"Who needs conscious, rational control?"

Oisin Deery

Abstract: Free actions are actions for which people are morally responsible, in the sense that they deserve praise or blame for doing them. Acting freely requires exercising control. Typically, the required control is taken to be a conscious, rational capacity exercised by the agent at the time of action. But evidence suggests that many seemingly free actions are in fact automatic, and detached from an agent’s conscious, rational capacities. One important example is behavior caused by implicit bias: a partly automatic and unconscious (and often negative) evaluative tendency regarding other people, based on their apparent membership in a socially salient category or group. Implicit biases seem not to be amenable to self-control, and are detached from agents’ conscious, rational capacities. So bias-caused actions seem not to be free. Given how widespread implicit bias is, that would mean that people are not responsible for a great deal of what they do, and hence should not be blamed for their wrongdoing. I maintain that people might well be responsible for their bias-caused actions even without exercising conscious or rational control. How? Whereas most philosophers focus on a single control capacity as being the one intuitively required for free action, I focus instead on a cluster of features or capacities, which are empirically identified. Actions that issue from this cluster are free, as long as the cluster hangs together and is maintained in a certain sort of way, and serves our goals in tracking it. Even if conscious, rational control belongs in this cluster, such control is not automatically necessary for free action. Why? Because none of the features or capacities in the cluster is individually necessary for actions issuing from the cluster to count as free. As long as a sufficient number are present, and work together stably, the actions are free. So actions might be free even without conscious or rational control.