Rise of Compatibilism MSRev

The Rise of Compatibilism: A Case Study in the Quantitative History of Philosophy SHAUN NICHOLS Incompatibilists about free will and responsibility often maintain that incompatibilism is the intuitive, commonsense position. Recently, this claim has come under unfavorable scrutiny from naturalistic philosophers who have surveyed philosophically uneducated undergraduates.1 But there is a much older problem for the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive – if incompatibilism is intuitive, why is compatibilism so popular in the history of philosophy? In this paper I will try to answer this question by pursuing a rather different naturalistic methodology. The idea is to look not at the responses of the philosophically naïve, but at the views of the most sophisticated – the philosophers 1 For statements of the intuitiveness of incompatibilism, see Robert Kane, “Responsibility, Luck, and Chance,” Journal of Philosophy, 96 (1999): 217-240 and Galen Strawson, Freedom and Belief. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). For empirical challenges to the claim that incompatibilism is intuitive, see Eddy Nahmias, Stephen Morris, Thomas Nadelhoffer, and Jason Turner, “Is Incompatibilism Intuitive,” forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research and Rob Woolfolk, John Doris, and John Darley, “Identification, Situational Constraint, and Social Cognition: Studies in the Attribution of Moral Responsibility,” Cognition (2006). And for a partial empirical defense of the intuitiveness of incompatibilism, see Shaun Nichols, and Joshua Knobe, “Moral Responsibility and Determinism: The Cognitive Science of Folk Intuitions,” forthcoming in Nous. 1 themselves. But we look at the history of philosophy not by further close reading of the texts, but rather, by doing the numbers. The paper will first set out the basic philosophical background of interest and then give a general methodological account of how a quantitative history of philosophy might proceed. This methodology will then be invoked as a tool for answering the question, why did compatibilism catch on? The hypothesis about compatibilism will be familiar – that compatibilism thrived because it is motivationally attractive. The novelty will be in using quantitative history to support the hypothesis. 1. PHILOSOPHICAL BACKGROUND Compatibilist accounts of free will have grown ever more sophisticated. The literature is impressive in both its subtlety and its volume. But we will be interested in the most elemental claim shared by all compatibilists, viz., the compatibility thesis: Free will and moral responsibility are compatible with determinism. That is, even if determinism is true, it does not threaten free will or moral responsibility. Those of us who embrace incompatibilism deny the compatibility thesis, of course. We maintain that determinism does conflict with our ordinary notions of free will and responsibility. In contemporary discussion of free will, incompatibilists self identify as the underdog.2 But we console ourselves with the idea that incompatibilism is the natural, intuitive view of free will and 2 See Derk Pereboom, “Determinism al dente,” Nous 29 (1995): 21-45 and Galen Strawson, “The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility,” Philosophical Studies 75 (1994): 5-24. 2 responsibility. The history of philosophy seems to have been unkind to our natural, intuitive notions. On one standard view, Hobbes was the first philosopher in the early modern period to articulate the compatibilist view clearly. But after Hobbes, compatibilism takes off. It might not be accurate to say that compatibilism becomes the dominant position in the early modern period, but it clearly enjoys an impressive members list. The enormous success of compatibilism is something of an embarrassment for those of us who think incompatibilism is the natural commonsense position. Incompatibilists are accordingly inclined to regard compatibilists as philosophically shallow. However, when compatibilism enjoys the support of Hobbes, Locke, Leibniz and Hume, the charge of philosophical superficiality starts to seem rather less plausible. Thus we are stuck with the question, If compatibilism violates commonsense, why is it such a hit? Many of us incompatibilists think we know the answer to this: it’s wishful thinking! Philosophers embrace compatibilism because they want it to be true. This view is, I think, common among incompatibilists. Famously, James dubs compatibilism a “quagmire of evasion”. Even more famously, Kant says it’s a “wretched subterfuge.” We can put the incompatibilist’s motivational hypothesis somewhat more precisely as follows: M: Philosophers embrace compatibilism despite its counterintuitiveness because compatibilism is motivationally attractive. But this might sound rather petulant and ad hominem. It would be nice to have at least a smattering of evidence for the charge. We need to devise a method to sharpen and evaluate our motivational hypothesis. 3 2. TOWARDS A QUANTITATIVE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Traditional history of philosophy proceeds by close readings of the texts, by using textual evidence and supplementary biographical materials to interpret the philosophical views of the great minds of the past. Here I want to advocate a more abstract approach that draws on traditional work in the history of philosophy. We can exploit traditional interpretations of historical philosophers to chart patterns of distribution of philosophers over philosophical positions. A related quantitative approach to literature has been championed by Franco Moretti.3 For instance, Moretti argues that we can get a better understanding of the history of genre literature by tallying the number of books published annually in a given genre. It is an unabashedly radical way to think about literature.4 It is no less radical to apply such a method to philosophy. But, as with Moretti’s fledgling attempts to understand the history of literature, one can hope that a quantitative approach will give us a new way to understand features of the history of philosophy, and even perhaps something about the philosophical mind. The guiding idea is that a more abstract, quantitative, approach can reveal patterns that get lost in the traditional project of close readings. In much empirical research, one tries to detect patterns through the 3 Franco Moretti “Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History – 1,” New Left Review 24 (2003): 67-93. 4 Although the application of quantitative history to literature is radical, within the field of history, quantitative history has been an established methodology for decades (see e.g., W. Adyelotte, A. Bogue, and R. Fogel, eds. The Dimensions of Quantitative Research in History [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972]). 4 noise of individual variation. Similarly, by doing quantitative history of philosophy, we might be able to find interesting generalizations through the din of history. Whereas for Moretti, the unit of analysis is the book, for our project, the relevant unit will be the philosopher. And rather than sort philosophers into genres, we will place them into the space of philosophical positions. How will we determine which philosophers go into which slots? It will not do for the quantitative historian of philosophy to decide on his own where the philosophers are located in philosophical space. For that will be a source for something like experimenter bias. Rather, the quantitative historian should rely on the work of others to determine where the philosophers lay in the philosophical geography. There is, however, an obvious problem with this method. Historians of philosophy notoriously disagree about how to interpret the philosophers. That’s their bread and butter. Indeed, from an outsider’s perspective, it can seem that the surest path to fame as a historian of philosophy is to make some outrageously heterodox interpretation seem plausible. Descartes isn’t a rationalist, Berkeley isn’t an idealist, Kant isn’t a Kantian. For doing quantitative history of philosophy, we want to avoid such controversies. Ideally, we will want to use the dominant interpretations among the experts in the area. The expectation is that if we get a good number of philosophers into our sample, it will not matter all that much if some of the standard interpretations we use are mistaken. Of course, if most standard interpretations are wrong, that spells real trouble for the quantitative history of philosophy. But if we are so bad at interpretation, this spells trouble for history of philosophy quite generally. 5 Merely plotting philosophers into a table of philosophical positions is not very illuminating. One needs hypotheses about the expected distributions to make the tables informative. And our hypotheses may come from many different sources since there are, in fact, many influences and constraints on the distribution and evolution of philosophical theories. In constructing hypotheses about the history of philosophy, we would do well not to focus exclusively on the constraints imposed by Truth and Rationality, but also to consider the influence of religion, politics, and culture. Philosophical inquiry is likely also shaped in ways that are illuminated by economic models.5 The particular aims of the research will largely determine which resources are appropriate to the task. 5 See P. Kitcher, The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) on economic models of scientific inquiry. To explain the history (and rationality) of science, Kitcher introduces the notion of a scientific entrepreneur who will pursue neglected lines of research purely out of self interest. We might appropriate this idea into a quantitative approach to philosophy. We have philosophical economies, sets of theories that are in competition for attention and discussion, and we have philosophical entrepreneurs who want to make novel contributions to the field. Although we philosophers sometimes think we’re above all this crassly self-interested jockeying, the idea of philosophers as entrepreneurs is likely no more of a distortion than that of scientists as entrepreneurs. Even Kant, revered for his philosophical purism, had an abiding, even passionate, desire to say something new (see M. Kuehn, Kant: A Biography [Cambridge, Cambridge, University Press, 2001]). 6 For our purposes, the most important factors are psychological, since we’re interested in the psychological underpinnings of philosophy. Here too, there are very many psychological factors that might influence the distribution and evolution of philosophical theories. For instance, researchers in cultural evolution maintain that cultural evolution is shaped by innate modules dedicated to folk psychology, folk physics, and folk biology. If they are right, it seems overwhelming plausible that these modules also shaped philosophical theorizing. Other work in cultural evolution indicates that emotion systems shaped the cultural evolution of norms.6 Again, it seems likely that emotions are an important psychological factor in the evolution and distribution of philosophical theories. But for our purposes, we want to focus on yet another psychological factor: motivation. For the claim I want to defend is that motivational factors explain the rise of compatibilism. There are several general reasons to think that motivation has an effect on theory building. The social psychology literature reveals a number of biases that make us more likely to adopt and retain beliefs that are motivationally attractive. Consider just two important biases, motivated memory search and motivated belief construction. When we 6 For innate modules and cultural evolution see Pascal Boyer, “Cognitive Constraints on Cultural Representations: Natural Ontologies and Religious Ideas,” in Mapping the Mind eds., L. Hirshfeld and S. Gelman (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994, 391-411) and Dan Sperber, Explaining Culture (Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell, 1996). For emotion and cultural evolution, see Shaun Nichols, “On the Genealogy of Norms,” Philosophy of Science, 69 (2002): 234-255. 7 search for memories, we show a bias, looking disproportionately for memories that are comforting or self-enhancing. For instance, in one experiment, subjects were induced to think either that being introverted was desirable or that being extraverted was desirable. Then subjects were asked to recount memories of past behaviors that indicated the extent to which they were introverted or extraverted. Subjects induced to find introversion desirable were more likely to recount introverted memories first and to produce more introverted memories than subjects induced to find extraversion desirable.7 Empirical work has also indicated that motivation affects which beliefs people are likely to acquire from new information. In one experiment, two groups of subjects were given information indicating either that people in their group were more prosocial or that they were less prosocial than a different group. The information presented to all of these subjects was based on a small sample. However, the subjects who were presented with an undesirable conclusion (that their group was less prosocial) were significantly more likely to call into question the adequacy of the sample size than the subjects who were presented with the desirable conclusion.8 This itself is a small sample of a rich body of work which indicates that motivation plays a powerful role in theory construction. 7 Rasyid Sanitioso, Ziva Kunda, and Geoffrey Fong, “Motivated Recruitment of Autobiographical Memories,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57 (1990): 229-241. 8 Bertjan Doosje, Russell Spears, and Wim Koomen, “When Bad Isn’t All Bad,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69 (1995): 642-655. For a terrific review of the literature on motivated reasoning see Z. Kunda, Social cognition: making sense of people (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, Bradford Books, 1999). 8 The psychological literature thus leads us to expect that motivationally attractive theories should enjoy an advantage. Of course, that alone does not guarantee that these forces would have historical influence. However, there is some historical evidence that motivation has indeed shaped the history of ideas, in particular, religious ideas. In the evolution of Abrahamic religions from Judaism through Christianity and Islam, the doctrines that get preserved seem to be disproportionately those that are motivationally attractive.9 The foregoing provides reason to suspect that motivation plays an important role in the history of philosophical ideas as well. But it’s easy to talk historicity. It will be more persuasive if we can marshal some historical evidence. 3. SHARPENING THE HYPOTHESIS Now that we have a very general sketch of the methods, we need to focus more closely on the factors that will be important to our case study. Sometimes, a given view is motivationally attractive to virtually everyone. This is plausibly the case for religious doctrines of heaven and divine justice. However, in other cases, a doctrine will be motivationally attractive to one group but not another. Racist doctrines provide an obvious example. Racist doctrines will be less attractive to members of the denigrated race than to others. When a view has this kind of differential motivational attractiveness, this will give rise to differential predictions about the groups that will tend to adopt the view. Such, I suggest, is the situation with compatibilism. 9 Shaun Nichols, “Is Religion What We Want?” Journal of Cognition and Culture 4 (2004): 347-371. 9 The motivational explanation for the rise of compatibilism generates a specific prediction about how the philosophical geography should be populated. The reason is simple. Compatibilism will be especially motivationally attractive for people who find determinism plausible. For those who independently reject determinism about choice, there is less motivational pressure to think that free will and responsibility are compatible with determinism.10 But of course in terms of the metaphysics, there is no particular reason why the truth of determinism should bear on the consistency of determinism and free will. It is perfectly consistent to maintain that determinism is false about choice, but orthogonal to whether we are free and responsible. So, the differential prediction is 10 For the purposes of this paper, the indeterminist claim is restricted to choice. The claim is that one fact about choices is that they are not always determined. For our historical purposes, this will work well, since in the period we will consult (the early modern period), indeterminism was almost exclusively a view held about choice. Quantum mechanics hadn’t arrived to complicate the picture. Note however, that the claim that choices are not determined is entirely consistent with compatibilism. For one might well think that as a matter of fact, choices are not determined, but this is irrelevant to what makes us free and responsible. A compatibilist can maintain that indeterminism is true of choice, but inessential to free choice. To offer a naïve analogy, suppose that it turns out (as it might) that only earth has intelligent life, then it’s a fact that all choices occur in our solar system. But that doesn’t mean that it’s essential to being a free choice that the choice happens in our solar system. It’s a fact that is uninteresting for the metaphysics of choice. Similarly then, one might hold that although choice happens to be indeterministic, this just isn’t important to what makes us free and responsible. 10 generated by the fact that compatibilism will be more attractive to determinists than to indeterminists. Hence, from our initial hypothesis (M) we can now fashion a more refined prediction: MD: Determinists will be more likely than indeterminists to be compatibilists. Table 1 sets out the philosophical geography, and, put graphically, the prediction is that the upper right cell in Table 1 will be systematically underfilled. Determinist Indeterminist Compatibilist Incompatibilist Table 1: The philosophical geography 4. TESTING THE PREDICTION To do quantitative history of philosophy, we need to focus on an appropriate population. That means picking a set of philosophers. Clearly we want to do this in the most objective way possible, and we would do well to begin with a set of philosophers that does not range wildly across philosophical history. That is, we should begin with a set that is constrained in its historical range.11 The early modern period will be a good focus 11 The reasons for this restriction parallel the reasons for using closely matched samples in other domains of research. We want to minimiz