We’re going to start by exploring how the Compatibilist thinks notions like “free” and “can” and so on should be understood, so that it turns out that Determinism is still compatible with you acting freely, with it being such that you can do things you’re determined not to do, and so on.
Let’s begin by considering paradigm cases in which you’re not able to act freely, and you don’t seem to be morally responsible for your actions. Then we can try to figure out what all such cases have in common.
Suppose your friend is drowning and needs your help — but you can’t help him because you’re chained to the wall. Or there’s a locked door between you and your friend. Or a high wall which you can’t scale. In all these cases, you are not able to act freely because there is some external impediment which prevents you from doing what you want to do.
Another sort of case is where you want to help your friend, but you can’t reach him in time, because you have a broken leg, or because your legs are paralyzed. These kinds of handicaps can also impair your ability to act freely.
A third sort of case is where you are pulled along by ropes, against your will. In the earlier cases, there were obstacles that prevented you from moving in certain ways. Here an external force is being applied to you which forces you to move in a certain way. In this case, too, you are prevented from doing what you want to do.
A fourth sort of case is where someone holds a pistol to your head and threatens or coerces you into acting a certain way. We have to be careful here. Not every sort of coercion will count as taking away your ability to act freely. If I threaten to give you a “D” in this course unless you carry out a bunch of assassinations for me, and you go ahead and carry out my orders, you can’t excuse your actions by saying that I forced you to do it. The threat I held over your head was too weak, compared to the badness of your subsequent actions. Suppose, on the other hand, that I hold a much greater threat over your head. Perhaps I threatened to kill you if you did not comply. And suppose all I demand that you do is throw eggs at some Professor in another department. In this case, if you give in to my demands, it’s less clear that you should be held responsible for your actions. When we talk about coercion in these notes, we’ll suppose that we’re always dealing with cases of this latter sort, where the threat always does seem to be relatively strong enough that it might excuse the agent for his or her actions.
In cases of coercion, it also seems to be the case that something (a threat) is preventing you from doing what you want to do. Of course, if a mugger holds a pistol to your head and tells you to hand over your money, there is a sense in which handing over your money is what you want to do. Taking everything into consideration, including what will happen if you don’t hand over your money, it seems that handing over your money is the most desirable option. But there’s also a sense in which you’re being forced to do something you’d rather not do. You don’t want to give the mugger your money; he’s forcing you, by threat, to do something you wouldn’t otherwise choose to do.
So a common element to all of these cases is that you’re being forced to do something you don’t want to do, or you’re being prevented from doing something that you do want to do. So we might say, as a tentative first stab, that:
(C1) You do X freely iff:
“Iff” is philosopher’s shorthand for “if and only if,” or “just in case.”
There is no obvious reason why the kind of freedom we articulate in (C1) should be incompatible with Determinism. The fact that I was causally determined to lecture today does not entail that I don’t want to lecture. (I may very well have been causally determined to want to lecture, too.) The fact that I was causally determined to lecture is compatible with my wanting to, and deciding to, lecture today.
So if this is the kind of freedom we’re interested in, if it’s the kind of freedom which is required for moral responsibility, then freedom does seem to be compatible with Determinism, after all.
This account of freedom is sometimes expressed with the slogan “Freedom is opposed to constraint not to necessity.” What this means is that the opposite of freedom is not causal “necessity” or Determinism. Rather, the opposite of freedom is being constrained to act, that is, not being able to act in the way you want to act, because of a force or threat or chain binding you to the wall. It’s not the mere fact that your act is causally determined that makes it unfree. It has to be caused in certain ways, for it to be unfree. It has to be caused in one of the ways we described, that prevent you from acting in the way you want to act. In his essay “Freedom and Necessity,” the philosopher A.J. Ayer says:
It is not when my action has any cause at all, but only when it has a special sort of cause, that it is reckoned not to be free.
So. Is this kind of freedom, the one articulated in (C1), the kind of freedom we’re interested in?
Sometimes people suggest that, even if our actions are determined, still, we can find a certain kind of peace and “liberation” by not struggling against the inevitable. We should resign ourselves to our circumstances. Like dogs on a leash being pulled behind a wagon, we can trot along peacefully or we can resist. Either way we’ll end up at the same destination. At least if we accept our situation and trot along willingly, this thought goes, we can take a kind of responsibility for our inevitable fate. (This image and line of thought date back to the ancient Stoics.)
I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t strike me as being a very satisfying sort of “liberation” or “responsibility for my own fate.” Yet in the case I described, trotting along peacefully behind the wagon is what you want and choose to do. So this dog-behind-the-wagon story is one where you have the kind of freedom articulated in (C1). If we hanker for more than that, we must be hankering for a kind of freedom that (C1) doesn’t yet capture.
The problem with the the dog-behind-the-wagon story is that you’re not following the wagon because you want and choose to follow it. You’d be following it no matter what. You have no choice in the matter. Of course, you may have gone through the process of choosing, and decided to follow the wagon. But you have no choice — in the sense that there’s no other action which you could perform, instead. If you had chosen to stay in one place, instead, you’d be out of luck. Your leash will pull you along after the wagon whether you want to follow it or not. Conceptually, it also seems to be possible for the opposite to happen: for you to have a choice but you don’t make a choice or go through the process of choosing, for example when you act out of automatic habit.
All this suggests that we should add to (C1) something about our having alternative choices open to us. We think that, whenever we really do something of our own free will, it has to be the case that we could also have done something else instead. If we had chosen to do something else, there should be no obstacle to our doing it.
What does this mean, to say that you “could have done something else”? The Compatibilist understands this as follows. When we say “you could have done something else,” she thinks, we mean that if you had chosen to do something else, you would have succeeded in doing something else. Nothing but your choice prevents you from doing the other thing. We call this the Compatibilist’s analysis of “could have done otherwise.” (Sometimes it is called the conditional or hypothetical analysis, instead.)
There are several variations on this basic analysis. As I’ve presented it, the Compatibilist says that “Y could have done otherwise” means that if Y had chosen or decided to do otherwise, then Y would have done otherwise. You may instead see Compatibilists saying that “Y could have done otherwise” means that if Y had tried to do otherwise, then Y would have done otherwise.
In his book Metaphysics, the philosopher Peter van Inwagen explains this view like so:
According to this solution, a future is open to an agent if, given that the agent chose that future (chose that path leading away from a fork in the road of time), it would come to pass. Thus it is open to me to stop writing this book and do a little dance because, if I so chose, that’s what I’d do. But if Alice is locked in a prison cell, it is not open to her to leave: if she chose to leave, her choice would be ineffective because she would come up against a locked prison door.
In the the dog-behind-the-wagon story, it is not true that you could have done otherwise, in the Compatibilist’s sense. If you had chosen to stand in one place, you would have been dragged along after the wagon anyway. Nor is it true that you could have done otherwise in our other paradigm cases, involving chains or locked doors or paralyzed limbs. Hence, the Compatibilist proposes:
(C2) You do X freely iff:
Is freedom in this sense compatible with Determinism? It seems like it is. If we accept this account of what it is to do X freely, then once again, being causally determined to do X seems to be compatible with doing X freely. After all, being causally determined to do X does not prevent me from satisfying condition (b). And it does not seem to prevent me from satisfying condition (c), either. It may be causally determined that I would lecture to you right now. But that’s because (it was causally determined that) I chose to lecture to you. If the world had gone differently, in such a way that I (was causally determined to) choose to stay home today, instead, then I would be at home right now, instead of standing here lecturing to you. So I can satisfy condition (c) of this proposal, even though I am causally determined to act in the way I do.
Is the Compatibilist right about what it means to say that someone “could have done otherwise”? And is she right about what it means to act freely?
The Compatibilist says that I “could have done otherwise” just in case, if I had chosen (or tried) to do otherwise, I would have done otherwise. But is this right?
Arguably at least some of the time this is not what we mean by “could.” The philosopher John Austin imagined an expert golfer who shoots an easy putt but misses it. The golfer curses, “Darn it, I could have (and should have) made that.” If this judgment might be correct, then the golfer could have made the putt, even though she tried and did not succeed. So “could have made it” doesn’t seem to be equivalent here to “If I tried, I would succeed.”
Perhaps the Compatibilist may agree that sometimes we mean other things by “could.” All she needs is that the notion she explained captures what we’re thinking about when we’re counting actions as free/unfree.
Imagine someone who has a psychological defect that forces him to make certain choices. We can suppose that when such a person is presented with the option of doing X, he is unable to choose to do anything other than X. He’s a compulsive Xer. For example, perhaps you’ve gradually introduced curry into his diet, so that now he has an addictive desire for curry which he cannot control. So he always chooses to eat curry. Notice: his obsession is so strong that it does not merely cause him to X, it also prevents him from choosing not to X.
We can note two features of this person:
So here we have a person who is not entirely free, because of not being able to act otherwise. Yet the counterfactual “If he had chosen to act otherwise, he would have acted otherwise” is true. If this is correct, then the Compatibilist’s account of what it means to be able to act otherwise must be wrong. To be able to act otherwise, it is not enough for the counterfactual “If you had chosen to act otherwise, you would have acted otherwise” to be true. In addition, you have to be able to choose to act otherwise.
Another case of this sort would be a case where my choices are caused by an evil scientist’s neural manipulations. My actions in that case may correspond perfectly to my choices. But intuitively I am not acting freely, and I could not have acted otherwise than I do in fact act, because I could not have chosen otherwise than I did. Nonetheless, it can still be true that if I had chosen to do otherwise, e.g., because the evil scientist made me choose something else, then I would have done that other thing instead. So here again the Compatibilist seems to be wrong. It can be the case that if I had chosen to do otherwise, I would have done otherwise; but in fact I could not have chosen to do otherwise; hence in such a case it’s wrong to say that I could have done otherwise.
In his book Metaphysics, the philosopher Richard Taylor describes someone whose choices are manipulated by a scientist and says:
This is the description of a man who is acting in accordance with his inner volitions, a man whose body is unimpeded and unconstrained in its motions, these motions being the effects of those inner states. [So it’s a case the Compatibilist would count as acting freely. But] It is hardly the description of a free and responsible agent. It is the perfect description of a puppet. To render someone your puppet, it is not necessary forcibly to constrain the motions of his limbs, after the fashion that real puppets are moved. A subtler but no less effective means of making a person your puppet would be to gain complete control of his inner states, and ensuring, as the theory of soft determinism does ensure, that his body will move in accordance with them.
Now, Determinism threatens to show that this is always our situation. We are always causally determined to choose as we do. Hence, even if it’s the case that if we had chosen otherwise we would have done otherwise, that doesn’t help us very much. We’re always causally determined to choose as we do, so it’s never the case that we could have chosen otherwise.