Brief Comment on XPhi

Simon Cullen's recent 'Ok kids, let Daddy talk for a moment' take-down of experimental philosophy is not a simple rejection of xphi. His point is that it might be important, but not yet. Cullen's argues that X-Phiers have been blind to the pragmatics of survey interpretation, and therefore, are discovering less about the untutored intuitions of the folk and more about latent biases built into the surveys they administer.

I have little to say about that, other than that Cullen's argument seem persuasive to me and I'd like to hear an x-phier respond. But it did get me thinking about a related, if more amateurish point:

The assumption behind x-phi is that there are rules for basic but philosophically relevant concepts like knowledge, intention, value and so forth. They like to draw an analogy to linguistics: any English speaker effectively knows a whole lot about English grammar, even though most hard-pressed to tell you much about it. So too, reason the x-phiers, the average knower knows a lot about knowing, as the average valuer knows a lot about value, but they are unable to say a whole lot about it explicitly. That's why we have surveys, in the same way that linguists proffer tests to learn how a particular linguistic community deals with this word, or that transformation, or this sort of sentence, etc.

More importantly, there is an explicitly normative component to experimental philosophy. Lots of philosophical arguments seems to come down to the tutored intuitions of trained philosophers. But we philosophers are a weird bunch. So we likely have abnormal and biased intuitions. We should--argue the x-phiers--at the very least weigh our intuitions against the folk before deciding whether to trust them. A similar dynamic of course plays out in linguistics, where there is a strong feed-back relation between the normative and descriptive elements.

In any case, my thought is this: why disparage our training? Joe Folk probably knows what he needs to know about knowing, and valuing, and intention-ascribing, and no more. Put Joe Folk in a weird, Gettier type situation, a situation he's never had to confront before, and he breaks down. X-Phiers will argue that giving Joe Gettier, or Old vs. Young Mary, or Truetemp situations is the philosophical equivalent of a wug-test. But it's not. Let me illustrate with the following analogy: Joe Folk also has intuitions about gravity. He knows that what goes up must come down. He knows that the farther things fall, the faster they go. Now physicists have some pretty strange intuitions about gravity and the shape of the universe. From what I can gather, lots of them think that the universe might well be a flat, and shaped like a donut, because, you know, donuts are flat. Suppose we ask Joe if he thinks that space is flat and shaped like a donut?Or suppose, because we want to wug-test him, we ask a question like 'Suppose that Jane starts out in a space ship in one direction from the Earth at light speed and travels for an infinite amount of time. At some point, continuing exactly in that direction, will she wind up where she started?' intending to get at Joe's implicit knowledge about space, time and gravity? I hardly need point out that Joe's answers to such questions, while interesting for folk-theories of space and time, are hardly important for physics.

My point is that, in some sense, Joe's theory of gravity and the physicists theory of gravity are the same thing and aimed at the same object: in some sense, they are both thinking about objects like rocks falling to the ground. But this hardly means that we should give equal weight to Joe's implicit beliefs about gravity. A better assumption to make is that Joe doesn't really have a 'theory' of gravity at all...he has whatever idea of gravity is necessary for him to get around in life, and no more. So too with Joe and philosophers. In some sense, sure, we share a basic understanding about knowledge, and value and intentions with Joe. But we are experts in the field, and so our intuitions are special. I would finally add that the field of mathematics relies upon intuition-based arguments quite often, and while this causes problems about the nature and possibility of proof, hardly any mathematician thinks that the right answer might be to go survey Joe and Jane Folk about Incompleteness and transinfinite numbers.

Let me briefly address a counter argument: one might argue that physicists' intuitions about space, time, etc., don't matter until they are testable and subject to public and verifiable scrutiny. The x-phier argument is that, in many philosophical disputes, intuitions themselves are the 'test' and 'verification', and since these are potentially biased, we should look to correct that bias. My reply is to iterate, what benefit do we get from extending our 'testing' to the folk. Many issues are insoluble and untestable in physics as well. Does anyone think that including the Folk in these disputes is going to clarify matters at all?

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Empathy and Moral Progress

Listening to the recent bloggingheads.tv discussion between Robert Wright and Steven Pinker, both countenance an idea I find hard to accept, namely, that the expansion of the moral imagination and empathy explain in large part human civilization's moral improvement.

Now, I have no problem with the idea that we humans are becoming better, morally. Anyone who denies this will have a lot of historical explaining to do. Wanton acts of cruelty, exploitation and deprivation just don't happen on the scale or percentage per capita today that they have in the past. We are kinder, more compassionate, less violent, and vastly less wasteful of both other humans and nature itself than our hunter-gatherer peers (and even our more recent peers). So, I accept the phenomenon. I just have hard time accepting the causal explanation given for this phenomenon.

Humans benefit from cooperation. The question is, why don't we cooperate in non-zero-sum partnerships more often? Why is it that humans have a tendency to compete and punish each other when both (or more) clearly benefit from cooperation? The answer recommended by Pinker and Wright is that our psychology isn't adapted to easily play non-zero sum games with strangers. But they both also observe that we as a society have gotten a lot better at this. The average American feels sorry for those who suffered in the 2005 Tsunami, and for the victims of protest in Myanmar and Iran, and for the poor in the inner cities. It bothers us when innocent Iraqis or Afghanis are killed because of our military action, and we are similarly disturbed by violence, like in Serbia, that doesn't really affect us other than morally.

Apparently, if Wright and Pinker are correct, this is all a very odd and recent phenomenon, to be explained by the fact that we have learned to expand the domain of our moral imagination. Our moral imagination, to give it a rough definition, is the ability to imagine ourselves in the circumstances of others, despite the fact that those circumstances might be very different from our own. Peter Singer has also recently championed this explanation. In short, we now include more people in our 'in-group,' where co-operative behavior is more likely and more rewarding. I went to talk just last Saturday where Frans de Waal also--albeit with scientific reservation--got in line, suggesting that humans as a whole are better learning to empathize with strangers, or to expand the in-group parameters, and that this explains in part better moral outcomes.

Again, I don't deny the phenomenon. To the extent that any of this is measurable, we are improving morally and we are also better at expanding the parameters of our 'in group,' to such an extent that most educated people, at least, have some inkling that they have a moral interest in the well-being of people not otherwise related to them beyond also being human. But Pinker, Wright et. al, want to explain the former by means of the latter, and this I just don't buy.

My basic argument is that cruelty is not the antithesis of empathy, but presupposes empathy. The moral imagination argument suggests a sort of moral blindness, relieved by an expansion of the moral imagination. Humans are cruel to one another because they do not see that the person they are victimizing feels pain, just like they do. When empathy is contracted, the victimizer is cruel to the victim because she is unable or unwilling to put herself in the victim's place, to understand the pain and suffering and humiliation that her action is causing. But this is precisely what cruelty does presuppose. In cruel acts, I take pleasure in the fact that I can empathize with your pain, helplessness and humiliation, I put myself in your shoes, understand that you are suffering, and delight in being the agent of that suffering. Such cruelty is not a failure of moral imagination or empathy, but a result.

One of the gifts left to us by the Ancient Assyrians is a trove of monuments and carved artifacts extolling the exploits of their kings. There is, for example, a monument remaining from King Asshuriziroal in the 9th century BCE that brags:

"Their men, young and old, I took as prisoners. Of some I cut off the feet and hands; of others I cut off the noses, and lips; of the young men's ears I made a heap; of the old men's heads I built a minaret.

Over fifteen hundred years after Asshuriziroal, an army of Goths savaged Milan, allowing the Byzantine garrison to depart unharmed but killing each and every male in the city while giving all the females over the Franks for slave labor and misuse. The siege of Milan is notable for not being particularly noteworthy at all, displaying the accepted mores, as it were, of siege warfare through most of human history. Such conduct, I believe, would not be tolerated today by even the most vicious of regimes. Only in the darkest depths of Hitler's genocide in Eastern Europe or Stalin's in the Soviet Russian Empire has anything approaching routine standards of ancient cruelty been witnessed by any living human.

I think it's clear that our 6th century peers were just as good at putting themselves in the heads of strangers as we are. The difference between our Gothic and Babylonian ancestors, I suspect, has less to do with an expanded moral imagination and more to do with the fact that we condemn what we experience in the exercise of our moral imagination. Perhaps it is true that an expansion of empathy is a necessary condition for treating strangers humanely, but it does not guarantee it. More to the point, perhaps, in-group/out-group distinctions are not drawn on the basis of who we empathize with. Humans can easily empathize with any other human. The difference that makes a difference to moral progress is not that we can imagine ourselves in the minds of strangers, but that we care about the strangers we imagine ourselves as being. This itself is not probably not a cognitve act, so I don't mean to suggest that in-group/out-group distinctions are drawn on a cognitive foundation (although that may be the case). I just think it unlikely that empathy alone explains that difference.

The morally disturbing fact about or predecessors were not that they couldn't put their heads into the minds of their victims, but that they could and were proud or honored by what they there imagined. Similarly, I think that the de-humanization argument often used to explain atrocities even today needs to be qualified: it's not that an SS officer simply did not understand that Jews and Slavs suffered, too, just like him; he did know that, he could visualize and imagine it--he just didn't care.

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A Refutation of Consequentialism? (I)

I'd like for someone to explain to me why the following isn't a sufficient refutation of consequentialism (at least of the maximalist or aggregative variety): One of the more over-reported anecdotes of the past century is Mao's retort to the question, "What was the significance of the French Revolution?" "It's too early to tell," Mao replied. Mao's point was partially tongue in cheek, but it managed to get across an important point: the effects of any action continue on into an indefinite, and at the limit, infinite, future. With that in mind, here's a refutation of consequentialism:

1) The right action in a given situation is a function of its net sum total consequences relative to alternative possible actions.

2) Sum net totals are calculated over total moments.

3) There are no total moments.

4) Hence, there are no sum totals.

5) Hence, there is no net sum total greater than all others.

6) Hence, there is no right action.

The key premise, obviously, is the third. It is also the least refutable. This is the insight captured in Mao's retort, and easily demonstrable: Let's take March 30th, 1794. You are Robesipierre, member the Committee for Public Saftey, deciding on the matter of Danton's execution. You think to yourself, What is the right thing to do? The answer, it is easy to demonstrate, depends upon what time frame is in question (and that, it should be stressed, is solely a matter of whim!). If the time frame is only through the end of the year, killing Danton will exacerbate the reign of terror (leading to your own execution!!), resulting in many more deaths. But, if your time frame is, say, up to 1814, it is precisely the excesses of the Reign of Terror and the Revolution that make Napoleon possible. Napoleon brings order finally to France, but he also harbingers war; yet without Napoleon there is no Congress of Vienna, which brings nearly a century of relative peace to Europe. But of course, without the developments that that century of peace engenders, there is no World War One and thus no World War Two. But without World War Two there is no United Nations....I could go on, but the point I take it is clear: whether it is right for you, Robespierre, to order the execution of Danton right now, in 1794, radically depends upon the time frame in question.

This is not an epistemic point. Of course it is hard to calculate out the consequences, and of course there is no reason whatsoever to believe that Robespierre could have made the considerations I just went over. But that is besides the point, which is that the consequentialist must be a realist about morality. The statement 'It is right in 1794 that Danton be executed' and its opposite, "It is wrong in 1794 that Danton be executed' must each have a determinate truth value. In general, any statement of the sort 'X is right' or 'X is good', if consequentialism is correct, must have a definite truth value, but no statement of that sort does. "It is right that Danton in 1794 be executed" is false in 1795, true in 1814, false again in 1816, true again maybe until 1914, false between 1914 and 1945, true again in 1946, and so on--which is just to say, "It is right that Danton is executed in 1794" has no definite truth value.

I suppose that one could argue that consequentialism is not a normative theory about what one ought to do, but is a descriptive theory that analyzes what we mean by statements of the sort 'X is right' and 'X is good'. But in that case, we have just shown that 'X is right' and 'X is good' have no definite truth values, and this, if any thing, speaks on behalf of error theory--and that, in turn, gets us to the same point: namely, that consequentialism is false.

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A Solution to Moral Luck?

Tomorrow I teach Nagel's 'Moral Luck' essay. I wonder if the solution to resultant, and perhaps circumstantial luck, is easily solved by the concept of moral risk. Winning the lottery is lucky, but it is not pure luck. Merely finding a winning lottery ticket in your coat pocket is pure luck. Playing the lottery and winning is something else. It is a risk one takes--deliberately accepting the cost of a few dollars for the low possibility of many thousands. It strikes me as perfectly reasonable to say that one deserves whichever outcome, even though that result is out of one's control. The outcomes may be widely divergent (a $2 sunk cost or $50,000 on the Pick 4), and yet equally deserved. Similarly, if I choose to drive over the speed-limit, I am taking a moral risk--and deserve whichever outcome, however divergent (getting to work on time vs. vehicular manslaughter). Not only is this a solution to resultant moral luck, but I believe that it's a fair exposition of our intuitions on the matter. Right?

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Sandel on Justice on the Radio

I haven't read his book, and I don't do political philosophy very much, but it seems to me that there is a pretty clear fallacy in Michael Sandel's thinking, at least as it is expressed in this recent NPR interview. Sandel argues that many CEO's and sports stars are unjustly compensated. This is supposed to follow from his definition of justice. Justice he understands to be, roughly, 'to each what they deserve,' and then specifies that by 'deserve' he means what results from one's doing. In general, one deserves the results of what one has done. CEO's today make roughly eight times what they made in 1980 relative to the average worker. It is hard to believe that they are eight times more productive, or work eight times harder. Thus, the increase in their compensation has not resulted from what they have done, and hence, they have no special right to those proceeds. He makes a similar argument about A-Rod: A-Rod may excel at baseball due to his hard work and natural talent, but his talent is not the result of his own doing, nor is the fact that there is a high demand for superb baseball skills. I detect an illicit conversion in both cases. Sandel is arguing that from (1) 'All things we deserve are things we have a right to' it follows that (2) 'All things we have a right to are things we deserve.' That can't be right, even if we stick with 'right' in an exclusively moral sense. Surely there are things to which we have a right even though we do not deserve them in the sense that they result from something we have done. For example, even in a Rawlsian framework, where we accept that I do not deserve my talents, can it really follow that I do not have a right to my talents? Or is this a bad counterexample?

UPDATE: Let me turn the somewhat hazy intuition informing this post into a question (okay, several questions): Is there anything, in a Rawlsian framework, that an individual deservesqua individual? Or do I 'deserve' only what is consistent with minmaxing, the difference principle, etc., regardless of my labor, effort, talent, luck, etc? In other words, do I, this unique individual, Michael, deserve anything? Or is it that only my behind-the-veil self, interchangeable with anyone, deserves anything? If so, it seems that Rawls is in fact missing an deep intuition about justice and desert, namely, that it is individual. As far as I can tell, according to Rawls, I only deserve anything as that behind the veil self, not as me. Alternatively: I just have Rawls completely wrong.

I might add at this point that I'm sympathetic to Sandel's conclusion, I'm just suspicious of his reasons. I can imagine a more libertarian-inclined fellow replying: 'Even if we grant your conclusion--namely, that we do not have a right to what we do not deserve--it hardly follows from the fact that I don't deserve a benefit I currently enjoy that you have a right to confiscate it. And that is what we are talking about: a collective of agents utilizing the coercive power of the state to confiscate the fruits of a good enjoyed by A-Rod that A-Rod doesn't deserve.' It's clear to me that A-Rod doesn't deserve it (in this I agree with Rawls and Sandel), but a lot more has to be said before we can conclude from this fact that A-Rod has no right to it. In fact, it's not entirely clear to me that these two should be related at all.

Assume for a moment that there is only one fan, that this fan is extraordinarily rich , that she has earned her money justly by Sandel's standards, and that she is happy to pay A-Rod $30 million a year to play baseball. I wonder if taking A-Rod's money (say through excessive taxation, higher than an average rate for that income level) is not in fact a violation of the fan's rights. And in any case, I would argue that A-Rod has a full right to this money, even if he did not earn it in a moral sense (does not morally deserve it). Remember, it seems to follow from Sandel's reasoning that 'excessive' compensation has nothing do with absolute earnings ($30 million/ year just being too much) nor with relative earnings (12 times the wage of the average worker), but solely with undeserved earnings. So, a just taxation system, it would seem to follow, would be one that taxed A-Rod at a higher rate than our fan, even if, let's suppose, they have the same income.

I can see avoiding this conclusion, but only if we accept that no one really earns their wage; that there is no such thing as a just wage individually calibrated. In other words, we can avoid the above conclusion if we rule out a priori the possibility that someone could morally earn $30 million, and then acknowledge that if one cannot morally earn $30 million, one can't really morally earn $30 thousand either.

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Are We Fascists Yet?

Brian Leiter links--rightly with some reservation--to this article trying to make a sober case for taking the threat of fascism, today, seriously. Her conclusion:

"We are now parked on the exact spot where our best experts tell us full-blown fascism is born. Every day that the conservatives in Congress, the right-wing talking heads, and their noisy minions are allowed to hold up our ability to govern the country is another day we're slowly creeping across the final line beyond which, history tells us, no country has ever been able to return."

And after reading truly deranged and psychotic stuff like this:

"There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America's military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the Obama problem. Don't dismiss it as unrealistic.

America isn't the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn't mean it wont."

it's no wonder that otherwise sane people really begin to wonder. Nonetheless, to suppose that we are actually flirting with fascism itself flirts with crazy; sober and silly are not mutually exclusive. I don't claim that we are definitely not anywhere near fascism, but I do claim that the entire exercise is misguided.

Discussions of this sort presume that Fascism is some sort of natural kind, and that there are antecedent conditions which, when met, will lead in a lawful or law-like manner to a fascist state. I'm willing to set aside the issue of whether or not it is appropriate at all to apply the concept of law to social and political phenomena. Let's assume that social and political phenomena exhibit regularities that, if not strictly lawful, are nonetheless sufficiently law-like. In either case, it's pretty standard to accept that lawful or law-like relations must be consistent over two variations:

1) Generalization: a lawful relation must obtain among a significant number of instances. Just because you caught the flu after getting a new pair of glasses does not mean that your glasses and the flu are in any way related. Similarly, just because Athens won the battle of Marathon after the Spartans failed to show up doesn't mean that in general battles go well when allies fail to appear. For there to be a relevant relation here, there would have to be lots of instances of armies succeeding after allies have failed to show.

2) Counterfactual Variation: Not only must a lawful relation obtain among a number of actual instances, that same relation must obtain over relevant counterfactual variations. So, it happened to be the case that Bismark was able to unify Germany by exploiting a mercurial French emperor. But knowing this doesn't mean that you could have inferred, in say 1866, from Napoleon III's mercurial nature to the likelihood of German unification. Chances are, Bismark would have been equally adept at manipulating a conservative and rigid Emperor of France, just as he successfully exploited Franz Josef. For Napoleon III's mercurial nature to have been causally and lawfully related to the unification of Germany, it would have to shown that had Napoleon III not been mercurial, Germany would not have been unified, along with many such other variations.

So let's ask, are there any relations that can survive these conditions applied to fascism? I don't think so. Most discussions I've had or read on the subject, from Robert Paxton's informative essay to Jonah Goldberg's silly book, get stuck on the generalization condition. Immediately there are problems that arise from trying to decide just what counts as the reference class for 'Fascist Regimes'. There's almost no way to answer this without begging the question. Hitler and Mussolini both represented movements angry about the loss of a purer past, whereas Stalin's USSR rejected the past for the sake of a communist future. So, is worry over a lost, organic past necessary to qualify as fascist? There seems no way to answer this without begging the question: if you really want to include Stalin among the fascists, then no, but if you don't mind dropping him from the list, then sure. No essence or natural kind is going to get in your way whatever you decide.

But what really makes predictions about fascism problematic is the second condition. There are probably no necessary conditions leading to any of the historically fascist states without which we could say with any credibility that fascism would not have emerged anyway. So Hitler's and Mussolini's fascisms were weirdly pagan, whereas Franco's was wed to the Catholic Church. But I see no reason why, mutatis mutandis, an ultramontane fascism could not have emerged out of conservative elements in Germany, nor why some charismatic anarchist leader could not have taken control of the Republicans in Spain and created a secular fascist state. The point is that there are simply no truly insightful comparisons, only superficially insightful ones. What we really mean by fascism is just 'tyranny,' or 'evil'--and so let's worry straightaway about whether any given regime is acting tyrannical or evilly, and not about whether they are rehearsing fascism's encore.

I guess the conclusion I would like to make, after this unintentionally long post, is two-fold:

1) Forget Fascism. It's not a useful concept. Instead of fretting over whether teabaggers represent an incipient fascism, let's just say that these people are really weird, willfully irrational, a little bit scary, and completely unsuitable as dinner guests.

2) More broadly, I think it's time to start a movement: I call on a MORATORIUM FOR ALL WWII REFERENCES. No longer will it be acceptable to think through any truly pressing political problem as if it were just a replay of the 1930's.

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Thought of the Day: Possible Worlds and the Experience Machine

In the most recent Family Guy episode, Stewie and Brian take a journey through several multiverses. Mostly these are just quirky (a literal Disney World) and funny (a world where even Meg is hawt). But the world Merry-Go-round stops when they happen into a world where the man/dog relation is reversed. Brian, as fans know, is a dog who happens to be intelligent, somewhat full of himself, and a complete--pun intended--horn-dog. Immediately upon arriving a super sexy 'pet' woman jumps him and licks him down. He's found his perfect pleasure world: Being a dog, he is the master in this world, and liking human women, access to sex will be much, much easier. He decides to stay.

I started thinking about Noick's experience machine: what if the choice were, not between 'fake' experiences and 'real' experiences, but between possible worlds within an actualist framework? In other words, what if the choice were, not between a pleasant fantasy and hard reality, but between an equally real possible pleasure world, and the merely indexically-present world? The thought experiment would then be the following: suppose that you could leave this current world for an equally real alternative world that happened to be much more pleasurable--would you?

Stewie and Brian decide after a short while that they want to go home. They miss their 'real' friends--a mis-description, since the people in Dogworld are just as real as in the home world. I don't think that the creators of Family Guy were thinking through the metaphysics of possible worlds nor the concept of hedonism, but that makes their resolution of the scenario all the more natural. I'd argue that this amendment to the thought experiment shows that it is the status-quo bias, rather than the reality bias or an aversion to dupery, that is behind most people's preference for the present world.

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Observation of the Day

On this bloggingheads, Robert Kagan makes the following argument against the effectiveness of international law for solving geo-political and geo-strategic problems: i) Law qua law requires that all parties be treated equally; ii) no nation ever has, nor ever will, treat all parties equally; iii) hence, no legal framework will be applicable to inter-state relations. Of course, I don't think we'd accept this argument at all if it were made on behalf of domestic law: i) Law qua law requires that all citizens be treated equally; ii) as a matter of fact, citizens are not treated equally (richer citizens afford better lawyers, more affluent citizens can affect the legislative process to their advantage more readily, many minorities are at a distinct disadvantage in lobbying for access to public goods and influence, etc.); iii) hence, no legal framework at all will be applicable to intra-state relations.

But I'm not going to make that point. Regardless of the argument's strength, isn't the first premise obviously false? I mean, before the age of Enlightenment, the idea that the laws must treat all individuals equally was, I'm pretty sure, non-existent. In fact, quite the opposite was true: a primary function of laws was to codify, legitimate and enforce the inequalities among parties by virtue of lineage, wealth, status, occupation, etc. And while very few regimes were what I would call admirably just, quite a lot of them were functional and did manage to advance their interests and values through a legal framework, both internally and externally. If I were forced to pin Kagan's basic mistake, it would be the assumption that law has to be naive and/or ignorant of real relations in order to function as law. In some cases, yes, but not all. Per the issue at hand in the bloggingheads, I see no reason legally why the Nuclear Club members can't just insist that they're better, they should have more say in shaping world nuclear policy, and then construct international law to reflect this (which, of course, is exactly what we do!). Now, there are good arguments for why this is an unjust arrangement, but that's not the issue: the issue is whether it's effective.

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Does the Possibility of Time Travel imply the Impossibility of Free Will? (I)

There seems to be wide agreement among theorists that while time travel is logically possible, altering the past is not. In other words, it's coherent to believe that you might travel into the past one day, but incoherent to believe that while on this journey you might kill your father. If that's right, it means problems for libertarian conceptions of free will.

The initial argument is simple: Let's say that

i) In 1966 George and Lorraine have a child, Marty.

ii) In 1985, Marty time travels to 1955 and runs his father, George McFly, over with a DeLorean, killing him.

iii) In 1966, George is dead and Lorraine is an alcohol-raddled spinster.

Thus, iv) In 1966 Marty is both born and not born.

(iv) is obviously self-contradictory, and therefore logically impossible. Furthermore, since Marty killing his own father is logically impossible, a fortiori it is physically impossible.

If this doesn't seem right, it helps to remember that Marty is a time traveler, not a world traveler. This is the point David Lewis stresses at the end of his important essay ('The Pardoxes of Time Travel'). There is only one 1955, just as there is only one 1966 and one 1985. Marty can travel from one time to another with about as much ease as you or I can drive from home to the supermarket, but just as when you or I visit the local supermarket it is always the same supermarket, so when Marty visits 1955 it is the same 1955 it has always been. Thus, in the 1955 in question, it is timelessly true that Marty was there, and that he was the instrument of his parents' romance, just as it is timelessly true that he is born in 1966 and travels back to 1955 from 1985. There is not one 1955 without Marty, and another 1955 with Marty. Marty is always there, in 1955, even though he is not born until 1966. This only seems to be paradoxical (How can he exist at a time before he is born?). Lewis recommends distinguishing between personal time and external time: For Marty, his arrival in 1955 follows his birth, whereas to an external observer, living through the normal course of time, Marty just appears one day in 1955, while his infant self is born eleven years later in 1966. (This of course poses problems for identity theory, but not for time). If the initial argument is correct, then Marty is, in the strogest sense--logically, physically--unable to kill George in 1955. If one nevertheless wants to insist the contrary, this would have to be in a different 1955, a 1955 which is followed by a 1966 in which no one is born to George and Lorraine, which in turn is followed by a 1985 in which no one identical to Marty travels back in time. In other words, we have here two worlds, not two times--a world in which George and Lorraine meet and have Marty who then time travels in 1985, and another world in which George is killed and no one identical to Marty is ever born. If Marty ends up in that 1966 where George has been killed and no one identical to himself is born, it has not been through traveling back and altering time, but by traveling between one world and another.

This suggests the following argument against libertarianism:

a) A free agent is able to cause one rather than another possible outcome.

b) Marty is not able to cause one rather than another possible outcome.

c) Marty is not a free agent.

d) Since Marty is not special in anyway, no one is a free agent.

Marty, we know, cannot kill George. He cannot do so by accident, but more to the point, he cannot do so intentionally. He may--perhaps overwhelmed by newly-blossomed incestuous longings--desperately want to kill George in 1955, but he cannot and thus will not do so, for we know that he is born in 1966 and that George is his father. But if Marty cannot alter the past and affect the present, so too neither he nor anyone else could alter the present and affect the future. For Marty's inability to kill his own father is not unique to Marty. If Marty is unable, despite the firmest of desires, goals and plans, to thwart George and Lorraine's consummation, then so too are George and Lorraine, whatever their desires, goals and plans, unable to alter that same consummation. George and Lorraine will give birth to Marty in 1966, and there is nothing George, Lorraine nor Marty can do about it. Suppose that Marty informs George that Lorraine becomes an insufferable alcoholic, that their kids are complete losers, etc.--no matter, George will not be able to avert that future, for if he does avert that future, then in 1966 Marty is not born, and so cannot time travel in 1985 and so will not be there to inform George in 1955 that.....you get the picture. Finally, if there is nothing special about Marty in 1955, and if there is nothing special about George and Lorraine in 1966, then there is nothing special about you or I today. Que sera, sera.

A libertarian might object at this point: even if we grant that it is impossible to perform actions today that are in contradiction to the future, surely we are free to do other things today not in contradiction with the future. For example, nothing is stopping Marty from moving the teapot in Doc's house from one burner to the other, because nothing about his later travel back to the past is inconsistent with that changed fact. Hence, Marty is free to move the teapot, even while he is not free to kill George. This objection misses the point. Nothing Marty does can change the future, not because the future is just somehow perfectly rigid, but because the future after 1955 results from whatever occurs in 1955, and Marty has always been in 1955, i.e., if Marty moves the teapot, then the teapot's being moved is just a timeless fact about 1955. What is compossible with moving the teapot is Marty's wanting to move the teapot. What is not compossible with the moving of the teapot is the not moving of the teapot. We can say that Marty is free to move to the teapot insofar as he is not stopped from doing what he wants to do, or insofar as his second-order intention towards his decision to move the teapot is an approving one, but we cannot say that Marty is free to move the teapot if by that we mean that Marty could have done otherwise.

Lewis' attempts to get out of this predicament seem only half-hearted. Lewis argues that, if we restrict the range of facts we are considering, then Marty is able to kill George. For example, Marty's killing George is compossible with Marty's desire to be his mother's lover, George's oafishness, the fact that George is weak and easily fooled, his ability to purchase a gun, etc., and insofar as we restrict ourselves only to facts like these, there is a sense in which it is appropriate to say that Marty could kill George . But as we expand the pool of facts that need to be included, the range of possible actions decreases, and once we consider all the facts, then it is impossible that Marty kills George. Lewis, in other words, does not really show that free will makes sense, he only manages to stipulate a use of 'could' or 'possibility' that is not baldly self-defeating; nothing Lewis says can be taken as proof that we really are free.

Anyway, I will address some further complications in a later post. I suspect there is something wrong or missing in the above argument, but I can't quite identify what it is. One point I will address is the following: the above account of time-travel certainly seems to suggest a four-dimensionist picture of time, and there have been attempts to make libertarianism compatible with four-dimensionalism. I don't find these persuasive. First off, I think the argument fails. Secondly, from what I have read, libertarian four-dimensionalists at best succeed in supplying a way in which we can think of choices as random events or points. I'm not persuaded: it seems to me that, even among libertarians, it's important not only that the agent be the cause of an action, but that s/he be responsible for that action, yet if an action is truly random, it may be the cause of some event, but I don't see why the agent would be responsible.

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Privy me this, Hayekians...

A brief, somewhat sour, query: Opponents of Marx are fond of arguing that, whatever else might recommend him, surely it matters that Marx was, all in all, wrong. Marx predicted a falling rate of profit, the internal collapse of the capitalist system, the increasing enlargement and impoverishment of the Lumpenproletariat, the triumph of communism--none of which, in fact, actually happened.

Friends of Marx of course protest such allegations by pointing out that 'real communism' has never been tried. The Soviet Empire, Yugoslavia, Cuba, China, North Korea--none of these nor any other of the historically communist regimes resembled very much the sort of ideal candidate Marx had in mind in his prediction of the sublation of a capitalist into communist mode of production. Each one had been governed by a leader or party that was explicit about making theoretical and practical amendations to the program provided in books like Das Kapital. However, this sort of counter-argument basically never works. It's hard to find an opponent of Marx accede this point and agree that only historically existing communist regmies have failed, not Communism or Marxism. 'No,' goes the reply,'communism was tried; conditions weren't perfect, but they were enough, they all failed, and so maybe we should stop continuing to find excuses and just admit that Marx was wrong and that Marxism is false.'

Ok, I have no wish to deny the opponent of Marx his point. But what I want to know is this: Shouldn't we accept that Hayek, too, and other such 'social democracy is just the first step towards totalitarianism' theories, be chalked up along with Marxism under the 'wrong' column?I say this only because I recently re-perused Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, and was struck by how many predictions he courageously offers, and how many of those have turned out to be--it has to be safe to say by now--wrong. Hayek viewed the fascists parties of Germany and Italy as not just successors to, but as the natural outgrowths of, earlier social democratic parties and policies. Social welfare policies will lead, even despite intentions, to serfdom and tyranny. Democratic conferral of such powers is no sufficient precaution against these eventualities. Any attempt to conflate economic with political liberty will ineluctably result in the negation of both. It's as clear to me at least that none of these turned out to be true. And there is no reason to think that they are just around the corner. In other words, most of the antecedent conditions that Hayek lays out have long obtained, and hardly any of the consequents have followed. That makes them false.

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