Just Deserts

Draft
Just finished reading Just Deserts by Daniel Dennett and Gregg Caruso. Overall I liked the book. But this very brief review is a draft and subject to change.

Likes
The best bit for was the interaction between Dennett and Caruso. So we did not have the typical book, where we have pages and pages of a single pedagogical discourse for or against some other author’s book of pedagogical discourse. Here we had some forth and back in ‘real time’. This format also helped clarify (to some degree) the actual meaning of the two philosophers positions.

The book had a brief glossary of terms at the front, which I thought was useful. Deontology is now in my vocabulary. I would have like to have seen a few other terms in that glossary, and these are simple ones like just, desert, morality, defined a little more rigorously. I know what they mean for me, but I can’t help thinking the authors were in accord with one another at times on the meanings.

Dislikes
Physically the book did not appear attractive (to me). I feel like Gregg was on the front foot most of the time, attacking and probing, but never gets Dan on the ropes. Much of the problem seem to be around the words punishment and retribution. While the two could seem to be separate and yet overlap in certain instances. Gregg and Dan seem to agree there is no libertarian free will, but neither of them seem to question the logic of the concept of morality in a world where we could not do otherwise. Of course Gregg was unsuccessful on pinning Dan down on how or what we can do otherwise.

My Take
I can’t help thinking the problem stems from not examining the fruits of agreeing with there being no such thing as libertarian free will. I remember watching a YouTube of Dan giving a prestigious lecture on free will in Edinburgh. Here he gave an example of being able to do otherwise:

A golfer misses a really easy six-inch putt. He replaces the ball and retakes the putt and makes it. He repeats this another nine times. He makes nine of the the ten extra putts.

Here, Dan thought this is demonstrating the golfer could have done otherwise, on the initial put and this is what people really mean by being able to do otherwise. Does morality exist in a determined (or indetermined) world? It is like asking are objects actually coloured when we understand the physics of light adsorption. Does an object have the colour of the light it adsorbs or that it reflects? Logically the reflected light is closer to the answer, but it does not quite answer the question is the object coloured? The same way, are certain arrangements of electrons, atoms, molecules or even brains, just, deserving or moral?

Dan also resorts to the concepts self-control and autonomy. I can’t help but inwardly smile when one plays the autonomy card. Are things that are completely autonomous automatons? Perhaps we need a new word autonomaton? OK that is a cheap word play.

Dan and Greg in their book Just Deserts have decided to engage one another and their readers in the quagmire of perception.

I have read philosophers Kane (his Free Will anthology), Wegner, Dennett, Levy, Strawson, Mele, Pink on the subject of free will. None of them for me address the problem how, if the real world materialism is true, then how could our chemistry have done otherwise? In the real world authors like Harris, Mlodinow, Hood, Eagleton, Blackmore, Carroll get closer to seeing the world the way I do. To be fair Trick Slattery seems to bridge that gap between reality and perception in Breaking the Free Will Illusion. There is no “I” that can control the diffusion of ions, shift equilibrium, and manipulate rates of reaction. While our chemistry that ultimately controls our perceptions of morality, justness and desert, however illusory they maybe, is not just autonomous the chemistry is automatic.