To try to get clearer on whether we have free will, we need at the same time to try to get clear on what free will is, or would be if anyone had it. It’s not so easy to do that. Many of the ways people will explain what they mean by “free will” are either uninformative, or else render the question of whether we have free will uninteresting. For instance, if we define “free will” as “having the power to do what you want to do,” this is not very informative: for the notion of “having the power to do something” is too similar to the notion we’re trying to explain. (If someone had philosophical perplexities about what free will was, they’d also have perplexities about what it is to have the power to do something.) We’d like to get a more informative understanding or explanation of what free will is than that.
Worries about whether we have free will arise from several different sources.
One sort of worry starts from the premise that the laws of nature and the past “causally determine” that you will act in the way you do. (More on what this means below.) This is thought to show that you’re not free to act in other ways. This worry concerns the relation between free will and Determinism.
A second sort of worry starts from the premise that there is only one “real” future. Perhaps someone already knows how this future will turn out. (For example, perhaps God knows this. Or perhaps some oracle with a crystal ball knows this, or a time traveller who’s come here from the future. Or perhaps we already have a problem if future historians looking back on the present day will know how things turn out.)
Or perhaps the trouble doesn’t depend on anyone knowing how the future will turn out. Even if no one now knows or is able to predict how you will act tomorrow, maybe there’s already some truth about how you will in fact act tomorrow. And if you will in fact act in certain ways tomorrow, it seems to be already true today that you will act in those ways tomorrow. This can seem like it also deprives of you of the freedom to act otherwise: what you’ll do tomorrow is inevitable, because it’s already true that you’ll act the ways you will. This is what’s called a fatalist worry.
We’re going to focus on the first sort of worry in these notes.
For both kinds of worry, one way to respond to them is to deny their respective premises. That is, we might deny that the laws of nature and the past causally determine your actions; and we might deny that claims about what you will do tomorrow are already true today.
Another way to respond to these worries is to concede the premises (perhaps only for the sake of argument), but to argue that no dire conclusions about free will follow from these premises.
What is Determinism? This thesis is defined in different ways. Sometimes it’s understood to be the thesis that how the future will be is entirely predictable from how the past was. Other times it’s understood to be the thesis that every event has a cause. However, for reasons I won’t go into, neither of those definitions really captures the core idea that’s most at issue in philosophical debates about free will.
The best way to define Determinism is instead as follows.
Certain laws of nature are such that, for a given “starting point” for the universe, those laws are compatible with only one subsequent future. Any world with that past but a different future would violate those laws. It couldn’t be a world that those laws described or governed. We call laws of this sort deterministic laws. Given a starting point, these sorts of laws require the future to proceed in a single fixed way. Any two possible worlds, if they started off the same way, and both had the same deterministic laws, must continue in the same way.
Other laws of nature are compatible with more than one subsequent future. We call these indeterministic laws. These laws may say: given this starting point, the world can evolve in any of ways A, B, or C. None of these possible futures is guaranteed to happen.
We will understand Causal Determinism, or Determinism for short, to be the thesis that all of the laws of nature that govern our world are deterministic laws.
Is Determinism true? This has been disputed for a long time. Some of the ancient Greeks, especially the Stoics, thought that it was. The “clockwork” picture of the universe we get from Newton is also a Determinist one. In more recent physics, things are less clear. Our best theories of quantum physics are not obviously deterministic. They don’t say “in situations like this, so-and-so is guaranteed to happen.” Instead they involve probabilities in ways we can’t eliminate. However, it is philosophically controversial how the probabilities in those theories should be interpreted. Hence, one cannot easily say whether or not our best theories of quantum physics posit that our world has indeterministic laws.
If you want to read more on debates about how to interpret the probabilities in quantum physics, this book is a good introduction to the issues.
Even if you think Causal Determinism is false about our world, still, you will learn a lot about our concept of free will by investigating what would follow if Causal Determinism were true.
Some philosophers hold the view that Determinism and free will are incompatible with each other. They think that if you’ve got one, you can’t have the other. We call these philosophers Incompatibilists. Other philosophers think that Determinism and free will are compatible. They think that it’s possible to have both. We call these philosophers Compatibilists. We can further sub-divide the Incompatibilists and the Compatibilists as follows:
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In a large poll of philosophy professors in 2009, 17% of the respondents favored Libertarianism, 15% favored us having no free will, and 56% favored Compatibilism. (The remaining 12% were undecided, thought the question was too unclear, or that there’s no fact of the matter, and so on.) Philosophy isn’t a popularity contest, so these numbers don’t tell us which view is right. But they do show how much controversy there is, and that each of these positions has some serious support.
Consider the following claims.
These examples show that the word “can” gets used in a variety of ways. In (1) we’re talking about what Felix is permitted to do. In (2) we’re talking about what I have the opportunity to do. In (3) we’re talking about what John now has strength enough to do, and speculating about what strength is achievable for him. This shows us that claims of the form “X can do such-and-such” mean a variety of different things. So too with claims like form “It could have happened that Y” and “X can bring it about that Y.” There is not just one way to interpret such claims.
Now, is there any sense of “can” according to which Determinism entails that you can only do the things you in fact do? Perhaps there are some senses of “can” according to which that follows. If Determinism is true, then, given the way the world was before you were born, it was causally determined that you would do the things you in fact do. You “can’t” do anything else — in the sense that, given the way the past is, the laws of nature exclude your doing anything else. So in that sense of “can,” the things you in fact do are the only things you can do.
But as we saw, the words “can” and “could” can mean many different things. What we need to know is not whether there’s a sense of “can” according to which Determinism entails that you can only do the things you in fact do. Perhaps there are other senses of “can” which do not have that consequence. What we need to know is not whether there’s some sense of “can” which lets us say such-and-such, or some sense of “can” which lets us say something else. Our task is much harder than that. What we need to do is to somehow identify senses of “can” that we’re independently interested in, and ask whether, with that sense of “can,” Determinism entails that you can only do the things you in fact do. For example, we might think that being morally responsible for an act entails that you can refrain from performing that act. Is the sense of “can” involved in that thought compatible with Determinism? This question is not very easy to answer.
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:
- you do X, and
- doing X is what you want and choose to do
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,” he 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 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:
- you do X, and
- doing X is what you want and choose to do (we still need this, to rule out cases of coercion), and
- if you had chosen to do something other than X, you would have succeeded in doing that other thing
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 he right about what it means to act freely?
The Compatibilist says that I “could have done otherwise” just in case, if I had chosen to do otherwise, I would have done otherwise. But is this right?
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 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.
So it looks like acting freely requires more than we laid down in (C2), before. It’s not enough that you’re merely such that if you had chosen to do otherwise you would have done otherwise. For that might be true even in a case where, intuitively, it was not in your power to choose to do otherwise. You might be choosing the way you do because you have a psychological obsession or addiction; or perhaps an evil scientist is causing you to choose in the way you do. In such cases, we wouldn’t want to say that you’re acting freely.
A more sophisticated form of Compatibilism accepts that criticism. It proposes the following:
(C3) You do X freely iff:
- you do X, and
- doing X is what you want and choose to do (as before), and
- if you had chosen to do something other than X, you would have succeeded in doing that other thing (as before), and
- if there were a good reason for you to act otherwise, you would have chosen to act otherwise
This account does rule out people who are unable to choose otherwise. Such people don’t count as acting freely, because they do not satisfy condition (d) of the account. They are not sensitive to reasons in the right way. It doesn’t matter what reasons the obsessive-compulsive, or the addict, or the scientist’s victim have for not doing X. They would still choose to do X anyway. X is the only choice they are able to make.
We’ve already seen that being causally determined to do X does not prevent one from satisfying conditions (b) and (c) of this account. Is being causally determined to do X also compatible with satisfying condition (d)? It seems that it is. For it may be that one is causally determined to do X because one is causally determined to have good reasons to do X. If one had been causally determined to have good reasons to do something else, instead, then one may have gone ahead and done that other thing. All that’s important, according to this Compatibilist, is that your choices are sensitive to and track your reasons. The mechanisms that produce those choices have to be reasons-responsive mechanisms. They have to be such that, if you had had different reasons, they would have produced different choices. If your choices are produced by reasons-responsive mechanisms, and you also satisfy conditions (b) and (c), then you do act freely, on this account. It is not necessary that your choices or actions be causally undetermined.
This theory sounds pretty good. It’s very sophisticated, and it avoids most of the problems that we’ve discussed so far. However, there are difficulties for it, too.
One difficulty is this. Not just any reasons-responsive mechanism will do. Suppose my choices are being caused by the neural manipulation of a benevolent scientist. This scientist always causes me to choose and act in the way that accords with the reasons I have. If there is a good reason for me to X, the scientist causes me to choose to do X. If there is a good reason for me to Y, the scientist causes me to choose to do Y. And so on. In this case, my choices are produced by a reasons-responsive mechanism, but I do not seem to be choosing or acting freely. Perhaps we can get around this problem by requiring that the reasons-responsive mechanism be located entirely inside the agent.
A second difficulty is this. On the current view, it sounds like I can act freely only if I always choose to do what I have good reason to do. I have to always choose to do “the right thing.” But if I’m free, can’t I also choose to do the wrong thing? Can’t I choose to do something which I recognize I don’t have good reasons to do? Sure, maybe that would be foolish or evil. But it does seem like it ought to be in my power. The current view says that such a choice would not be free, because it would not have been produced by a mechanism that responds to my reasons in the right way. But it’s hard to see why choosing to do the wrong thing has to be less free than choosing to do the right thing.
There is an important argument that we have not looked at so far. This is an argument that the Incompatibilist uses. If this argument works, then we don’t have to bother with questions about how the Compatibilist analyzes words like “could have done otherwise.” This argument threatens to show that free will just can’t be compatible with Determinism, no matter how you analyze our words.
The argument goes as follows:
If Determinism is true, then how we act today is the necessary consequence of the laws of nature and the way the world was before we were born. But it is not up to us what went on before we were born. And neither is it up to us what the laws of nature are. We have no control over those things. And if it’s not up to us whether certain things happen, then neither is it up to us whether the consequences of those things happen. If we have no control over the laws and the past, and they have the consequence that we will act a certain way, then we have no control over how we act. Hence, if Determinism is true, then it is not up to us how we act today.
We call this The Consequence Argument, because it appeals to the principle “If we have no control over certain things, then we don’t have control over the consequences of those things, either.” It is a very plausible argument. There are things the Compatibilist can say in response, but those things are very subtle and may not be convincing.
How can the Compatibilist respond to the Consequence Argument?
In a few classes, we’ll be talking about different senses of “possibility.” One kind of possibility we’ll discuss is “physical possibility.” We say that some event is physically possible (with no qualifications) iff it’s compatible with our laws of nature that that event take place. We can say that an event is physically possible at time t iff it’s compatible with our laws of nature, and the actual state of the universe at t, that the universe evolve in such a way from t so that that event comes about.
Another kind of possibility we’ll consider is “epistemic possibility.” Roughly, something is epistemically possible iff it might be true, for all we know.
Now, we also employ claims like “It’s possible for me to do A” when we’re talking about what it’s in our power to do. Say that an act A is volitionally possible for me at time t iff, at t, it’s in my power to do A. If doing A and refraining from doing A are both volitionally possible for me at t, then it is up to me at t whether to do A.
The relations between these different kinds of possibility are not very straightforward. For instance, when we discuss Descartes’ Sixth Meditation later in the class, we’ll be considering things that may be imaginable or conceivable, and so epistemically possible in some sense, even though they’re not possible in other ways, including being physically possible. So “it is epistemically possible that P” will not entail “it is physically possible that P.”
The Incompatibilist assumes that, if doing A is in your power right now, then it must be compatible with the laws of nature, and the present state of the universe, that you do A. That is, he assumes that: “It is volitionally possible for you at t to do A” does entail “It is physically possible at t that you do A.”
However, the Compatibilist thinks that the mere fact that you’re causally determined not to do A does not by itself settle the question whether you could do A. The Compatibilist thinks that, even if your doing A is ruled out by the laws of nature and the present state of the universe being as they are, doing A might nonetheless be something which is in your power. That is, according to the Compatibilist: “It is volitionally possible for you at t to do A” does not entail “It is physically possible at t that you do A.” Some things can be volitionally possible at t which are not physically possible at t.
Why would anyone believe this? How could it be in your power to violate the laws of nature, or to make the past be other than the way it is?
Well, forget about Determinism for a moment. Think about an oracle 500 years ago who could look in her crystal ball, and see everything you’re now going to do. This is controversial, but many philosophers will agree that it’s already being true that you won’t do A doesn’t, by itself, entail that you are unable to do A. The fact that you won’t do it doesn’t show that you can’t do it. Similarly, the fact that the oracle has already seen that you don’t do it does not show that you can’t do it. It only shows that, as a matter of fact, you won’t do it.
Now here you are, deciding whether or not to do A. We suppose that you could do A. What does that show about your relation to the oracle? If you had done A, then presumable the oracle would have seen you doing A, instead of what she actually sees. Does that mean that your doing A today would have caused the oracle to see something different, 500 years ago? That sounds strange. How can what you do now cause something different to happen 500 years in the past? Some philosophers will say that, if the oracle really saw you do it, and wasn’t just guessing, then yes, you’ll have needed to cause her vision in the past. But another thing we can say is this. You have the power to do A, and if you had done A, and the oracle had retained her fortune-telling powers, then she would have seen you doing A. This is not the same as your having the power to cause the oracle to see anything.
Regardless of whether you think any such fortune-telling oracles are possible, this is a helpful distinction to make when we’re thinking about free will and the consequence argument.
Could you have prevented the laws of nature and the past from being as they are? The Compatibilist will say: there’s nothing you can do which would cause the laws and the past to be different. Just as there’s nothing you can do now to cause the oracle to see something different 500 years ago. But that doesn’t settle the question we’re interested in. There may be things you can do (but won’t do), such that, if you were to do them, the laws and the past would have been different. In the same way that there may be something you can do (but won’t do), such that if you had done it, and the oracle had retained her powers, she would have seen something different in her crystal ball.
That is the core move in the Compatibilist’s response to the Consequence Argument. According to the Compatibilist, there are things you can do, even though the laws and the past have the consequence that you don’t do those things. The Compatibilist accepts that you can’t make the laws and the past be different. It’s just that there are certain things you can make happen, such that, in a counterfactual situation where you do make those things happen, the laws and the past would have been different. (For example, they might have been different in such a way that they had the consequence that you would do those things.)
That is how the Compatibilist will argue that things can be volitionally possible for you, or in your power to do, even though it is not now physically possible for you to do those things.
As I said, it is a subtle response to the Consequence Argument. Personally, I do think it’s an effective response; but not everyone finds it convincing. Some philosophers feel that it’s a kind of “trick.” I don’t think it is a trick. But it would take a lot more discussion to settle that.
Suppose we abandon Compatibilism and instead become Incompatibilists. What are our options then?
Libertarians, recall, are Incompatibilists who think that we have free will and hence that Determinism is false. The simplest kind of Libertarian thinks that our acts and choices are free because they are uncaused. In his book Metaphysics, Richard Taylor calls this view “Simple Indeterminism.”
A problem for this kind of Libertarian is the following. To say that our acts and choices are uncaused makes it sound like they are random and arbitrary. But if they are, then how could we be held responsible for them? Suppose Arnold is strapped into a machine which has a 50% chance of making him shoot a gun to the left, and a 50% chance of making him shoot the gun to the right. Surely in this case Arnold is not responsible for which way the gun shoots. He’s at the whim of chance. And why should we be any more responsible if the randomness is located inside our heads, rather than in some machine that we’re strapped into? Suppose there’s an electric pulse travelling through my brain. When it hits a certain nerve, it will either go to the left or to the right. It has a 50% chance of going either way. If it goes to the left I will perform one act, and if it goes to the right I will perform another. I’m no more in control, in this case, than Arnold is. There’s no way for me to influence the pulse, to make it go one way rather than the other. For we said that nothing causes the pulse to go in the way it does. If it goes to the left, that just happens; and if it goes to the right, that just happens, too. I have no choice in the matter. I’m at the whim of chance, just like Arnold is.
Hence, if this kind of Libertarian view is correct, it’s hard to see how I could be any more morally responsible for my actions than I would be if all those actions were causally determined.
A more sophisticated kind of Libertarian is what we call an Agent-causation Theorist. Taylor calls this view the “Theory of Agency.” He writes:
In the case of an action that is free, it must not only be such that it is caused by the agent who performs it, but also such that no antecedent conditions were sufficient for his performing just that action. In the case of an action that is both free and rational, it must be such that the agent who performed it did so for some reason, but this reason cannot have been the cause of it… When I believe that I have done something, I do believe that it was I who caused it to be done, I who made something happen, and not merely something within me, such as one of my own subjective states, which is not identical with myself. If I believe that something not identical with myself was the case of my behavior — some event wholly external to myself, for instance, or even one internal to myself, such as a nerve impulse, volition, or whatnot — then I cannot regard that behavior as being an act of mine, unless I further believe that I was the cause of that external or internal event.
According to Agent-causation Theorists, an agent’s acts and choices are caused, all right, but they are not caused by any other events which took place before them. Rather, they are caused by the agent himself. He makes them occur without anything’s making him do so.
This is an interesting theory. It may better capture your intuitions about free will than any of the other theories we’ve looked at so far. Unfortunately, we don’t here have the time or sophisticated background needed to get into it very deeply. I will just raise a few difficulties for it.
The Agent-causation Theorist says that whenever someone makes a free choice, he starts a new causal chain which was not present in the universe before he made his choice. Hence we can, in principle, test the hypothesis that there is agent-causation. Suppose we lock you in a room, and we have scientists monitor the behavior of all the particles and energy fields in the room, including the neurochemical activity in your brain. At a certain moment, you freely choose to raise your hand. Whoa! That should send the scientists scurrying. Because all of a sudden there are new causal processes going on in the room, which weren’t caused by anything that was going on in the room beforehand. Your arm is going up, it’s moving air molecules, it’s reflecting light in new ways. According to the Agent-causation Theorist, none of these processes were caused to happen by the events that preceded your choosing to raise your arm.
Does it really seem plausible that the scientists would notice new causal processes of this sort? If so, we’ll have to scrap science as we currently know it, and start over. Because science as we currently know it tries to explain how the world evolves, by treating the entire world, including our bodies, as a closed system. Scientists don’t think that any “new” causal chains get introduced into the world every time an agent makes a free choice. Hence, from a scientific standpoint, the view that there’s such a thing as agent-causation looks rather dubious.
When John raises his hand, science tells us that the hand motion was caused by events in John’s brain. Perhaps the Agent-causation Theorist should accept this. He just thinks that John himself also did some causing. What is the relation between the brain events and John’s alleged agent-causation? Did they both cause the hand to be raised? Wouldn’t that make the hand-raising be “overdetermined” in some sense? (We’ll revisit this idea later in our class.) Or was it rather that what John agent-caused was his brain events, and not the hand-raising itself? But intuitively, John didn’t do anything to his brain. He needn’t even know that he has a brain. It’s not clear that there’s any satisfying position here for the Agent-causation Theorist to occupy.
There are also more subtle philosophical difficulties with the Agent-causation Theory. These make it unclear whether the notion of an agent’s causing something to happen, independently of all earlier events, even makes sense. Some of these difficulties are:
What does an agent’s causing event X consist in? What is the difference between X’s just happening and the agent’s causing X to happen? What is it about the agent that makes a difference? The agent’s mere existence usually won’t suffice to bring X about. It seems that no additional event can be what makes the difference either: else X would be caused by that event, rather than by the agent. It looks like the Agent-causation Theorist has to say that the difference between X’s just happening and the agent’s causing X to happen is primitive, and cannot be further explained. Some philosophers are willing to live with that, but many find it unsatisfying.
Suppose John agent-causes X to happen. Now consider the event J: John’s becoming an agent-cause of X. Is there any such event J? Was J causally determined to happen? If it was, then X would probably end up being determined too, and so John could not have done X freely. So we should assume that J was not causally determined.
But now consider: did John have any choice about whether J occurred? If not, then it’s hard to see how he had any choice about doing X. So John should have a choice about whether J occurred. Now does that mean that he had to agent-cause J, too? That is, he had to agent-cause his becoming an agent-cause of X? Won’t the problem we’re now considering then just repeat itself, at the next higher level?