Molinism and behavioral dispositions

There is some sort of a link between counterfactuals and dispositions, though there are lots of counterexamples to direct links. Here is a very weak principle affirming such a link:

1. Suppose that x is in state S at time t and that x’s being in S at t grounds x’s being disposed to behavior A after t. Then there is some maximally determinate categorical proposition p describing the world up to time t and logically compatible with x’s being in S at t such that it is false that were p true and x in state S, x would fail to engage in behavior A after t.

To put it very roughly, this messy principle says that if a disposition to a behavior is grounded in a state, then it’s not the case that no matter what one adds to the state, the behavior would not occur. Suppose that (1) is a necessary truth.

Add this:

2. It is possible for a human being to have an unactualized indeterministic disposition with respect to non-derivatively free behavior.

For instance, there is presumably a shade R of red that Jean Vanier has never met someone wearing, and yet he is disposed to behave non-derivatively freely kindly to persons wearing R.

What I have said so far does not, however, cohere with Molinism. For on Molinism, the conditionals of free will logically float free from the indeterministic dispositions of things. There is, for instance, a possible world where Jean Vanier still has the same kindly dispositions that he does in the actual world, but where the Molinist conditionals say that in the case of any of the appropriate maximally deterministic categorical strengthenings of the claim that he meets a person wearing R, if that strengthening were actual, he would behave unkindly to that person. This would violate (1).

[Note added later: This was, of course, written before the revelations about Jean Vanier's abusiveness. I would certainly have chosen a different example if I were writing this post now.]

Intending material conditionals and dispositions, with an excursus on lethally-armed robots

Alice has tools in a shed and sees a clearly unarmed thief approaching the shed. She knows she is in no danger of her life or limb—she can easily move away from the thief—but points a gun at the thief and shouts: “Stop or I’ll shoot to kill.” The thief doesn’t stop. Alice fulfills the threat and kills the thief.

Bob has a farm of man-eating crocodiles and some tools he wants to store safely. He places the tools in a shed in the middle of the crocodile farm, in order to dissuade thieves. The farm is correctly marked all-around “Man-eating crocodiles”, and the crocodiles are quite visible to all and sundry. An unarmed thief breaks into Bob’s property attempting to get to his tool shed, but a crocodile eats him on the way.

Regardless of what local laws may say, Alice is a murderer. In fulfilling the threat, by definition she intended to kill the thief who posed no danger to life or limb. (The case might be different if the tools were needed for Alice to survive, but even then I think she shouldn’t intend death.) What about Bob? Well, there we don’t know what the intentions are. Here are two possible intentions:

1. Prospective thieves are dissuaded by the presence of the man-eating crocodiles, but as a backup any that not dissuaded are eaten.

2. Prospective thieves are dissuaded by the presence of the man-eating crocodiles.

If Bob’s intention is (1), then I think he’s no different from Alice. But Bob’s intention could simply be (2), whereas Alice’s intention couldn’t simply be to dissuade the thief, since if that were simply her intention, she wouldn’t have fired. (Note: the promise to shoot to kill is not morally binding.) Rather, when offering the threat, Alice intended to dissuade and shoot to kill as a backup, and then when she shot in fulfillment of the threat, she intended to kill. If Bob’s intention is simply (2), then Bob may be guilty of some variety of endangerment, but he’s not a murderer. I am inclined to think this can be true even if Bob trained the crocodiles to be man-eaters (in which case it becomes much clearer that he’s guilty of a variety of endangerment).

But let’s think a bit more about (2). The means to dissuading thieves is to put the shed in a place where there are crocodiles with a disposition to eat intruders. So Bob is also intending something like this:

3. There be a dispositional state of affairs where any thieves (and maybe other intruders) tend to die.

However, in intending this dispositional state of affairs, Bob need not be intending the disposition’s actuation. He can simply intend the dispositional state of affairs to function not by actuation but by dissuasion. Moreover, if the thief dies, that’s not an accomplishment of Bob’s. On the other hand, if Bob intended the universal conditional

4. All thieves die

or even:

5. Most thieves die

then he would be accomplishing the deaths of thieves if any were eaten. Thus there is a difference between the logically complex intention that (4) or (5) be true, and the intention that there be a dispositional state of affairs to the effect of (4) or (5). This would seem to be the case even if the dispositional state of affairs entailed (4) or (5). Here’s why there is such a difference. If many thieves come and none die, then that constitutes or grounds the falsity of (4) and (5). But it does not constitute or ground the falsity of (3), and that would be true even if it entailed the falsity of (3).

This line of thought, though, has a curious consequence. Automated lethally-armed guard robots are in principle preferable to human lethally-armed guards. For the human guard either has a policy of killing if the threat doesn’t stop the intruder or has a policy of deceiving the intruder that she has such a policy. Deception is morally problematic and a policy of intending to kill is morally problematic. On the other hand, with the robotic lethally-armed guards, nobody needs to deceive and nobody needs to have a policy of killing under any circumstances. All that’s needed is the intending of a dispositional state of affairs. This seems preferable even in circumstances—say, wartime—where intentional killing is permissible, since it is surely better to avoid intentional killing.

But isn’t it paradoxical to think there is a moral difference between setting up a human guard and a robotic guard? Yet a lethally-armed robotic guard doesn’t seem significantly different from locating the guarded location on a deadly crocodile farm. So if we think there is no moral difference here, then we have to say that there is no difference between Alice’s policy of shooting intruders dead and Bob’s setup.

I think the moral difference between the human guard and the robotic guard can be defended. Think about it this way. In the case of the robotic guard, we can say that the death of the intruder is simply up to the intruder, whereas the human guard would still have to make a decision to go with the lethal policy in response to the intruder’s decision not to comply with the threat. The human guard could say “It’s on the intruder’s head” or “I had no choice—I had a policy”, but these are simply false: both she and the intruder had a choice.

None of this should be construed as a defence in practice of autonomous lethal robots. There are obvious practical worries about false positives, malfunctions, misuse and lowering the bar to a country’s initiating lethal hostilities.

The dispositional account of ability, the Principle of Alternate Possibility and compatibilism

The Principle of Alternate Possibility says something like:

• (PAP) If x freely does A, then x is able to do otherwise than A.

Michael Fara in a very interesting paper has offered an account of ability that makes PAP compatible with both determinism and Frankfurt examples. The clever move is to note that ability should not be tied to counterfactuals like

• Were x to try in circumstances C, x would do A

since such counterfactuals can be "masked" in Frankfurt cases, but to dispositions. More precisely:

• (DispAb) x is able to do B in circumstances C if and only if x has a disposition to do B when trying to do B in C.

The possession of a disposition to do B upon trying to do B in C is compatible with being actually determined to do A (where B is incompatible with A). And Frankfurt cases don't take away the disposition, but only mask the counterfactual. This is very neat.

Very neat, except that it runs into one serious difficulty. The definition of ability cannot be plugged into PAP. To plug it into PAP, we would need DispAb to define being able to do B. But DispAb doesn't define that. It defines being able to do B in circumstances C. And PAP has no mention of circumstances. In other words, PAP uses a two-place concept of ability—x is able to do A—while DispAb defines a three-place concept—x is able to do A in C.

Maybe this is much ado about nothing. While PAP doesn't mention circumstances, we should take it to say:

• (PAP') If x freely does (variant: chooses) A, then x is able to do (variant: choose) otherwise than A in these circumstances.

But now the problem is evident. For what are these circumstances in a Frankfurt case? Suppose we say:

1. The circumstances of deciding between A and B while there is a neurosurgeon who upon observing that you are about to try to do otherwise than A will prevent you from doing otherwise than A.

But you are not disposed to do otherwise than A when trying to do otherwise than A in circumstances (1). The details depend on how we spell out (1). Either the neurosurgeon manages to redirect your action towards A before you try to do otherwise or right after you have begun to try. If after, then it is clear that you are not disposed to do A in circumstances (1), since to have such a disposition you'd need to have a disposition to get past the neurosurgeon's control when you try to do otherwise, which you don't. If, on the other hand, the neurosurgeon is able to prevent the trying itself, then trying to do A in (1) is impossible, and Fara says you don't have dispositions whose activation conditions are impossible. (He needs this to handle cases where some psychological compulsion removes your ability to do B by making it psychologically impossible to try to do B.)

Of course, one might use coarser-grained circumstances:

2. The circumstances of deciding between A and B.

But that's too coarse grained. Suppose, for instance, that you are deciding between staying put and running off, while unbeknownst to you, you are tied down. That's a case where obviously you have no ability to do otherwise than stay put. Nonetetheless, you do have a disposition to do otherwise than A when trying to do otherwise than A in (2). For normally when you try to do otherwise than A in (2), you do succeed.

The above approach to figuring out what the relevant circumstances are is too ad hoc anyway. Obviously, one can specify the circumstances at varying levels of descriptive detail. We need a principled way to decide how much detail. The minimal level of detail is given by (2). We have already seen that that's too little. We presumably cannot include in the circumstances what the decision itself is—we get irrelevantly weird stuff if we ask what you are disposed to do in the odd circumstances of trying to do B when having decided to A. So that would be too much. Where can a principled line be drawn? I think the three most natural non-arbitrary options are:

3. The circumstances are all events that are causally prior to your decision.
4. The circumstances are all events that are not your decision nor causally posterior to your decision.
5. The circumstances are the complete state of the universe temporally just prior to your decision.

But now notice that given causal determinism, none of these three ways of specifying the circumstances is going to allow you to maintain PAP in a causally deterministic world. For each of them in a deterministic universe is sufficient, at least in conjunction with the laws[note 1], to fix what you're going to decide.

So all the non-arbitrary ways I can think of for spelling out the circumstances to plug the dispositional account of ability into PAP are not ones a compatibilist who wants PAP to hold can embrace.

But interestingly Fara's dispositional approach can help the incompatibilist! For those of us who think that causal (or at least explanatory) priority is the most important thing vis-a-vis freedom will, I think, be drawn to (3) as the right description of the circumstances. But the libertarian can say that in the neurosurgeon-type Frankfurt case, you do have the disposition to act otherwise than A when trying to do A in circumstances C satisfying (3). For the neurosurgeon's activities are not causally prior to your decision. (And if they were, then the Frankfurt case would make your action be determined by causal factors prior to your action, and that would beg the question against the typical libertarian.)

So, to recap, a non ad hoc filling out of the details in the dispositional account of ability (a) is incompatible with saving PAP on compatibilism but (b) can help the libertarian with Frankfurt examples.

Frankfurt, incompatibilism and finking

Some dispositions are deterministic, or nearly so. In normal conditions, in the presence of the trigger, they do their one thing. Sugar at room temperature in water dissolves. Some dispositions are indeterministic. The electron in a mixed up/down state sent through a magnetic field will go up or down; it might go up but it might also go down. We now know better than to try to define dispositions in terms of conditionals, unless perhaps we are fond of ceteris paribus or "normally" clauses, and even then defining dispositions in terms of would-conditionals is problematic. For the dispositions can be finked. Sugar is not such that it would dissolve at room temperature in water if there were a counterfactual intervener who would vaporize it as soon as it was dipped in water.

For exactly the same reason, to define a disposition as indeterministic by means of might-conditionals is problematic, and we should know better than to try. Let's say that flipping a coin has an indeterministic disposition to result in heads or in tails. But we can imagine Black, a counterfactual intervener who, as soon as the coin flies in the air, can tell which way it's going to land if it's not interfered with, and if it's not heads, he takes away the coin's disposition and makes it land heads. In the presence of Black, it's false that the coin might land tails. But the coin still has an indeterministic disposition in the presence of Black, even if it exhibits not even the least flicker of freedom (e.g., take the case where Black has access to divine middle knowledge about how the coin would go) and worries about counterfactual interveners should not talk us out of the useful notion of an indeterministic disposition.

The Principle of Alternate Possibilities (PAP) is closely analogous to a might-conditional characterization of an indeterministic disposition. And just as we now know we should not try to characterize indeterministic dispositions by means of "if ... might ..." (at least not without a dollop of "normally"), likewise we should not try to characterize freedom by means of "could have" or "might". But just as the realization that dispositions can be finked should not make us abandon the idea that some dispositions—say, quantum mechanical ones—are indeterministic, so too Frankfurt cases should not make us abandon the idea that something indeterministic is going on. It is reasonable in the face of worries about finking simply to take dispositions to be primitive, and in particular to take the notion of an indeterministic disposition with multiple outcomes (and maybe with probabilistic tendencies) to be primitive. And then it is reasonable to take it to be a necessary condition on a free choice that it is an exercises of an indeterministic disposition.

There are some pretty strong intuitions behind PAP—between Hume (inclusive) and Frankfurt (exclusive), compatibilists tended to feel the need to do justice to it, despite it being very difficult to do so satisfactorily. If a formulation of PAP can be given that is not subject to counterexamples and appears to capture a good deal of the intuitions behind PAP, there will be good reason to believe it. And I think there is such a formulation: The agent free to choose A in circumstances C has an indeterministic disposition to choose A or to choose something else in C. This seems to capture some of the intuition behind PAP, and also captures the intuition that some libertarians have that Frankfurt examples are missing something important. The down side of this formulation of PAP is that it directly denies that all dispositions are deterministic, and hence isn't going to be neutral ground. But that's fine. The neutral ground now shifts from PAP to the idea that "something like PAP is true".

Interestingly, fairly recently some compatibilists have started to try to rehabilitate PAP using dispositions (see, for instance, the references in this paper as well as this one). So the incompatibilist who makes this move will have to see if her proposed revamping of PAP is more plausible than the proposed compatibilist ones. But a revamping of PAP should be done, as PAP attempts to capture something central to our intuitions about freedom. And my point remains: to see Frankfurt examples as destroying the idea of alternatives as central to freedom is like seeing C. B. Martin's work as destroying the idea of dispositions.

Mumford's "Ungrounded Argument"

Mumford's argument for dispositions not grounded in non-dispositional properties is:

1. Some subatomic particles are simple.
2. Simples have "no lower-level components or properties".
3. All properties of subatomic particles are dispositional.
4. If x has a grounded dispositional property, the ground of that property is "among the lower-level components or properties" of x.

Here is one problem. A proton is supposed to be composed of two up quarks and one down quark, and this is a compositional, and not a dispositional, property of the proton. Maybe it is charitable, however, to restrict 3 to simple particles.

However, even after this modification, it seems that 3 is dubious. For instance, suppose an up quark is simple. But then, isn't simplicity a property, and a non-dispositional one at that, so that the up quark has a non-dispositional property?

Perhaps, then, we need to have a sparse view of properties. But simplicity seems sufficiently natural to qualify as a property even on sparse views. A different way to save 3 would be to restrict to intrinsic properties, and have a very narrow view of intrinsic properties: having an intrinsic property does not depend on an entity's relations to other entities or the lack of such relations. But being simple depends on not standing in a whole-to-part relation to anything else. In fact, the same restriction lets us not worry about the proton counterexample to 3, since being composed of quarks is not an intrinsic property, then. Note, however, that such a notion of intrinsic properties is narrow enough—for instance, squareness might not be an intrinsic property, since maybe an object is a square only because its parts are arranged a certain way.

But let us continue with such a narrow sense of intrinsicness. Is 3 true? Maybe not. Bill the Up Quark seems to have all sorts of non-dispositional properties: being identical with Bill, being u seconds old, having a worldline that is shaped in such-and-such a way, etc. Maybe some of these don't count as properties on a sufficiently austere sparse account of properties. But all that needs significant argument.

Actually, I am not completely sure about 4, or more precisely the conjunction of 3 and 4. Suppose Occasionalism is true. Then properties like "charge" are grounded in God's dispositions to move particles around. In such a case, we might keep 4 but deny that anything other than God has dispositional properties, or else we might keep 3, but allow that the particles' dispositions are grounded in God's dispositions. Now, Occasionalism is false. But the same issue comes up if one thinks that laws of nature are grounded in global entities—say, fields—that push particles around. Now, in such a case, we can try to ask about the entities that push particles around—don't they have dispositional properties, and aren't they simple? And quite possibly the answer is positive. But a lot more work is needed here.

Causal theories of mind

Suppose we have a causal theory of mind, like Lewis's. In this theory, states get their nature from the way they tend to causally interact. Now, suppose that Black, our faithful neurosurgeon with his neuroscope, observes Freddy's brain for all of Freddy's life. Moreover, Black has a script for how every neural event in Freddy's life is to go. As soon as there is a deviation from the script, Black blows up Freddy. Now, all of the counterfactuals about Freddy's neural states are destroyed. For instance, assuming it's not in Black's script that Freddy ever is visually aware of a giraffe, then instead of having the counterfactual: "Were a giraffe in Freddy's field of vision, Freddy would likely form such-and-such a belief", we have the counterfactual: "Were a giraffe in Freddy's field of vision, Freddy would explode." But suppose that all goes according to script. Then the neurosurgeon doesn't interfere, and so Freddy thinks like everybody else—despite all the counterfactuals being all wrong. If the causal theory is defined by counterfactuals about the mental states, this refutes the causal theory.

OK, that was too quick. Maybe the idea is to look at the counterfactuals that would hold of Freddy in a "normal environment" to define the states. But that won't do. Consider the mental state of seeing that things aren't normal. We can't define that simply in terms of normal environments I bet. Moreover, even supposing we can somehow abstract Freddy from his environment, we could make Black be a part of Freddy. How? Well, make Black be a little robot. Then give this robot one more function: it is also a very reliable artificial heart. Then implant the robot in Freddy's chest in place of his heart. It no longer makes sense to ask how Freddy would act in the absence of Black, since in the absence of Black—who is now Freddy's artificial heart—Freddy would be dead.

Maybe you think that Freddy is just a brain, so the heart is just part of the environment. Fine. Take some part of the brain that is important only for supplying nutrition to the rest of the brain, but that is computationally irrelevant. Replace it by Black (a robot that fulfills the functions of that part, but that would blow up Freddy were Freddy to depart from the script). And again we've got a problem.

We can perhaps even put Black more intimately inside Freddy. We could make Black be a mental process of Freddy's that monitors adherence to the script.

So the causal theory requires a counterfactual-free account of causal roles. The only option I see is an Aristotelian one. So the prospects for a causal theory of mind that uses only the ingredients of post-Aristotelian science are slim.

Becoming charged

Suppose I become negatively electrically charged. I then acquire a bunch of dispositional properties, such as the property of repelling electrons and attracting positrons. But have I gained any basic dispositional properties?

One could take one of two views here:

1. In becoming charged, I took on new basic dispositional properties characteristic of charge.
2. Prior to being charged, I already had the dispositional property of being such as to repel electrons and attract positrons when negatively charged.

On the first view, charge is a dispositional property. On the second view, charge is not a dispositional property per se, but a triggering condition for a dispositional property I already had. An advantage of the first view is that it helps explain why it is that charge makes anything that has it be ceteris paribus attractive to electrons and repellent to positrons. On the second view, it is just a coincidence or a matter of divine arrangement that all the material things there are have the dispositional property stated in (2). On the other hand, the second view is slightly neater in a different way, because it allows one to say that all dispositional properties are grounded in the essences of things. I suspect that only a generalization of the first view lets one preserve the Catholic view that pursuit of the supernatural end of human life is something graciously superadded on top of our nature.