Paul Bloom is a noted psychologist at Yale, specializing in morality and its development in young children (see an earlier post on that topic here).

Now, in the new Atlantic, Bloom has published a longish piece, “The war on reason,” that describes a purported war on rationality incited by the findings of neuroscientists, determinists, and people like Sam Harris—findings that we are “biochemical puppets.” While Bloom’s piece is well reasoned and well written, I think it comes off as a veiled attack on incompatibilism, or at least as a defense of compatibilism, where “free will” is replaced by the word “reason.” And I think he’s off the mark when saying that the rationality of humans somehow exempts us from being “biochemical puppets.”

I say it’s a “purported” war because I don’t think that we hard determinists have any problem with rationality, or with people using reason before they perform an action.  I see reason and rationality as tools installed in us (and our ancestors) by natural selection: a computer program, if you will, whereby input information is weighted differently depending on how reliable it is, or whether it’s empirical versus revelatory.  And rational behavior is reinforced by being emphasized by everyone (except some churches) as a virtue. Humans, of course, aren’t the only animals that can reason.  Surely many primates can, as well as dogs, cats, and even those birds who, when they cache food, will dig it up and cache it elsewhere if they see another bird watching. (The latter involves a “theory of mind” which, in humans, would be taken as evidence for “rationality”.)

It’s obvious why natural selection would favor brain patterns that would evaluate evidence rationally, for if you have good reasons for what you do, you’re more likely to survive and reproduce. That is why, for example, our ancestors used empirical evidence and reason when hunting or finding food, or evaluating the mindset of their clan members.  (You don’t look for wildebeest where there is no grass.)

But rationality is not something we “choose” to exercise (I’m using “choose” in a libertarian sense here). Rather, it is something that most people are conditioned to use when evaluating evidence. And some do not, for they are swayed by emotion, mental illness (brain disorders that we still fail to understand), abuse or other prior mistreatement, a childhood spent in bad environments, and so on. And none of us (not even Professor Ceiling Cat) are completely rational beings. Love, for instance, is a largely irrational emotion, often driven by factors beyond our current ability to reason.  Most of us are largely rational but also show a good dollop of irrationality based on our backgrounds and genes. And some people are less rational than others.  But, at any rate, rationality is simply the brain’s adaptive computer program that, before providing an output, weighs the inputs according to their probative value. The use of rationality is something over which we have no personal control. Why on earth should it be seen as being less free from determinism, or more conducive to culpability, than even full-blown irrationality?

In other words, to say that we can reason says nothing about whether our “decisions” and actions are “free” or different in principle from the actions taken by those who are irrational or have a mental illness that impairs the input-output system of their brain.  The fact that we use reason says nothing about whether those who can reason, but nevertheless do bad things, deserve more punishment than those who can’t reason.  Both groups show equal moral responsibility for their actions—that is, none. 

Certainly we should treat those malefactors who are mentally ill, irrational, or incapable of persuasion differently from those who can be persuaded to reform via rational argument.  No determinist says otherwise.  But that rehabilitation and punishment must be determined by three things: a.) the liability of an offender to be rehabilitated, and the best means of doing so;  b.) the likelihood of recidivism (pedophiles, for instance, are more likely to relapse than are other criminals); and c.) the deterrent effect of punishment on others.  And of course it can be useful to persuade people to be rational, for it’s possible to reprogram someone’s brain by that form of environmental input. (It’s a common misconception that determinists don’t believe that their behavior can be changed by others.) But I see no rationale for claiming that rationality somehow makes me less of a biochemical puppet.

Bloom feels otherwise. He does agree though, that we are largely “biochemical puppets,” but somehow exempts reason from that monicker. And therefore he sees neuroscientists and incompatibilist philosophers as engaging in a “war on reason.” Frankly, I’m baffled. The article almost sounds as if it were written to reassure those who are discomfited by determinism (and the latest findings in brain science) that we can safely retain our notions of free will and moral responsibility.

First, Bloom’s admission of determinism:

We are soft machines—amazing machines, but machines nonetheless. Scientists have reached no consensus as to precisely how physical events give rise to conscious experience, but few doubt any longer that our minds and our brains are one and the same.

. . . For the most part, I’m on the side of the neuroscientists and social psychologists—no surprise, given that I’m a psychologist myself. Work in fields such as computational cognitive science, behavioral genetics, and social neuroscience has yielded great insights about human nature. I do worry, though, that many of my colleagues have radically overstated the implications of their findings. The genetic you and the neural you aren’t alternatives to the conscious you. They are its foundations. [JAC: who said otherwise?]

So where is this attack on reason coming from? According to Bloom, from the neuroscientists and psychologists who find that people can be influenced by unconscious factors—or take decisions made by their brains before they’re conscious of them. One of the former is the famous experiment showing that people who find a dime in phone booth are more likely to act charitably than those who don’t. There are innumerable similar studies showing how people’s behavior can be unconsciously manipulated. Bloom agrees, but says that this is not a strong criticism of rationality because those unconscious determinants don’t completely dominate our behavior—they merely influence it.

My response to this is: so what? Nobody claims otherwise. Except for strong manipulations like drugs or electrical stimulation of the brain, we can rarely completely efface rational thought and action.  Humans are a combination of programmed rational behavior—programmed by our genes and past environments—and behaviors that don’t always follow the dictates of reason (also caused by genes and whatever environments we experienced). Someone may, for instance, have been severely mauled by a dog when young, and although normally rational, he continues to hurl rocks at dogs whenever he sees them. We all know scientists like Ken Miller and Francis Collins who are perfectly rational in their working lives, but throw that all out the window on Sundays.

Bloom further notes that we should draw a distinction between people who have been “horrifically abused as a child,” those who “are psychopaths who appear incapable of empathy,” and “the cold-blooding planning of a Mafia hit man.” He sees the last person as having more morally responsibility for their actions.  But moral responsibility is, to many of us (including me) bound up with our idea of “freedom to choose otherwise in a fixed situation” and nobody—including Bloom—thinks we have that.  In fact, although Bloom throws about the term “moral responsibility,” he fails to distinguish it from “agent responsibility.” Yes, a psychopath is responsible for what he did, and should be punished, but he had no more choice in his actions than did a Mafia hit man. They are both biochemical puppets. Later in the piece, Bloom implies that you are somehow more culpable if you could have exercised “self control” over your actions (he says that such self control is “the embodiment of rationality”), but self control, too, is something we don’t choose to exercise or not. We simply have or do not have it depending on our genes and environments. It’s simply not true that anyone can choose to stop chain-smoking.

This bit, I think, sums up Bloom’s dilemma:

You have reasons for that choice, and you can decide to stop reading if you want. If you should be doing something else right now—picking up a child at school, say, or standing watch at a security post—your decision to continue reading is something you are morally responsible for.

The idea of “choosing” to stop (or choosing anything at all), they suggest, implies a mystical capacity to transcend the physical world. Many people think about choice in terms of this mystical capacity, and I agree with the determinists that they’re wrong. But instead of giving up on the notion of choice, we can clarify it. The deterministic nature of the universe is fully compatible with the existence of conscious deliberation and rational thought—with neural systems that analyze different options, construct logical chains of argument, reason through examples and analogies, and respond to the anticipated consequences of actions, including moral consequences. These processes are at the core of what it means to say that people make choices, and in this regard, the notion that we are responsible for our fates remains intact.

I am guessing that Bloom’s agenda is in the third sentence of the second paragraph: “But instead of giving up on the notion of choice, we can clarify it.” He wants to let people know that by some redefinition, they can retain their beloved idea of choice.  By all means we should avoid discomfiting the public with the scientific truth. By some judicious re-jiggering of how we use words, we can let them have their determinism and moral responsibility, too.

Bloom is right that “choice” is really deterministic: we could not have chosen otherwise. Where he goes wrong is thinking that somehow rational deliberation is what people really mean when they say they make choices, and that such rationality is the ultimate touchstone of moral responsibility. (By the way, why on earth would Bloom think that a choice to continue reading his article is a “moral” choice? Even if you believe in moral responsibility, which I don’t, not all choices are “moral” ones. And surely to continue reading has nothing to do with morality, however you conceive it.)

But who is Bloom to tell us what people really think when they say we “make choices” or are “morally responsible” for our choices? We’ve seen in the past few days, reading papers by Nahmias et al. and Sarkissian et al., how complex this issue is, and how hard it is to gauge what people really think about determinism and moral responsibility. First of all, many people are true indeterminists, disagreeing with the Bloom’s notion that the universe is deterministic (with some quantum indeterminacy thrown in—an addition that doesn’t give credence to anybody’s notion of “free choice” or “moral responsibility”). Second, some people agree that in such a universe people are not morally responsible for their action. Curiously, still others think that in a universe that is completely determined, people still think that others “could have chosen otherwise” and are morally responsible for their actions.

It’s all a mess, probably because, as some commenters have noted, many people don’t think a lot about physics, determinism, and moral responsibility. What we do know, as scientists, is that determinism reigns (as Official Website Physicist™ Sean Carroll notes, the laws underlying the physics of everyday life are completely understood), and in that light we have to decide what we mean by “responsibility.” Bloom is silent on this issue, particularly when it comes to “moral responsibility.”

In the end, I don’t agree with Bloom that determinists, like those who show we can predict simple decisions before people are conscious of having made them, are waging a war on rationality. We aren’t. If there is a “war,” it’s on three other fronts.

First, there’s a war on whether determinism reigns. Bloom and I agree that that issue has been settled in favor of determinism, but many fellow humans would disagree. Those include the many religious believers who think that we can make libertarian, can-do-otherwise choices.

Second, there’s a war about what it means to be “morally responsible,” and how that differs from simply being “responsible” (to see how one can distinguish these, read Bruce Waller’s book Against Moral Responsibility).  I don’t think that there is such a thing as moral responsibility, for if surveys say anything, they tend show that moral responsibility goes hand in hand with the notion of true libertarian (“can do otherwise”) free will—something that we do not have. I fully agree that we must hold people responsible for their actions, for social good demands it, but we must realize that there is no essential difference between the culpability of those who are “rational” criminals and those who are “irrational” criminals. There is a difference, however, in how we should deal with such people.

These first two “wars” are important ones, for they have real implications about how we should run our society. While some disagree, and argue that giving up the ideas of indeterminism, free choice, or moral responsibility would still have no social implications, I think they’re wrong. They’re wrong because we already recognize that some people can’t freely choose to refrain from crime. Sending mentally ill criminals to prison hospitals instead of jail is one example. Imagine how things would differ if we realized, as we should, that no criminal had a choice about what he did.  I won’t dwell on how we’d change the criminal justice system, but, with Waller, I agree that we’d also concentrate far more on eliminating the environmental factors that promote criminality. (Chicago is already doing that by getting rid of large “projects” and trying to mix low-income people with higher-income ones.)

Finally, there is a semantic war among determinists: do we have “free will” or not? I myself engage in this discussion, but see it as a much less important “war” than the battle between deterministics and indeterminists. That’s why I say that I’m baffled when philosophers spend their time confecting new and diverse reasons why we have “free will” in a deterministic world. That’s like theology: it’s an activity without a point. (Or rather, the point resembles the point of theology: to reassure people that they have something they don’t.)

Let me hasten to add again that I do believe in holding people responsible for their actions.  I also believe that rationality is a quality that we should aspire to and promote. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t spend a lot of time criticizing religion and its evidential basis—faith. What I don’t believe is that people can themselves “choose” to be rational in a libertarian sense. But we can promote the virtue of rationality, and even in a deterministic world such promotion can have positive effects.

And finally, we can’t freely choose to promote rationality. We do that because of our genes and environments: the infinite regress back to our ancestors. What a good thing that evolution and experience favor rationality!