Freedom to act

David Papineau’s book Knowing the score shows that sport is a very relevant theme for philosophy. That’s why its subtitle is How Sport teaches us about Philosophy (and Philosophy about Sport). The world of sport is a kind of mini-society where everything happens what happens also “in real”. Therefore sport can be used as a kind of model world for learning about the wide wicked world. It is true both for team sports and for individual sports. This makes it important that everybody should spend some time on practising a sport (or preferably several sports) during a shorter or longer period; especially children should do. It’s a world where you can learn to cope with society at large. However, sport experiences need not only be positive. It’s not only about cooperation, comradeship, learning to set goals and accepting defeats and setbacks. In sport you find also much hate, jealousy and violence. Wasn’t it the outstanding Dutch football coach Rinus Michels who said “Football is war?” But besides that sport can be help to learn the practice of life, it can also be used for substantiating or refuting scientific and philosophical theories.

As for the latter, I think that the practice of training for a sport is a clear refutation of the philosophical view that says that there is no free will. Actually this view says that first you start to act and only after your act has started you confabulate a reason why you act this way. At least, I think that this is the essence of a common interpretation of the famous experiment by Benjamin Libet that showed that an action precedes the conscious decision to perform it with a fraction of a second. Libet discovered that the beginning of an action precedes the awareness of the decision to act with 200 milliseconds (a description of the experiment is easy to find on the Internet). On the basis of this experiment the psychologist Daniel Wegner argued that there is no free will but only an illusion of free will. We have a feeling that we decided to perform the action concerned, but since the decision comes after the start of the action it cannot be true that we took a decision.  It’s simply an illusion. Automatic behaviour controls our conscious decision making and not the other way round. Really?

I don’t want to deny that at the moment we act we mistakenly feel to act according the decision. But let me take an example from tennis. Say Roger Federer is playing against Rafael Nadal. At a certain moment Federer has to return the ball and he decides to hit the ball that way that it passes left of Nadal, which will make it impossible for Nadal to return. And so it happens. What would we see if we could look in Federer’s brain at the moment he hits the ball? Indeed: He first hits and then he decides to hit. However, although Federer may have taken the decision after the hit, nevertheless, he knew what he had to do in order to score and he could act according to this knowledge. How is this possible if Federer hit the ball automatically? Was it merely luck that he hit the ball in the right way and not a free action?

In order to investigate this question, let me assume now that Nadal wasn’t playing tennis against Federer, but against me, the author of this blog. It’s true, for a short period in my life I have been a member of a tennis club, but today I hardly know any longer how to hold a tennis racket in the right manner, let alone that I can return a ball if Nadal is my opponent and that I know more than the basics of the tactics of tennis. I simply don’t have the automatisms to hit and return a ball. However, hadn’t I stopped playing tennis after two years, but had I continued doing so for the rest of my life, and moreover, which is especially important here, had I invested a lot of time in training, then certainly I still wouldn’t have been able to beat Nadal even once in my life, but I surely would have possessed the automatisms I need in order to hit some balls with this top player. But it didn’t happen. I decided to stop playing tennis, and later I choose another sport. And Federer? When he was sixteen years old, he decided to go on with playing tennis and to become the best tennis player in the world (or so I assume for this example). Therefore, he invested very much time in training and in learning the automatisms needed in order to be able to react automatically in the best way when he had to return such difficult balls as in his match with Nadal just described. And that’s what makes that he is free (as a tennis player). Federer’s freedom is not that he returns the ball in the intended way at the moment he is playing, but he is free because he decided to learn to perform the automatic reactions he wishes to do at the moment he needs them to do. Actually the decision to hit the ball is not taken at the moment Federer hits but it has been taken already long before, namely during his training, and just because Federer is able to act automatically now he is free. Generally, it’s the planning, so the long term decisions, that makes us free, not the intentional momentary act itself. Being able to act automatically according our intentions makes us free. So if there is no free will, as many philosophers state, it’s not because we are not free to act but because we are not free to plan.

“There is no such thing as society” (Thatcher): A counter example

The former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is known as one of the world leaders of the second half of the twentieth century. But do you know that she has also a reputation in philosophy? She got it by her bold assertion “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and families.” I don’t know what you think of this statement, but I am not only a philosopher but also a sociologist, and certainly – but not only –from a sociological point of view I think that it is quite naive. It leaves much of what we see around us unexplained and difficult to understand. In the end such social (!) phenomena like groups, associations, society, ingroup-outgroup conflicts, but also shared values and norms would be based on nothing than selfishness if they were family-based or based on individuality. But look around and you’ll see that the world is more complicated and that many loyalties and emotional attachments to others and to organisations, let alone to the nation could not be understood, for everything beyond the family would be merely practical and based on the calculated advantages we receive from extra-familial bonds. For example, all excitement about the Brexit would be mere fuss, and an account of the economic profits and losses would give the answer to the question whether or not Britain should leave the European Union. However, a closer look at the discussion shows that the problem is about loyalties and self-determination of the Britishness. But how can there be a loyalty to something that doesn’t exist and the self-determination of an non-existing x-ness?

I would have forgotten Thatcher’s assertion, hadn’t I read it again in the interesting book by David Papineau on sport and philosophy, Knowing the Score. After having quoted Thatcher’s assertion, Papineau continues: “Teams give the lie to this individualistic vision.” (p. 155) I think it is worthwhile to present here his example of cycle racing as an actual case why Thatcher’s view is false.

At first sight cycle racing seems a sport for individuals. Of course, there are teams but at the finishing line it is the winner who gets the flowers; it’s not the team that gets them. Teams seem only practical ways to go to the race and for organising the training. The only actual sign that the team members belong together is that they wear the same shirts. Is it true? No, and then I am not thinking only of the level of professional cyclists and good amateurs where riders may cooperate because they are paid for it or because they want to show that they are good enough to become professionals. No, riders cooperate at all levels in order to make that not just they themselves win but that one of the team wins. The team counts, not because you are paid for it but because you belong to it; certainly at the lowest levels. “Once you are part of a team”, so Papineau, “... you are no longer limited to asking ‘What shall I do?’ Now you can ask ‘What shall we do?’ ” (p. 159)

Let me illustrate what I mean by pasting together some quotes from Papineau’s book. Take teams in a race. “The domestiques, as the French bluntly term the lesser team members, slave away shepherding their team leader around the course. Their aim is to increase their leader’s chance of a medal, but in doing so they sacrifice any hopes of winning prizes themselves.” (p. 148). Papineau quotes from the website startbikeracing.com: “Team riders decide among themselves which has the best chance of winning. The rest of the team will devote itself to promoting the leader’s chances, taking turns into the wind for him or her ... and so on.” (p.149) Papineau comments “[Y]ou won’t understand cycle racing unless you appreciate the complex dance of altruistic, mutualistic and selfish motives that are in play in a road race.” (ibid.; my italics)

So, as Papineau writes a few pages later, “[W]hat then are we to say about the domestiques who devote themselves to a team victory? Their goal is a living testimony to the way teams transcend their members. They want their team to win, not to win the leader to gain the winner’s medal. The leader’s prize just happens to be the symbol that cycling uses the mark which team has won.” (pp. 156-7) And what Papineau doesn’t tell us is that if a team leader doesn’t win because of his own mistakes, he isn’t only disappointed but feels also ashamed towards the team, which helped him so much, and often excuses himself.

This example refutes not only Thatcher’s assertion (for who can seriously maintain that your cycling team is your family?), but it undermines also “the economic theories of decision-making [that leave] no room for agents to care about anything but individual people.”, so Papineau (p. 156) Indeed, there are individuals, families and groups and much more, including society.

Source

Papineau, David, Knowing the score. How Sport teaches us about Philosophy (and Philosophy about Sport). London: Constable, 2017

On customs

The idea that customs determine a big part of our lives runs like a thread through Montaigne’s Essays. Montaigne devotes even explicitly three essays to the theme but also in other essays the subject receives much attention. Searching the word “custom” in the Adelaide translation of the Essays (see Sources below) gives 275 hits. It is not surprising that customs were so important for Montaigne and he wasn’t alone in the 16th century in giving attention to them, for it was a time of change. This made that the world of his days was confronted with new ideas and other ways of life. First there was the rediscovery of classical antiquity and so the rediscovery of the world and works of Rome and Old Greece: the Renaissance. Then there was the discovery of another continent on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, which was called the New World - the world of the Indians with their “exotic” ways of living. And last but not least there was an important change of the world view within the world of the Europeans themselves: the rise of a new religion - Protestantism. Not only the views on the world changed but the discovery of the art of printing made that new ideas could spread rapidly.

Customs can be of three kinds. First they can be ways how things are done in a certain society, like greetings or political institutions. Second, they can be individual habits like making a walk every day after lunch. And thirdly they can be traditions, like midsummer celebrations or eating doughnut balls on New Year’s Eve, as the Dutch do. Montaigne pays attention to all these kinds of customs. Even more, for him customs are essential for understanding man. They are the key to culture. But it is dangerous to see the way man behaves as the way man is. Behaviour that is normal for us can be “not done” for other people; or others behave simply habitually in a different manner. Montaigne devotes pages and pages of his essay “Of custom” (essay 23; in other editions #22) in telling us how things can be done in a different manner than the French of his days did. Here is the beginning of his list of “unusual” habits in order to give an impression: “There are peoples, where, his wife and children excepted, no one speaks to the king but through a tube. In one and the same nation, the virgins discover those parts that modesty should persuade them to hide, and the married women carefully cover and conceal them. To which, this custom, in another place, has some relation, where chastity, but in marriage, is of no esteem, for unmarried women may prostitute themselves to as many as they please, and being got with child, may lawfully take physic, in the sight of every one, to destroy their fruit. And, in another place, if a tradesman marry, all of the same condition, who are invited to the wedding, lie with the bride before him; and the greater number of them there is, the greater is her honour, and the opinion of her ability and strength: if an officer marry, ’tis the same, the same with a labourer, or one of mean condition; but then it belongs to the lord of the place to perform that office; and yet a severe loyalty during marriage is afterward strictly enjoined. ....” Etc.

Being aware that the same things – approaching a king, marriage and so on – can be done in different ways makes that Montaigne gives us the warning not to be prejudiced that only what we do is right simply because everybody around us does it our way and simply because we have done it always that way. That a custom has become “second nature” doesn’t mean that it belongs to the nature of man. In the end, a custom is acquired, not innate. Montaigne gives this warning already in the first paragraph of the essay “Of Custom”, where he warns us also that a custom can be even unnatural: “[I]n truth, custom is a violent and treacherous schoolmistress. She, by little and little, slily and unperceived, slips in the foot of her authority, but having by this gentle and humble beginning, with the benefit of time, fixed and established it, she then unmasks a furious and tyrannic countenance, against which we have no more the courage or the power so much as to lift up our eyes. We see her, at every turn, forcing and violating the rules of nature”.

Think of this, Montaigne wants to say, when you meet people from other cultures, those whom we call “barbarians” – a word borrowed from Old Greek that originally meant only “not-Greek”, “those whom we don’t understand”–. “Barbarians are no more a wonder to us, than we are to them” (id.) Or as Montaigne says in “Of Cannibals” (essay 31 resp. 30): “[E]very one gives the title of barbarism to everything that is not in use in his own country.”

The world of today is even more in flux than the world in Montaigne’s days. Then it was exceptional to meet someone from a culture different from yours. Today it has become normal in a large part of the world even in the sense that an increasingly number of societies has become multicultural. But often we see other cultures with other customs still as “barbarian”. “We” still have “always the perfect religion, ... the perfect government, ... the most exact and accomplished usage of all things.” (ibid.) If this is so, Montaigne still has us a lot to say.

Sources

- Essays of Montaigne, on website https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/montaigne/michel/essays/complete.html#book1.46

- Guillaume Cazeaux, Montaigne et la coutume. Sesto San Giovanni: Éditions Mimésis, 2015.

Consequentialism and deontologist ethics

In my recent blogs I have talked about moral dilemmas, so about the question how to decide when you have a problem with several solutions with different moral consequences. For example, in the problem discussed last week (the “repugnant conclusion”) again and again we must decide whether we want an acceptable and positive welfare for many people or the highest welfare possible for fewer people (a question that can be relevant when a country must decide whether or not to accept refugees who are fleeing from a cruel dictator or a bloody war; or whether or not to receive foreign labourers in order to increase the total welfare of the country). What I didn’t talk about is which criteria we apply when taking such a decision. Many dilemmas are very complicated, which makes that in the end we must decide from case to case, but we can distinguish two main types of criteria in philosophy. One view says that we must look which consequence of our decision is the best. Not surprisingly this approach is called consequentialism. The problem then is, of course, what is “best”, but this is a derived discussion, which only arises when we have decided already to apply a consequentialist approach. For there is also an opposite approach to tackle a dilemma. It is called deontological ethics. It says that not the consequences of a decision count first but that its morality does, so whether the decision is morally right or wrong. These approaches can – though don’t need to – conflict when we have to choose in a dilemma. Usually it is so that a person is either an adherent of consequentialism or of deontological ethics.

Here are a few examples. In order to make the distinction clear, they have been simplified. I just mentioned the case of refugees fleeing from a cruel dictator or a bloody war. A hard consequentialist might say: Receiving refugees will lower the welfare of my country. They bring nothing and they’ll make my country poorer and as a consequence me finally as well. The dictator and the war are their problems, not mine. Let’s keep them out. A deontologist might say: We must help people in need anyway, even if it makes me poorer, so let them in.

A second example is about a possible situation during the Second World War. Your country has been occupied by the Germans and the persecution of the Jews has started. You have hidden a Jewish child in your house. One day there is a raid in your street: the SS is looking for Jews. An SS-man knocks at your door and he asks you: Is there a Jew in your house? If you are a consequentialist, you’ll certainly say “No”. But what if you are a deontologist who has as a principle “never lie”?

My third case is the “trolley problem”. Maybe you remember it from my older blogs: A driverless, runaway trolley on a railway is heading for a tunnel, in which it would kill five people. As a bystander, you could save their lives by turning a switch and redirecting the trolley on to another track. However, there is a man walking on that track that would be killed instead of the five. If you are a consequentialist, you may say: I turn the switch for it may save four lives. However, I shall have killed actively – “intentionally” as some philosophers say – one man, and maybe my conscience will trouble me for the rest of my life because of that. If you are a deontologist, you may have another problem. Say you have the principles “Never kill a man” and “Always save as many people as you can”. What should you do then?

The trolley case becomes even more intricate in this footbridge variant: A driverless, runaway trolley on a railway is heading for a tunnel, in which it would kill five people. You are standing on a footbridge above the track. You are slim and short but a large man is just crossing the bridge. If you jump on the track, you will be run over by the trolley, which will kill you and the five people as well. If you push the large man on the track, he will be killed but the trolley will stop and the five will be saved, but you will be prosecuted for killing an innocent person.

These cases are still relatively simple, but the footbridge example raises already the question: Are we allowed to use any means if in the end the result is positive if we subtract the costs of the means (like the number of people killed) from the yield of the consequences (like the number of lives saved)? This is the question whether the means sanctifies the purpose. Terrorists usually say “yes”. For deontologists this questions doesn’t arise, but they have the problem whether some consequences aren’t more important than their principles. Actually it is so then that their principles clash. But which principles are then most important and why and when? All this makes clear that the choice for a consequential or a deontological approach is itself a moral dilemma.