The Disappearing Agent Objection to Free Will Libertarianism

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(Previous Entry)

The term “libertarianism” is used in two senses in philosophical circles. The first, and perhaps more famous sense, is as a name for a family of political theories that prioritise individual freedom; the second, and perhaps less famous (except among the cognoscenti), is as a specific view on the nature of free will. It is the latter sense that concerns me in this post.

As a view about the nature of free will, libertarianism is committed to both the existence of free will, and the incompatibility of free will with causal determinism. Consequently, it is to be contrasted with compatibilism — which holds that free will exists and is compatible with causal determinism, and hard incompatibilism — which shares with libertarianism the belief that free will is not compatible with determinism, but adds to this the belief that free will does not actually exist.

There are three main types of free will libertarianism:

Event Causal Libertarianism: This version assumes a standard scientific account of causation, according to which events cause other events. It thus takes it as a given that human actions are caused by agent-involving events, i.e. beliefs, desires and intentions of agents. In this respect, it seems entirely deterministic. It takes on a libertarian edge by holding that the agent-involving events include an element of indeterminacy. In other words, the beliefs, desires and intentions are not themselves sufficient for causing (truly free) human actions. A degree of indeterminacy must be added to the mix in order for the agent to have free will.

Agent-causal Libertarianism: This version assumes that agents exist as distinct metaphysical substances and that they can cause decisions to be made without themselves being caused by anything else. This is a metaphysically exotic view as it must account for the existence of agents apart from (or emergent from) ordinary material and physical causal forces. Nevertheless, it has been quite popular in the history of Western philosophy.

Non-causal Libertarianism: This is probably the most unusual version of libertarianism. It assumes that conscious agency is non-causal in nature and that all application of causal language to mentality and agency is metaphorical and ultimately misleading. It goes on to hold that certain other noncausal conditions must be satisfied in order for an action to be free. These conditions often focus on the phenomenology or teleology of the action.

Because it is the version of libertarianism that works most closely with the scientific understanding of human behaviour, and because I find it to be the most interesting, I want to focus on event-causal libertarianism in the remainder of this post. Again, I will do so by using Derk Pereboom’s critique of the view in his recent book Free Will, Agency and Meaning in Life. I’ll run through Pereboom’s basic criticism — the disappearing agent objection — and then I’ll follow up by looking at Mark Balaguer’s attempt to rescue event-causal libertarianism.


1. The Disappearing Agent Objection
Pereboom is a proponent of the sourcehood view of free will. According to this view, in order for us to say that an agent’s decision is free (in the sense required for moral responsibility) we must be able to say that the agent was the source of his or her decision to act. That is: the decision must (somehow) belong to, or be attributable to, the agent. For what it’s worth, this is a view to which I am highly sympathetic. I have long taken the position that attributing an action to an agent is what matters when it comes to moral responsibility; not whether that agent “could have done otherwise”.

The sourcehood view poses a problem for event-causal libertarians. Some of them are happy to accept that certain decisions are causally determined. For example, Robert Kane is a famous event-causal libertarian who is willing to accept that many of the decisions we make on a day-to-day basis are causally determined by other decisions we have made, or by our personalities, traits and dispositions. In these cases, it is plausible to suppose that the agent is the “source” of the decisions. But where Kane diverges from the deterministic view is in holding that truly free decisions — decisions to which our responsibility must ultimately be traced — will not be causally determined by features of our personalities, traits and dispositions. Instead, these truly free decisions will involve some element of indeterminacy.

For Kane, the truly free decisions occur when agents experience some conflict of wills. Imagine you have a really difficult decision to make: should you accept a new job in a faraway place, away from your friends and family, or should you stay where you are. Suppose, further, that there are good reasons for either decision. Suppose these reasons are equally weighted or incommensurate. In other words, they do a good job of pulling you in both directions without allowing for any decisive reason on either side of the equation. Nevetheless, you eventually do make a decision. In those moments, there is some indeterminacy — the agent-involving events (moral and prudential reasons, beliefs, desires etc) do not causally determine the decision — and in those moments there is true freedom. Kane and other event-causal libertarians also often try to show how this view is compatible with the indeterminism of modern physics, e.g. by suggesting that there is some degree of quantum indeterminism inherent in the brain mechanisms underlying human decision-making.

The problem is that if this characterisation of indeterminate decision-making is correct, the decision in question will fail to satisfy the sourcehood requirement. As Pereboom puts it:

In fact, because [on these occasions] no occurrence of antecedent events settles whether the decision will occur, and only antecedent events are causally relevant, nothing settles whether the decision will occur. Thus it can’t be that the agent or anything about the agent settles whether the decision will occur, and she therefore will lack the control required for [free will and moral responsibility] 

(Pereboom 2014, 32)

To put this in the form of an argument:

• (1) Event-causal libertarianism assumes that indeterminacy is needed in order for an agent’s decision to be truly free (i.e. that the agent-involving events leading up to a decision cannot be sufficient for the decision itself).

• (2) The sourcehood view requires that in order for a decision to be free, something about the agent must settle the question of whether a decision is made or not, i.e. the decision must have its source in the agent.

• (3) If the agent-involving events leading up to a decision are insufficient for the decision, then nothing about the agent settles the question of whether the decision is made or not.

• (4) Therefore, event-causal libertarianism is not compatible with the sourcehood view.

• (5) But the sourcehood view is correct (previous argument).

• (6) Therefore, event-causal libertarianism must be false.

This is called the “disappearing agent objection” because it suggests that if event-causal libertarianism is true, the agent disappears from the causal chain leading to the decision. The decision can no longer be traced or attributed to the agent in the appropriate way.


2. Can Balaguer’s account of Torn Decisions save the event-causalists?
Pereboom intends the disappearing agent objection to be a general objection to all versions of event-causal libertarianism. In his original work he specifically targeted Robert Kane’s event-causalist account. In his more recent work, he focuses on Mark Balaguer’s account. This is for a good reason. Balaguer’s account is the most sophisticated and up to date defence of event causalism, responding to many of the standard objections and trying its best incorporate modern scientific discoveries (he calls his book Free Will as an Open Scientific Problem). Pereboom reasons that if Balaguer’s account is also vulnerable to the disappearing agent objection, there is little hope for event causalism.

Balaguer’s account is pretty technical, but let’s try to see how it goes. It starts with some definitions. The first is the definition of a “torn decision”, which corresponds to my earlier example involving the decision about where to work:

Torn Decision: A decision in which an agent (a) has reasons for two or more options and feels torn as to which set of reasons is strong, i.e. has no conscious belief as to which option is best; and (b) makes a decision without resolving this conflict — that is, the agent has the experience of “just choosing”.

(Note: all these definitions come, with minimal modifications, from Balaguer’s 2009 book)

Now, Balaguer doesn’t think that all free decisions involve torn decisions, but he does think that torn decisions are the quintessential exemplars of free actions. So torn decisions are crucial to his account of free will. His basic contention is that certain torn decisions meet the requirements of libertarian free will by being wholly undetermined, and yet also caused by the agent in the appropriate way (i.e. the way required by the sourcehood view):

Libertarian Freedom (L-Freedom): If a torn decision is wholly undetermined, then it is L-free — that is, it is not just undetermined but also appropriately non-random, and the indeterminacy increases or procures the appropriate non-randomness.

So far so good, but bear in mind that all we have right now is a bunch of definitions that could form the basis of an argument. We don’t know yet how it is that torn decisions are wholly undetermined and how that indeterminacy satisfies the appropriate non-randomness condition demanded by the sourcehood view. That’s where the next key concept comes in. It is something called “torn decision indeterminism” (called TDW-indeterminism for some reason — I don’t know why it wasn’t simply called TD-indeterminism):

TDW-Indeterminism: Some of our torn decisions are wholly undetermined at the moment of choice, that is, the moment of choice probabilities of the various reasons-based tied-for-best options match the reasons-based probabilities, so that these moment-of-choice probabilities are all roughly even, given the complete state of the world and the laws of nature, and the choice occurs without any further input, that is, without anything else being significantly causally relevant to which option is chosen.

This might be a little obscure and technical in the abstract. Fortunately, Balaguer uses an example to ground his analysis. The example involves a man named Ralph who has to decide whether to stay in Mayberry or move to New York city. The reasons that count in favour of moving to New York are that he wants to play for the Giants and star on Broadway. The reasons that count in favour of staying in Mayberry are that he wants to marry his sweetheart Robbi Anna, and manage a local restaurant. In the end, Ralph decides to move to New York.

In this case, there are four agent-involving events that could causally determine his decision: the two reasons in favour of going to New York and the two reasons in favour of staying in Mayberry. But these events are in a perfect equilibrium: they do not decisively support one choice over the other. Furthermore, no other external causal factor intervenes to tip the balance in favour of one decision or the other. The state of the world prior to the decision is not causally sufficient for either option. Nevertheless, Ralph breaks the deadlock by just choosing to go to New York. He is thus responsible for the decision through his choosing. Nothing else. In this way, we have an indeterminate set of events leading up to the decision and a decision that is attributable to nothing other than the agent.

So much for Balaguer’s account. Is it any good? Pereboom is suspicious. As am I. I’m not even sure that the kind of scenario Balaguer imagines is plausible or possible, though this may be because of some strong methodological naturalism on my part. I have a very hard time imagining a case in which the total set of causal factors external and internal to the agent would be insufficient for determining an action and yet nevertheless we would still be entitled to say that the agent made the decision in the sense demanded by the sourcehood view. If an agent simply is a set of events (a set of reasons, desires and beliefs etc.) then according to Balaguer’s thought experiment, there is still nothing about the agent that settles whether a decision was made or not. On the other hand, if an agent is not a set of events, then I’m left wondering what an agent is. It would seem like, in that case, Balaguer’s account simply tips over into the agent-causalist or non-causalist camp. And both of those views have their costs. Agent-causalism involves some pretty exotic metaphysical assumptions about the existence of agents qua substances, set apart from the material, causal world; while the non-causalist account borders on incoherence. What’s more, Balaguer disavows those approaches in his own work. So that can’t be what he wants. In the end he seems to be left with a bit of a dilemma: if he follows event-causalism about agents, then his account is still vulnerable to the disappearing agent objection; if he doesn’t follow event-causalism about agents, he ends up with a different account of libertarianism.

The problem can be seen more clearly if we consider Balaguer’s response to something called the “rollback objection”. What if we were to roll the clock back to the moment when Ralph made his decision? What if we were to do this over and over again? Suppose we do it 100 times. What would we observe? If the decision is truly indeterminate, then we should probably expect to see Ralph choosing to go to New York 50 times and choosing to stay in Mayberry 50 times. If there was some bias in one direction or the other then the world wouldn’t be in the kind of causal equilibrium Balaguer imagines. But if we did observe that 50-50 pattern, aren’t we right to say that the decision to go to New York is simply a matter of chance? There is nothing about the decision that we can really attribute to Ralph. At least not in the sense that Ralph is the source of the decision. The decision could just as well be attributed to a random coin toss.

Balaguer responds to this by re-emphasising his point about Ralph “just choosing”. He claims that, if in each of these 100 cases, Ralph consciously chooses one of the options, without being causally influenced by anything else, then the decision can be attributed to him in the sense required, even if we observe this 50-50 split. But as Pereboom points out, it’s no good simply stating that it is Ralph that “just chooses” to go to New York in all of these cases. We are owed some coherent account of how it is that Ralph just chooses one option 50 times and the other option 50 times, without falling into determinism or one of the other non-event-causalist views. It’s hard to see how Balaguer can manage this.

As a result, we can probably conclude that event-causal libertarianism is unable to avoid the disappearing agent objection.

The Free Will Debate: Sourcehood or Alternative Possibilities?

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Borges and the Garden of Forking Paths

What makes us free, if we are free? In other words, what conditions must be satisfied in order for us to say of any particular agent that he/she has free will or doesn’t? This is something that philosophers have long debated. Indeed, the free will debate is almost nauseating in its persistence and intricacy.

Nevertheless, there are essentially two basic views about what is needed in order to say that an agent has free will (note: throughout this post, assume that the term “free will” can be used interchangeably with the term “moral responsibility”; I know that some think there is an important distinction between the two terms, but for the purposes of this post these distinctions can be ignored):

Alternative Possibility View: In order for an agent to freely perform a particular action A (in the sense required for moral responsibility) the agent must have genuine alternative possibilities open to him or her at the moment he or she decided to A (or, in shorthand form, the agent must have been able to do otherwise). This condition is also referred to as the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP).

Sourcehood View: In order for an agent to freely perform a particular action A (in the sense required for moral responsibility) the decision to A must have been up to the agent, i.e. the agent must have been the source of the decision to A.

There are tensions between the two views. Some would argue that the alternative possibility view excludes the sourcehood view: if there are genuinely open alternative possibilities then this seems to require indeterminism, which also seems to exclude the possibility of the agent being the source of the actions. So it is important, before you decide what your position is going to be on the great free will debate, to figure out which view is more plausible.

That’s where this post comes in. In the remainder of it, I want to look at an argument from Derk Pereboom’s recent book Free Will, Agency and Meaning in Life, which claims that the sourcehood view is the more plausible one. Pereboom’s book presents probably the best available argument for hard incompatibilism (the view that free will is not compatible with causal determinism), and his defence of the sourcehood view is just part of this overall argument. I hope to cover other aspects of his argument in future posts, but I’m starting with this first piece of the puzzle.

Before I begin I want to say a big thank you to Gregg Caruso for writing an excellent little summary of Pereboom’s book. I’ll be following the structure of that summary in what follows.



1. Frankfurt Style Cases and the Original Problem with PAP
Pereboom’s defence of the sourcehood view comes in three easy steps. The first step looks back to the old tension between PAP and Frankfurt style cases. These were thought experiments that appeared to undermine PAP. The second step revisits some of the leading objections to Frankfurt style cases. And the third step presents a revised Frankfurt style case that is immune to these objections. All of this suggests that PAP is misleading, and that the best explanation for this is that the sourcehood view is more plausible.

So let’s start with PAP and Frankfurt style cases. As you’ll recall from above, PAPists think that an agent must have genuine alternative possibilities open to them at the moment they decide to act in order for them to exercise free will (in the sense required for moral responsibility). For a long time this seemed like a plausible account of what was necessary for free will. So much so that staunch compatibilists — i.e. those who think that free will is compatible with causal determinism — felt it incumbent upon them to explain how an agent “could have done otherwise” in a causally deterministic world.

This changed in 1969. That is when Harry Frankfurt published his famous paper detailing a type of thought experiment which seemed to undermine the need for PAP. Such thought experiments have since become known as “Frankfurt style cases”. Here is a classic one (modified from Wikipedia):

Frankfurt style case: Donald is a Democrat and is likely to vote for the Democrats; in fact, only in one particular circumstance will he not: that is, if he thinks about the prospects of immediate American defeat in Iraq just prior to voting. Ms White, a representative of the Democratic Party, wants to ensure that Donald votes Democratic, so she secretly plants a device in Donald's head that, if activated, will force him to vote Democratic. Not wishing to reveal her presence unnecessarily, Ms White’s device will only kick-in if Donald’s brain displays a certain neurological signal that is known to indicate that he is thinking about Iraq and so going to choose to vote Republican. As things happen, Donald does not think about Iraq prior to voting, and so he never displays the neurological signal needed for Ms White’s device to kick in. He is happy to vote Democrat. Did he do so in a way that makes him free and morally responsible for his decision?

Frankfurt’s interpretation of this case is that Donald is indeed responsible for his vote. But look at the set-up of the case. He is responsible for his vote despite the fact that he could not have done otherwise. Ms White’s device closed off all the alternative possibilities. But this doesn’t seem to alter our intuitive reaction. This suggests that PAP is not necessary.

PAPists have some responses to Frankfurt style cases. Two are relevant here. The first — which I covered in more detail before — claims that in every proposed Frankfurt case there is a “flicker of freedom”, i.e. a flicker of a genuine alternative possibility which is open to the agent, and that the presence of this flicker can account for our intuitive reaction. Thus, in the case just outlined, Donald’s brain could have displayed the relevant neurological signal indicating his desire to vote Republican. The fact that he could have done so explains why we think he is responsible for nonetheless choosing Democrat. And all of this is consistent with PAP.

The other response is to claim that Frankfurt-style cases problematically assume the truth of causal determinism. Specifically, they assume that certain neural signals are causally determinative of certain decisions. But this is something that many PAPists will object to. Many PAPists are libertarians who believe that free will exists but is not compatible with causal determinism. This leads them to reject causal determinism. Consequently, they will be unswayed by a thought experiment that assumes the truth of something they deny.


2. Pereboom’s Modified Frankfurt Case
This is where Pereboom enters the ring. He think it is possible to construct a Frankfurt style case that avoids the PAPist criticisms, but nevertheless shows that PAP is irrelevant to judgments about free will and moral responsibility. In constructing this case, he first offers a more detailed analysis of the kinds of alternative possibility that must be available to an agent on PAP. You see, not just any alternative possibility will do. It must be an alternative possibility that would have allowed the agent to avoid the type of responsibility we are purporting to impose upon him or her. In essence, the agent must have had an excusing alternative possibility open to them, and they must have had some cognitive sensitivity to that possibility. Pereboom summarises this as a robustness criterion for PAP:

Robustness Criterion for PAP: For an agent to have a robust alternative to her immoral action A, that is, an alternative relevant per se to explaining why she is blameworthy for performing A, it must be that:

(a) She could have voluntarily acted or refrained from acting as a result of which she would be blameless, and 

(b) For at least one such exempting acting or refraining, she was cognitively sensitive to the fact that she could so voluntarily act or refrain, and to the fact that if she voluntarily so acted or refrained she would then be, or would likely be, blameless.

With this criterion in place, we have a clearer sense of what the PAPists are demanding. And with a clearer sense of what they are demanding, we can construct a new Frankfurt case that seems to show how PAP is not required for moral responsibility. Such a case will feature a counterfactual intervener (the neuroscientist’s device) that stops an agent from reaching the conditions needed to meet the robustness criterion, but in which the agent nevertheless seems intuitively responsible for what they did. The implication drawn from this intuition then is that PAP is not needed for free will and moral responsibility, which in turn suggests that the sourcehood view is the only game left in town.

So what is Pereboom’s new Frankfurt case? It is complicated, but here it is in its entirety (it is called Tax Evasion 2 because it is updated and improved from an earlier thought experiment proferred by Pereboom in his 1999 book Living Without Free Will):

Tax Evasion 2: Joe is considering claiming a tax deduction for the registration fee that he paid when he bought a house. He knows that claiming this deduction is illegal, but that he probably won’t be caught, and that if he were, he could convincingly plead ignorance. Suppose he has a strong but not always overriding desire to advance his self-interest regardless of its cost to others and even if it involves illegal activity. In addition, the only way that in this situation he could fail to choose to evade taxes is for moral reasons, of which he is aware. He could not, for example, fail to make this choice for no reason or simply on a whim. Moreover, it is causally necessary for his failing to choose to evade taxes in this situation that he attain a level of attentiveness to moral reasons. Joe can secure this level of attentiveness voluntarily. However, his attaining this level of attentiveness is not causally sufficient for his failing to choose to evade taxes. If he were to attain this level of attentiveness, he could, exercising his libertarian free will, either choose to evade taxes or refrain from so choosing (without the intervener’s device in place). However, to ensure that he will choose to evade taxes, a neuroscientist has, unbeknownst to Joe, implanted a device in his brain which, were it to sense the requisite level of attentiveness, would electronically stimulate the right neural centers so as to inevitably result in his making this choice. As it happens, Joe does not attain this level of attentiveness to his moral reasons, and he chooses to evade taxes on his own, while the device remains idle. 

(Pereboom 2014, 15)

The point is that in this case causal determinism is explicitly not assumed to be true: we are told that nothing necessitates certain actions by Joe. What is assumed, however, is that a certain level of attentiveness is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for Joe to do otherwise. This level of attentiveness also happens to be essential if the robustness criterion is to be met, for only then will Joe have the requisite cognitive sensitivity to the exempting alternative possibility. The set-up is such that a counterfactual intervener will alter Joe’s decision if that level of attentiveness is reached, but that level of attentiveness never is reached. Despite this, according to Pereboom, it is intuitively attractive to say that Joe was responsible for his decision to evade taxes: he knew what he was doing was wrong, his personality prioritised self-interest over costs to others, but he went ahead and did it.

What are we to make of this intuitive reaction? Well, Pereboom thinks we are to infer that PAP is mistaken. Genuine alternative possibilities — ones that meet the robustness criterion — are not needed for free will and responsibility. This can be shown our reaction to a thought experiment which does not assume the truth of causal determinism and which pays attention to the robustness criterion. What’s more, the most plausible explanation for the intuitive belief that Joe is responsible for what he did in this case is the sourcehood view: Joe is responsible because of who he is and how his character/personality/occurrent beliefs and desires are linked to his decision.

Of course, Pereboom is walking a fine line in drawing this inference. I know when I first read Tax Evasion 2 I was inclined to be more agnostic about Joe’s responsibility. This was because I was inclined to question why Joe was so self-interested and inattentive to certain moral reasons. Were external forces responsible for that? Could he really be blamed? Ultimately, Pereboom also asks these questions and draws the further conclusion that, despite the intuitive appeal of Joe’s responsibility, neither he nor anybody else is truly free and responsible for what they do. The argument that leads him to this conclusion will have to wait for another day. In the interim, with his revised Frankfurt style case, he only hopes to show that the sourcehood view is to be preferred over the alternative possibility view. So, if we are to have free will, we must be the sources of our actions. We need not have access to genuine alternative possibilities.

Review of 2014: Favourite and Most Viewed Posts

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As the year now winds to close I thought it might be appropriate to briefly review what has happened on this blog in the past 12 months. Not that I want this to be deeply introspective or anything like that. I just want to give you a bunch of lists, reviewing my favourite posts, some readers' picks, and the most popular posts by page views. Obviously there is some overlap between the lists -- it would be disappointing if my favourite posts never overlapped with the most viewed -- but there are plenty of differences too.

Let's start with favourites. I've tried to pick one "favourite" from each month, substituting some readers' picks in November and December. It was pretty difficult to do this since some months were clearly better than others, and there were several that I wanted to include but didn't. But I published over 110 posts this year so something had to be left on the cutting room floor. If you're curious about all those others, why don't you check them out for yourself. They are available in the archives in the right hand column of this page. And if you have alternative recommendations, feel free to add them in the comments.



Favourite Posts

• Rule by Algorithm? Big Data and the Threat of Algocracy (Jan 2014)

• Advanced Trolleyology and the Doctrine of Double Effect (Feb 2014)

• Plantinga versus Peels on Naturalism and Moral Realism (Part One, Part Two) (Mar 2014)

• Should we bet on radical enhancement? (Apr 2014)

• The Ethics of Suicide: A Framework (May 2014)

• The Ethics of Benign Carnivorism (Part One, Part Two) (June 2014)

• Bostrom on Superintelligence (3): Doom and the Treacherous Turn (Jul 2014)

• Are we heading for technological unemployment? An Argument (Aug 2014)

• Chalmers v Pigliucci on the Philosophy of Mind-uploading (Part One, Part Two) (Sep 2014)

• Should we abolish work? (Oct 2014)

• The Legal Challenges of Robotics (2): Are Robots Exceptional? (Nov 2014)

• Are we innate retributivists? A Review of the Psychological Evidence (Dec 2014)

Moving on then to page views. I know some people like to think of Bitcoin as the currency of the internet, but as we all know the real currency of the internet is page views. How did the blog do on that front? Pretty well, all things considered. I crossed the one million page view mark back in October (according to Google stats anyway) and I ended the year averaging about 40,000 hits per month. That's not amazing, but it is up about 15,000 per month on last year. I also had far more posts this year that scored over 1,000 hits, which is nice. Anyway, here are the top ten posts by number of views (how many actually read them is another matter entirely):

Top Ten posts on Philosophical Disquisitions by page views

• The Ethics of Virtual Rape (6090 hits)

• Do Cognitive Enhancing Drugs Actually Work? (5444 hits)

• Can blogging be academically valuable? Seven reasons for thinking it might be (4025 hits)

• The Ethics of Suicide: A Framework (3420 hits)

• Is Modern Technology Creating a Borg-Like Society? (3400 hits)

• Should we have a right not to work? (3071 hits)

• Enforcing Morality through Criminal Law (Part One) (2853 hits)

• Rule by Algorithm? Big Data and the Threat of Algocracy (2061 hits)

• How can you make your writing more coherent? Four Tips (2012 hits)

• An Ethical Framework for the use of Enhancement Drugs (1690 hits)

Finally, over the past two years my work has been republished several times on various other popular weblogs. Just this past year, I've had posts published on Humanity Plus, Disinfo and Practical Ethics. But my main other outlet is the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) blog. They republish nearly everything I publish on here (a big thank you to Kris Notaro for supporting my work). Here are the top ten posts (by page views) over on IEET.

Top Ten Posts on IEET by page views

• Will sex workers be replaced by robots? A Precis (14645 hits)

• Rule by Algorithm? Big Data and the threat of Algocracy (14262 hits)

• Are we heading for technological unemployment? An Argument (8601 hits)

• Should we have a right not to work? (7843 hits)

• Dawkins and the "We are going to die" Argument (6603 hits)

• Should we abolish work? (6458 hits)

• Big Data, Predictive Algorithms and the Virtues of Transparency (5478 hits)

• Steven Pinker's Guide to Classic Style (5238 hits)

• Is Modern Technology Creating a Borg-like Society? (5118 hits)

• Algocracy and other Problems with Big Data (4775 hits)

So that's it for 2014. Let's see what happens next year.

Academic Papers 2014

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End of year navel-gazing exercises seem to be the norm on blogs. Here's the first of mine. It's a list of all the peer-reviewed papers I have had accepted for publication in the past year. Not as many as in 2013, but hey I couldn't keep that pace up forever. Two of these have already been published. The other two won't be published until 2015. You can follow links to copies of all four (if you are so inclined):

• The Normativity of Linguistic Originalism: A Speech Act Analysis (2015) Law and Philosophy, forthcoming - Originalism is a theory of constitutional interpretation, according to which a constitution ought to be interpreted in light of its original meaning. This is my attempt to critique a certain type of originalism. Specifically, the linguistic originalism associated with the likes of Lawrence Solum and Jeffrey Goldsworthy. Both claim that the meaning of a constitution simply is its original meaning, not something else that we morally desire or wish it to be. I argue that this is wrong, even if we agree with the versions of originalism espoused by Solum and Goldsworthy: working out the communicated content of a constitution is not a purely factual/empirical affair; it is also a deeply normative and moral affair. (Official; Academia; Philpapers)

• Robotic Rape and Robotic Child Sexual Abuse: Should they be criminalised? (2015) Criminal Law and Philosophy, DOI 10.1007/s11572-014-9362-x - With sophisticated sex robots likely to become a reality in the not-too-distant future, this paper asks what happens when they are used to provide realistic facsimiles of rape and child sexual abuse. Should this be outlawed? This paper provides an extremely tentative argument for criminalisation, based on some leading theories of criminalisation. The argument is not intended to be conclusive, but rather to provide a framework for future debate. (Official; Academia; Philpapers)

• The Comparative Advantages of Brain-Based Lie Detection: the P300 Concealed Information Test and Pre-trial Bargaining (2015) 19(1) International Journal of Evidence and Proof  DOI: 10.1177/1365712714561189 - This paper looks at the possible forensic uses of the P300 Concealed Information Test. It argues that this technology could be used to empower innocent defendants during pre-trial plea bargaining in criminal cases. This is because it would offer a better solution to the "innocence problem" (the phenomenon whereby innocent defendants are incentivised to plead guilty) than any other currently-proposed solution. (Official; Academia; Philpapers)

• Sex Work, Technological Unemployment and the Basic Income Guarantee (2014) 24(1) Journal of Evolution and Technology 113-130 - This paper looks at the possible impacts of sex robots on the sex work industry. It considers the arguments for two competing hypotheses. The Displacement Hypothesis, which claims that human sex workers will eventually be displaced by robots; and the The Resiliency Hypothesis, which claims that human sex work will remain resilient to technological unemployment. It also looks at how these possibilities affect the case for the basic income guarantee. (Official; Academia; Philpapers)

Stopping the innocent from pleading guilty: Can brain-based recognition detection tests help?

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P300 Concealed Information Test

So I have another paper coming out. It’s about plea-bargaining, brain-based lie detection and the innocence problem. I wasn’t going to write about it on the blog, but then somebody sent me a link to a recent article by Jed Radoff entitled “Why Innocent People Plead Guilty”. Radoff’s article is an indictment of the plea-bargaining system currently in operation in the US. Since my article touches upon same thing, I thought it might be worth offering a summary of its core argument.

The gist of it is that I think that it may be possible to use a certain type of brain-based lie detection — the P300 Concealed Information Test (P300 CIT) — to rectify some of the problems inherent in current systems of plea bargaining. The word “possible” is important here. I don’t believe that the technology is currently ready to be used in this way. I think further field testing needs to take place. But I don’t think the technology is as far away as some people might believe either.

What I find interesting is that, despite this, there is considerable resistance to the use of the P300 CIT in academic and legal circles. Some of that resistance stems from unwarranted fealty to the status quo, and some stems from legitimate concerns about potential abuses of the technology (miscarriages of justice etc.). In the article, I try to overcome some of this resistance by suggesting that the P300 CIT might be better than other proposed methods for resolving existing abuses of power within the system. Hence my focus on plea-bargaining and the innocence problem.

Anyway, in what follows I’ll try to give a basic outline of my argument. As ever, for the detail, you’ll have to read the original paper.


1. Plea Bargaining and the Innocence Problem
Plea bargaining is the common practice whereby by a defendant charged with a particular offence will plead guilty to a lesser offence, in an effort to reduce their expected punishment. Radoff’s article describes how the practice currently operates in the US. Similar practices operate in other countries, though they are possibly less extreme than that found in the US.

Plea-bargaining is attractive to both prosecutors and defendants. It is attractive to prosecutors because they are incentivised to achieve the maximum amount of punishment for the minimum expenditure of prosecutorial resources. Plea bargaining enables them to do this by eliminating the costs associated with lengthy trials. It is attractive to defendants because they are incentivised to minimise their expected amount of punishment. Going to trial is risky from their perspective because it carries with it a higher possible sentence. If they are being prudent, pleading guilty to a lesser offence is often going to be the safer bet.

In fact, things are probably skewed more heavily in favour of entering a guilty plea than I am letting on. As Radoff points out in his article, certain changes to sentencing law (mandatory minimums) coupled with differential power as between prosecutors and (most) defence lawyers, will make entering a guilty plea nearly always the sensible thing to do. For example, most defence lawyers are at a considerable informational disadvantage when they first meet with the prosecutors. They will have had limited opportunities to meet with their clients, whereas the prosecutor will have a full police report, witness testimony and forensic evidence (assuming there is any):

Against this background, the information-deprived defense lawyer, typically within a few days after the arrest, meets with the overconfident prosecutor, who makes clear that, unless the case can be promptly resolved by a plea bargain, he intends to charge the defendant with the most severe offenses he can prove…If, however, the defendant wants to plead guilty, the prosecutor will offer him a considerably reduced charge—but only if the plea is agreed to promptly (thus saving the prosecutor valuable resources). 

(Radoff 2014)

Under these conditions who wouldn’t be inclined to plead guilty?

“The truly innocent”, you might respond. But that is not the case. Again, as Radoff points out in his article, studies have shown that a number of innocent defendants have opted to plead guilty in order to avoid more serious charges. The Innocence Project, which seeks to exonerate innocent defendants on the basis of DNA evidence, has identified 30 people (approx. 10% of their total) who pleaded guilty despite later turning out to be innocent. Similarly, the National Registry of Exonerations (in Michigan Law School) has found that 10% (or 151 cases) of legally acknowledged exonerations since 1989 have involved false guilty pleas. Of course, the real number is difficult to know since many of those who plead guilty despite their innocence will never be uncovered. But the 10% figure from these sources looks worrisome.

This is plea bargaining’s innocence problem: the incentives are such that innocent defendants are persuaded to plead guilty more often than we would like.


2. The Innocence Problem as a Signalling Problem
There are many possible causes of the innocence problem. Long-standing structural and political issues are part of the problem, as are the idiosyncrasies of particular cases and personalities. But at the heart of them all is a basic signalling problem. Innocent defendants feel the pull of the guilty plea because they know they have no way in which to credibly signal their innocence to the prosecutors.

The classic signalling problem can be found in the biblical tale of King Solomon and the two women. I think I’ve shared this many times on the blog so you’ll have to forgive me if I do it one more time. According the traditional version of the story, two women came to King Solomon with a dispute as to parental rights. Apparently, each woman had recently had a child. One woman had rolled over her child while sleeping and the child suffocated and died. She then stole the other woman’s child and claimed it as her own. This is what led to the dispute coming before King Solomon.

The problem for Solomon was that the signals sent to him by the women were the same. They both claimed to be the mother, with equal vigour, and in the absence of further evidence there was no reason to believe one over the other. Economists sometimes refer to this as a pooling equilibrium: both the fake mother and the real mother are incentivised to adopt the same signalling strategy. The claim I’m making here — and I’m certainly not the only one to make it — is that a similar sort of pooling takes place in the typical criminal case. It doesn’t matter how much the truly innocent defendant protests their innocence. Their signals will tend to be pooled with the signals of guilty defendants who also protest their innocence. In the absence of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, there is no reason for the prosecutors to believe either.

How can the signalling problem be resolved? Well, speaking in very abstract terms, you need to change the incentives so as to avoid the pooling equilibrium. That’s exactly what King Solomon did in the case of the two women. He decreed that the child be cut in half and shared equally between the them. The false mother was happy to go along with this (she had already lost her child and wished to punish the true mother), but true mother was not (she didn’t want her child to die). Consequently, she was incentivised to concede the dispute to the false mother, which allowed Solomon to work out her real identity. The signals were suddenly separated.

Can something similar be done in the case of the innocence problem? Can we change the incentives so that there is some signal that innocent defendants are more likely to send to the prosecutors than guilty ones?


3. The P300 CIT as a device for Credible Signalling
In a lengthy article, which I covered last year, Russell Covey has argued that the signalling problem can be solved by introducing a “subwager” into the pre-trial bargaining game that is being played between prosecutors and defendants. He explains the idea by analogy to a simple card game. Since I went through the details of that card game before, I’ll just skip to the conclusion here. The subwager is akin to a bet that a truly innocent defendant would be willing to take, while a guilty one would not. In other words, it is a bet with asymmetrical risks: it is high risk to the guilty defendant but low risk to the innocent.

My claim is that the willingness to undergo a voluntary P300 CIT could count as such a subwager. Now, you may be wondering, what exactly is a P300 CIT and how can it count as a subwager? In brief, a P300 CIT is a type of brain-based lie detection. Actually, no, scrap that: it’s not really a form of lie detection. Rather, it is a type of memory or recognition detection test. It provides evidence for whether or not a suspect recognises information that was present at a crime scene. Thus, it can be used (as part of an appropriate inductive inference) to either link a guilty defendant to a crime scene or separate an innocent defendant from a crime scene. It does so by detecting the presence or absence of a particular of a brainwave known as the P300. Hence the name. The assumption underlying the test — and backed up by experimental tests thereof — is that this brainwave is detected when a suspect — or, perhaps more correctly, a suspect’s brain — recognises information.

I don’t want to get into the evidence supporting the reliability of the P300 test here. I cover that at some length in my article, and there is an excellent review paper covering all the experimental evidence in favour (and against) the version of the test that I think stands the best chance of actual forensic use. Suffice to say, I think the evidence for the test is more impressive than you might think (though certainly not without its flaws). It can be used to distinguish those who recognise crime-relevant information from those who do not at a rate that is far better than chance (with several experimental tests reporting accuracy levels above 90%). To be sure, there have been dubious uses of the test in past — for instance, Lawrence Farwell’s use of a P300 “brain fingerprinting” test has been criticised — and we should guard against dubious uses in the future, but I nevertheless believe that with more extensive field testing this technology could be used in forensic contexts.

But, as I say, I don’t want to dwell on the evidence in favour of the P300. Instead, I want to highlight how it could be used to resolve the innocence problem. In brief, I think the test provides a way for innocent defendants to credibly signal their innocence to investigators and prosecutors of crimes. Why so? Because the test has the asymmetrical risk profile needed for a successful subwager. It presents a low-risk to innocent defendants (indeed, one of the nice things about the P300 test is its low rate of false positives, particularly when compared with classic forms of lie detection), but a high-risk to guilty defendants. Innocent defendants could thus voluntarily submit to such a test and credibly signal their innocence to prosecutors. In the article, I develop this argument in more detail, explaining why it is important that the use of the test be truly voluntary and why it is important not to simply infer guilt from an unwillingness to undergo such a test. To summarise the argument:

• (1) The innocence problem arises from a signalling problem: signals sent by innocent defendants are indistinguishable from the signals sent by guilty defendants.

• (2) Introducing a subwager into the pre-trial bargaining game can help solve this signalling problem by giving those with private knowledge of innocence a credible way to distinguish themselves from others.

• (3) Giving defendants the option of voluntarily submitting to a P300 CIT provides them with just such a subwager.

• (4) Therefore, giving defendants the option of voluntarily submitting to a P300 CIT can help solve the innocence problem.

Don’t read too much into the wording of this conclusion. I don’t think that my proposal will fully “solve” the innocence problem. At best it will provide a partial solution, applicable in a certain range of cases. But I think this is nothing to be sniffed at and could be considered seriously in the not too distant future.



4. Criticisms of my proposal?
This initial argument for my proposal will probably seem unpersuasive in and of itself. That’s why I insist upon developing the argument within a comparative advantage framework. In other words, within a framework that explicitly compares the proposal to other possible solutions to the innocence problem. When considered in this light, I believe it becomes a good deal more persuasive. I’ll try to explain by considering three other possible solutions to the innocence problem (there are more — for example other types of forensic evidence like DNA testing can be used and have been used by the Innocence Project — but in my analysis I’m limiting my focus to cases in which these other forms of evidence are not available).

The first solution is the one proposed by Russell Covey, from whom I got the idea of the subwager. He thinks that voluntary submission to interrogation functions as a credible signalling device for innocent defendants. In other words, if I am truly innocent, I should forego my right to silence and submit myself to robust questioning by the authorities. Since I am innocent, I am more likely to “pass” the interrogation test than a guilty defendant. The asymmetry of risks needed for the subwager is present in this decision. To be fair, Covey adduces some empirical evidence to suggest that innocent defendants really are better off if they voluntarily submit to interrogation. But I think we should be cautious about this proposal. Interrogation, particularly if the methods become more robust, is open to abuse and comes with no known error rates. The P300 CIT has an advantage over interrogation in that it is a scientifically based test, with known error rates, that has to be administered in accordance with strict protocols.

Another possible solution would be to use other methods of lie detection — e.g. fMRI lie detection. The reasoning would be similar: they represent a low risk to innocent defendants and a high risk to guilty defendants. But, again, I think we should be cautious about such a proposal. Other methods of lie detection tend to follow a control question test (CQT) format, which is open to abuse and has been used, in the past, as little more than an interrogation prop. Also, I think we should be much more suspicious of the evidence claimed on behalf of fMRI-based tests: the signals can be overinterpreted, and it is much more difficult to test whether someone is lying in a lab setting than it is to test whether they recognise certain information. I think the P300 CIT has the advantage once more.

Finally, there is what I call the “sousveillance” solution. This isn’t a subwager-like proposal. This is something far more radical. The idea behind it is that everybody wears veillance technologies at every moment in their lives. This technology will allow them to record and detail everything they have ever done. This will provide them will reliable and credible documentary evidence of their movements and, if they are truly innocent, it should provide them with a way to document their innocence. I accept that this may resolve the innocence problem. And I accept that the evidence produced by such veillance technologies may be more reliable than that produced by a P300 CIT. But, again, I think the P300 has some advantages over the sousveillance solution. For one thing, the sousveillance solution would require prospective implementation, i.e. everyone would need to be using such technologies before any crime were committed. The P300 CIT can be implemented retrospectively, i.e. to investigate crimes after they have taken place. Since we may not be able to guarantee the widespread use of sousveillence technologies, the P300 CIT seems like it could be more useful. For another thing, the widespread use of sousveillance would have a range of other social costs (and benefits) associated with it. It should not be adopted as a targeted solution to the innocence problem. Still, I accept that certain technological trends may be pushing us in this direction. (Note: The sousveillance solution is something I wanted to discuss in the article but the editor asked me to remove the discussion of it before publication. I am grateful to have the opportunity to add it in here)

When considered in light of these other possible solutions, the P300 CIT “solution” to the innocence problem looks more promising. There are other objections to the proposal too, but I’ll leave you read about those in the article itself.


5. Conclusion
To briefly sum up, there is an innocence problem inherent in existing systems of plea-bargaining. The incentives of the system are such that innocent defendants are sometimes persuaded to plead guilty. Ideally, we should avoid this problem. Although there are many possible causes, one of the chief ones is the inability of innocent defendants to credibly signal their innocence to prosecutors. I have argued that a brain-based recognition detection test — specifically the P300 CIT — may help to correct for that inability. The technology is not ready for this use just yet, but may be in the near future.

Meaning, Value and the Collective Afterlife: Must others survive for our lives to have meaning?

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Samuel Scheffler made quite a splash last year with his book Death and the Afterlife. It received impressive recommendations and reviews from numerous commentators, and was featured in a variety of popular outlets, including the Boston Review and the New York Review of Books. I’m a bit late to the party, having only got around to reading it in the past week, but I think I can see what all the fuss was about.

The book really does offer some interesting, and novel, insights into what it takes to live a meaningful life. The most interesting of those insights comes from Scheffler’s defence of the collective afterlife dependency thesis. According to this thesis, much of what makes our lives valuable is dependent on the existence of a collective afterlife. This collective afterlife is not, according to Scheffler, to be understood in supernatural or religious terms; it is to be understood in secular and naturalistic terms. It is the continued existence of beings like us in an environment which is roughly equivalent to the one in which we now live.

Scheffler is quite careful in his development of this thesis. He distinguishes three different versions of it, and clarifies (to some extent) exactly what needs to be preserved in this collective afterlife. I’m going to skip over some of this nuance in what follows. I’m just going to look at Scheffler’s defence of the unrefined version of the dependency thesis, as well as some criticisms of that idea. In particular, I’m going to look at Mark Johnston’s criticism, which claims that if Scheffler is right, then life is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme: it needs an infinite stream of future generations to “pay in” in order to make life meaningful for the current generation.


1. What is this “collective afterlife” you speak of?
Before looking at the argument proper, we need to clarify the central thesis. As I just said, it all hinges on the notion of a collective afterlife. Scheffler alludes to this idea several times in the book. He knows that his use of that term is contentious — “afterlife” brings with it a rich set of religious connotations — but that’s part of the fun. Here is a quick definition, based on my own reading between the lines:

Collective Afterlife: The continued existence of human-like beings in conditions roughly equivalent to those in which you now live, after your death.

A couple of points about this definition. First, note how it refers to “human-like beings”, not humans. This is my addition. Throughout the book Scheffler talks (or implies) that his imagined collective afterlife involves the existence of human beings, but I take it that it is not absolutely essential for the beings that exist in the collective afterlife to be human (i.e. genetic members of homo-sapiens). Human-like beings, with similar properties of personhood and similar goals and aspirations would be sufficient. That brings us to the other part of the definition, which is also mine, and which claims that they must live in conditions roughly equivalent to those in which we now live. It turns out that the precise conditions in which future generations must live is somewhat contentious as between Scheffler and his critics. It’s pretty clear that, in order to confer meaning on our lives, the lives of future generations must share at least some of our values, aspirations and needs, and that they must not live in a state of abject immiseration and deprivation, but they probably don’t need to have lives that are exactly the same as ours. I’ll return to this later when looking at Johnston’s criticism. Finally, note how the definition makes no appeal to the continued existence of humans that are particularly close to us (i.e. friends and family). This is important because one of things that Scheffler points out in his book is that, in order to confer value on our lives, the lives of future beings need not bear a close relation to us.

So much for that. What role does the collective afterlife play in our lives? Scheffler claims that it plays quite a big role. He claims that much of what we value in life (our plans, hopes, projects, activities and so on) depends for its value on the existence of a collective afterlife:

…our conception of a human life…relies on an implicit understanding of such a life as itself occupying a place in an ongoing human history, in a temporally extended chain of lives and generations. 

(Scheffler 2013, p. 43)

This is the dependency thesis:

The Collective Afterlife Dependency Thesis (CADT): The existence of a collective afterlife is an important condition for living a valuable life; without a collective afterlife our present lives would be denuded of much of their value.

To be clear, this is my definition of the thesis, not Scheffler’s. He is much more careful in his discussion. He distinguishes between an attitudinal, evaluative and justificatory version of the thesis. These distinctions look into whether the collective afterlife is something that merely affects our attitudes to our lives, whether it actually affects what is valuable about our lives, and whether the actual (as opposed to believed) existence of the afterlife is essential. I’m going to ignore these distinctions for now. You’ll also note that my definition refers to the collective afterlife as an “important” condition for value in life. I use that term because I don’t think Scheffler intends for it to be understood as either a necessary or a sufficient condition; but he does clearly think it has a significant impact on the amount of value in our lives. Hence “important” seems like the most appropriate descriptor.


2. Scheffler’s argument for the CADT
Scheffler doesn’t present a formal argument for the CADT in his book. Instead, he presents a series of thought experiments and reflections upon those thought experiments. As always, I would like to recover as much formal structure from these reflections as possible. So in what follows I’ll try to show how those thought experiments can be used as part of a semi-formal defence of the CADT. There are two thought experiments that are particularly important for this purpose.

The first thought experiment is:

Doomsday Thought Experiment: Suppose that you will live a long, normal human life, but that 30 days after your death, all human life will be destroyed in some catastrophic event (for example, an asteroid collision). Suppose, further, that you know this catastrophic event will take place as you are living your life. What effect would this have?

Scheffler suggests, in a long and thoughtful analysis, that it would have a pretty devastating affect on your life. It would rob many of your projects and activities of their value, and would probably induce a significant amount of despair, grief and existential hand-wringing. He further contends that it is not really plausible to react to the scenario with indifference. As he puts it:

[F]ew of us would be likely to say… “So what? Since it won’t happen until thirty days after my death, it isn’t of any importance to me. I won’t be around to experience it, and so it doesn’t matter to me in the slightest.” 

(Scheffler 2013, p. 19)

Of course, it’s always dangerous when philosophers play these intuition-mongering games. There may be some people who do react with utter indifference (think Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia - if you think life is pretty pointless anyway you might not be too bothered). But I still sympathise with what Scheffler is saying. I certainly don’t think that I would react with utter indifference. The possibility of the doomsday scenario after my death would probably change my attitude to life.

Scheffler thinks these likely reactions tell us something interesting about what it takes to live a valuable life. In particular, he thinks they suggest that there is a strong nonexperiential aspect to what makes life worth living. In the doomsday scenario, your life and experiences are unaffected — you do not die prematurely — but nevertheless the value of your life is, somehow, affected. He also thinks that these reactions suggest that there is a significant conservatism to what makes our lives valuable. In other words, we want the things we currently value and care about to continue to exist after we die. Combined, these two implications provide some support for the CADT. They point to the need for the continued existence of beings like us, living lives like ours, in order for our lives to have as much value as we seem to think they do.

One problem with the doomsday thought experiment, however, is that it conflates the continued existence of beings with lives that are close to our own with the continued existence of beings with lives like our own. What do I mean by this? I mean it could be, for all the doomsday thought experiment suggests, that what induces all the despair and existential angst is the fact that our children, friends and family, or any other being close to us, will die. Although Scheffler thinks the continued existence of such beings is an important part of what confers value on our lives, he thinks that their existence alone does not do justice to the CADT. This leads to the second thought experiment:

Collective Infertility Thought Experiment: Suppose that the entire human race is infertile. In other words, the current generation of humans is the last generation of humans that will ever live. (A situation depicted in the novel and film The Children of Men). What effect would that have on our lives?

Again, Scheffler suggests that it would have a pretty devastating effect. It would induce a significant amount of despair and existential angst. Indeed, this is something that the Children of Men tries to illustrate in some rich, imaginative detail. We are shown a world in which anarchy and anomie reign supreme, and in which only an extremely authoritarian government can keep control. In the book, it is said to give rise to ennui universel, and that only those who “lack imagination” or who are in the grip of an extreme egotism are immune from the negative effects.

In these respects, the collective infertility scenario is similar to the doomsday one. But there are some crucial differences. As Scheffler points out, the despair in the collective infertility scenario is not just caused by the prospective deaths of ourselves and people we care about. In fact, we already know that everyone we know and love will someday die and yet this, in and of itself, does not induce the same degree of existential angst. The despair in the collective infertility scenario is caused by the fact that everyone — including those with whom we have no special or personal connection — is gradually going extinct. The fact that we feel despair at this generalised extinction tells us something interesting. It tells us that there is a strong altruistic element to the role of the collective afterlife in our own lives. We care about the general fate of humankind, not just the fate of people we know and love. Once again, this seems to support the CADT.

To summarise all this in a simple formal argument, we could construct the following:

• (1) If our intuitive reaction to certain thought experiments suggests that the continued existence of human-like beings in conditions roughly equivalent to those in which we now live is an important condition for meaning and value in our lives, then we are warranted in accepting the CADT.

• (2) Our intuitive reactions to the Doomsday Thought Experiment and the Collective Infertility Thought Experiment suggest that the continued existence of human-like beings in conditions roughly equivalent to those in which we now live is an important condition for meaning and value in our lives.

• (3) Therefore, we are warranted in accepting the CADT.

You might think it’s silly to spell out the argument in this level of detail. But one thing I like about this semi-formal reconstruction is that it renders transparent the type of inference that is taking place. Scheffler is defending the CADT on the basis of our reactions to certain thought experiments. Though this is a common methodology in philosophy, there are no doubt people who will worry about inferring such a significant thesis from such a limited set of reflections. All I can say to such people is that Scheffler’s reflections are much more detailed than I am making them out to be in this post, and even if his argument is ultimately lacking, it provides much food for thought.


3. The Ponzi Scheme Problem
There are several criticisms and commentaries on Scheffler’s argument. Some of them are modest in nature. For example, Susan Wolf — in a response contained within the original book — argues that much of what we value (e.g. certain intellectual and artistic pursuits) could still retain value in the face of the Doomsday scenario. This is modest insofar as it doesn’t completely deny that the collective afterlife plays a role in conferring value on our present lives. But there are also critics who take issue with the CADT as a whole. One of them is Mark Johnston who, in his review of the book, argues that if we take the CADT seriously, life ends up being akin to a Ponzi Scheme. And since he feels that this is implausible, he rejects the CADT.

Let’s try to make sense of this criticism. As best I can tell, it works as a reductio of the CADT:

• (4) If the CADT is true, then the possibility of our lives being full of value and meaning is dependent on the existence of future generations living lives full of value and meaning.

• (5) If the possibility of our lives being full of value and meaning depends on the existence of future generations living lives full of value and meaning, then life turns out to be a Ponzi scheme: we need an infinite stream of future generations to pay into the system in order to make our lives meaningful.

• (6) But we are not going to have an infinite stream of future generations paying into the system.

• (7) Therefore, our current lives are denuded of much of their value and meaning.

• (8) It is implausible to think that our current lives are denuded of much of their value and meaning.

• (9) Therefore, the CADT is implausible.

Johnston’s argument appeals to the “rough equivalence” concept that I introduced earlier on. As you’ll recall, I said that in order for the collective afterlife to confer value on our present lives, it cannot be the case that future generations live in a state of abject immiseration and deprivation, and that they must live lives that are roughly equivalent to those that we now live. Johnston is taking this a step further and arguing that their future lives must be very similar to our own, at least with respect to the amount of value and meaning in them. He then combines this with a transference principle for the conferral of value:

Transference Principle: If human generation_n (G_n) lacks value and meaning in their lives, then so too does G_n-1, and G_n-2, all the way back to G₁.

In other words, the lack of meaning and value in one future generation transfers back to the present generation. As Antti Kauppinen puts it, Johnston here seems to be endorsing a kind of Recursive Afterlifism. The question is whether this is itself a plausible construal of the CADT.

Kauppinen thinks that it is not, and I have similar feelings. While I appreciate the metaphor of the Ponzi scheme, I have a hard time accepting the transference principle upon which Johnston’s criticism is based. Kauppinen suggests in his commentary that future generations need not match us in terms of value and meaning in order for our activities and projects to have value conferred upon them by the existence of those future generations. For example, finding a cure for cancer in the present generation would be a valuable activity if it benefitted some future generations (e.g. 10 future generations). It would not be robbed of its value simply because there won’t be an infinite stream of happy future generations. What we end up with is a modified version of the transference principle. Instead of the amount of value and meaning in G_n being entirely determined by the amount of value in G_n+1, we have a situation in which the amount of value and meaning in G_n is partly determined by the amount of value and meaning in G_n+1. This more modest form of collective afterlifism has some disturbing implications. It suggests that life for the final generation of humans will indeed be devoid of much meaning and value, and that things won’t be much better for the second-to-last generation. But this is entirely consistent with the CADT. It simply suggests that the impact of the eventual demise of the human race attenuates as we go back in time. I find that to be a plausible construal of the CADT.


4. Conclusion
I’m going to leave it there. To quickly recap, Scheffler’s book argues that the amount of value and meaning in our lives is highly dependent upon the existence of a collective afterlife. He defends this by analysing two thought experiments, in one of which the human race goes extinct 30 days after your death, and in the other of which the human race is collectively infertile and dying out. One thing I have not covered in this post is the role of our deaths in conferring meaning on our lives. This is another, probably more controversial, aspect of Scheffler’s book. He thinks that our deaths are important for conferring meaning on our lives, and that the collective afterlife is more significant than our (individual) continued existence. I hope to cover that argument in more detail another time.

Should we criminalise robotic rape and robotic child sexual abuse?

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I recently published an unusual article. At least, I think it is unusual. It imagines a future in which sophisticated sex robots are used to replicate acts of rape and child sexual abuse, and then asks whether such acts should be criminalised. In the article, I try to provide a framework for evaluating the issue, but I do so in what I think is a provocative fashion. I present an argument for thinking that such acts should be criminalised, even if they have no extrinsically harmful effects on others. I know the argument is going to be unpalatable to some, and I myself balk at its seemingly anti-liberal/anti-libertarian dimensions, but I thought it was sufficiently interesting to be worth spelling out in some detail. Hence why I wrote the article.

For the detail, you’ll have to read the original paper (available here, here, and here). But in an effort to entice you to do that, I thought I would use this post to provide a brief overview.


1. What is robotic rape and robotic child sexual abuse?
First things first, it is worth clarifying the phenomena of interest. I’m sure people have a general sense of what a sex robot is, and maybe some vaguer sense of what an act of robotic rape or child sexual abuse might be, but it’s worth being as clear as possible at the outset in order to head-off potential sources of confusion. So let’s start with the notion of a sex robot. In the article, I define a sex robot as any artifact that is used for the purposes of sexual stimulation and/or release with the following three properties: (i) a human-like form; (ii) the ability to move; and (iii) some degree of artificial intelligence (i.e. an ability to interpret, process and act upon information from its environment).

As you can see from this definition, my focus is on human-like robots not on robots with more exotic properties, although I briefly allude to those possibilities in the article. This is because my argument appeals to the social meaning that might attach to the performance of sexual acts with human-like representations. For me, the degree of human-likeness is a function of the three properties included in my definition, i.e. the more human-like in appearance, movement and intelligence, the more human-like the robot is deemed to be. For my argument to work (if it works at all) the robots in question must cross some minimum threshold of human-likeness, but I don’t know where that threshold lies.

So much for sex robots. What about acts of robotic rape and robotic child sexual abuse? Acts of robotic rape are tricky to define given that legal definitions of rape differ across jurisdictions. I follow the definition in England and Wales. Thus, I view rape as being non-consensual sexual intercourse performed in the absence of a reasonable belief in consent. I then define robotic rape as sexual intercourse performed with a robot that mimics signals of non-consent, where it would be unreasonable for the performer of those acts to deny that the robot was mimicking signals of non-consent. I know there is some debate as to what counts as a signal of non-consent. I try to sidestep this debate in the article by focusing on what I call “paradigmatic signals of non-consent”. I accept that the notion of a paradigmatic signal of non-consent might be controversial. Acts of robotic child sexual abuse are easier to define. They arise whenever sexual acts are performed with robots that look and act like children.

Throughout the article, I distinguish robotic acts from virtual acts. The former are performed by a human actor with a real, physical robot partner. The latter are performed in a virtual world via an avatar or virtual character. There are, however, borderline cases, e.g. virtual acts performed using immersive VR technology with haptic sensors (e.g. such as those created by the Dutch company Kiiroo). I am unsure about the criminalisation argument in such cases, for reasons that will become clearer in a moment.


2. What is the prima facie argument for criminalisation?
With that definitional work out of the way, I can develop the main argument. That argument proceeds in a particular order. It starts by focusing on the purely robotic case, i.e. the case in which the robotic acts have no extrinsic effects on others. It argues that even in such a case, there may be grounds for criminalisation. That gives me a prima facie argument for criminalisation. After that, I focus on extrinsic effects, and suggest that they are unlikely to defeat this prima facie argument. Let’s see how all this goes.

The prima facie argument works like this:

• (1) It can be a proper object of the criminal law to regulate conduct that is morally wrong, even if such conduct has no extrinsically harmful effects on others (the moralistic premise).

• (2) Purely robotic acts of rape and child sexual abuse fall within the class of morally wrong but extrinsically harmless conduct that it can be a proper object of the criminal law to regulate (the wrongness premise).

• (3) Therefore, it can be a proper object of the criminal law to regulate purely robotic acts of rape and child sexual abuse.

I don’t really defend the first premise of the argument in the article. Instead, I appeal to the work of others who have. For example, Steven Wall has defended a version of legal moralism that argues that actions involving harm to the performer’s moral character can, sometimes, be criminalised; likewise, Antony Duff has argued that certain public wrongs are apt for criminalisation even when they do not involve harm to others. I use both accounts in my article and suggest that if I can show that purely robotic acts of rape and child sexual abuse involve harm to moral character or fall within Duff’s class of public wrongs, then I can make the prima facie case for criminalisation.

This first premise is likely to be difficult for many, particularly those with a classic liberal or Millian approach to criminalisation. They will argue that only harm to others renders something apt for criminalisation. I sympathise with this view (which is why I am cagey about the argument as a whole) but, again, appeal to others who have tried to argue against it by showing that a more expansive form of legal moralism need not constitute a severe limitation of individual liberty and how it may be very difficult to consistently hold to the liberal view. I also try to soften the blow by highlighting different possible forms of criminalisation at the end of article (e.g. incarceration need not be the penalty). Still, even then I accept that my argument may simply lead some to question the moralistic principles of criminalisation upon which I rely.

Premise two is where I focus most of my attention in the article. I defend it in two ways, each way corresponding to a different version of legal moralism. First, I argue that purely robotic acts of rape and child sexual abuse may involve harm to moral character. This is either on the grounds that the performance of such acts encourages/requires the expression of a desire for the real-world equivalents, or on the grounds that the performance requires a troubling insensitivity to the social meaning of those acts. This is consistent with Wall’s version of moralism. Second, I build upon this by arguing that the insensitivity to social meaning involved in such acts (particularly acts of robotic rape) would allow for them to fall within Duff’s class of public wrongs. The idea being that in a culture that has condoned or belittled the problem of sexual assault, an insensitivity to the meaning of those acts demands some degree of public accountability.

In defending premise (2) I rely heavily on work that has been done on the ethics of virtual acts and fictional representations, particular the work of Stephanie Patridge. This reliance raises an obvious objection. There are those — like Gert Gooskens — who argue that our moral characters are not directly implicated in the performance of virtual acts because there is some distance between our true self and our virtual self. I respond to Gooskens by pointing out that the distance is lessened in the case of robotic acts. I rely on some work in moral psychology to support this view.

That is my defence of the prima facie argument.

3. Can the prima facie argument be defeated?
But it is important to realise how modest that argument really is. It only claims that robotic rape and robotic child sexual abuse are apt for criminalisation all else being equal. It does not claim that they are apt for criminalisation all things considered. The argument is vulnerable to defeaters. I consider two general classes of defeaters in the final sections of the paper.

The first class of defeaters is concerned with the possible effects of robotic rape and robotic child sexual abuse on the real-world equivalents of those acts. What if having sex with a child-bot greatly reduced the real-world incidence of child sexual abuse? Surely then we would be better off permitting or facilitating such acts, even if they do satisfy the requirements of Duff or Wall’s versions of moralism? This sounds right to me, but of course it is an empirical question and we have no real evidence as of yet. All we can do for now is speculate. In the article, I speculate about three possibilities. Robotic rape and robotic child sexual abuse may: (a) significantly increase the incidence of real-world equivalents; (b) significantly reduce the incidence of real-world equivalents; or (c) have an ambiguous effect. I argue that if (a) is true, the prima facie argument is strengthened (not defeated); if (b) is true, the prima facie argument is defeated; and if (c) is true then it is either unaffected or possibly strengthened (if we accept a recent argument from Leslie Green about how we should use the criminal law to improve social morality).

The second class of defeaters is concerned with the costs of an actual criminalisation policy. How would it be policed and enforced? Would this not involve wasteful expenditure and serious encroachments on individual liberty and privacy? Would it not be overkill to throw the perpetrators of such acts in jail or subject them to other forms of criminal punishment? I consider all these possibilities in the article and suggest various ways in which the costs may not be as significant as we first think.

So that’s it. That is my argument. There is much more detail and qualification in the full version. Just to be clear, once again, I am not advocating criminalisation. I am genuinely unsure about how we should approach this phenomenon. But I think it is an issue worth debating and I wanted to provide a (provocative) starting point for that debate.