Wolf's "Asymmetrical Freedom": Conditional Responsibility, Ethical Theory, and Marx's Synthesis of Teleology and Deontology

Susan Wolf has a really novel contribution to action theory (free will, determinism, etc.), a fact I've just now noticed after sort of half-paying attention to her work in the Free Will class I took at Catholic U. My friend "Crisp" (not using real names) is working on a paper on Wolf's famous "Moral Saints" piece, and I've always been into analytic action theory as one of a handful of side-pieces to my German continental malarkey, so I read her piece "Asymmetrical Freedom," and it really stuck with me. Key parts of it--parts I think are central to the piece and not ancillary--suggest novel commitments to certain normative ethical theories. I'll get into the Marxian part of this later on, and hopefully I will be persuasive enough that readers will be relieved to see I am not predictably "shoehorning" my politics into a poorly-matched area of philosophy again.

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Commitment to normative ethical theories is something that is not often found in the literature on free will. Most of that literature is devoted to thought experiments, counterfactuals, et cetera, meant to establish how it could in theory be the case that: one is truly free in the sense of possessing ontological primacy, one can be both free and determined (more on this in a sec), or that one can be both a determined agent and still bear moral responsibility for actions. Throughout much of that body of literature (Frankfurt, Pereboom, Kane, etc), moral responsibility is used, if not synonymously with freedom, then certainly as a reliable index for it and vice versa. This is good, I think, and correct. 

The issue is that these authors don't fill out what is meant by the "morals" to which one has a responsibility when one is said to be relevantly free. This isn't necessarily a problem for their arguments in terms of conceptual self-consistency. They're deeply investigating the physical and metaphysical problems of free will and determinism, often using modal or propositional logic, as well as hard sciences like neuroscience, to develop their arguments. But as I hope to show through a pertinent counter-example to this formalist strain, this issue does, in my view, weaken possibilities for the concrete ethical application of their respective positions. 

Harry Frankfurt looms large in this formalist set for his fascinating and counterintuitive thought experiments that aim to refute the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (the notion that an agent is only responsible for an action if that agent could have acted otherwise.) The PAP is the fundamental backbone of incompatibilism (the notion that free will is strictly incompatible with determinism). It's related to Kant's famous dictum: "ought implies can." How can one be held morally responsible (which implies freedom) if one is unable to do other than what one does? (this latter constriction itself implies unfreedom in a very intuitive sense, thus making it hard to see how counter-PAP arguments could work without being self-contradictory.)

Frankfurt's counter-PAP arguments form a whole genre, generally awkwardly dubbed "Frankfurt-type examples." They essentially go something like this. Agent X, in theory, can choose between Action A and Action B--those are the only two theoretically or actually possible actions. But an insurmountable real-life impediment has been placed on B unbeknownst to X. If X remains unaware of this insurmountable impediment, and chooses A from his own volition (believing both A and B to be equally possible), he is morally responsible for A despite having no real-life ability to act other than A (because B has been foreclosed upon without X's knowledge). 

Make of that strain of thinking what you will. But it is my hunch that our knowledge of, and ability to assess, the content of a given theoretical action--which would rely upon some normative content or another--would matter for free will. To be held "morally responsible" is not really something that can be conceived of, by itself, outside of the theoretical world. In none of the literature is the absurd suggestion made that "moral responsibility" itself is adjudicated in the real world, through some real-life process according to concrete institutional norms. Moral responsibility, then, is a vacant concept without (a more or less static) notion of what it is to be "moral." 

If the notion is not static, and always contingent or relative, comparisons between competing accounts of the conditions under which moral responsibility holds (the very substance of debates in action theory) make no sense. In order for a static notion to hold, a construct or heuristic of some kind must be able to account for the meaning of "moral." It could be arbitrarily constructed, but then the stakes involved in the debate disappear. Moral responsibility, the standard index of free will, must be so for some reason, a reason serious enough to merit its being the fulcrum of the entire philosophical study of human freedom. With contingency and arbitrariness out the window, it would seem only that a coherent, feasible, universalizable metric of moral right and wrong will do. This means, in practice, that only the inclusion or baked-in assumption of some moral theory or another will suffice if action theorists are going to debate with each other using terms that are not indefensibly vacant from the start.

This is what I take to be a major contribution underpinning Susan Wolf's "Asymmetrical Freedom." She argues the following:

"When we imagine an agent who performs right actions, it seems, we imagine an agent who is rightly determined: whose actions, that is, are determined by the right sorts of interests, and whose interests are determined by the right sorts of reasons. But an agent who is not psychologically determined cannot perform actions that are right in this way. And if his actions can never be appropriately right, then in not performing right actions, he can never be wrong. The problem seems to be that the undetermined agent is so free as to be free from moral reasons." (Wolf 153-154).

She attempts other ways of cutting this problem, but none stick. In the end, then, she is left (in part) with a markedly Kantian view. It is Kantian in the sense that it affirms ontological primacy while arguing that in order for us to predictably perform right actions, we must be psychologically "determined" by the "right sorts of interests," a notion that is cashed out in "moral reasons." Kant invites us to intentionally orient ourselves toward duty, never assuming that we are psychologically predestined to follow a moral law (what would be the use of moral imperatives, in that case, he asks). Moral law is self-legislated, but the self doing the legislating is one that is free in the paradoxical sense of being directed away from subjective inclinations (which are not components of the free self-legislator, but rather are in some sense exogenous to her, acting upon the rational being and not manifesting through its activity.) The self, in this sense, is psychologically oriented toward duty itself, which in turn is determined by the categorical imperative: the imperative that in performing a given action, the rational being would at the same time will that the action be universal law. 

There does not appear to be any air between the basic structure of the two concepts: Wolf's positive sense of being psychologically "determined" and Kant's. Wolf argues that "the condition of freedom depends on the condition of value," not the other way around. By "condition of value," she refers to the imperative to meet the condition of being a "moral agent," or an "agent to whom moral claims apply." In other words, previous thinkers of free will have subordinated the moral condition to freedom, arguing things like "one must not be determined if one is to be morally responsible for his actions." But Wolf flips the script: an agent's being constituted such that moral rules can meaningfully apply to them is the key criterion for that agent being free. This "constitution" obviously involves various sorts of determinism, which I will get into in a moment.

Let's discuss the notion alluded to by the paper's title: this "asymmetry." This has great bearing on the direction of the paper (this post is turning into a paper all to itself!). Wolf argues that there is an unacknowledged asymmetry in our intuitions about free will. The literature in this area has tended always to focus on blameworthy actions, and build their claims around these. "We seldom look," she argues, "at examples of agents whose actions are morally good. We rarely ask whether an agent is truly responsible if his being responsible would make him worthy of praise" (155). 

Her strongest point in this direction is that we do not generally apply the principle of alternative possibilities to praiseworthy actions:

    "'I cannot tell a lie,' 'He couldn't hurt a fly' are not exemptions from praiseworthiness but testimonies to it. If a friend presents you with a gift and says "I couldn't resist," this suggests the strength of his friendship and not the weakness of his will. If one feels one "has no choice" but to speak out against injustice, one ought not to be upset about the depth of one's commitment" (156)

She discusses moral character, the kind of "right determination" that makes it so that an agent acts according to moral reasons. She concedes that a good moral character may be determined, but also that it nonetheless "seems absurd to say that it is not under his control. His character is determined on the basis of his reasons, and his reasons are determined by what reasons there are" (158). His good moral character is determined doubly, in a manner that's structurally compatible with Kant's ideal rational being. First by "his reasons" (his self-legislation of moral law), which are then determined by "what reasons there are" (the duties which pass muster against the categorical imperative.)

What this all comes down to, for Wolf, is reasons. Science-fiction-like "concrete" prohibitions on certain actions do not interest Wolf. Frankfurt's most famous counter-PAP thought experiment involves an agent Y putting a chip into agent X's brain that activates as soon as agent X is about to make a decision, so that agent X can only perform action A and not action B--yet agent X already decides on action A and not B, from his own volition. This sort of thing does not comport with realistic arguments about morality and responsibility. 

The factors that doom the PAP, according to Wolf, are our own correct intuitions about moral reasoning. Here is the incomplete and problematic version of the intuitive assumption:

"...when an agent performs a good action, the condition of freedom is a counterfactual: though it is required that the agent would have been able to do otherwise had there been good and sufficient reason to do so, the situation in which the good-acting agent actually found himself is a situation in which there was no such reason. Thus, it is compatible with the satisfaction of the condition of freedom that the agent in this case could not actually have done other than what he actually did. When an agent performs a bad action, however, the condition of freedom is not a counterfactual. The bad-acting agent does what he does in the face of good and sufficient reasons to do otherwise. Thus the condition of freedom requires that the agent in this case could have done otherwise in just the situation in which he was actu- ally placed. An agent, then, can be determined to perform a good action and still be morally praiseworthy. But if an agent is to be blameworthy, he must unconditionally have been able to do something else" (159)

The problem is this: the praiseworthy agent is permitted to be determined by moral reasons, while the blameworthy agent is not permitted to be determined by (and given a pardon for) lack of moral reasons. To motivate this point, Wolf discusses a hypothetical agent who has been raised only with examples of bad action, with good moral reasons nowhere to be found. She gives her takeaway on this example in the second paragraph of the depicted text:

Above, we see how other ethical theories beyond Kantianism--but not necessarily at odds with its application--are at play in this definitive portion of the text. Skipping ahead a bit: Philip J Kain has done a masterful job showing how the works of the "young" Marx synthesize Kantian and Aristotelian ethics. I believe in the context of the kind of concrete justice that Wolf recognizes is at stake here, pure Aristotelianism won't quite do to fully flesh out the pieces highlighted in blue (especially the last). Scandalous as it may appear, we would do well to bring in Marx.

Marx, according to Kain, combines commitments both to Kantianism and to Aristotelian ethics in his early to mid-period work. In short, Marx's concern about alienation--and his later "concrete" turn toward the process of valorizing the commodity, which is, in my view, alienation by another name--is deeply motivated by Kant's categorical dictum that people are not to be treated as "mere means" but as "ends in themselves." He takes serious steps toward an exhaustive practical treatment of this notion of a human "end in himself" by joining it to an Aristotelianism not unlike that on display in the final sentence of the above depicted Wolf segment. 

Aristotle derives his "teleological" ethics from what is known as his "function argument." This argument has been amply criticized for its supposedly biologically and morally reckless imputation of an intrinsic "purpose" to human beings. If this critique correctly reflected Aristotle's meaning, Marx's synthesis of Aristotelian teleology with Kant's maxim of "ends, not means" would indubitably fail. Aristotle would have stamped us with an instrumental purpose, and all of us would already be conscripted as means to some global end. 

Christine Korsgaard, in her Creating the Kingdom of Ends, lays this interpretation of the function argument to rest. The teleological ideal, according to Korsgaard and amply supported in the Nicomachean Ethics, refers to "how one does what one does." One realizes or occupies oneself specifically as a human being, with all a human being's attendant biological and mental talents, by adhering to a set of virtues which best preserves one's self qua humankind. It is teleological because one can fall short of this preservtion via virtues.

Marx's Aristotelianism consists in (at least a significant part of) the concrete normative ideal that motivates his rejection of the instrumentalization and commodification of human labor--of the reduction of naturally creative, socially laboring to mere repositories of "labor-power," a commodity which adds value to wares while its human repositories are denied the value that they've produced through the exercise of that power.

The exemplary text for Marx's Aristotelianism is The German Ideology (henceforth GI), though the indelible mark of that ethical commitment can be found in negative, concretized propositions at least as late as Capital V. 1 (see Capital vol. 1, ch. 24, 1990 Penguin edition, particularly p. 716). Marx (along with Engels) write in GI:

    "The all-round development of the individual will only cease tobe conceived as ideal, as vocation, etc. when the impact of the world which stimulates the real development of the abilities of the individual comes under the control of the individuals themselves" (GI 311-16).

The "all-round individual" is referenced at least five times throughout the GI. Marx is clear that that individual represents not some higher stage of individual, but rather, the full development of the human being itself, as it is meant to function. The project for Marx is not explicating the human's "function" so much as demonstrating how extrinsic assignments of instrumental purposes thwart the teleological attainment, by the individual, of what she already intrinsically is. Marx shows, through the concept of alienation, how an exogenous and systemic violation of the Kantian maxim not to "treat others as mere ends" necessarily impinges on the realization of Aristotle's conception of properly human "ends."

It is clear that this synthesis, in the person of Marx, conforms to Wolf's own conclusions about extrinsic impediments to one's access to moral reasons. In the final section of the section depicted above, Wolf is concerned about two things in relation to the moral legibility of "freedom" as it is traditionally conceived. First, the attainment of our "fundamental selves," which are by necessity moral selves (or virtuous men, in Aristotle's parlance); second, the fact that the realization of the fundamental self requires the "cooperation of the world." 

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To conclude, let me systematically lay out my claims. Wolf's project offers two unique, and inextricably linked, "compatibilist" views on the standard conceits of action theory. The first is the notion that to be "determined" by good moral reasons is not only compatible with freedom, but prerequisite to it. The second is that an agent is not blameworthy for her action--even if she has the theoretical ability to do otherwise--if she does not have access to moral reasons. Or, put another way, if she is unable to be determined by them, through extrinsic impediments. 

Next, Wolf, through her manner of emphasizing the critical importance of the moral in "moral responsibility" for free will, as well as through the way she cashes this out in her particular conclusions, suggests or even demands engagement with static, coherent ethical theory. Her two unique compatibilist notions, taken by themselves, conform neatly to Kantian deontology. But her concluding analysis of the stakes and impediments involved in depriving an agent of moral reasons suggest an Aristotelian theory of the human, while hardly abandoning the Kantianism at the core of her compatibilism. Further, her dictum that moral reasoning requires "the cooperation of the world" in quite a concrete sense creates a philosophically fruitful opening to a particular ethical framework that synthesizes Kant and Aristotle in a particular way. 

That is to say, the ethical theory of the early and mid-period Marx. Marx's particular blend of Kantian and Aristotelian frameworks for understanding freedom has the advantage, for engaging fruitfully with Wolf's claims, of a negative emphasis--he focuses principally on impediments to those very Kantian and Aristotelian maxims. Wolf, too, utilizes a negative expository method for dealing with her underlying Kantian claim--that an agent's being psychologically determined by good moral reasons is a requirement for his moral responsibility (his freedom)--as well as her related Aristotelian concern, about our development into our "fundamental selves." 

Not only that, but her negative account is cashed out in terms that comport with Marx. It is through a lack of "cooperation" by the "world" (I take her to mean the world less literally and more the concrete world of society, persons, agents, and power) that prevents us from achieving the twin Kantian-Aristotelian duty to become one's fundamental (free) self through adhering to good moral reasons. In Marx, it is our fundamental social order, embodied in the capitalist class relation, that prevents both our being treated as ends in ourselves and our achievement of the Aristotelian goal to become "all-round individuals" (to embody what we already are, by virtue of our humanity specifically.)

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A brief potential objection to all this. The basic objection I foresee is the notion that I am simply shoehorning my ethical-theory interests into Wolf's paper--that Wolf would not have conceived of her work in these terms at all. This is probably true enough. But philosophy and philosophical scholarship is built on synthesis. Is this a synthesis, though, one might ask--are you not merely scouring Wolf for points which resemble various ethical theories? I would argue I am certainly not doing so. I am highlighting the ways in which Wolf's claims about the centrality of moral reasons--and the built-in rationale she proffers to buttress these claims--are already fertile ground for a more detailed analysis of just what ethical philosophies underpin that rationale from the first. She is surely unlikely to have seen the Marxian angle, but what does this matter, if my claims about the strong compatibility between her negative, normative conclusions and Marx's conclusions of the same sort hold? None of my ethical-theoretical claims are mere heuristics for grappling with Wolf's claims: rather, they are positions intrinsic to the work that I have identified, named and fleshed out for the purpose of contributing to a more morally sophisticated approach to an area of philosophy which has long been encumbered by vagueness and theoretical incoherence.