- and S-responsibility sometimes? Since N- and S-responsibility seem to differently relevant in the case of goods and evil, it may make a difference whether one's intuitions are driven by cases of good actions or cases of evil actions. Evil actions are, I think, the more commonly discussed in the literature, which pushes the discussion towards N-responsibility.

Here is my intuition, one that I think a lot of incompatibilists have. If C is a sufficient cause of E, then one is no more morally N-responsible for E than one is for C. (One might also conjecture that if C is a necessary cause of E, then one is no more morally S-responsible for E than one is for C. But I am less sure about this, for the same reason that I am not sure about the bulleted claims about S-responsibility above.) If this is true, then something like incompatibilism about N-responsibility follows if there is no backwards N-responsibility. For if causal determinism holds, then the precise state of the universe prior to my conception is a sufficient cause of everything I am a cause of, and hence I am no more morally N-responsible for anything I am a cause of than I am morally N-responsible for the precise state of the universe prior to my conception. And it is plausible that I am not at all morally responsible for the precise state of the universe prior to my conception.

Desires

There are times when we have two incompatible desires and we act on the one that felt weaker to us. In those cases, there is a temptation to say: "It must have actually been stronger, since it won out." But to say that goes against the introspective evidence which is that it was, in fact, weaker. Moreover, some of these cases will be cases where one is praiseworthy or blameworthy for acting. So, if we take seriously the introspective evidence, we conclude that sometimes one is praiseworthy or blameworthy for acting on a weaker desire. Those who think freedom is compatible with actions not being determined by one's character and circumstances (that will include all libertarians and some compatibilists) can accept this at face value.