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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Great Debates in Philosophy
- Sprache: Englisch
A lively and engaging debate between four representative views on free will, completely revised and updated with new perspectives
Four Views on Free Will is a robust and careful debate about free will, how it interacts with determinism and indeterminism, and whether we have it or not. Providing the most up-to-date account of four major positions in the free will debate, the second edition of this classic text presents the opposing perspectives of renowned philosophers John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom, and Manuel Vargas.
Substantially revised throughout, this new volume contains eight in-depth chapters, almost entirely rewritten for the new edition, in which the authors state their different positions on the debate, offer insights into how their views have evolved over the past fifteen years, respond to recent critical literature in the field, and interact and engage with each other in dialogue. In the first four chapters the authors defend their distinctive views about free will: libertarianism, compatibilism, hard incompatibilism, and revisionism. The subsequent four chapters consist of direct replies by each of the authors to the other three.
Offering a one-of-a-kind interactive conversation about the most recent work on the subject, Four Views on Free Will, Second Edition provides a balanced and enlightening discussion on all the key concepts and conflicts in the free will debate. Part of the acclaimed Great Debates in Philosophy series, it remains essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students, lecturers and scholars in philosophy, ethics, free will, philosophy of mind, political philosophy, law, and related subjects.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Notes on Authors
Preface to the Second Edition
Acknowledgments
Some Terms and Concepts
Basic Terms: Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and Determinism
Philosophical Options on the Free Will Problem
1 Libertarianism
1 Introduction: An Ancient Problem with Modern Significance
2 Modern Debates and Views
3 The Compatibility Question, Alternative Possibilities, and Ultimate Responsibility
4 Self‐forming Actions
5 Freedom of Action and Freedom of Will: AP and UR
6 Plurality Conditions and Plural Voluntary Control
7 Will‐setting and Self‐formation
8 The Compatibility Question Revisited: Free Will and Moral Responsibility
9 Fair Opportunity to Avoid Wrongdoing: Hart and Others
10 Reactive Attitudes, Criminal Trials, and Transference of Responsibility
11 Transference of Responsibility and Compatibility Questions
12 Two Dimensions of Responsibility
13 Compatibilist Responses I: Conditional Analyses
14 Compatibilist Responses II: Frankfurt‐style Examples
15 The Intelligibility Question
16 Indeterminism: Empirical and Philosophical Questions
17 Initial Pieces: Self‐formation, Efforts, Willpower, Volitional Streams
18 Indeterminism and Responsibility
19 Initial Questions and Objections: Indeterminism and Chance
20 Further Questions and Objections: Phenomenology and Rationality
5
21 Micro‐ vs. Macro‐control
22 Control and Responsibility
23 Agency, Complexity, Disappearing Agents
24 Regress Objections: Responsibility and Character Development
25 The Explanatory Luck Objection: Authors, Stories, Value Experiments, and
Liberum Arbitrium
26 Contrastive Explanations
Further Reading
Notes
2 Compatibilism
1 Introduction
2 The Lure of Compatibilism
3 A Compatibilist Account of Freedom
4 The Consequence Argument
5 Semicompatibilism and the Frankfurt‐style Examples
6 Direct Incompatibilism
7 Why Be a Semicompatibilist?
8 An Account of Guidance Control
9 Conclusion: Making a Statement
Further Reading
3 Hard Incompatibilism
1 Outline of Hard Incompatibilism
2 Against Compatibilism
3 Against Libertarianism
4 Hard Incompatibilism, Responsibility, and the Moral Emotions
5 Hard Incompatibilism and the Treatment of Criminals
6 Alternative Possibilities and Determinism
7 Alternative Possibilities and Moral Responsibility
Further Reading
Notes
4 Revisionism
1 Changing Our Minds
2 Kinds of Theories
3 Diagnostic Remarks
4 Anger
5 The Control Rule
6 Adjusting the Rules
7 What About Free Will?
8 Abilities
9 Normative Authority
10 Realism
11 Topic Continuity
12 Reconsidering Alternative Positive Views
13 Free Will Eliminativism
14 Free Will and Back Again
Further Reading
5 Response to Fischer, Pereboom, and Vargas
1 Response to Fischer
2 Response to Pereboom
3 Response to Vargas
6 Response to Kane, Pereboom, and Vargas
1 Response to Kane
2 Response to Pereboom
3 Response to Vargas
7 Response to Kane, Fischer, and Vargas
1 Response to Kane
2 Response to Fischer
3 Response to Vargas
8 Response to Kane, Fischer, and Pereboom
1 The Free Will Debates
2 Kane’s Libertarianism
3 Fischer, Semicompatibilism, and Revisionism
4 Pereboom’s Hard Incompatibilism
5 Fairness Under Determinism
6 Some Concluding Observations
Appendix: Some Free Will Debates
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 Garden of forking paths.
Guide
Cover Page
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Notes on Authors
Preface to the Second Edition
Acknowledgments
Some Terms and Concepts
Begin Reading
Appendix: Some Free Will Debates
Bibliography
Index
WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
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Great Debates in Philosophy
Series Editor: Ernest Sosa
Dialogue has always been a powerful means of philosophical exploration and exposition. By presenting important current issues in philosophy in the form of a debate, this series attempts to capture the flavor of philosophical argument and to convey the excitement generated by the exchange of ideas. Each author contributes a major, original essay. When these essays have been completed, the authors are each given the opportunity to respond to the opposing view.
Personal IdentitySydney Shoemaker and Richard Swinburne
Consciousness and CausalityD.M. Armstrong and Norman Malcolm
Critical TheoryDavid Couzens Hoy and Thomas McCarthy
Moral Relativism and Moral ObjectivityGilbert Harman and Judith Jarvis Thomson
Atheism and Theism, Second EditionJ.J.C. Smart and J.J. Haldane
Three Methods of EthicsMarcia W. Baron, Philip Pettit, and Michael Slote
Epistemic JustificationLaurence BonJour and Ernest Sosa
Four Views on Free WillJohn Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom, and Manuel Vargas
Expression and Self‐KnowledgeDorit Bar‐On and Crispin Wright
Four Views on Free Will
Second Edition
John Martin Fischer
University of California Riverside
Riverside, CA
Robert Kane
The University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX
Derk Pereboom
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY
Manuel Vargas
University of California San Diego
La Jolla, CA
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Notes on Authors
John Martin Fischer is Distinguished Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, where he has held a UC President’s Chair. He is the author of The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control (1994) and, with Mark Ravizza, S.J., Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (1998). He has published four collections of essays on the topics of this debate: My Way: Essays on Moral Responsibility (2006), Our Stories: Essays on Life, Death, and Free Will (2009), Deep Control: Essays on Free Will and Value (2012), and Our Fate: Essays on God and Free Will (2016). In 2017 he was appointed by the Board of Regents as the first and only philosopher to hold a University Professorship in the University of California.
Robert Kane is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of ten books and over eighty articles on the philosophy of mind and action, free will, moral and legal responsibility, ethics, and the theory of values, including Free Will and Values (1985), Through the Moral Maze (1993), The Significance of Free Will (1996), A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will (2005), Ethics and the Quest for Wisdom (2010), and, with Carolina Sartorio, Do We Have Free Will? A Debate (2022), and The Complex Tapestry of Free Will: A Philosophical Odyssey (accepted for publication). He is editor of two editions of The Oxford Handbook of Free Will (2002 and 2011) among other edited anthologies. The recipient of fifteen major teaching awards at the University of Texas, he was named an inaugural member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers in 1995 and in 2017 was awarded the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award by Marquis Who’s Who.
Derk Pereboom is the Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Ethics in the Philosophy Department at Cornell University and Senior Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities in Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences. His areas of research include free will and moral responsibility, philosophy of mind, and early modern philosophy, especially Kant. He is the author of Living Without Free Will (2001), Consciousness and the Prospects of Physicalism (2011), Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life (2014), and Wrongdoing and the Moral Emotions (2021). He has published articles on free will and moral responsibility, consciousness and physicalism, nonreductive materialism, and Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology.
Manuel Vargas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California San Diego. He is the author of Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (2013), which won the 2015 APA Book Prize. He is a coeditor of Rational and Social Agency: The Philosophy of Michael Bratman (2014) and the Oxford Handbook of Moral Psychology (2022). He also publishes on the history of Latin American philosophy and is the author of the forthcoming Mexican Philosophy.
Preface to the Second Edition
All the chapters of this second edition of Four Views on Free Will have been updated, and even entirely rewritten from the first edition.
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank the many teachers and readers of the first edition, especially those who shared with us their experiences using that edition. We hope this volume is even more useful to you.
JMF: Over the years I have had the benefit of comments and conversations with many colleagues and students, too numerous to mention, which have significantly shaped my contribution. Thank you so very much. I am also honored by the opportunity to write this book with such distinguished philosophers, from whom I have learned throughout my career, as well as here. I appreciate the ideas, inspiration, and gracious collaboration.
RK: Thanks to the other three authors for their cogent comments, and to Manuel for his diligent organizational efforts.
DP: Thanks from me to Manuel Vargas, Robert Kane, John Fischer, Seth Shabo, David Christensen, and Sarah Adler.
MV: I’d like to thank my coauthors for agreeing to do the first edition of this book with a very green philosopher all those years ago, and for being game to get the band back together again. The ideas presented in this edition of my chapters have benefitted from the feedback of many colleagues and students over the years. In this edition my chapters have especially benefitted from the feedback of Michael Bratman, Federico Burdman, Joseph Martinez, Dana Nelkin, Sam Ridge, Dan Speak, and Satya Vargas.
Some Terms and Concepts
Basic Terms: Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and Determinism
Perhaps the three most important concepts in philosophical work on free will are free will, moral responsibility, and determinism.
The notion of freedom at stake in philosophical discussions is usually distinguished from a variety of other freedom concepts, including things like religious and political freedom. Usually, free will is also treated as distinct from several other concepts associated with human agency, such as autonomy and authenticity. As we will see in the chapters that follow, there are many ways of thinking about the nature of free will, and there are serious disagreements about what would constitute an adequate theory of free will. Much of the tradition has taken free will to be a kind of power or ability to make decisions of the sort for which one can be morally responsible, but philosophers have also sometimes thought that free will might be required for a range of other things, including moral value, originality, and self‐governance. Two other claims often made about free will are hotly disputed among philosophers. One is the claim that free will requires “alternative possibilities” or the power to do otherwise, and the other is the claim that free will requires that we are the “ultimate sources” of our free actions or the ultimate sources of our wills to perform free actions. The authors of this volume will take different sides on these claims.
Important to many discussions of free will is the idea of moral responsibility. In the context of discussions of free will, moral responsibility is often understood as a kind of status connected to judgments and/or practices of moral praise and blame. This meaning is distinct from another, perhaps more commonly used, sense of responsibility: responsibilities as obligations (e.g. when we talk about what responsibilities a parent has to a child). There are important connections between responsibility of the sort concerned with praise and blame and responsibility of the sort concerned with obligations. However, philosophers writing on free will and moral responsibility are typically concerned with the former and not the latter.
Determinism is a third concept that is often important for philosophical discussions of free will. For present purposes, we can treat determinism as the thesis that at any time (at least right up to the very end, if there is one) the universe has exactly one physically possible future. Something is deterministic if it has only one physically possible outcome.
It is important to bear in mind that a definition of determinism is just that – a characterization of what things would have to be like if things were deterministic. It does not follow that the universe is actually deterministic. Compare: “A creature is a gryphon if it has the hindquarters of a lion and the head and claws of an eagle.” Nothing about the definition of “gryphon” shows that there are such creatures in our universe. It simply tells us something about what sorts of things would count as gryphons. Similarly, to offer a definition of determinism does not show that the universe is deterministic. It only defines a term, and we may find that the term never properly applies to the world we live in.
When discussing these issues, it is natural to wonder whether the world is deterministic. Most physicists and philosophers think that the answer is no, but the technical issues are extremely complex. Nevertheless, if we accept that the universe isn’t deterministic, there are still good reasons to think about the compatibility of free will and determinism. First, it could turn out that future physicists conclude that the universe is deterministic, contrary to the contemporary consensus about at least quantum mechanics. It is notoriously difficult to predict how future science will turn out, and it might be useful to have an answer to the question in advance of the scientific issues getting sorted out. Second, even if the universe were not fully deterministic, determinism might hold locally (either as a matter of how local spacetime is constructed or as a matter of how the physics for nonquantum physical objects operates). Third, we could be interested in whether free will is compatible with a broadly scientific picture of the universe. Since some aspects of the universe seem deterministic and others do not, we might ask if free will is compatible with determinism as a first step to answering the more general question of whether free will is compatible with a broadly scientific picture of the universe.
Philosophical Options on the Free Will Problem
One particularly important issue for contemporary philosophers thinking about free will is whether we could have free will in a deterministic universe. Call this issue – whether free will could exist if the universe were deterministic – the compatibility issue. There is a long‐standing tradition of dividing up the conceptual terrain in light of the main answers to the compatibility issue. Traditionally, incompatibilists are those who think that free will is incompatible with the world being deterministic. Compatibilists, conveniently enough, are those who hold that free will is compatible with the universe being deterministic.
It is important to recognize that the compatibility issue is distinct from the issue of whether we have free will. You could be an incompatibilist and maintain that we do have free will. Or you might be an incompatibilist and think that we lack free will. (You could even think that irrespective of how the compatibility issue is settled, there are threats to free will apart from determinism.)
In the philosophical literature, libertarianism is the view that we have free will and that free will is incompatible with determinism. In this volume, it is the view presented by Robert Kane. Libertarianism as it is used in the context of free will is distinct from libertarianism in political philosophy. (Indeed, “libertarianism” in the free will sense is the original meaning – it was only later appropriated as the label for a view in political philosophy.) One might be a libertarian in both political and free will senses, but you can be a libertarian about free will without being a libertarian in political philosophy. And, perhaps, you could also be a political libertarian without being a free will libertarian (although some political libertarians are also free will libertarians).
Following Derk Pereboom, we will label as hard incompatibilism any view that holds that (i) incompatibilism is true and (ii) we lack free will. Historically, most hard incompatibilists were what William James called hard determinists. (Indeed, Pereboom’s coining of the term “hard incompatibilism” reflects James’s older terminology.) Hard determinists think we lack free will because the world is deterministic. Contemporary hard determinists are few and far between. What is more common are views that hold that we have no free will irrespective of whether the world is deterministic, and views that hold that although freedom might not be conceptually incompatible with determinism (or indeterminism, for that matter), we nevertheless lack it. As with the other views, Pereboom’s version of this view represents one among several ways one can be a hard incompatibilist.
To summarize then: a traditional way of dividing up the terrain concerns answers to the compatibility issue. The two main approaches are incompatibilism and compatibilism. We have been considering the incompatibilist fork, where the two main species of incompatibilism are libertarianism and hard incompatibilism. Both forms of incompatibilism have further species we have not discussed in this brief introduction.
The remaining fork of the compatibility debate is compatibilism. There are many varieties of compatibilism. Some compatibilists have emphasized a particular understanding of “can,” others have emphasized a kind of identification with one’s motives or values, and others emphasize the role of responsiveness to reasons. One influential variation, however, is the view that holds that responsibility is compatible with determinism, combined with agnosticism about whether free will, understood in one important way, is compatible with determinism. This view is semicompatibilism, and its most prominent defender is John Martin Fischer.
Lastly, there are views that resist some or other aspects of traditional formulations of positions or methods in debates about free will. Revisionism is one such view, and it is the view defended by Manuel Vargas. The core idea of revisionism is that the picture of free will and moral responsibility embedded in common sense needs revision, but not abandonment. That is, the revisionist holds that the correct account of free will and moral responsibility conflicts with common sense. As is the case with libertarianism, hard incompatibilism, and compatibilism, this view can take a variety of more specific forms. In this volume, the view recommends a compatibilist repair to our incompatibilist thinking, given a diverse set of theoretical, empirical, and moral considerations.
For a diagram and discussion of these and some other possible positions in philosophical debates about free will, see the appendix at the end of this volume.
1Libertarianism
Robert Kane
There is a disputation that will continue till mankind is raised from the dead, between the necessitarians and the partisans of free will.
Jalalu’ddin Rumi, thirteenth‐century Persian poet and mystic
1 Introduction: An Ancient Problem with Modern Significance
The problem of free will and necessity or determinism of which Jalalu’ddin Rumi spoke has arisen in history whenever humans have reached a higher stage of self‐consciousness about how profoundly the world may influence their behavior in ways unknown to them and that they do not control. The rise of doctrines of determinism or necessity in the history of ideas is an indication that this higher stage of self‐consciousness has been reached. People have wondered at various times whether their actions might be determined by Fate or by God, by the laws of physics or the laws of logic, by evolution, genes or environment, unconscious motives, upbringing, psychological or social conditioning, or, with the latest scientific threats from the neurosciences, by the activity of the neurons of their brains of which they are not conscious.
There is a core idea running through all these historical doctrines of determinism or necessity, whether they are religious, secular, or scientific, that shows why many people have felt they are a threat to free will. This core idea may be stated as follows:
Determinism: given the past at any time and the laws governing the universe, there is only one possible future. Whatever happens is therefore inevitable; it cannot but occur, given the past and laws.
Free will: by contrast, this implies (i) an open future, with multiple possible paths into the future and that (ii) it is sometimes “up to us” which of these possible paths we will take.
Such a picture of an open future that free will seems to require is often illustrated by an image made famous in a short story by the well‐known South American writer Jorge Luis Borges. It is the image of a “garden of forking paths” illustrated in Figure 1.1. At each juncture there are forking paths into the future. If we believe our choices about which of these paths we will take at such times are free choices, we must believe both options are “open” to us while we are deliberating. We could choose different paths into the future at various points in our lives; and it would be “up to us” and no one and nothing else which of these paths will be taken.
Figure 1.1 Garden of forking paths.
I believe such a picture of different possible paths into the future, at least at some times in our lives, is essential to our understanding of free will. Such a picture is also important, we might even say, to what it means to be a person and to live a human life. Yet determinism, if true, would seem to threaten this picture. For it implies that there really is, at all times, only one possible path into the future, not many. We may believe there are multiple paths available to us. But in reality, if determinism is true, only one of them would be possible.
2 Modern Debates and Views
Like Rumi and many other thinkers of the past, I had always believed there was some kind of conflict lurking here that was very deep and could not be easily dismissed by facile arguments. Yet I was also aware that many philosophers and scientists, especially in the modern era, have argued that doctrines of determinism pose no real threat to free will, or at least to any free will “worth wanting.” These thinkers are usually called “compatibilists”:
Compatibilists: believe that free will is compatible with determinism, so that we can have all the free will that is possible and worth wanting, even if determinism should be universally true.
Even in a determined world, these compatibilists argue, we would want to distinguish persons who are free from such things as physical restraint, addiction or neurosis, coercion, compulsion, covert control by others, or political oppression from persons who are not free from these things; and we could affirm that these freedoms could exist and would be preferable to their opposites even in a determined world. In addition, these modern compatibilists commonly argue that requiring that free actions must be undetermined would not do anything to enhance our freedom, but would rather reduce our freedom to mere chance or luck or mystery.
In modern debates about free will, compatibilist views of these kinds are opposed by:
Incompatibilists: those who deny that every kind of freedom “worth wanting” is compatible with determinism.
I will be defending such an incompatibilist view in this debate. While many kinds of freedom may be compatible with determinism, as the preceding paragraph suggests, I believe there is one important kind of freedom – traditionally called the “freedom of the will” – that is also worth wanting but that is not compatible with determinism.
Freedom of will of this incompatibilist kind satisfies the two conditions mentioned earlier that seem to be threatened by determinism, that is (i) at least at some points in our lives, we face a genuinely open future, with forking paths into that future, either of which we may choose, and (ii) at these crucial times, it is “up to us” and no one and nothing else, which of these possible paths into the future will be taken. We determine our future at such times and the kinds of persons we will become. Those who believe there is an important kind of freedom of will that we can possess satisfying these conditions which is not compatible with determinism are usually called “libertarians” about free will in contemporary debates (from the Latin liber meaning “free”).1
Libertarians about free will believe there is an important kind of freedom of will we can possess that is incompatible with determinism and satisfies the following conditions: (i) at some points in our lives, we face a genuinely open future, with forking paths into that future, either of which we may choose, and (ii) at these crucial times, it is “up to us,” and no one and nothing else, which of these possible paths into the future will be taken.
I will be defending such a libertarian and incompatibilist view of free will in this debate. Many thinkers believe that a free will of the kind libertarians defend – a free will that is not compatible with determinism – is not even possible or intelligible. It is not a kind of freedom, they argue, we could have. This worry has a long history and is related to an ancient dilemma: if free will is not compatible with determinism, it does not seem to be compatible with indeterminism either. Arguments have been made since the time of the ancient Stoics that undetermined events would occur spontaneously and hence could not be controlled by agents in the way that free and responsible actions would require.
If, for example, a choice occurred by virtue of some undetermined quantum events in one’s brain, it would seem to be a fluke or accident rather than a responsible choice. Undetermined events occurring in brains or bodies, it is commonly argued, would not seem to enhance our freedom and control over, and hence responsibility for, actions, but rather to diminish freedom, control, and responsibility. Arguments such as these and many others have led to often‐repeated charges throughout history that undetermined choices or actions such as a libertarian free will would require would be “arbitrary,” “random,” “irrational,” “uncontrolled,” “mere matters of luck,” or “chance,” and hence could not be free and responsible actions at all.
In response, libertarians about free will throughout history have often appealed to special and unusual forms of agency or causation to explain undetermined free actions, while their opponents have cried magic or mystery. Indeterminism might provide “causal gaps” in nature, libertarians frequently reasoned, but that was only a negative condition for free will. Some special form of agency or causation was needed that went beyond familiar modes of causation in the natural order to “fill” those causal gaps in nature left by indeterminism. And thus we had historical appeals to “extra factors,” such as noumenal selves outside space and time (e.g. Immanuel Kant); immaterial minds (e.g. René Descartes); or uncaused causes, nonevent agent causes, or prime movers unmoved that might account for an otherwise undetermined free will.
A tempting way to think, to be sure. But such traditional ways of thinking have also prompted charges by compatibilists and free will skeptics and many other modern critics of libertarian free will. These critics argue that one cannot make sense of an undetermined free will without appealing to magical or mysterious forms of agency which have no place in the modern scientific picture of the world and of human beings.
Friedrich Nietzsche summed up this prevailing modern skepticism in his inimitable prose when he said that such a traditional notion of freedom of the will that would underwrite an ultimate responsibility (UR) for our actions and require that one somehow be an undetermined “cause of oneself” was “the best self‐contradiction that has been conceived so far” by the human mind (1989: Section 17.8).
I agree that a traditional idea of free will that would require its being incompatible with determinism is likely to appear utterly mysterious and unintelligible in a modern context unless we learn to think about it in new ways, hence my long struggle in attempting to defend and make sense of such an idea of free will without reducing it to mere chance, on the one hand, or to mystery, on the other. Yet the struggle seemed worth the effort. For, like many another issue of modernity, the question is whether something of this traditional idea of free will in what Nietzsche called “the superlative metaphysical sense” can be retrieved from the dissolving acids of modern science and secular learning. Or would it become, along with other aspects of our self‐image, yet another victim of the “disenchantments” of modernity?
Yet I came to realize that any retrieval of this idea of free will that would require its being incompatible with determinism would be no simple matter, if it were possible at all. Such a retrieval would require answering not one question but a whole host of questions. And it would require rethinking the relations of many different and related notions: agency, choice, mind, action, selfhood, will, control, responsibility, power, and many others.2 I will be addressing many of these questions and topics here, beginning with the following central question in contemporary debates about free will.
3 The Compatibility Question, Alternative Possibilities, and Ultimate Responsibility
Why might one believe there is an important kind of free will worth wanting that is not compatible with determinism? The first step in answering this question is recognizing that – as this so‐called Compatibility Question is usually formulated in many modern discussions of free will, “Is freedom compatible or incompatible with determinism?” – the question is too simple. For, as noted in Section 2, there are many meanings of “freedom” (as one would expect from such a much‐disputed and debated term) and many of these meanings are compatible with determinism. Even in a determined world, as noted, we would want to distinguish persons who are free from such things as physical restraint, addiction, coercion, and political oppression from persons not free from these things. And we should acknowledge that these freedoms are significant (“worth wanting”) – having them would be preferable to their opposites – even in a determined world.
Those of us who are libertarians about free will (who believe in a free will that is incompatible with determinism) should, I contend, concede this point to compatibilists: many freedoms worth wanting are compatible with determinism.
What libertarians about free will should insist upon is that there is at least one kind of freedom that is also worth wanting and is not compatible with determinism. This further freedom is freedom of will, which I define as: “the power to be the ultimate source and sustainer to some degree of one’s own ends or purposes.”
To understand what this notion of free will amounts to, return to the two features mentioned in Section 2 that have historically led persons to believe that free will is threatened by determinism. We believe we have free will when we view ourselves as agents capable of influencing the world in various ways. Open alternatives seem to lie before us (a “garden of forking paths” in the earlier image). We reason and deliberate among them, and choose. We feel (i) it is “up to us” what we choose and how we act, and this means we “could have chosen or acted otherwise” or that we had “alternative possibilities.” This “up‐to‐us‐ness” also suggests that (ii) the ultimate sources of our actions lie to some degree in us and not entirely outside us in factors beyond our control.
Most modern debates about whether such a free will is or is not compatible with determinism have tended to focus on the first of these two requirements, which might be called the:
Condition of alternative possibilities (AP): free agents must have “alternative possibilities” or “open alternatives” for choice or action, which implies that they “could have chosen or acted otherwise.”
But arguments about whether or not this much‐discussed condition of alternative possibilities (AP) is compatible with determinism have led to contentious debates in modern philosophy. These debates in turn have tended to stalemate over differing interpretations of what it means to say that agents have alternative possibilities, or that agents “could have done otherwise” than they actually did, or that they had the “power” or “ability” at a given time to act or to act otherwise.
I believe these contentious debates about the meaning of such expressions as “could have done otherwise” and the resulting stalemates about the role of this AP condition in modern debates about free will are symptoms of a deeper problem. The deeper problem is that focusing on alternative possibilities alone is too thin a basis on which to rest the case for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. It is not that alternative possibilities and the power to do otherwise are unimportant for free will. Far from it. They are very important and we will return shortly to consider why. It is rather that other considerations must also be brought into the picture in arguing for the incompatibility of free will and determinism if we are to fully understand historical and contemporary debates about free will. The Compatibility Question concerning free will and determinism cannot be resolved by focusing on alternative possibilities or the power to do otherwise alone.
Realizing this, I have argued that one must revisit the long history of debates about free will to see where else to look. When doing so, one finds there is another historical condition fueling incompatibilist intuitions that to my mind is even more important than the alternative possibilities condition. This other condition is related to the second of the two requirements for the “up‐to‐us‐ness” of freedom of will mentioned, namely that “the ultimate sources of our actions must lie to some degree in us and not entirely outside us in factors beyond our control.” I call this further condition:
The condition of ultimate responsibility (UR): the basic idea is that to be ultimately responsible for an action, an agent must be responsible to some degree for anything that is a sufficient reason (a sufficient condition, cause, or motive) for the action‘s occurring.
If, for example, a choice were to issue from, and can be sufficiently explained by, an agent’s character and motives (together with background conditions) at the time, then to be ultimately responsible for the choice, the agent must be at least in part responsible by virtue of choices or actions voluntarily performed in the past for having the character and motives he or she now has. Compare Aristotle’s claim that if a man is responsible for wicked acts that flow from his character, he must at some time in the past have been responsible for forming the wicked character from which these acts flow (Aristotle 1985: 67).
This condition of UR accounts for the ultimate in the original definition of free will given earlier: “the power of agents to be the ultimate sources and sustainers to some degree of their own ends or purposes.”
4 Self‐forming Actions
Importantly, such a condition of ultimate responsibility (UR) does not require that we could have done otherwise (AP) for every act done “of our own free wills.” This UR condition thus partially vindicates compatibilists and others who insist that we can be held morally responsible for many acts even when we could not have done otherwise than perform them. But the vindication is only partial. For this UR condition does require that we could have done otherwise with respect to some acts in our life histories by which we formed or shaped our present characters, motives, and purposes (i.e. our wills). I call these character and will‐forming actions:
Self‐forming actions (SFAs): those acts by which we form and reform our wills (our characters, motives, and purposes) and for which we could have done otherwise, that must occur at some times in our lives, if we are to be ultimately responsible for having the wills we have and hence for being the kinds of persons we become.
To bring out the importance of these self‐forming actions (SFAs), consider a familiar line of argument purporting to show that moral responsibility does not require alternative possibilities or the power to do otherwise at all, a line of argument illustrated by compatibilist Daniel Dennett’s much‐discussed example of Martin Luther (1984: 131–133). When finally breaking with the Church at Rome, Luther said, “Here I stand, I can do no other.” Suppose, says Dennett, Luther was literally right about himself at that moment. Given his character and motives, he literally could not then have done otherwise. Does this mean he was not morally responsible? Not at all, Dennett says. In saying, “I can do no other,” Luther was not disowning responsibility for his act, but taking full responsibility for it. Thus, compatibilist Dennett concludes, “could have done otherwise (AP) is not required for free will in a sense demanded by moral responsibility.”
In response, I would argue that incompatibilists about free will may, and indeed should, grant that Luther could have been responsible for this act, even ultimately responsible in the sense of UR, though he could not have done otherwise then and there, even if his act were determined by his existing will at that moment. But this would be so, incompatibilists should argue, to the extent that Luther was responsible for his present motives and character (his will) by virtue of some earlier struggles and self‐forming choices (SFAs) that brought him to this point where he could do no other.
Acting of “our own free will”: often we act from a will already formed, but it is “our own free will” by virtue of the fact that we formed it by other choices or actions in the past (self‐forming choices or actions or SFAs) for which we could have done otherwise. If this were not so, there is nothing we could have ever done differently in our entire lifetimes to make ourselves different than we are – a consequence, I believe, that is incompatible with our being (at least to some degree) ultimately responsible for being the way we are.
5 Freedom of Action and Freedom of Will: AP and UR
Focusing on this condition of ultimate responsibility (UR) tells us something else of importance about the traditional problem of free will. It tells us why it is a problem about the freedom of the will and not just about the freedom of action and why these freedoms must be distinguished if the Compatibility Question and other questions about free will are to be adequately addressed.
There has been a tendency in the modern era of philosophy, beginning with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke in the 17th century, and coming to fruition in the 20th century, to reduce the problem of free will to a problem of free action. I believe such a reduction oversimplifies the problem.
Free will is not just about free action, though it involves free action. Free will is about self‐formation, about the formation of our “wills” or how we got to be the kinds of persons we are, with the characters, motives, and purposes we now have. Were we ultimately responsible to some degree for having the wills (characters, motives, and purposes) we do have, or can the sources of our wills be completely traced back to something over which we had no control, such as Fate or the decrees of God, heredity and environment, social conditioning, or hidden controllers, and so on? Therein, I believe, lies the core of the traditional problem of “free will.”
John Locke (1690/1975, Book II, Chapter xxi: 134) famously said in the 17th century that the so‐called problem of free will which had so exercised medieval and earlier philosophers was really a problem about free agency, or the freedom of the agent, and not about the freedom of the will. Like other thinkers of the modern era, Locke was skeptical of medieval references to the “will” in general which often made it out to be a mysterious inner homunculus or power capable of influencing actions and events in ways not countenanced, Locke believed, by the new emerging sciences of his day.
Many moderns down to the present time have followed Locke in this skepticism. They argue, as did Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) and Gilbert Ryle (1949) in the mid‐20th century, that references to the will and acts of will were outdated remnants of pre‐modern modes of thought and should go the way of witches and phlogiston. Even some modern libertarians and incompatibilists about free will have joined compatibilists in arguing that the historical “problem of free will” is really about the freedom of agency and hence about the freedom of action and not about the freedom of the will.
I believe this is a mistake. It is not wrong, to be sure, to say as Locke does that the traditional problem of free will is really a problem about free agency. But it is wrong to say it is not therefore also about the freedom of the will. For, as described in these paragraphs, freedom of will is an important aspect of free agency; and moreover free will is that particular aspect of free agency that has been the subject of historical debates about whether it is or is not compatible with determinism.
For if the case for the incompatibility of free will and determinism cannot be made by appealing to the condition of alternative possibilities (AP) alone, the case can be made if UR is added. I have thus argued that UR should be moved to center stage in free will debates. To be ultimately responsible for an action in the sense required by UR, an agent must be responsible to some degree for anything that is a sufficient reason (cause or motive) for the action’s occurring. And this implies, as noted, that if a choice or action can be sufficiently explained by an agent’s present character, motives, and purposes, then to be ultimately responsible for the choice or action, the agent must be at least in part responsible by virtue of choices or actions voluntarily performed in the past for having the character, motives, and purposes he or she now has. But this being the case, an impossible infinite regress of past choices or actions would be required unless some choices or actions in the agent’s life history (self‐forming actions, or SFAs) did not have sufficient causes or motives (and hence were not determined).3
Yet if one could arrive at the incompatibility of free will and determinism from this condition of ultimate responsibility (UR) alone in this manner, one might wonder whether appeals to alternative possibilities (AP) are needed at all for free will. Some recent philosophers who are impressed by arguments of the above kind for incompatibilism (they are sometimes called “source incompatibilists”) have suggested that appeals to alternative possibilities and the power to do otherwise are not needed at all for free will.
I believe this is also a mistake. Both conditions – UR and AP – are needed for free will. But the reasons why both conditions are needed are more subtle than is generally realized; and understanding them requires further steps in rethinking the Compatibility Question.
6 Plurality Conditions and Plural Voluntary Control
The first of these further steps concerns what I call “plurality conditions” for free will. When we wonder about whether the wills of agents are free, it is not merely whether they could have done otherwise that concerns us, even if the doing otherwise is undetermined. What interests us is whether agents could have done otherwise voluntarily (or willingly), intentionally and rationally. Or to put it more generally, we are interested in whether agents could have acted voluntarily, intentionally, and rationally in more than one way, rather than in only one way, and in other ways merely by accident or mistake, unintentionally, involuntarily, or irrationally. I call such conditions:
Plurality conditions for free will (Kane 1996: 107–111): the power of agents to act voluntarily, intentionally, and rationally in more than one way, rather than in only one way, and in other ways merely by accident or mistake, unintentionally, involuntarily, inadvertently, or irrationally.
Such conditions seem to be deeply embedded in our intuitions about free choice and action. Most of us naturally assume that freedom and responsibility would be deficient if it were always the case that we could only do otherwise by accident or mistake, unintentionally, involuntarily, or irrationally.
To illustrate, imagine a world in which there is a considerable amount of genuine indeterminism or chance in human affairs as well as in nature. In this world, people set out to do things – kill prime ministers, press buttons on machines, punch computer keys, hit targets, etc. – usually succeeding, but sometimes failing by mistake or accident. Suppose an assassin, who usually hits his targets, is aiming to kill a prime minister from a distance with a high‐powered rifle, when some undetermined events in his nervous system lead to a wavering of his arm and he misses his target. Or suppose I approach a coffee machine meaning to push the button for black coffee when, due to an undetermined brain cross, I accidentally press the button for coffee with cream.
Now imagine further that all actions in this world in the lifetimes of agents, whether the agents succeed in their purposes or not, are such that their reasons, motives, and purposes for wanting and trying to act as they do are always preset or settled by prior circumstances of heredity, environment, social conditioning, and other formative circumstances. Whether the assassin misses the prime minister or not, his intention to kill is already settled prior to his attempt, by his past formative circumstances. Whether I succeed in pressing the button for coffee without cream, my wanting to do so because of my dislike of cream is already settled by my formative circumstances. And so it is, we are to assume, for all persons and all their actions in this imagined world.
I would argue that persons in such a world lack free will, even though it may often be the case that they have (i) alternative possibilities and that their actions are (ii) undetermined. For they can sometimes do otherwise than they do in a manner that is undetermined, but only inadvertently or unintentionally, by mistake or accident, as in the case of the assassin or my pressing the wrong button on the coffee machine – and this is a limited kind of freedom at best. What they cannot do is will otherwise than they do. Their reasons, motives, and purposes have been already “set one way” before and when they act, so that if they act otherwise, it will not be “in accordance with their wills,” but rather by chance or accident.
What this shows is that when we wonder about whether the wills of agents are free, it is not only whether they could have done otherwise that concerns us, even if their doing otherwise is undetermined. What interests us is whether they could have done otherwise voluntarily (in accordance with their wills), intentionally (knowingly rather than inadvertently and on purpose rather than accidentally), and rationally (having reasons for so acting and acting for those reasons). Or to put it more generally, we are interested in whether they could at some times have acted voluntarily, intentionally, and rationally in more than one way, rather than in only one way, and in other ways merely by accident or mistake, unintentionally, inadvertently, or irrationally.
We thus arrive at an answer to the question of why these “plurality conditions” are so deeply embedded in our intuitions about free choice and action. We naturally assume that freedom and responsibility would be deficient if it were always the case that we could only do otherwise by accident or mistake, unintentionally, involuntarily, or irrationally, in short, unwillingly. To have freedom of will, we must not only be able to do otherwise: we must be able to do otherwise willingly or at will. If free will involves more than alternative possibilities and indeterminism, these plurality conditions appear to be among the significant additional requirements.
Reflecting on these plurality conditions tells us something else of importance about free will. For, satisfying such plurality conditions implies that agents must be able to exercise a certain kind of control over some of their actions that I refer to as:
Plural voluntary control (PVC): agents have PVC over a set of options (e.g. choices or actions) when (i) they are able to bring about either of the options voluntarily (without being coerced or compelled or otherwise controlled by other agents or mechanisms), intentionally (knowingly and on purpose, rather than merely by accident or mistake) and rationally (for reasons that they then and there wish to act upon) and (ii) whichever option they do bring about by exercising such PVC will have been brought about by them voluntarily, intentionally, and rationally in these senses.
These conditions can be summed up by saying, as we sometimes do, that the agents can act or choose either way “at will” or, alternatively, that it is “up to them” which way they will choose or act when they choose or act.
7 Will‐setting and Self‐formation
Focusing in this way on plurality conditions and plural voluntary control (or PVC) also leads to a further important and often‐neglected topic in free will debates that I call “will‐setting” (Kane 1996: 113–115). In the imagined scenario in Section 6, all of the motives and purposes of agents in every situation are already “preset” or “set one way” before they act. The assassin’s desires and purposes are set on killing the prime minister, not on missing or killing an aide. My desires and purposes are set on pressing the button for black coffee and not any other button. In such cases, where the motives and purposes of agents are already set one way before they act, we may say:
Their actions are will‐settled, meaning that the wills of agents, their motives and purposes, are already set one way on doing something before they act.
By contrast:
Actions are will‐setting when the wills of agents, their motives and purposes, are not already preset or set one way before they act. Rather the agents set their wills one way or another in the performance of the actions themselves.
Choices or decisions, which are self‐forming actions (SFAs), in the sense defined here, are will‐setting in this sense. The agents’ wills are not already set one way before they choose, but they set their wills, one way or the other, voluntarily, intentionally, and rationally, in the act of choosing itself. Such self‐forming actions would thus satisfy the plurality conditions.
The imagined world in which all the motives and purposes of agents are already set one way whenever they act thus provides a clue to the deep connection between will‐setting, ultimate responsibility (UR), free will, and the plurality conditions. If we are to be to some degree ultimate determiners of our own wills, as UR requires, some actions in our lifetimes (self‐forming actions, or SFAs) must be will‐setting in the above sense and hence must satisfy the plurality conditions. But these self‐forming actions will then satisfy the condition of alternative possibilities (AP) as well. For if one can do or do otherwise, voluntarily, intentionally, and rationally either way, it follows that one can do or do otherwise. One has alternative possibilities. AP would therefore be necessary for free will after all, at least sometimes in our lives when we engage in self‐formation.
8 The Compatibility Question Revisited: Free Will and Moral Responsibility
Focusing on both ultimate responsibility (UR) and alternative possibilities (AP) when discussing the Compatibility Question, rather than merely on AP alone, has another significant consequence. It shows why issues about free will have been so deeply entangled throughout history with issues about moral responsibility for actions. This entanglement is no accident. It has to do with the very meaning of freedom of will (which involves both UR and AP). Reflecting on this entanglement of free will and moral responsibility leads to further arguments relating to whether freedom of will is or is not compatible with determinism – arguments having to do with our ordinary practices of holding persons responsible for their actions in everyday moral and legal contexts.
Many contemporary compatibilists and other philosophers have been influenced on these topics by a seminal 1962 article by British philosopher P.F. Strawson. In this influential article, entitled “Freedom and Resentment,” Strawson focused on our ordinary practices of holding persons morally responsible and on what he called the:
Reactive attitudes: attitudes toward persons usually associated with ordinary practices of holding persons morally responsible, including attitudes such as blame, resentment, indignation, guilt, moral approval, and moral praise.
Strawson argued that our ordinary practices of holding people responsible, including these reactive attitudes, were basic to our human form of life and could be wholly “insulated” from traditional abstract philosophical and scientific concerns about free will and determinism. To believe, he argued, that our ordinary practices of holding persons responsible in everyday life and the reactive attitudes related to them would have to be qualified in some ways – or even possibly abandoned – if we found that all their actions were determined by prior causes was to “overintellectualize” the issues.
This “insulation thesis” (as it has sometimes been called) is a controversial feature of Strawson’s article, and it has had numerous proponents and critics. Interestingly, one of the most prominent of the critics was Strawson’s son, Galen Strawson, who in his 1986 book Freedom and Belief took issue with his father’s contention in “Freedom and Resentment” that ordinary practices of blaming and other reactive attitudes could be entirely “insulated” from metaphysical concerns about determinism. Against this contention, Galen Strawson argued that “the roots of the incompatibilist intuition” (that free will is incompatible with determinism) “lie deep” in our ordinary practices and in the reactive attitudes associated with those practices. These ordinary practices and the reactive attitudes associated with them, he argued, “enshrine the incompatibilist intuition,” rather than being “insulated” from it (Strawson 1986: 89).
I agree with Galen Strawson on this issue, though my reasons are not all the same as his. Like him, I believe our ordinary practices of holding persons morally responsible and related questions about blameworthiness and the reactive attitudes cannot be entirely insulated from philosophical worries about free will and determinism that have engaged philosophers for centuries. This genie cannot be kept in the bottle, annoying as he may be. There are a number of ways to show this that I will explore in Section 9.
