Does Consciousness Play a Role in Attributions of Moral Responsibility
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Are Zombies Responsible? The Role of Consciousness in Moral Responsibility
Neil Levy Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, University of Melbourne And James Martin 21st Century School, Oxford University [email protected]
Compatibilism is attractive, in part, because if it is true our conception of ourselves is not hostage to future scientific findings about the causal structure of the universe. But there are apparent threats to free will and moral responsibility besides determinism. In this paper, I examine one: the claim that consciousness does not cause intentions, decisions or volitions. The scientific evidence for this claim is not overwhelming; nevertheless, I suggest, it is very likely to be true on conceptual grounds. What follows from its truth? Robert Kane has recently remarked that if this is true, all accounts of free will go down, compatibilist and libertarian; moreover our legal practice seems to presuppose that consciousness is necessary for moral responsibility. I argue that consciousness is required for responsible agency; not because it causes intentions or volitions but because it ensures that our decisions are deeply reflective of our identities as agents. Are Zombies Responsible?
One of the attractions of compatibilist accounts of moral responsibility, at least those that hold that responsibility is compatible with both determinism and indeterminism, is that they promise to protect our conception of ourselves as free and responsible agents from advances in the sciences. However, determinism is not the only possible threat to this conception. It is the purpose of this paper to examine to threats from a different direction; two challenges (or, perhaps better, two variants of a single challenge) from psychology and from neuroscientice. Briefly, the challenge is this: that consciousness does not cause intentions, decisions, or volitions; the proximate cause of our actions. This claim has widely been taken to be threatening to all accounts of moral responsibility: As Robert Kane, one of the leaders of the recent revival of libertarianism puts it, ‘If conscious willing is illusory or epiphenomenalism is true, all accounts of free will go down, compatibilist and incompatibilist’.1
Philosophers have already responded to this threat in a variety of ways, designed to show that the empirical claims their originators make are not in fact established by their experiments and arguments. I shall argue that these responses, if they are successful, merely delay a reckoning with the threats they aim to disarm. In fact, the fundamental claim that the empirical challenges make is overwhelmingly likely to be true, even if it is not demonstrated by their study designs. We shall need an account of moral responsibility that is compatible with this claim, just as it is compatible with determinism (and indeterminism). In many ways, I suspect, this won’t prove all that difficult: once we think clearly about the challenge to moral responsibility sketched, we shall see that it can be met. But existing accounts of moral responsibility will need modification in the light of the challenge; so, at least, I shall suggest.
Who Decides When I Decide?
In essence, the claim made by both variants of the empirical challenge to moral responsibility is this: consciousness plays no direct role in decision-making or volition. We do not consciously decide or consciously initiate action; that is, consciousness does
2 Are Zombies Responsible? not do these things. Consciousness comes on the scene too late to play any causal role in action. The attempt to show that this is so has been made, independently, by two thinkers: Benjamin Libet, a neuroscientist, and Daniel Wegner, a psychologist.
Libet’s results are now well-known to philosophers. In one of the most famous experiments in recent neuroscience, Libet and his colleagues asked subjects to flick or flex their wrist whenever they wanted to, while the experimenters recorded the “readiness potential” (RP) in their brains, which precedes voluntary movement by up to one second or more.2 Subjects were also asked to watch a special clock face, around which a dot of light travelled about 25 times faster than a normal clock (with each ‘second’ therefore being about 40 ms). They were required to note the position of the dot on the clock face at the time at which they became aware of the wish to move. Controlling for timing errors, the experimenters found that onset of RP preceded awareness of the wish by an average 400 ms. In other words, subjects became aware of their decision to act only after its implementation was under way.
Libet’s experiment has widely been seen as an empirical demonstration that there is no such thing as free will and (therefore) moral responsibility.3 Libet has shown, the argument goes, that consciousness of the decision to act or of the volition comes too late to be causally effective. Consciousness is informed of the decision; it does not make it. But the agent, the target of ascriptions of praise and blame, is, if not identical to consciousness, at least more properly identified with consciousness than with the subpersonal mechanisms that are, as a matter of fact, causally effective in action. It turns out that we do not make our decisions; they are made for us. But if we cannot control what we decide to do, then we cannot be responsible for our decisions.4
Philosophers and cognitive scientists have not been slow to find fault with Libet’s claims. For instance, Flanagan argues that it is consistent with Libet’s results that we consciously initiate important or “big picture” decisions, merely leaving the details of the implementation of these decisions to subpersonal processes. Thus, having – consciously – decided to comply with Libet’s instructions to flick their wrist when they felt like it, his
3 Are Zombies Responsible? subjects might have delegated the details to the unconscious mechanisms which Libet’s experiment tracks. If that’s right, then our big picture decision might after all be made consciously.5 As Richard Double has recently put it, this picture leaves plenty of space for a distal cause (compatibilist) or distal influence (libertarian) view of moral responsibility.6 Mele shows that it is reasonable to doubt whether Libet is right in identifying the unconscious events he tracks with the intention or the decision to flick, rather than with an urge or a desire to flick. Hence, Libet’s experiment might not bear upon the role of consciousness in decision-making at all.7 Haggard has argued that though Libet is right in thinking that do not consciously initiate actions, our conscious intention may coincide with the specification of action. Our decision to act may not be consciousness’s doing, but the choice of how precisely to act (whether, for instance, to use our left hand or our right) might nevertheless be made by consciousness.8 Finally Dennett has shown that there are deep problems with relying upon subjective judgments of simultaneity, as a consequence of which we cannot rely upon Libet’s results. In any case, Dennett argues, it is a mistake to think that there is a precise moment at which anything enters consciousness: the idea that there is any such moment is a hangover from the notion of the Cartesian Theatre, where everything comes together and is viewed by the self. Such a notion, Dennett points out, has rightly been discarded by philosophers and neuroscientists, yet we all too easily fall back into modes of thought that commit us to it. Once we reject it finally and decisively, we shall recognize that consciousness is temporally smeared; not a moment, but a process with fuzzy edges.9
Libet’s is not the only threat to the role of consciousness in action, however. Before we assess the adequacy of these responses to him, let’s set out Wegner’s challenge. I shall go into more detail here than with regard to Libet’s work, since Wegner’s challenge is less familiar to philosophers than is Libet’s.
In his recent book The Illusion of Conscious Will, Wegner presents a wealth of evidence for essentially the same conclusion advanced by Libet: that consciousness does not initiate action.10 Wegner distinguishes between what he calls the phenomenal will – our experience of our will as causally effective – and the empirical will; the actual causal
4 Are Zombies Responsible? mechanisms of behavior. The eponymous ‘illusion of conscious will’ arises when we mistake the first for the second; when we take our experience of causation to be a direct readout of the reality. In fact, our experience is a belated and unreliable record of action; it is neither itself a causal force, nor is it a direct reflection of the actual causal forces.
Wegner argues that, far from being the cause of our actions, the phenomenal will is itself caused by the mechanisms that actually produce actions. The real causal springs of our actions are subpersonal – and therefore unconscious – mechanisms. These mechanisms produce the action, but they also produce a mental preview of the action. So long as certain conditions are satisfied, agents take this mental preview to be the real cause of the action. As Wegner puts it, ‘People experience conscious will when they interpret their own thought as the cause of their action’.11 We fall victim to this illusion when three conditions are satisfied: the mental preview of action occurs at the right time (prior to the action, but close to the moment of its initiation), the preview is consistent with the action, and the agent is unaware of other potential causes of the action. Wegner calls these three conditions of the experience of conscious will the priority, consistency and exclusivity principles.12 Since his account explains why we think that our preview of the action causes it, Wegner call it the theory of apparent mental causation.
In defence of his claim that conscious will is an illusion, Wegner offers us evidence that conscious will is subject to a double dissociation: its presence is not an infallible guide to our agency, and its absence is not an infallible guide to our passivity. Consider the second claim first. In a number of situations, both inside and outside the laboratory, people sincerely deny that they have acted, when in fact they have. Some kinds of paranormal experiences can be explained in this way. For instance, the phenomenon of table turning, which amazed so many Victorians, can be parsimoniously explained via Wegner’s theory. In table turning, a group of people sit around a table, each with his or her hands flat on its surface. If they believe or hope that it will begin to turn on its own, it will often, miraculously, begin to do so. The phenomenon was often interpreted as evidence for the existence of supernatural beings. Of course, the participants were themselves making the table turn; the real mystery is why they sincerely denied their own agency.
5 Are Zombies Responsible?
Wegner suggests that when many agents each contribute to the causation of an action – in other words, when the exclusivity principle is not fulfilled – we may easily overlook our own contribution. The movements of the pointer on the Ouija board can be explained in precisely the same way.13 So, sadly, can the phenomenon of facilitated communication, in which facilitators take themselves to be merely helping profoundly disabled people to communicate, but in which the ‘facilitator’ is herself the source of the message.14 More controversially, the phenomena of the alien hand and of hypnosis are taken by Wegner to be cases of action without conscious will. We need not enter into the controversy of whether this interpretation of either phenomenon is correct.15 So long as some of Wegner’s evidence stands up – and it is overwhelmingly likely that some of it does – we ought to grant him that absence of the feeling of will is not proof of absence of agency.
Whereas evidence for the second dissociation can be collected ‘in the wild’, Wegner needed to design experiments to demonstrate the possibility of the first. Most convincing here is the ‘I-Spy’ experiment.16 Briefly, the experiment placed subjects in a situation in which the degree of their causal contribution to an action was unclear, due to the presence of an experimental confederate. Wegner and Wheatley found that when the confederate caused an action in this situation, the subject would over-attribute it to themselves if they were primed in accordance with the priority principle. The feeling of conscious will can be produced by priority and consistency in the absence of exclusivity, and in the absence of genuine agency.
Philosophers have responded to Wegner’s claims in ways that are closely analogous to the manner in which they have responded to Libet: they have denied that Wegner has shown that consciousness does not play a causal role in action. They have pointed out that the demonstration of a double dissociation does not show anything about the normal case. Consider perception: sometimes people fail to see an object in front of them – because of a more or less spectacular dysfunction in their visual system, or because it is disguised – and sometimes they claim to see what is not there (as in many visual illusions). Perception, too, is subject to a double dissociation. But it does not follow that we do not actually see what we think we see, most – almost all – of the time.17
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For what it’s worth, I think that the responses to Libet and to Wegner are successful in pointing out severe problems in their arguments. Neither has demonstrated, anywhere near conclusively, that consciousness does not initiate action or make decisions. However, I also think that this is largely a distraction, at least for philosophers primarily concerned with free will and moral responsibility. We should get on with assessing whether, and how, moral responsibility might be compatible with the finding that consciousness does not initiate action or make decisions. We should do this for two reasons. First, because we do not want moral responsibility to be hostage to scientific discoveries; we should not wait until something is demonstrated before we assess its implications. Second, we should do so because there are very good reasons to think, no matter what Libet or Wegner has shown or failed to show, consciousness really doesn’t initiate actions or make decisions.
Consciousness and Moral Responsibility.
Prima facie, consciousness seems required for moral responsibility. Indeed, the claim that agents must be conscious of their actions (decisions) seems to be built into our legal system, and to drive our intuitions about praise and blame. Consider the legal doctrine of mens rea. Someone is guilty of a crime (strict liability aside, which is in any case rare in the criminal law) only if they were in the requisite state of mind, where ‘being in a state of mind’ seems to require consciousness. In order to be liable for the highest degree of criminal responsibility, an agent must have performed a wrongful action purposefully and knowingly. A somewhat lower degree of moral responsibility can be imputed if the agent acted recklessly, which might (provisionally) be understood as having been conscious of the risks of one’s conducts, but nevertheless having failed to take due care. These grades of moral responsibility seem to require consciousness: of intentions, of risks and possible consequences. To be sure, negligence does not seem to require consciousness, but it is the lowest grade of responsibility. For all grades above negligence, consciousness seems required for responsibility. And, precisely because negligence can be imputed in the absence of consciousness, some philosophers regard negligence as a legal fiction.
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The notion that consciousness is required for moral responsibility seems therefore to be central to the criminal law. It also seems to be at work in explaining our assessments of responsibility in exotic cases, such as cases of automatism. Consider the case of Ken Parks.18 In 1987, Parks drove the 23 kilometres to the Ontario home of his parents-in-law, where he stabbed them both. He then drove to the police station, where he told police that he thought he had killed someone. Only then, apparently, did he notice that his hands had been badly injured. Parks was charged with the murder of his mother-in-law, and the attempted murder of his father-in-law. He was acquitted, on the grounds that he had performed the act while sleep-walking. The court found, and on appeal the Canadian Supreme Court agreed, that, he had committed the act in a state of automatism. Now, I think it is clear that the best explanation of the widely shared intuition that Parks was not responsible for his actions is that he was not conscious of what he was doing.19 Why consciousness should matter is not clear; that it matters seems obvious.
It seems, therefore, that agents can be responsible for their actions only if they were conscious of them. As it stands, however, that claim is ambiguous between (at least) two readings: Consciousness of decision: An agent is morally responsible for an action just in case, at the time she performs that action, she is conscious of her decision to perform it.
Consciousness as causal mechanism: An agent is morally responsible for an action just in case her decision is consciously made; that is, made by consciousness.
Which of these readings is the right one? It is hard to see how consciousness of decision could confer moral responsibility. Being aware only that I have made decision D seems to leave me a spectator of my action. It implies a rather alienated view of agency. It is hard to see why I should be responsible for what I merely observe (equally, it is hard to see why agents should be excused of moral responsibility if they do not – merely – observe their actions). Instead, it seems as though the second reading must be the right one. Ken Parks was not morally responsible for his actions because his consciousness was not the causal mechanism that initiated his actions. It is only if consciousness causes
8 Are Zombies Responsible? our decisions that we are responsible. Call this the decision constraint upon moral responsibility.
In claiming that consciousness comes too late on the scene to cause our decisions, Libet and Wegner seem to be denying that the decision constraint is satisfied. And most of the responses from philosophers to Libet and Wegner seem to aim at showing that the decision constraint might be satisfied after all. However, it is extremely unlikely that the decision constraint is ever satisfied. Indeed, it seems to be incoherent. The decision constraint is unsatisfiable for conceptual reasons, quite independent of anything that Libet or Wegner has shown.
Why can’t the decision constraint be satisfied? Consider what it would be like to satisfy it. Suppose, for the sake of concreteness, that you are faced with some momentous choice: for instance, whether or not to accept a job in another city. There are many reasons in favor of your accepting the job (new and exciting challenges; better pay; more recognition, and so on) and many reasons against (your friends and family would be far away; the work raises moral qualms in you; you worry that you may have too little autonomy, and so on). Given the importance of the choice, you deliberate carefully before you make up your mind. This deliberation is, of course, carried out consciously: that is, you aware that you are deliberating, and the considerations for and against accepting the job occupy your mind.
But look closer; what role does consciousness actually play? What is really happening, when you consciously weigh reasons? Either the reasons you consider have a weight independent of your deliberation or they do not. 20 Suppose, first, that they do not (or, equivalently for our purposes, that you can and do ignore this weight). In that, either you must make your decision without regard to the rational weight of your reasons (for you), or by assigning weight to them. But either alternative entails that you make your decision arbitrarily. If you make your decision without regard to the weight of your reasons, you are effectively flipping a coin. Your decide as you do by chance, and such arbitrary decisions do not give us the kind of freedom-level control over our decisions and actions
9 Are Zombies Responsible? needed for free will and moral responsibility.21 If you assign weights to your reasons, either you assignment is caused (deterministically or indeterministically) by the weights they have independently of this act of deliberation (in which case we are on the first disjunct after all) or your assignment is itself arbitrary, and the arbitrariness of the assignment of weight transfers to the subsequent decision. There can be no freedom-level control on this disjunct.
Turn, then, to the first disjunct. Suppose, that is, that when you deliberate your decision is caused by the weight your reasons have (for you) independent of your deliberation. Where does this weight come from? As we’ve just seen, it can’t be assigned by consciousness. Instead, it must be reported to consciousness. The fact that you will miss your family and friends matters more, you find, than the fact that the job will offer you exciting challenges (say). You do not and cannot decide that the first matters to you more than the second; the weight of our reasons is simply assigned to them, by subpersonal mechanisms, by culture, by your system of values. Consciousness cannot assign the weights; it receives the news from elsewhere. The alternative is arbitrariness.
Moreover, for exactly the same reasons that we cannot consciously assign weights to our reasons, we cannot consciously assign weight to the set of reasons. But reaching a decision just is coming to a judgment as to the all-things-considered weight of our reasons. Just as the assignment of weight to our reasons must be carried out by unconscious or nonconscious processes, so must the ultimate decision itself be arrived at by such processes, and then reported to consciousness. It simply seems to us that the first set of reasons, those in favor of taking the job, outweighs, or is outweighed by, the second.
There are two possible objections to the forgoing, so far as I can see. First, it might be pointed out that people frequently choose in defiance of their reasons; they choose akratically. Second, it might be held that though we must decide in light of our reasons, we can nevertheless take them as mere guides, rather than as determinants of what we must do: perhaps the weights that our reasons have for us are reported to consciousness,
10 Are Zombies Responsible? which then decides whether or not to vary them. Let’s consider these objections in turn.
It would be odd, to say the least, to think that akratic actions are, alone of all actions, free. In any case, akratic actions no more satisfies the decision constraint than any other kind of actions. Though it is true that when we decide akratically, we decide, in some sense, in defiance of our reasons, the sense in which this is true is irrelevant here. There is a wider and a narrow sense of “reason”; the sense in which when I choose akratically I choose against my reasons is the narrow sense, while the sense in which my actions are always caused – deterministically or indeterminstically - by my reasons is the wide sense of reasons. To say that when I act against my all-things-considered judgment I act against my own reasons is to say, roughly, that I allow myself to be moved by considerations that I do not reflectively endorse. To say that my akractic action is nevertheless caused by my reasons is to say, roughly, that it was caused by considerations that exert some causal power over my decision-making mechanisms in light of their attractiveness for me. I do not reflectively endorse my desire for a third beer; in that sense if I drink it I act in defiance of my reasons. But that third beer is nevertheless reason-giving for me; it exerts causal power over me because it satisfies some of my desires.
The second objection, that my decision can be guided by my reasons without being caused by them, seems to me hopeless. To the extent to which my decision departs from the course that the weight my reasons have for me recommends, it does so arbitrarily. The greater the role for consciousness, if we follow this route, the greater the chanciness of our decisions. If consciousness has the power to vary the weights our reasons have for us – and I don’t see how it could have this power, in any case – then our decisions are less rational than we hoped, and we have less freedom-level control. We find a role for consciousness at the expense of responsibility.22
So decision-making is a response to weights, which reasons have independently of the decision. Decision-making is not something performed by consciousness; instead, we simply see – recognize, are struck by, grasp; the metaphors are revealing – how weighty the reasons are, and our decision follow from them. Indeed, the very phenomenology of
11 Are Zombies Responsible? decision-making reflects the extent to which it is a paradoxically passive phenomenon. As Dennett points out, decisions are in some sense things that happen to us: From some fleeting vantage points, they seem to be the preeminently voluntary moves in our lives, the instants at which we exercise our agency to the fullest. But those same decisions can also be seen to be strangely out of our control. We have to wait to see how we are going to decide something, and when we do decide, our decision bubbles up to consciousness from we know not where. We do not witness it being made; we witness its arrival.23 Decision-making by deliberation is something that I do, and that I control inasmuch as I can cease to engage in it or persist in it, but I do not and cannot actively control its course or its upshot, in the sense of consciously deciding how weighty my reasons are. If I could, it would not be deliberation – the weighing of reasons – but something else entirely; something non-conducive to moral responsibility.
No matter what the faults of their experimental designs, therefore, Libet and Wegner must be right. Decision-making is not a task of consciousness. We cannot control our decision-making, for a simple reason: decision-making is, or is an important element of, our control system, whereby we control our activity and thereby attempt to control our surroundings. If we were able to control our control system, we should require another, higher-order, control system with which to exert that control. And if we had such a higher-order control system, the same problems would simply arise with regard to it. The demand that we exercise conscious will seems to be the demand that we control our controlling. And that demand cannot be fulfilled.
Moral Responsibility Without the Decision Constraint
Where does that leave us? Should we simply conclude that satisfying the decision constraint is not necessary, because in fact consciousness has no role to play in responsible agency? At least one philosopher has suggested just that. According to David Rosenthal, it does not matter whether or not are actions are caused consciously; what matters is whether our actions fit with the conscious picture we have of ourselves and of our ends.24 As we have already seen, however, there are good reasons to think that consciousness has some more direct role to play in moral responsibility. Parks was
12 Are Zombies Responsible? excused responsibility for his actions because he wasn’t conscious at the time of action, not because his actions failed to fit with his conscious view of himself and his ends (which view could, in any case, be quite mistaken). How, then, might consciousness matter to moral responsibility, if the decision constraint cannot be satisfied, and if mere consciousness of decision turns us into spectators of our actions?
Here is not the place – nor am I the person – to defend a particular account of consciousness. However, recent years have seen something of a convergence on, if not an account of consciousness, at least an account of something that consciousness does.25 Consciousness is, or facilitates, or results from (depending on the account) a global workspace, as Baars calls it.26 A global workspace is a space in which information, accessed from many different sources – from modular brain systems and from the environment – become accessible to many different parts of the brain simultaneously. Consciousness serves the function of allowing parts of the brain, that are otherwise relatively isolated from each other, to communicate. Consciousness is or at least facilitates what Dennett calls ‘fame in the brain’, or ‘cerebral celebrity’27; in the terms made famous by Ned Block, phenomenal-consciousness facilitates access- consciousness.28 The contents of consciousness are globally available for behavior control; it is for this reason that consciousness is necessary for moral responsibility.
To say that information in consciousness is globally available is not to say that it is available to consciousness. Of course, it is available to consciousness; that much is tautologically true. What matters is that it is available to the subpersonal mechanisms; the actual causal mechanisms of behavior. As cases of automatism show, we do not need much in the way of consciousness for intelligent action. Subpersonal mechanisms can get along surprisingly well without it – which is to say without each other. But we have good reason to think that without consciousness agents are not morally responsible, because they act only on a subset of the information that normally guides them, and this subset is likely to be inadequate.
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The picture I am urging is this: even though the decision constraint cannot be satisfied, even though consciousness doesn’t make our decisions, consciousness matters for moral responsibility because conscious deliberation – typically – greatly improves the quality of the decisions the subpersonal mechanisms ultimately cause. Deliberation, the turning over in our minds of all the considerations that seem relevant to a decision, puts our decision-making mechanisms in contact with one another, and thereby with more, and more relevant, information: information about our values, about moral standards, about the world, about other people, about our plans and policies. As we deliberate, more and better information ‘comes to mind’; that is, is broadcast by the modular mechanisms to us and to each other (broadcasting to each other other is broadcasting to us; broadcasting to us is broadcasting to each other, since we are nothing over and above the set of mechanisms). Moreover, the likelihood is that this information is somehow tagged or prioritized by deliberation, so that information about what matters most to us is broadcast more often, or more forcefully, to the right mechanisms.29 Deliberation is also a process of putting questions to ourselves; considering problems so that our subpersonal mechanisms can go to work on them, and broadcast the solutions back to us – and therefore to each other. Hence, the longer we deliberate, the better informed, the more intelligent, our actions, and the greater the extent to which they reflect our deepest values.
High-quality deliberation will therefore greatly increase the likelihood that the resulting action reflects our real selves. Under responsibility-conducive conditions, the action will still be made by subpersonal mechanisms, but it will be controlled by us, in the fullest sense; by our real selves, for these mechanisms are us.30 It is this fact, the fact that deliberated upon action is deeply reflective of our deepest values, that best explains the legal typology encapsulated in the doctrine of mens rea. Murder ‘in cold blood’ is worse than unpremeditated killing, because a planned murder better reflects my settled convictions, my sense of what really matters, my values, whereas a spontaneous killing reflects only a part of my self, and perhaps a relatively inessential part at that.31
The global workspace idea also explains why agents who act in a state of automatism are not responsible for what they do. Agents like Parks act only on a small subset of their
14 Are Zombies Responsible? action plans, policies, desires and goals. Their actions do not reflect their deepest selves, their settled convictions. Since the agent was not even conscious, we have good reason to think that the action is less reflective of their identity as practical agents than even the spontaneous and immediate actions of the agent who acts (for instance) under provocation, or who acts negligently. Thus, actions in a state of automatism is not attributable to the agent as an individual. Of course, it might be reflective of the agent; a thoroughly bad agent is as susceptible to entering the state of automatism as a good. But when this is so, it is only by chance. The bad agent did not have the opportunity to think twice, and lacking this cannot be blamed for their action.32
A caveat is in order: phenomenal-consciousness is unlikely to be a sufficient condition of access-consciousness; indeed, it may not be a necessary condition. If zombies are indeed possible, it is (by hypothesis) possible that access-consciousness can exist without phenomenality. Perhaps phenomenal-consciousness is a necessary condition of access- condition in ordinary human beings. In any case, it is clear that even for us as we are currently constituted, it is not a sufficient condition. There are a number of conditions, from pathological states to ordinary dreaming, in which there seems to be phenomenality without global access (if our beliefs were on line when we dream, our dreams would not have the bizarre, logic-defying, content that is characteristic of them). Nevertheless, if – as I claim – phenomenal-consciousness is highly correlated with access-consciousness, and access-consciousness is a necessary condition of moral responsibility, the absence of phenomenal consciousness is a reliable indicator that the action is not deeply reflective of the agent and therefore that the agent is not responsible for it.33
What, finally, of zombies? Are they responsible agents? Zombies, if they are possible, lack only phenomenal consciousness. If they are able to control their behavior in the way we do – and they must be able to, in order to count as zombies – then they must possess access- consciousness. Somehow or other information must be globally available to all their decision-making systems. But, as we have seen, it is access-consciousness, and not phenomenal consciousness, that is required for moral responsibility. On the assumption that zombies are possible, that is, if phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness
15 Are Zombies Responsible? can dissociate (as Block believes, and Dennett denies), we should conclude that zombies are morally responsible. Perhaps phenomenal consciousness is necessary for being a moral patient, or perhaps a full moral patient, because a being that lacked phenomenal consciousness might not be susceptible to certain sorts of harms.34 But it is not necessary for moral agency.
Drawing some morals
This sketch of the role of consciousness in morally responsible actions has several messages for us. First the good news: we don’t need to spend time replying to Libet and Wegner (not, at least, in our capacity as moral philosophers; of course philosophers have a contribution to make to cognitive science, and they can do a lot worse than engage with these problems). No matter what the successes and failures of their experimental designs and their arguments, consciousness cannot play the role of initiating action. The decision constraint cannot be satisfied. But (and this is the really good news), it doesn’t matter. When our subpersonal mechanisms make decisions, we make decisions. Though the mechanisms out of which our minds are built are dumb, when they act in concert the decisions they make are – or can be – intelligent. They are not random or arbitrary; they are rational responses to the environment, made in the light of our beliefs and our values.
Indeed, this is how things must be: we are the set of our subpersonal mechanisms, and nothing else, and our intelligence just is the product of the successful combination of these dumb machines. They are us: they reflect our uniqueness, our difference from one another. My decisions reflect my history, my learning, my experience; I choose in ways that would be entirely inexplicable if what I thought did not heavily influences everything that I do. The mechanisms that make my decisions are, in fact, me. As Dennett puts it, Libet has not shown that we are out of the loop: we are the loop.35 Decision-making cannot be conscious – that is, caused by consciousness – but that needn’t matter, for the mechanisms that make the decision are nevertheless ours, us; they have our values, they have our beliefs, our goals (we have them by them having them), and when they decide, we decide.
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That doesn’t mean, however, that any and all decisions made by the subpersonal mechanisms and modules that populate my mind is my decision, or that it is (by my lights) a good decision. It is only when the mechanisms work together that I decide, and that my decision is the one I want to make. Since consciousness (typically) allows this condition to be satisfied, by making information globally available, and putting the mechanisms in contact with one another, consciousness is after all a necessary condition of moral responsibility.
Now the bad news. To say that moral responsibility does not require the satisfaction of the decision constraint is not to say that all extant accounts of moral responsibility are compatible with the real role of consciousness in rational decision-making. Some accounts fare better than others, in the light of the claim that consciousness does not itself decide. I have space for no more than the briefest sketch how it might make trouble for two accounts of moral responsibility.
Consider, first, the agent-causal libertarianism expounded – if not defended – by Randolph Clarke. According to Clarke, an agent is fully morally responsible for an action if it is caused both by her reasons and by the agent herself. She must exercise ‘real causal influence – and influences distinct from that exerted by any event – over which of the actions open to her she will actually perform’.36 Agents, rather than events involving agents, cause their actions as substances. But it is difficult (for me, at least) to see how substance causation, causation by the agent, and not by events within the agent, can be reconciled with the kind of considerations that rule out consciousness as a cause, and at the same time retain the elements that make it preferable to event-causal accounts. As Clarke argues, agent-causation is attractive because it seems to add to compatibilism not merely alternative possibilities, but also the exercise, by the agent herself, of a positive active power to causally influence which of the open alternatives becomes actual, thus increasing her control over her action (compared with both compatibilist and event-causal libertarian accounts). How will the agent decide whether or not to agent-cause the alternative that events within her pick out? Either she will defer to her reasons – the very
17 Are Zombies Responsible? reasons that have been causally efficacious in her event-causation – or she will not. On the first disjunct, she merely endorses event-causation, and her agent-causation adds nothing to her control. It is superfluous, and ought to drop out of the picture. On the second disjunct, she agent-causes an alternative arbitrarily, and it is hard to see how this would increases – rather than decrease – her freedom-level control over her action. It may well be that proponents of agent-causation are covertly appealing to the idea of consciousness as a cause: when consciousness causes an action, the agent causes an action. But consciousness does not, and cannot, cause actions. So agent-causation, if indeed it exists, seems unlikely to add anything to our powers of active control.
But the news is not good for all versions of compatibilism either. Consider Fischer and Ravizza’s account of moral responsibility.37 According to their account, an agent is morally responsible for an action if she acts upon a moderately reasons-responsive mechanism of her own, where a mechanism is moderately reasons-responsive if it is regularly receptive to reasons and at least weakly reactive to reasons (that is, if the mechanism is capable of recognizing reasons, including moral reasons, and there is at least one possible world in which it would react to such reasons). Now, this account of moral responsibility has, deservedly, been very influential, for it is one of the most thorough, well-developed and reasoned accounts available. But Fischer and Ravizza have, by their own admission, had little to say about how to individuate mechanisms. Instead, they simply appeal to intuition, arguing that for each act ‘there is an intuitively natural mechanism that is appropriately selected as the mechanism that issues in action’.38
However, if the account of the role of consciousness in moral responsibility is even half right, then we cannot cash out moral responsibility in terms of mechanisms in this way. The role of consciousness is to put mechanisms in communication with one another; the agent is responsible, not if one, or a small subset, of mechanisms is in control of behavior, but if enough of them are in control: a sufficient number for us to say that the agent is in control. It is not when we act upon a moderately reasons-responsive mechanism that we are morally responsible; it is when we are moderately reasons-
18 Are Zombies Responsible? responsive. It remains to be seen if Fischer and Ravizza can incorporate this modification into their account.
In many ways, my claims concerning the role that consciousness must play, if agents are justifiably to be held morally responsible for actions, should be comforting to moral philosophers. If I am right, then an account of moral responsibility that is not hostage to empirical discoveries concerning the timing of conscious states should not prove to be all that difficult to develop. Nevertheless, it seems likely that the account will force modifications, of greater or lesser extents, on existing theories of moral responsibility. The nature of these modifications I leave to another day.
NOTES
19 Are Zombies Responsible?
20 1 R. Kane, ‘Remarks on The Psychology of Free Will,’ presented at the 31st Annual Meeting of The Society Of Philosophy And Psychology, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, June 9-12, 2005. Available online, at