Task 3 Flashcards
What is the role of folk psychology on our common sense conception of agency?
Theory of action: presupposes that it is a person that acts based on the person’s desires, beliefs and intentions. Because it is an agent who acts it makes sense to ask that person to give an account of his or her behavior and to be held accountable.
How would you define the problem of the illusion of conscious will, also called by some ‘epiphenomenalism’ or the challenge of ‘No Action Thesis’ (NAT)?
Epiphenomenalism: thesis that seemingly causally relevant conscious processes (intention formation and decisions) do not play any active causal role in the production of the correspondent action
Why does this specific problem seem to be for compatibilists a more challenging critique towards our foundations of legal responsibility than mere determinism?
In a deterministic view no one can be held responsible. In a compatibilist world responsibility depends on agency, on the causal role of mental states and the new discoveries arguably deny the possibility of agency as it is traditionally conceived.
Can you give some concrete (experimental) examples that illustrate this NAT? What is the actual evidence for NAT?
NONE of these types of evidence offers logical support for NAT. What IS needed to support NAT is a general and direct demonstration that causal intentionality is an illusion.
Do you think that Wegner’s research and Libet (like) experiments prove NAT? Is our conscious will indeed an illusion?
Electricity in the brain is not a mental state such as a decision or an intention. The RP is not a decision. Libet’s work is fascinating but is does not prove that humans are generally not conscious, intentional agents or capable of employing their conscious intentionality when they have good reasons to do so. Even if the work is methodologically valid, various reasons conceptual and interpretative arguments undermine the claim that Libet has demonstrated that NAT is true.
Wegner’s experiment: tend to show that in the circumstances considered, individuals are easily fooled, believing that they are the authors of an action that was actually performed by others or performing an acting that they did not consciously want to perform. He says conscious will is certainly a useful compass to understand our behavior in the world but has no causal power. But there are actually cases in which people are not prey to external circumstances and decide based on internally generated intentions in a conscious way.
These experiments do not prove NAT.
In criminal law we need an actus reus (voluntary act). Explain Denno’s argumentation about voluntariness (partly based upon Libet’s experiment) and the reasons why Pardo and Patterson reject it.
Denno: voluntariness for criminal liability requires willed movements. Willed movements require internal, conscious decisions. Decisions about willed movements are made by ‘the unconscious’. Therefore, willed movements are not really voluntary in a sense that distinguishes them from the movements the criminal law acknowledges are not voluntary.
Pardo: problems with the argument of Denno: the relationship between voluntariness and the conscious decision to act. Voluntary action does not require an ‘internal process’ or feeling of consciously deciding to act preceding the bodily movements. E.g. picking up the phone.
What is the so-called mereological fallacy and what role can it play in this debate on legal agency?
Attributing an ability or function to a part (brain) that is only properly attributable to the whole (human) of which it is a part
Please explain the distinction between triggering and structuring causes and why this could be important for understanding that conscious intending is not an illusion and is actually causally relevant? How would you apply this way of understanding the conscious will to the mens rea of intent (as in the ‘intent’ to steal or to kill)?
Triggering causes: S is triggering cause of y when x causes y
Structuring causes: Z is structuring cause when z causes the fact that the occurrence of x will produce y
Structuring causes in agency
Example of booking a flight (Slors). If I decide to book a holiday. I will reflect on it and debate. Reflective consciousness. BUT, In Libet’s only phenomenal consciousness. Then I’m going to Iceland. I go to my work and I passed by a travel agency. I go in. I’m sensible/triggered to see the travel agency. Because I already reflected on traveling and booking holiday. It’s your thinking about booking holidays that makes you enter the travel agency. Triggering causes cannot be disconnected from structuring causes. You cannot disconnect actus reus from mens rea
Example of driving
Stopping at the red light does not always require a conscious reflection. BUT, part of distal intention of being a safe participant in the traffic. You are responsible for it
What is neuro-reductionism?
Reductionism – reducing complex phenomena into their most basic parts. Trying to explain the mind in terms of the brain, because we do understand those.
