determinism Archives - Prindle Institute

May 27, 2022December 14, 2022

Wanda Maximoff and the Metaphysics of Responsibility

This article contains spoilers for the Disney+ series Wandavision and the films Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, and Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.

In the latest entry to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, the titular hero squares off against a former ally in a race across universes. After losing the love of her life (twice) at the end of Avengers: Infinity War and watching almost everyone else miraculously resurrected at the climax of Avengers: Endgame, Wanda Maximoff retreated to a small town in New Jersey to mourn. As shown in the Disney+ series Wandavision, she instead ends up (mostly accidentally) trapping the town inside a painful illusion wherein she could pretend that her beloved Vision was still alive; her powerful magic even creates two children (Billy and Tommy) to complete the couple’s happy life of domestic bliss — until everything unravels, that is, and Wanda is again forced to say goodbye to the people she loves.

Last March, I wrote about Wanda’s journey through grief and love for the Post;

at that point, MCU fans had a number of reasons to be hopeful for a genuine Maximoff family reunion. Now, the newest Doctor Strange film has buried those chances firmly under the rubble of Mount Wundagore.

In brief, Wandavision ends by revealing Wanda as a being of immense (and ominous) power known as the “Scarlet Witch” — she frees the town of her illusion, apologizes for the harm she caused, and escapes with a mysterious spellbook called the Darkhold, seemingly intending to somehow use it to reconnect with Billy and Tommy. But from her first scene in Multiverse of Madness, it’s clear that Wanda Maximoff is no longer sorry for what she plans to do: namely, absorb an innocent teenager’s soul and travel to a different universe (where Billy and Tommy are still alive) to kill and replace her counterpart, then live out her days as a mother to the alternate versions of her children. Moreover, Wanda is fully comfortable with killing anyone who tries to stop her — something she does in spades before the story’s end (including to most of the film’s celebrity cameos). Ultimately, it turns out that the Darkhold is a thoroughly evil book which taints whoever reads it with darkness and madness — by searching its pages for a spell to save her children, Wanda was also unknowingly corrupting her once-heroic soul. After Doctor Strange and his allies manage to cut through the Darkhold’s influence, Wanda sacrifices her own life to destroy the demonic book and spare the multiverse from the threat of the Scarlet Witch.

So, here’s where we can ask a more philosophical question:

Wanda brutally murders dozens of people in her quest to save her children, but — if she was under the influence of the Darkhold’s power — was she responsible for her actions?

One common idea (connected to the philosophical idea of “libertarian free will”) is that for an agent to be fully responsible for some action, they must be fully free or in control of the choice to perform the action — as it is often put, the responsible person must have been “able to do otherwise than they actually did” (more technically, they must satisfy the “Principle of Alternative Possibilities,” or PAP). If I were to cast a spell that hypnotically forces you to transfer your life savings into my bank account, you would not have the power to do otherwise, so you would not be free and I would be responsible for the money transfer.

On the other hand, some philosophers believe that a strong commitment to PAP is scientifically untenable: if our actions are ultimately rooted in the material interactions of molecules in our brains (as opposed to something like an immaterial soul), and if those material conditions necessarily obey regular laws of physics, then it seems like no one can ever satisfy PAP (because you will only ever do what the material conditions of the universe dictate). On this view (typically called “determinism”), notions like “free will” and “moral responsibility” are often written off as mere intuitions or illusions that, though sometimes useful in certain conversations, shouldn’t ultimately be taken too seriously.

The middle ground between these views is an interesting position called “compatibilism” which argues that determinism (as described in the preceding paragraph) actually is compatible with a robust sense of freedom and moral responsibility, but not one that requires PAP.

Instead, compatibilists argue that a person is free (and therefore responsible) for a choice if that choice aligns with their dispositions (like wanting or believing certain things). Often, compatibilists will frame responsibility for determined-but-free choices as a matter of “getting what you want” (even if you couldn’t have “gotten” anything else).

For example, suppose that you want to sit in a particular chair and read a book, so you enter a room, close the door, sit in your chair, and read the book — unbeknownst to you, the door locks after you close it, but that doesn’t matter, because you just want to sit and read — are you responsible for the choice to stay in the room? The compatibilist will easily say yes: you’re satisfying your desire, so the fact that you couldn’t have chosen otherwise (violating PAP, thanks to the locked door) is unimportant.

So, what does this mean for Wanda?

Admittedly, the MCU has given only sparse explanations about the metaphysical nature of the Darkhold (so we have to engage in a bit of speculation here), but the film does make clear that the demonic book exerts some kind of influence on (and extracts a price from) its readers. Which means that we can ask two questions:

1. Was Wanda “able to do otherwise than she actually did” while under the Darkhold’s influence?

2. Regardless of the Darkhold’s influence, did Wanda want to do what she did?

If the answer to (1) is “No,” then Wanda’s condition fails to satisfy PAP — just like how Wanda-838 (the actual mother to Billy and Tommy from the Illuminati’s universe) isn’t responsible for the actions that Wanda-616 (from the standard MCU reality) performs while dreamwalking across the multiverse, Wanda-616 would be similarly at the mercy of the Darkhold. If the answer to (2) is also “No,” the compatibilists will also be able to recognize that Wanda wasn’t responsible for her murderous choices, even though she couldn’t have done otherwise.

One of the most interesting things about this whole conversation, though, is that it’s actually not clear that the answer to (2) is “No.” While the movie takes pains to signpost the dangerous nature of the Darkhold (most notably by implicating it in the deaths of multiple versions of Stephen Strange), Wanda repeatedly suggests that her (understandable) desire to find her children is fully her own. If this is the case, then the Darkhold’s influence might have provoked her to act in extreme ways (to say the least), but the compatibilist might not be able to draw a sharp line between Wanda’s dispositions and the book’s suggestions.

However, though Wanda fans might balk at the notion that she authentically “broke bad” and is responsible for murdering whole armies of sorcerers and superheroes, this narrative might make Wanda’s decision to destroy both the Darkhold and herself at the film’s end all the more impressive.

It remains to be seen whether Wanda Maximoff’s tenure in the MCU has come to an end (the movie notoriously avoids offering conclusive proof of her death), just as it is unclear how her character might handle questions of guilt and responsibility, should she return. (For what it’s worth, I’m still hoping that the MCU will grant her a happy ending!) One thing, though, is certain: having grossed nearly a billion dollars in its first month, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness proves that Marvel Studios is all-but-determined to continuing making MCU films — and audiences will absolutely choose to keep watching them.

April 9, 2020December 14, 2022

A Stoic’s Guide to Crisis

photograph of mountain stream falling through jagged rocks

Since my news article about the context of coronavirus numbers was published, the number of reported cases has increased seven-fold. Schools have closed down as education becomes virtual. The vast majority of workers have been told to stay home. Social distancing has become the new norm. As I sit here in social isolation–hopefully like many of you–I think about how I ought to react to this pandemic.

As one individual, there is little about this pandemic that is within my control. I am avoiding physical social contact, I am washing my hands, I am heeding the advice of my government, and I am keeping myself informed. I am doing my best to neither contract nor spread the virus, especially because I am intimately familiar with the concern for those with weak immune systems. But I cannot control the course of the pandemic nor how my government or fellow civilians respond.

My life has been disrupted through no fault of my own. My academic year has ended prematurely. My days are now confined to my bedroom. Trips, job searches, post-grad plans, living arrangements, and much more have been cancelled or put on hold. Everything is uncertain. For many, life is on pause but time continues to move. It is a strange feeling. Shouldn’t I be upset? Shouldn’t I be disappointed? Shouldn’t I be anxious, worried, panicked?

Or should I be stoic? Or better yet, Stoic? Stoicism is a philosophy that prioritizes rational thought over emotion and argues that contentment is found when one’s natural role is realized and acted out.

What would the famously non-emotional Stoics of Antiquity say if I were to ask them, “How should I respond to the disruption this pandemic has caused me?” One might find the answer to this question in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations.

The Roman emperor writes, “A bitter cucumber? Throw it away. Brambles in the path? Go round them. That is all you need, without going on to ask, ‘So why are these things in the world anyway?’” (Med., 8). This pandemic has caused many bitter cucumbers and brambles in the path. But, the Stoics would argue, there is no reason to question their occurrences. By doing so, you make the cucumber more bitter and the bramble more obstructive.

Aurelius continues: “Remember, that as it is a shame for any man to wonder that a fig tree should bear figs, so also to wonder that the world should bear anything, whatsoever it is which in the ordinary course of nature it may bear” (Med., 8.13). These seemingly random and disruptive events are a natural facet of life. If and once you understand that, there is no reason to toil over the events’ occurrence just as you would not toil over a fig tree bearing figs.

But the ethics of Stoicism is not without magnificently substantial flaws. Aurelius argues, “Whatsoever doth happen in the world, doth happen justly” (Med., 4.8). I pity the person who is charged with making the case that the spread of COVID-19 is somehow just. He continues:

“Nothing can happen unto thee, which is not incidental unto thee […] As nothing can happen either to an ox, a vine, or to a stone, which is not incidental unto them; unto every one is his own king. If therefore nothing can happen unto anything, which is not both usual and natural, why art thou displeased?” (Med., 8.45).

The philosophy holds that everything is predetermined, which is absurd. The lack of an emotional response to crises is justified by the notion that every event is essential. You should not fret about crises because a crisis would not happen to you if you were not equipped to handle it. That which occurs to you is within your nature to occur to you; therefore, why be upset that it is occurring to you? Hmm. I am not satisfied. Nor should you be. One possible implication of endorsing this position is to have no coordinated response to the pandemic whatsoever.

But there is something useful to be disentangled from this wonky, possibly illogical view of nature: Understand what is within your control and adjust your mindset accordingly.

“Let thy chief fort and place of defence be, a mind free from passions. A strong place and better fortified than this, hath no man,” writes Aurelius. “Keep thyself to the first bare and naked apprehension of things, as they present themselves unto thee, and add not unto them.” (Med., 8.46-47).

In other words, keep your mind free from the subjective values you assign to an event. Do not allow your mind to be consumed by emotions felt with regard to the event lest the event cause you even more disruption or pain as a result.

To illustrate this advice, the Roman emperor asks you to suppose someone is speaking ill of you. The fact that someone is speaking ill of you is indisputable. But the degree of the offense or hurt that the speech causes depends on your reaction to it.

The fact that the pandemic has caused school closures, employment displacement, uncertainty about the future is indisputable. But the degree to which those realities affect your emotional and mental well-being depends on your reaction to it. How you react is within your control. Best not to add additional suffering.

In one passage particularly pertinent to our current situation, Aurelius observes: “Hath not yet experience taught thee to fly from the plague? For a far greater plague is the corruption of the mind, than any certain change and distemper of the common air can be” (Med., 9.2).

August 15, 2019December 14, 2022

Determinism and Punishment

One summer evening, a friend and I tackled the question of free will and all that it entails. Do we have free will? If we do, how do we know do? If we do not, what are the implications for social and legal norms? My friend, who argued against the existence of free will, posited a scenario in which he was “molecule for molecule” a violent criminal, asking me if he could have chosen to act differently than the violent criminal.

The immediate reaction might be, “No.” How could he have? But this rhetorical device, used by Sam Harris to disprove the existence of free will, is not entirely helpful. It does not prove that we cannot freely choose; it merely shows that if you were “molecule for molecule” someone else you would make the same choice that they made, which is self-evident. It reveals nothing about what you could have done, nor anything about the choices available to you and your ability to choose.

But suppose my friend is correct and we do not have free will. This view coincides with the philosophical doctrine of determinism. Writing for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Carl Hoefer defines determinism as the philosophical belief that “given a specified way things are at a time t, the way things go thereafter is fixed as a matter of natural law.” In other words, a violent criminal such as Davis Bradley Waldroup, Jr. could not have acted differently.

Waldroup engaged in acts of undeniable brutality. An article in The New Statesman describes how he shot his wife’s friend eight times with a rifle before attacking his wife. Waldroup shot her, maimed her, bludgeoned her with a shovel and a machete, and attempted to rape her before she managed to escape. Yet Waldroup was only found guilty of voluntary manslaughter, kidnapping, and attempted murder, partly because his defense team successfully argued that Waldroup possessed a genetic predisposition to violence, preventing him from engaging in the judgment and reflection required for premeditated crimes (for a similar case see Meredith McFadden’s “‘It Wasn’t Me’: Neurological Causation and Punishment“).

Warranted outrage followed from the families of the victims when he was sentenced to a mere 32 years in prison. Waldroup’s wife said the sentence “was not justice.” Many would agree that the punishment was not equivalent to the severity of his wrongdoing; it was not the punishment he deserved. But if Waldroup did indeed possess a violence gene and thus, no free will in this situation, how can we even conceptualize what he deserves? Determinism renders the sentiment “He did not get what he deserved” meaningless and irrelevant. And that is not all.

The most fundamental structures in our daily lives are based on the belief that we are free to choose how to act. While we seek and discover external factors (be they biological or environmental) that influence a person’s decision or even the external factors that brought the individual to a moment of choosing, these explanations do not contradict our conception responsibility. Without the foundation of free will, even the relevance of morality becomes suspect. Either morality cannot exist because people cannot choose to do something right or wrong OR it is already determined that one person will act morally good or morally bad.

Adopting the view that free will does not exist would require a near-revolutionary reform of our justice system. As Luis E. Chiesa of Pace Law School notes, “It is because of this uniquely human capacity to choose to do otherwise that humans can and should be blamed for their crimes.” Our current system, for all of its failings and imperfections in practice, is based on a consort of factors: rehabilitation, deterrence, public protection, retribution, and proportionality of the punishment to the crime. A new justice system capable of accommodating determinism would need to be based not on retribution or what the lawbreakers deserve, but rather solely on concern for public safety, deterrence, and rehabilitation.

Some may wonder how rehabilitation could be retained under this reformed justice system. Is it possible to rehabilitate someone’s behavior if it is determined? It is a worthy criticism. Yet it is possible that some determinists could argue that just as an animal, whose behavior is determined by their nature, can be trained to act in a certain way, a human can be rehabilitated, or trained to behave in a less dangerous way.

Forms of incapacitation, such as incarceration, would exist merely as a means of protecting the public from violent criminals. Lawbreakers who are not violent, such as those who evade taxes, for example, would not need to go to prison as they pose no threat to the safety of the public. Instead, they would need to, if possible, rehabilitate their evasive ways so that they refrain from committing the act again. The only purpose of any other form of legal punishment would be to deter individuals from breaking the law.

Suppose Waldroup’s violent behavior was altered after one day of rehabilitating in prison and he would never again attempt to brutalize another human being. Should he be punished further than the one day in prison for his previous acts of murder and assault? Troubling as it may be, the determinist would say, “No.”

Why should he? His behavior has been changed, he no longer poses a threat. Like a dog who has learned not to pee inside, Waldroup has been trained to no longer behave in that unacceptable and dangerous way. And given that he did not freely choose to kill one woman and severely injure another, the purpose of punishing him is nullified. He deserves nothing because he controls none of his decisions.

Even the well-known determinist Sam Harris points out, “Without free will, sinners and criminals would be nothing more than poorly calibrated clockwork, and any conception of justice that emphasized punishing them (rather than deterring, rehabilitating, or merely containing them) would appear utterly incongruous.”

If free will is an illusion, although I am inclined to believe it is not, there is demonstrable value to living under that illusion. The idea that you and I have control over our actions affects the way we behave and structures the nature of our interactions and relationships. We expect and hope for certain behaviors to be exhibited by the people in our lives. We express disappointment in others when they have done worse than they should have because we believe they could have done better. Just as we express pride or happiness in others when they have done better than they should have because we believe they could have done worse. But blame and praise is utterly irrelevant if you believe others could not have done anything other than what they did.

Let me live under the illusion that I freely chose to write this op-ed and I will let you live under the illusion that you freely chose to read it. And we can both go back to agreeing that some people do not receive the punishment they deserve.

May 3, 2019December 14, 2022

“It Wasn’t ‘Me'”: Neurological Causation and Punishment

photograph of dark empty cell with small slit of sunshine

The more we understand about how the world works the more fraught the questions of our place in the causal network of the world may seem. In particular, the progress made in understanding how the mechanisms of our brain influence the outward behavior of our minds consistently raises questions about how we should interpret the control we have over our behavior. If we can understand the neurological processes in a causal network that explain the way we act, in what sense can we preserve an understanding of our behavior as ‘up to us’?

This has been a concern for those of us with mental illness and neurological disorders for some time: having scientific accounts of depression, anxiety, mania, and dementia can help target treatment and provide us with tools to navigate relationships with people that don’t always behave like ‘themselves’. In serious cases, it can inform how we engage with people who have violated the law: there is a rising trend to use “behavioral genetics and other neuroscience research, including the analysis of tumors and chemical imbalances, to explain why criminals break the law.”

In a current case, Anthony Blas Yepez is using his diagnosis with a rare genetic abnormality linked to sudden violent outbursts to explain his beating an elderly man to death in Santa Fe, New Mexico, six years ago in a fit of rage. His condition explains how he wasn’t “fully in control of himself when he committed the crime.”

Putting aside our increasing ability to explain the psychological underpinnings of our behavior more causally or scientifically, our criminal justice system has always acknowledged a distinction between violent crimes committed in states of heightened emotionality and those performed out of more reasoned judgments, finding the latter to be more egregious. If someone assaults another immediately after finding out they cheated with a significant other, the legal system punishes this behavior less stringently than if the assault takes place after a “cooling off period”. This may be reflective of a kind of acknowledgement that our behavior does sometimes “speak” less for us, or is sometimes less in our control. Yepez’s case is one of a more systematic sort where he is subject to more dramatic emotionality than the standard distinction draws.

Psychological appeals for lesser sentences like Yepez’s are successful in about 20% of cases. Our legal system still hasn’t quite worked out how to interpret scientific-causal influences on behaviors, when they are not complete explanations. Having a condition like Yepez’s, or other psychological conditions we are gaining more understandings of every year, still manifest in complex ways in interaction with environmental conditions that make the explanations fall short of having a claim to fully determining behavior.

It does seem that there is something relevantly different in these cases; the causal explanations appear distinct. As courts attempt to determine the implications of that difference, we can consider the effect of determination-factors in how we understand behavior.

John Locke highlights the interplay between what we may identify as the working of our will and more external factors with a now-famous thought experiment. Imagine a person in a locked room. There seems to be an intuitive difference between such a person who wishes to leave the room but cannot – their will is constrained and they cannot act freely in this respect. On the other hand, something seems importantly different if the person were in the locked room and didn’t know the door was locked – say they were in rapt conversation with a fascinating partner and had no desire to leave. The world may be “set up” so that this state of affairs is the only one the person could be in at that moment, but it isn’t clear that their will is not free; the constraints seem less relevant.

We can frame the question of the significance of the determination of our wills in another way. While not all of our actions are a result of conscious deliberation, consider those that are. When you question what to eat for lunch, what route to take to get to your destination, which option to take at the mechanics, etc., what would result from your certainty that your ultimate decision is determined by the causal network of the world? If, from the perspective of making a decision, we consider ourselves not to be a source of our own behavior, we would fail to act. We would be rendered observers to our own behavior, yet in a perspective of wondering what to do.

Note an interesting tension here, however: after we decide what to do (to have a taco, take the scenic route, replace the transmission) and perform the relevant action, we can look back at our deliberative behavior and wonder at the influences that factored into the performance. It often feels like we are in control of our behavior at the time – say, when we consider tacos versus hamburgers and remember how delicious, fresh and cheap the fish tacos are at a stand nearby, it seems that these factors lead to seeking out the tacos in a paradigmatic instance of choice.

But what if you had seen a commercial for tacos that day? Or someone had mentioned a delicious fish meal recently? Or how bad burgers are for your health or the environment? What if you were raised eating fish tacos and they have a strong nostalgic pull? What if you have some sort of chemical in your brain or digestive system that predisposes you to prefer fish tacos? If any of these factors were the case, does this undermine the control you had over your behavior, the relevant freedom of your action? How do such factors relate to the case that Locke presents us with – are they more or less like deciding to stay in a locked room you didn’t know was locked?

These questions could be worrying enough when it comes to everyday actions, but they carry import when the behaviors in question significantly impact others. If there is a causal explanation underpinning even the behaviors we take to be up to our conscious deliberation, would this alter the ways we hold one another responsible? In legal cases, having a causal explanation that doesn’t apply to typical behaviors does lessen the punishment that seems appropriate. Not everyone has a condition that correlates to violent outbursts, which may make this condition a relevant external factor.

February 14, 2018December 14, 2022

In Climate Change Denial, Fatalism Versus Determinism

“Climate change fatalism,” a term often thrown around in the discussion about climate change denial, contains an important philosophical idea that deserves more exploration: fatalism. Robert Solomon states in his article, “On Fate and Fatalism” that, “fatalism is the idea that what happens (or has happened) in some sense has to or had to happen.” Thus, climate change fatalism would be the idea that climate change, particularly the feared imminent catastrophic end caused by climate change, has to happen, and is therefore out of human control. Fatalism is important to study because this tendency to believe that climate change is out of human control greatly reduces our motivation to mitigate the negative effects of global climate change.

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