A Question of Choice: Choosing the Best Incompatibilist Theory
To have a solid theory of action one must know what kind of world the agent in question inhabits. Aside from simply defining what action means we need to set the background for which such action takes place; after all, it is the system that this agent inhabits that more or less defines this 'action'. Many philosophers have constructed systems to explain the world around us, but with the advent of science many of those systems have been committed "to the flames" as David Hume would say. One theory that has lasted the test of time, or at least lasted enough in the sense that people still argue over it, is that of causal determinism. Determinism is a very important idea to tackle, given that if it were true it would have deep repercussions in how we view moral responsibility and free will as we will see later on. I will be focusing on a particular argument in favor incompatibilism - the idea that free will and determinism are not compatible - posited by Peter Van Inwagen, but I will argue in favor of another form of incompatibilism (posited by Derk Pereboom, but for brevity I will not get into the specifics of his particular argument but I will give my interpretation of it) and why it is a much stronger argument that tackles the real issue of what freedom and moral responsibility means in a deterministic universe.
To begin, I will first go over the terms - I will try to be as brief and clear as possible. Determinism, to put it bluntly, is the idea that whatever happened in the past will determine what happens now and in the future. So, something that happened ten seconds ago, thirty seconds, a year, a decade, a century, a millennia, etc. determines what you do now, what you will do, and what everything will be like after you pass away. The debate over this theory has led to different groups of people - indeterminists and determinists; and compatibilists and incompatibilists. Under the indeterminist banner are the libertarians and on the determinist side are the hard and soft determinists - as for the compatibilists and incompatibilists, the soft determinists (also called compatibilists) are, obviously the former since they hold that free will is compatible with determinism - while hard determinists are incompatibilists, they think that both concepts are anathema to one another. Libertarians are incompatibilists as well but are indeterminists - they believe that agents are free of their own accord, they can shape and choose who they are regardless of past events and hold determinism to be false. To sum things up in much simpler way:
Determinist: Determinism is true
Soft Determinist/Compatibilist: Determinism is true and is compatible with free will
Hard Determinist: Determinism is true and incompatible with free will
Indeterminist: Determinism is not true
Libertarianism: Determinism is not true and we have free will
Compatibilism: See Soft Determinist
Incompatibilist: Determinism is incompatible with free will
It's easy to see how people can be see determinism as a threat to freedom, as some do away with determinism as a whole (libertarianism) and others try to reconcile the two to keep it (compatibilism). One of the reasons some people wish to keep the idea of free will is to preserve moral responsibility. Since if everything is determined, how did we even make a choice to begin with? What's the point of choice if we have no alternatives? And without any of these characteristics of freedom how then can we assign moral responsibility to agents? These type of questions are what separate incompatibilists into two new groups: source incompatibilists and leeway incompatibilists. The former holds that for an agent to be free he/she must be the source of his/her action, without a source to attach responsibility then it is not be possible to be held morally responsible for their actions, while the latter believes that without the ability 'to do otherwise' one cannot be 'free' thereby absolving the agent from moral responsibility for his/her choice and action. Derk Pereboom defends hard determinism via source incompatibilism in his paper, "Determinism al-Dente" while Peter Van Inwagen defends leeway incompatibilism in his paper, "The Incompatibility of Free Will and Determinism". To be clear, I don't necessarily think that free will is incompatible with determinism per se, but if one were to make an argument against the compatibility of free will (thereby attacking moral responsibility) and determinism, then I believe the best route to take would have to be the source incompatibilist route. Now it's important to point out that there may be some issues of equivocation, to be clear, there is a difference between moral responsibility and free will. It's very easy to conflate the two but it's important to find the distinction, although for some it may seem like there's very little since both are dependent of each other (It might be said that moral responsibility is a necessary condition of free will but more on that later). In the following sections I will go over Van Inwagen's position and show that there is enough room for 'freedom' to blossom out of the cracks of leeway incompatibilism.
Peter Van Inwagen states that, "It seems to be generally agreed that the concept of free will should be understood in terms of the power or ability to act otherwise than they in fact do." (Van Inwagen, 188) In other words, the power or ability to do otherwise is what cements our free will, without this ability it would be, for Van Inwagen, that what a man "does do and what he can do coincide." and that ability to do otherwise is necessary for anyone to be held responsible for the act. Van Inwagen's definition of determinism takes into account the "laws of nature" and given how I defined determinism in Section I it adds a bit more nuance to the argument because what happens in the past is a combination of the laws of nature and certain propositional statements that express the state of the world; if the agent were suddenly to do otherwise that agent would have to be able to render both the proposition that expresses the state of the world in conjunction with rendering the laws of nature false, which is simply absurd. (Van Inagen, 191 - 194) Now a common complaint could be that science, for all its successes, sometimes gets things wrong. What we first thought was a “law of nature” turned out to be wrong, after a new theory is proposed. But this would simply be a misunderstanding of what Van Inwagen said, and credit should be given to him for anticipating this criticism:
It should be emphasized that ‘P’ does not mean ‘the proposition that expresses the state of the world at ‘T’. Rather, ‘P’ denotes the proposition that expresses the state of the world at T. (Van Inwagen, 192)
This means that one should be careful not to confuse a proposition that expresses the state of the world as it truly is, but that the proposition stands as a sign of that particular law of nature; in other words, the proposition can be wrong but the law of nature in itself cannot. He goes in further detail to emphasize this point by giving the example of two propositions: (A) Nothing ever travels faster than the speed of light, and (B) Jones is a physicist who can construct a particle accelerator that would cause protons to travel at twice the speed of light. It’s obvious, given what Van Inwagen has said, that if the laws of nature cannot be changed, then (B) is false; but assuming that (B) is true, then it would have to be the case that (A) is false - the proposition that ‘Nothing ever travels faster than the speed of light’ does not denote an actual physical law, since (B) rendered that very proposition false. (Van Inwagen, 193)
This is indeed a very strong argument against having the ‘ability to do otherwise’ since if one did have that ability, one would have to render the laws of nature, and one could even say reality, false which is simply absurd. However, Van Inwagen spends his time explaining how we do not have ‘the ability to do otherwise’ but this does nothing to actually eradicate any sense of freedom of the will in a deterministic world. Granted, he explains early on, as stated earlier, that free will should be understood as having that ability to do otherwise, but I can simply reply with an over simplified Frankfurtian* answer, “So what?”. The problem with incompatibilists like Van Inwagen is that they focus too much on the aspect of alternate choices but if one were simply to view free will from a different perspective, then it would one could make free will compatible with determinism.
To emphasize my point we can imagine that there are two chess players, one is named Calvin and the other David. Before the game begins, Calvin lets David know a secret: Calvin is omniscient, he knows every single thing about what David will do in the future. He tells David that he will lose the game and even tells him the actual moves he will carry out in the game. David thinks it's all just ruse to get the upperhand and proceeds to simply ignore his claims. As the game goes on, David realizes some of the moves he’s taking are the very one’s Calvin mentioned. But, when David looks down at the board, he figures his choice is the best one at hand, especially given what other moves he thinks he can do. In the end, David does lose the game just as Calvin predicted.
Calvin’s knowledge is absolute so that any proposition that Calvin will state about the natural world will always align with the laws of nature. Yet, despite this David is still ‘free’ to make his moves because his desires, in spite of being determined, are his own and chooses to go with his original plan. One could make the argument that it’s not fair, since David doesn’t really have a ‘choice’ - he can’t do otherwise but the question would have to be, why would he? Given who he is and the strategy he has in mind, he chose what he thought was best. In the end, David remains the source of his actions, he knew that Calvin knew what he was going to do, so one could say that David could’ve chosen otherwise but instead chose to do as he did - in tracing responsibility it still falls on David as the source of his own actions. We could be sticklers about how this really isn't "free will", which one can concede that point, however, the problem with doing this is that the reason free will is attacked is to eliminate moral responsibility. As I mentioned earlier, it can be seen that free will is a sufficient condition for moral responsibility but it is not a necessary one. Even if we concede that both players have no free will we can still hold them responsible for their actions – David is still responsible for making a 'bad decision' and Calvin is still responsible for making 'good' decisions (On a side note: 'Bad' and 'good' apply to the chess game, by the way. 'Bad' choices lead to a loss, while 'good' ones lead to a win, they don't carry any moral 'weight' but the point is that here, we can still assign responsibility – as such, moral responsibility can be considered just another type of responsibility).
In Pereboom's essay, "Determinism Al Dente" he attacks the compatibilist idea that determinism and moral responsibility are compatible . He gives a few examples of certain cases, for which I will post 2, the first and last, for brevity:
Case 1: Mr. Green is like an ordinary human being, except that he was created by neuroscientists, who can manipulate him directly through the use of radio-like technology. Suppose these neuroscientists directly manipulate Mr. Green to undertake the process of reasoning by which his desires are modified and produced, and his effective first-order desire to kill Ms. Peacock conforms to his second-order desires. The neuroscientists manipulate him by, among other things, pushing a series of buttons just before he begins to reason about his situation, thereby causing his reasoning process to be rationally egoistic. His reasoning process is reasons-responsive, because it would have resulted in different choices in some situations in which the egoistic reasons were otherwise. Mr. Green does not think and act contrary to character, since the neuroscientists typically manipulate him to be rationally egoistic. (Pereboom, 23)
I think it's plainly obvious to say that Mr. Green is not free since he is being directly manipulated by these neuroscientists to kill Ms. Peacock, but this is where Pereboom begins to change things up a bit, he presents more cases (Pereboom, 24 - 25) in which control of Mr. Green seems to be getting more and more distant – as in the forces that control become less apparent and less direct, but nonetheless control him. We can see this in his fourth case:
Case 4: Physicalist determinism is true. Mr. Green is a rationally egoistic but (other-wise) ordinary human being, raised in normal circumstances. Mr. Green's killing of Ms. Peacock comes about as a result of his undertaking the reasons-responsive process of deliberation, and he has the specified organization of first and second-order desires. (Pereboom, 25)
Some clarification may be needed here. The part about the "reasons-responsive process of deliberation" is a type of deliberative process such that, if one were to argue for the freedom required for moral responsibility then one would need the ability to will; which means that for us to be responsible and make proper free choices, "it must result from the agent's rational consideration of reasons relevant to the situation, such that, in at least some alternative circumstances in which there are sufficient reasons for her to do otherwise than she actually does, she would be receptive to these reasons and would have done otherwise by the efficacy of the same deliberative mechanism that actually results in the action." (Pereboom , 21)
This case is important because Pereboom's move of distancing the forms of control from direct agent-on-agent control to external-detached control is critical. Pereboom's case assumes that determinism is true, that all prior events determine the outcome of the future, in this case, Mr. Green's future (it's important to differentiate determine from cause since what is determined cannot be changed while something is caused may not necessarily be determined) – Mr. Green had been determined to do what he did from the start. Really all Pereboom did was replace the neuroscientists with nature itself – it is not people pushing buttons in the background guiding Mr. Green to kill Ms. Peacock but the very system that they're both in. The source of action has been shifted, from something extremely concrete and easy to pin down to something vast and almost intangible (in the sense that we can't really assign blame to nature).
To illustrate Pereboom's point further, let’s go back to the chess game. Everything is more or less the same, Calvin has absolute knowledge and David still loses, but there is one key difference: Calvin created the entire world - set up all the physical laws - so that David would be determined to make particular choices that will lead to Calvin winning the game. It’s easy to see how blame can be cast on Calvin for why this is unfair and that David is not responsible for his loss, after all, the game was rigged from the start. But it’s important to note that this is precisely my point, responsibility (and freedom) has shifted from David to Calvin. In the first example, both players were credited for being the sources of their own actions even if the everything was determined, since the point of the discussion was solely focused on whether or not the agents were able to do otherwise and not on whether they were the source of their actions. In my view, the reason we can pin down responsibility for this wrong action (assuming that cheating and rigging the laws of nature for the petty act of winning a chess game is considered ‘wrong’) is because this ‘world’ is so small. We can trace back the causes to the main source of the determination: Calvin. In our world, if determinism is true, no one can be responsible because to find the source could set off an infinite regress, or if there is a ‘first cause’ then that is what is ‘responsible’ and not the agents within the system – they would simply a single link in a long chain with responsibility falling solely on the one that created the system in which the agents inhabit.
Van Inwagen does a good job in getting rid of one use of the term, “free will” but there are enough left over to apply to agents - even a Humean take of it (Unless if you're a Kantian and see it as nothing than "wretched subterfuge" then, fine, free will is eliminated but not moral responsibility, in which case, the argument of free will vs. determinism becomes a bit pointless if you think about it.). The real problem of free will and moral responsibility in a deterministic world does not fall with us being able to do otherwise but whether or not we are the sources of our actions. So when one wants to attack compatibilism it’s important to make the right choice...to prevent free will from blossoming out of the cracks of leeway incompatiblism, it’s important to remove the roots and prevent it from sprouting again.
Peter Van Inwagen: "The Incompatibility of Free Will and Determinism"
http://www.calstatela.edu/sites/default/files/dept/phil/pdf/res/van-inwagen-incompatibilism.pdf
David Pereboom: "Determinism al Dente"
http://www.class.uh.edu/faculty/tsommers/Freewill%2012/determinism%20al%20dente.pdf
*See: Harry Frankfurt: "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility" http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwCompatFrankfurt.htm
