Drifty's Rants

Moral responsibility is an age-old dilemma within philosophy. Philosophers have been trying to devise a way to allow moral responsibility for people in all sorts of different ways. With the possibility of determinism controlling all of our actions, it has been questioned whether moral responsibility can exist. Determinism is the idea that actions follow causal laws with a cause and an effect for any action. Some philosophers extend determinism's power to the point that the first cause was the Big Bang and all events in the universe afterwards being its effect, basically making the whole outcome of the universe predetermined as soon as the Big Bang occurred. It can easily be seen how having free will can cause conflicts with certain views of determinism. Take the Big Bang example: free will would not necessarily work in that viewpoint of the world since all actions would be controlled by the causal chain emanating from the Big Bang. This is the incompatibilism viewpoint; free will cannot coexist with free will. On the other hand, some philosophers would argue that the causal chain does not extend that far back and that free will can be the cause of a causal chain. This is compatibilism; determinism and free will coexisting. One thing has remained consistent, though, throughout the lifetime of this dilemma is that most philosophers believe that moral responsibility requires free will. This all then ties into the issue of determinism allowing free will which automatically draws moral responsibility into the issue at hand. Without responsibility, morality is thrown out the window since having one's actions determined and forced immediately alleviates any responsibility for one's actions. Showing free will exists, with or without determinism, is key to allowing moral responsibility. One possible solution for this dilemma with moral responsibility is brought up by Daniel C. Dennett in his essay "Mechanism and Responsibility" as published in the book Free Will (ed. Gary Watson (Oxford University Press, 1982)). It is put forth by Dennett that there exists a way to view people's actions called the Intentional stance that shows that people can be held morally responsible for their actions. But there are mechanistic stances that can also be used. I would argue that the Intentional stance is nothing more than a reinterpretation and over-simplification of the mechanistic stances and is thus not a true stance; negating Dennett's defense of moral responsibility and thus free will.

Before this paper proceeds any farther, some terms must be explicitly defined and laid out and an objective explanation of the other side of this argument must be heard. To start, Dennett points out three stances that "one can choose to adopt in trying to predict and explain its [the system's] behaviour" (p. 154). One such stance is the design stance which attempts to predict the behavior of a system by its design alone. When using this system "one assumes there will be no malfunction, and predicts, as it were, from the blueprints alone" (p. 154). Another stance to take towards a system is the physical stance in which "predictions are based on the actual state of the particular system, and are worked out by applying whatever knowledge we have of the laws of nature" (p. 154). This makes the physical stance unique by being the only stance that "can predict the malfunction of systems" (p. 154). Both the design stance and physical stance are labeled as mechanistic stance. The last stance brought up by Dennett is the Intentional stance. This stance "assumes not just the absence of malfunction, but the rationality of design or programming as well" (p. 155). But the rationality of the system is "not necessarily perfect rationality"; the Intentional stance "start[s] with the supposition of what we take to be perfect rationality, and then alter our premise in individual cases as we acquire evidence of individual foibles and weakness in reason" (p. 155). Allowing the stance to adapt to the imperfect rationality of the system makes it very suitable for explaining the behavior of human beings.

Dennett points out "that the choice of stance is 'up to us', a matter of decision"; there is no "right" stance to take toward any system (p. 156). This leads to the issue of adopting a moral view of a system. Dennett quotes Peter F. Strawson as saying "If your attitude toward someone is wholly objective, then though you may fight him, you cannot quarrel with him, you cannot reason with him...You can at most pretend to quarrel, or to reason, with him" (p. 157). None of the three stances mentioned directly give morality to a system. This is important to point out since this means that by default adopting any of the three stances toward a system does not automatically account of moral responsibility, including the Intentional stance. To deal with this, Dennett creates a fourth stance called the personal stance which presupposes the Intentional stance. As he puts it, the personal stance is "just the annexation of moral commitment to the Intentional" (p. 158). None of the first three stances (design, physical and Intentional) give a moral commitment to a system on their own, but the Intentional can when raised so to speak to the level of the personal stance. This is not to say that one cannot hold feelings toward a system when the design or physical stance are used; as Dennett states it is like "The solicitude of a gardener for his flowers" (p. 159). You can hold personal feelings toward a system, but you do not use these feelings for moral commitment.

Dennett deals with the question of how man is affected by having the ability to explain our action's mechanistically. It is said that "the only implication that could be drawn from the general thesis of man's ultimately mechanistic organization would be that man must, then, be imperfectly rational" (p. 163). This is probably true because having our actions be mechanistically determined would cause us to possibly have non-rational actions, removing the possibility of perfect rationality for human beings. This still allows the Intentional stance to supposedly work if our actions truly are mechanistically determined. So Dennett would make it appear that there seems to be no consequence of being able to explain our actions mechanistically in regards to moral responsibility; possibly ignoring deterministic implications.

When the Intentional stance should be passed over for a mechanistic stance is "when a system happens to fall short of rationality in its response, whether because of a weakness in 'design', or physically predictable breakdown" according to Dennett (p. 164). This ties into Dennett's belief that all stances are applicable to any system and it is just a question of ease as to which one you use.

"The performing of actions is the restricted privilege of rational beings" and thus limits what can be properly labeled actions (p. 164). To establish that something is an action requires "not…examining its causal ancestry but by seeing whether certain sort of talk about reasons for action are appropriate in the context" (p. 164). Under this definition, "we exculpate the insane…[and] excuse the results of physical force dejeure" from being causes of actions (p. 164).

Influencing an action is as easy as speaking. Presenting an argument can "set air waves in motion, cause ear drums to vibrate", etc. (p. 165). In fact, "An Intentional system is precisely the sort of system to be effected by the input of information" according to Dennett (p. 165). Determinism would seem then to affect actions under the Intentional stance.

Determining whether an action committed by someone warrants responsibility is hinged upon "The crucial point…[of] whether or not the antecedent inputs achieve their effects as inputs of information or by short-circuit" (p. 165). Dennett is making the point that there is a difference between having an antecedent input affecting a system to the extent that the system "short-circuits" and performs an action that it is not meant to perform or to perform an action that is expected but forced by the antecedent's influence. Performing an action that the system was not meant to perform could be compared to a perfectly rational person performing an irrational action; making a system do something completely out of character that would normally never be performed had it not been for the "short-circuit". This is the difference in performing an action that one would never perform if it was not for the antecedent input and performing an action one would normally perform and just having the action coerced by the antecedent input. An example of out is meant by a system "short-circuiting" has already been given; a system being coerced is like causing a system to perform an action that is characteristic of the system, just at the time when the antecedent input demands it and out of the control of the system deciding whether or not to perform that action. In general, we are "absolved of responsibility in cases where we have been manipulated by others" (p. 165). But Dennett asks the question of about situations where there "is no one principle of innocence by reason of manipulation" (p. 165). So when is one not to be held responsible? "If one has been led to commit the act by deliberately false information communicated by another" then that person should not be held responsible for any actions leading from the false information (p. 165). Put simply, "to determine guilt or innocence in such cases is simple whether the defendant had reasonably good evidence for the beliefs which led to his act" (p. 166). It should be pointed out that "The principle in such cases has nothing to do with one's Intentional system being tampered with" (p. 166). In case of a fully rational being, one is absolved of moral responsibility when one performs an action based on false information that no rational being could be able to realize is false by normal means. But if the false information that the action is based on is obviously false to any rational being, then the person can be held responsible. The key here is whether the false information is obvious to a rational being or not; if it is then moral responsibility is applied to the rational being. It goes without saying that if the person in question is not rational, such as someone insane, they are pardoned from any moral responsibility.

Mechanical interference with a system is a whole other problem. If a simple bump in the arm causes an action, then the person bumped is not held responsible for events that are caused by that bump. Simple physical incidents like these obviously don't hold the anyone morally responsible if it was a valid accident. What about more complex physical interference? What about when there have been physical alterations to one's brain? Should one be held responsible for acts caused by an implanted belief? Dennett believes there are situations where the answer would be "yes". These situations arise when someone has a belief inserted into their mind without effecting that person's rationality. Since we hold a person responsible "to inspect his relevant beliefs before undertaking important action" we are allowed to hold people responsible as long as rationality prevails in their mind (p. 169). But if one's rationality is utterly destroyed by some manipulation of his/her mind, then he/she is excused from responsibility "on the grounds of insanity" since he/she will have become "invulnerable to rational communication" (p. 169). All of this hinges on the definition of a belief being "essentially something endorsed (by commission or omission) by the agent on the basis of its conformity with the rest of his beliefs" (p. 170). This means that "Whatever might be induced in me is either fixed and obsessive, in which case I am not responsible for where it leads me" (p. 170). All of this simplifies down to that a person is responsible for the actions caused by an implanted thought(s) as long as they are a rational being who has the ability to rationalize that the thought is wrong and that any rational being could, within in reason, be able to realize that the thought is false. Otherwise all actions connected with that thought are not to be held against the person.

In regards to whether it would be possible to dispose of the Intentional stance fully in favor of the mechanistic stance, Dennett says that the Intentional stance "may coexist with mechanistic explanations", but he believes that it can never be fully removed and replaced (p. 170). "One cannot have a world view of any sort without having beliefs, and one could not have beliefs without having intentions, and having intentions requires that one view 'oneself', at least, Intentionally, as a rational agent", leading to the actual need of the Intentional stance in Dennett's eyes (p. 171). Another reason why "we, as persons, cannot adopt exclusive mechanism" is because "no information system can in carry a complete true representation of itself" (p. 172). Thus the having beliefs and not having enough information about oneself forces us to hold on to the Intentional stance if Dennett is correct.

But is he correct? Is all that Dennett has presented to us right? I would have to beg to differ. I believe that the Intentional stance is no more than a reinterpretation of the mechanistic stances so as to simplify them for human consumption, leaving the Intentional stance not truly a stance on its own. By this I mean that when the supposed Intentional stance is being used we are not truly, at the lowest levels, really predicting a system based on its rationality, but in fact by its design and physical restraints. Consider the point that Dennett makes multiple times about all three stances (not including the personal stance since it has a prerequisite of the Intentional stance) can be applied to any system. This includes people, machines, etc. Obviously the mechanistic stances work wonderfully for machines. Since machines have a design they can have predicted actions based on that design as long as there is no malfunction. And since all things follow the laws of physics, the physical stance also works nicely with enough information and time. Even the Intentional stance works somewhat with any machine, assuming that the design of the machine is rational and not faulty and certain concessions are made. Take a bicycle, for instance. Applying the Intentional stance toward a bicycle, it would be rational for the bicycle to turn its wheels when pressure is applying on the pedals in the correct direction to go forward. And if it does not, then you must readjust what you expect from this rational system, just as Dennett says to do with the Intentional stance. Of course this all relies on the design of the bicycle. But wait. Rationality of a machine is based on its design. Wouldn't that mean that the design of a machine supercedes its rationality as the part of the system that ultimately leads to that system's outcome rather than its supposed rationality? Dennett even admits that a system to have the Intentional stance applied to it assumes "the rationality of design" (p. 155). You may still be able to view the system from the Intentional stance, but to be able to make a more informed prediction you would want to use the design or physical stance, even with human beings. Dennett says "that the choice of stance is 'up to us', a matter of decision", so being able to choose any stance to view a machine allows choosing the Intentional stance, but would you really want to? All three stances should be applicable, albeit not as effectively as another in certain cases, but still work in at least some limited capacity. But that appears to not be the case. The Intentional stance just not fully work for certain systems. Take the fact that the shortest point between two points is a curve. Does that make any rational sense? No, but Einstein proved that is so. Or how about that fact that Euclidean geometry does not necessarily hold in the world. That is really irrational, but it is fact. The physical stance and design stance are the only stances of the three that could possibly hope to point that out. This is of significant since I believe that Dennett believes any stance can be applied to any system. Not only is the Intentional stance mediocre for applying to machines, but it would appear that it cannot even be applied to all systems as Dennett would appear to hope. So what is it good for?

The Intentional stance is primarily used by humans to try to predict the outcome of other human beings. But the same basic ideas discussed above play out for human beings. Consider how much the human body is like a living machine. Every cell follows a design of fetching information from DNA, creating a specific protein to perform a specific action for a specific reason. Our whole body is just one huge chain of chemical reactions following a certain design. Our brains are nothing more than a huge repository of chemicals and synapses, constantly playing off of each other following a certain set of rules for the application and effects of chemicals. There is a reason why theologians used to use to justify the existence of a god by saying that our bodies seem to be well-designed living machines that only a deity could design. The physical stance can also be applied to the human body. Just take the view of the body as just a chain of chemical reactions; you could even take this down to the molecular level. All actions in the body follow quantum physics. We can predict out what can prevent certain proteins from being released by examining its molecular makeup. Drugs our now starting to be designed at the molecular level thanks to nanotechnology. With enough knowledge about physics or chemical reactions anyone could predict the actions of a person, rational or not (Obviously this would require a large amount of knowledge and mental or computer ability to figure out. It is possible that it could never be done, but it still strictly theoretically possible). The Intentional stance can not say the same thing. It requires that a person maintain a certain level or rationality. But what if some brain chemical is released that causes a person to throw their arms in the air for no rational reason? The Intentional stance would have to ignore it and say that it was a fluke, in a way. The design stance, though, could predict it since the chemical release was probably triggered by some other chemical reaction in the body which was designed by evolution to have that chemical trigger. And the physical stance could quite easily since everything in the world is dictated by physics; it would just be a matter of following back the causal chain as far as you wanted to. It would appear that theoretically the physical and design stance work better than the Intentional stance when it comes to human beings. Theoretically speaking, if we had enough knowledge we would know everything about human beings. Forget predicting our actions. We could predict when a cell would divide. That type of knowledge is much more powerful than the Intentional stance which has to constant redefine its parameters so as to properly predict the outcome of a system. The physical and design stances could also us to predict essentially anything without having to redefine how we predict. So, the Intentional stance not only is unsuitable for certain systems (including human beings) but is even unusable for others. The Intentional stance seems more and more faulty.

It would appear that the Intentional stance is rather imperfect. It would appear that almost anything about human beings that might seem to have its basis in rationality would be explainable through the design and physical stances. Something as basic as our personalities, something that would be normally put within the realm of the Intentional stance, develops out of evolution. When a loud noise goes off and we are startled, it is not because it is a rational reaction but because evolution has made us cautious of such noises. Men do not try to have sex with a certain women just because she looks good; evolution has made it a prime directive of men to try to inject as much of their DNA into the gene pool as possible with the best women of our species with time conditioning us to want a certain type of woman, with DNA filling in the rest. This is all by design, dictated by chemical reactions with atoms of our DNA. This is nature over nurture. And when we are influenced by our environment, our brains store that information chemically and access that information chemically with all of these reactions predictable physically, not rationally. Yet the Intentional stance has none of this to help it. It must start at perfect rationality and then work its way down to a lower level of rationality. It starts off not working effectively as a stance! It also requires that the system not malfunction; with human beings you never know when that is going to happen based on rationality. Take my writing of this paper. Why did I choose this topic? Because rationality dictated that I write it because I thought that Dennett was mistaken in his essay? No, because brain chemicals happened to be in such a state that when my senses picked up that I needed a paper topic my brain chemically came up with the topic. Instinctive predisposition and previous events led to certain tendencies and habits which led to my paper topic of choice. Take creativity. Obviously this would seem like something that could never be boiled down to brain chemicals. But couldn't some great idea be just the collection of certain ideas that led to the right brain state that led to the idea? Perhaps you have a brain "wired" for abstract idea connections, so your synapses tend to make far-reaching conclusions. You also happened to have the right experiences over your life and recently that your synapses fired off this supposed "creative" idea. If you took a complete look at someone's brain at the instant that an idea occurred you could presumably could trace every atom and chemical state back to some cause at some other point; not some rational cause. Rationality has nothing to do with it; chemistry has everything to do with it. Human rationality can be boiled down to chemical reactions in the brain and chance.

Perhaps rationality itself can be explained by the design stance. Rationality has a necessary condition of logic. Logic could be said to come from the design stance. Perhaps a god designed it, who knows. But it would not be difficult to agree that logic has a consistent coherency that precedes rationality. Logic stands true even after rationality has broken down, but the reverse is not true. Rationality does not help lead to logic, it is the other way around. The other part of rationality is habit. Something can be called irrational because it does not seem reasonable to society. But what dictates reasonability? Part of it is habit. Things are taboo in society only because habitually other people think it is not proper thing to do. Consider the case of someone leaving there home on a very rainy day. It would be rational to expect someone to walk out with an umbrella. But if that person didn't have an umbrella it would be considered non-rational. Why? Getting wet does not cause you to catch a cold; that's an old wife's tale. Perhaps the person likes the rain. I personally often go out into the rain without an umbrella on purpose. I will even put my umbrella down when it is raining. You should see the looks I get. People think it is not a very rational thing for me to do. But is it really that irrational? He have been habitually conditioned to believe that the rational response to walking in the rain is to have an umbrella. Hume himself said that we have beliefs in causal relations because of habits that we pick up from certain things seeming to always lead to something else. People would say that not believing in causal relations is irrational, but Hume presented a very good argument against believing in causal relations; I would wager that Hume is a very rational person. Yet people still view his ideas as irrational. The same could be said about what is considered rational. And what dictates what we consider rational from a habitual viewpoint? Once again it is our brain and its little chemical game that it plays. When we see something happen, we store it chemically in our brain. When something similar happens to the event we reinforce our habitual belief in it. We end up having events reinforced so often that we come to view it as a rational event to occur. Rationality appears to be in part conditioned responses to certain situations. It would appear then that even rationality has some basis from the design and physical stance.

What does all of this mean? What does it mean to say that the Intentional stance is not the best stance for any system, including the human stance? What does it mean to say that the Intentional stance cannot even be applied to some systems? What does it mean to say that rationality, the focal point of the Intentional stance, is based on the physical and design stance? It means that the Intentional is really nothing more than a oversimplification and reinterpretation of the mechanistic stances. What is meant by this, you may be asking. Well, think of it in terms of computer programming. In programming, you write programming code according to a programming language. Languages coming in many forms, such as C/C++, PASCAL, COBOL, Assembler, Java, etc. Languages like COBOL and PASCAL are called high-level languages. They are labeled this because they are designed to be simple and easy to understand and use. But they have the drawback of not having the ability to do everything you may want to do. That is where low-level languages come in. Languages like Assembler and C are considered low-level because they allow you to practically do what ever you want, albeit it in a complicated manner. But this ability to be able to do anything is what allows the high-level languages to exist. You see, high-level languages are often written and based on low-level languages. One example of this is the programming language Python. It is a simple, high-level language designed for simplicity and ease of use. But the program that turns code into an actual program, the compiler, is written in C. That is because you could never write a high-level language without writing the compiler for the program in a lower-level language. The C compiler itself is written in Assembler, the lowest-level language. Consider high-level languages the Intentional stance and low-level languages the mechanistic stances. Just as high-level languages simplify ideas, the Intentional stance simplifies things with its basis in rationality. But just like high-level languages, the Intentional stance is limited. All the while low-level languages, just like the mechanistic stances, are able to do any and all things in computers if you have the ability. It could be said that Assembler is the "true" programming language and everything else is just a simpler interpretation of Assembler. Same with the mechanistic stances being the "true" stances and the Intentional stance being just a simplification and interpretation of the mechanistic stances.

How about a simpler analogy. Think of technical schematics for a machine. They can be very complex and hard to understand, but they tell you everything you could possibly ever want know about the machine with careful analysis and consideration. Or you could always look at a picture-book version of the schematics. Granted, they don't tell you everything that you need to know, but they are a heck of a lot easier to understand. This is why the Intentional stance seems to work so well for people. The Intentional stance give us the picture-book version of people which anyone can understand while the mechanistic stances explain the inner-workings of all of us. This is why the Intentional stance seems to work; it makes sense to us and is comprehensible to us. But its limitations don't fully explain us as a system. That is why Dennett had to stipulate that the Intentional stance continually adjusts its judgment of a system's rationality; otherwise its imperfections would be glaringly obvious.

All of this is to point out that the Intentional stance should not be considered a true stance. It should be labeled the Intentional interpretation. I will continue to call it the Intentional stance, but realize I consider it really an interpretation of the mechanistic stances and thus not worthy of the "stance" label. All of this is pointed out because the Intentional stance plays an important role for Dennett in terms of morality, free will, and determinism. Remember that the moral stance presupposes the Intentional stance. But the Intentional stance, in essence, does not exist. So Dennett's explanation on how we can have morality toward a system is eliminated. What is also eliminated is Dennett's way of figuring out what does warrant moral responsibility. So what does all of this do to us? Is moral responsibility still possible without the Intentional (and thus the moral) stance? From the viewpoint that has been adopted to refute the Intentional stance I would have to say no. The brain does not seem to hold any free will, per se. If everything in the brain is truly chemically based, then it would mean that everything either relies on the laws of physics or chance; neither of which warrant free will. Chemical reactions don't allow us to interject any choice in how the chemical reaction will happen; causal relations don't allow it. Chance also does not give us free will; the whole point of chance is that it is random and thus not chosen to come out the way it does. This all leaves us with a very deterministic view of the world with no free will. A whole new factor would be thrown into the mechanistic stances if free will existed; the design stance could not be applied to human beings since choice is not designed but a purely free choice. Sure, there are possible influences, but in the end you would not be able to predict a free choice if it is truly free. The same goes for the physical stance. That would mean that there was some outside force beyond physics and chemistry acting on the brain, and thus the body, that allowed us to act in some way that was freely chosen, outside the power of physical causality that occurs in the brain. The Intentional stance would be the only possible stance then that would work for human beings if this viewpoint was true. This would allow morality. But this does not appear to be the case, so if you take determinism to be mean that all events can be traced back to a cause then incompatibilism rules this view. But if determinism is to mean that causation can exist but does not have to apply to all causes, then compatibilism could work. I would have to say, though, that the former seems to fit better for the view of the world as it is presented here in this paper.

Determinism reigns supreme with this incompatibilist view. If it could be shown that there existed something outside of the physical world, such as a metaphysical mind, soul, agent, etc., then possibly the Intentional stance could work. This would also possibly negate the mechanistic stances for people since the causal chain would not fully exist for human beings. Compatibilism would be true in this instance. But this all depends on metaphysicians finding such a non-materialistic agent to interject its influence into the causal chain. Philosophers have as of yet fully proven beyond a doubt that such an agent exists. Thusly, we currently should view the world as incompatibly determined, with the Intentional stance used just to help cushion the shock from this knowledge and to simplify our lives. Now it is quite possible that a good amount of what has been said here is wrong and that the world is such that the Intentional stance can be properly applied as Dennett has explained it. I think, though, that a compelling enough of an argument has been presented here to at least raise some doubt about the true independence of rationality when it comes to human beings. The true ability of the Intentional stance also has at least been called into question, at least partially weakening Dennett's defense for moral responsibility. I would like to hope that this paper will compel the reader to reinterpret what they exactly believe when it comes to rationality and how we use it to predict a persons actions. I also hope that the question of the role of determinism and free will in regards to human beings is brought up for the reader. If it does, then this paper was successful.