Freedom and Determinism: The Importance of Method

The question of the relation between freedom and determinism elicits contrasting intuitions. It is clear to incompatibilists that freedom requires the falsity of determinism. And it is clear to compatibilists that freedom is compatible with (certain) forms of determinism. Compatibilists and incompatibilists differ not only with respect to the content of their accounts, but also with respect to their “method”. Whereas, compatibilists could be represented as (typically) elucidating our ordinary notion of freedom, incompatibilists could be represented as (typically) offering a revision of that notion. I argue that if we get the methodological point right, we can be free and determined.     

FOREKNOWLEDGE, FREEDOM, AND OBLIGATION

Abstract: A vital presupposition of an influential argument for the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and libertarian free action is that free action requires alternative possibilities. A recent, noteworthy challenge to this presupposition invokes a “Divine Frankfurt‐type example”: God's foreknowledge of one's future actions prevents one from doing otherwise without having any responsibility‐undermining effect on one's actions. First, I explain why features of God's omniscience cast doubt on this Frankfurtian response. Second, even if this appraisal is mistaken, I argue that divine foreknowledge is irreconcilable with moral obligation if such foreknowledge eliminates alternatives.     

Incompatibilism and the garden of forking paths

Let (leeway) incompatibilism be the thesis that causal determinism is incompatible with the freedom to do otherwise. Several prominent authors have claimed that incompatibilism alone can capture, or at least best captures, the intuitive appeal behind Jorge Luis Borges's famous “Garden of Forking Paths” metaphor. The thought, briefly, is this: the “single path” leading up to one's present decision represents the past; the forking paths that one must decide between represent those possible futures consistent with the past and the laws of nature. But if determinism is true, there is only one possible future consistent with the past and the laws and, hence, only one path to choose from. That is, if determinism is true, then we are not free to do otherwise. In this paper, I argue that this understanding of the Garden of Forking Paths faces a number of problems and ought to be rejected even by incompatibilists. I then present an alternative understanding that not only avoids these problems but still supports incompatibilism. Finally, I consider how various versions of (leeway) compatibilism fit with the Garden of Forking Paths as well as the broader question of whether metaphors, however intuitive, have any dialectical force in the debates over freedom.     

DENNETT ON THE BASIC ARGUMENT

Abstract: I argue that Dennett does not adequately support his rejection of the “Basic Argument” for the incompatibility of causal determinism and the sort of free will that involves genuine access to alternative possibilities (sometimes referred to as the “Consequence Argument”). In addition, I seek to highlight the plausibility and importance of the incompatibilist's interpretation of this sort of free will.     

Explaining Away Incompatibilist Intuitions

The debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists depends in large part on what ordinary people mean by ‘free will’, a matter on which previous experimental philosophy studies have yielded conflicting results. In Nahmias, Morris, Nadelhoffer, and Turner (2005, 2006) , most participants judged that agents in deterministic scenarios could have free will and be morally responsible. Nichols and Knobe (2007) , though, suggest that these apparent compatibilist responses are performance errors produced by using concrete scenarios, and that their abstract scenarios reveal the folk theory of free will for what it actually is—incompatibilist. Here, we argue that the results of two new studies suggest just the opposite. Most participants only give apparent incompatibilist judgments when they mistakenly interpret determinism to imply that agents’ mental states are bypassed in the causal chains that lead to their behavior. Determinism does not entail bypassing, so these responses do not reflect genuine incompatibilist intuitions. When participants understand what determinism does mean, the vast majority take it to be compatible with free will. Further results indicate that most people’s concepts of choice and the ability to do otherwise do not commit them to incompatibilism, either, putting pressure on incompatibilist arguments that rely on transfer principles, such as the Consequence Argument. We discuss the implications of these findings for philosophical debates about free will, and suggest that incompatibilism appears to be either false, or else a thesis about something other than what most people mean by ‘free will’.     

Prophets against Ockhamism. Or: why the hard fact/soft fact distinction is irrelevant to the problem of foreknowledge

In this paper, a cognate of the problem of divine foreknowledge is introduced: the problem of the prophet’s foreknowledge. The latter cannot be solved referring to Ockhamism—the doctrine that divine foreknowledge could, at least in principle, be compatible with human freedom because God’s beliefs about future actions are merely soft facts, rather than hard facts about the past. Under the assumption that if Ockhamism can solve the problem of divine foreknowledge then it should also yield a solution to the problem of the prophet’s foreknowledge, it is concluded that Ockhamism fails.     

Faith in doubt in the end

At one time or another, most Contemporary Continental philosophers of religion make reference to Nietzsche’s announcement that “God is dead.” However, their interpretation and treatment of that announcement owes nothing to Nietzsche. Instead, they see the death of God as Hegel did, as a moment in a transition to a new way of talking and thinking about God or the Absolute. Their faith in God or the Absolute is not in doubt in the end. We argue that if one hears and thinks Nietzsche’s word “God is dead”—along with Heidegger’s critique of onto-theo-logy-then faith in the end is in doubt. Any affirmation or profession of faith is questionable; there is no promise that all conflicts will be resolved and that all will be saved and forgiven. Nietzsche’s saying that “God is dead” calls for thinking and questioning; it calls not for faith, but faith in doubt.     

‘Can’ and the Consequence Argument

The consequence argument is a powerful incompatibilist argument for the conclusion that, if determinism is true, what one does is what one must do. A major point of controversy between classical compatibilists and incompatibilists has been over the use of ‘can’ in the consequence argument. Classical compatibilists, holding that abilities to act are dispositions, have argued that ‘can’ should be analyzed as a conditional. But such an analysis of ‘can’ puts compatibilists in a position to grant the premises of the argument while denying the conclusion. Incompatibilists remain unconvinced, and this corner of the debate over free will has reached a dialectical impasse. The present paper has two aims. First, to offer a new dialectical point of entry into this dispute on behalf of incompatibilists. By making use of Angelika Kratzer's influential semantic work on ‘can’ and ‘must’, I argue that incompatibilists are in a position to offer a plausible, positive treatment of ‘can’ that favors their view. Second, even if one does not think incompatibilism is thereby true (for as we shall see there are places to push back), the Kratzer semantics yields a number of important insights concerning the consequence argument that should be of broad interest. ¹      

Against Limited Foreknowledge

Theological fatalists contend that if God knows everything, then no human action is free, and that since God does know everything, no human action is free. One reply to such arguments that has become popular recently— a way favored by William Hasker and Peter van Inwagen—agrees that if God knows everything, no human action is free. The distinctive response of these philosophers is simply to say that therefore God does not know everything. On this view, what the fatalist arguments in fact bring out is that it was logically impossible for God to have known the truths about what we would freely do in the future. And this is no defect in God’s knowledge, for infallible foreknowledge of such truths is a logical impossibility. It has commonly been assumed that this position constitutes an explanation of where the fatalist argument goes wrong. My first goal is to argue that any such assumption has in fact been a mistake; Hasker and van Inwagen have in effect said only that something does go wrong with the argument, but they have not explained what goes wrong with it. Once we see this result, we’ll see, I think, that they need such an account—and that no such account has in fact been provided. The second goal of this paper is therefore to develop— and to criticize— what seems to be the most promising such account they might offer. As I see it, this account will in fact highlight in an intuitively compelling new way what many regard to be the view’s chief liability, namely, that the truths about the future which God is said not to know will now appear even more clearly (and problematically)‘ungrounded’.     

What Makes an Intuition a Compatibilist Intuition? A Response to Sripada

So-called “manipulation arguments” have played a significant role in recent debates between compatibilists and incompatibilists. Incompatibilists take such arguments to show that agents who lack ultimate control over their characters or actions are not free. Most compatibilists agree that manipulated agents are not free but think this is because certain of the agent’s psychological capacities have been compromised. Chandra Sekhar Sripada has conducted an interesting study in which he applies an array of statistical tools to subjects’ intuitive responses to a manipulation case, and he insists that the results of his study provide compelling evidence that people favor compatibilist views of freedom. I argue that because the case that forms the centerpiece of his study is relevantly different from the sort of cases incompatibilists have developed and because he fails to build deterministic conditions into this case, Sripada’s data cannot help settle the disagreement between compatibilists and incompatibilists.     

Ability,Foreknowledge, and Explanatory Dependence

Many philosophers maintain that the ability to do otherwise is compatible with comprehensive divine foreknowledge but incompatible with the truth of causal determinism. But the Fixity of the Past principle underlying the rejection of compatibilism about the ability to do otherwise and determinism appears to generate an argument also for the incompatibility of the ability to do otherwise and divine foreknowledge. By developing an account of ability that appeals to the notion of explanatory dependence, we can replace the Fixity of the Past with a principle that does not generate this difficulty. I develop such an account and defend it from objections. I also explore some of the account's implications, including whether the account is consistent with presentism.     

“Local determination”, even if we could find it,does not challenge free will: Commentary on Marcelo Fischborn

Marcelo Fischborn discusses the significance of neuroscience for debates about free will. Although he concedes that, to date, Libet-style experiments have failed to threaten “libertarian free will” (free will that requires indeterminism), he argues that, in principle, neuroscience and psychology could do so by supporting local determinism. We argue that, in principle, Libet-style experiments cannot succeed in disproving or even establishing serious doubt about libertarian free will. First, we contend that “local determination”, as Fischborn outlines it, is not a coherent concept. Moreover, determinism is unlikely to be established by neuroscience in any form that should trouble compatibilists or libertarians—that is, anyone who thinks we might have free will. We conclude that, in principle, neuroscience will not be able undermine libertarian free will and explain why these conclusions support a coherent compatibilist notion of causal sourcehood.     

The neuroscience of "free will"

Advances in neuroscience over the past 40 or more years are causing a re-visiting of an old debate: Does man possess free will over his actions, or do forces out of his control determine his behavior? Philosophers and biologists since the beginning of recorded history have taken positions on each side of the debate. Recent discoveries of brain activation prior to conscious awareness and genetic conditions that induce impulsive violent behavior are fortifying the perspective that biological determinism is basic to the human condition. But some contemporary thinkers are conflicted in this viewpoint since “free will” is a necessary element for self-determination and for attributing personal responsibility for one's actions. Hence, modifications of strict determinism have emerged which try to incorporate the features of determinism enforced by neuroscience findings with some element of “free will”, making the two seemingly opposed positions compatible. How successful this will be to rescue “free will” in the long term depends on future discoveries in neuroscience and genetics. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Kane,Luck, and the significance of free will

Abstract

This paper raises a pair of objections to the novel libertarian position advanced in Robert Kane's recent book, The Significance of Free Will.The first objection's target is a central element in Kane's intriguing response to what he calls the “Intelligibility” and “Existence” questions about free will. It is argued that this response is undermined by considerations of luck.The second objection is directed at a portion of Kane's answer to what he calls “The Significance Question” about free will: “Why do we, or should we, want to possess a free will that is incompatible with determinism? Is it a kind of freedom ‘worth wanting’... and, if so, why?” A desire for “objective worth” has a featured role in his answer. However, a compatibilist can have that desire.     

Moral Responsibility,Reactive Attitudes and Freedom of Will

In his influential paper, “Freedom and Resentment,” P. F. Strawson argued that our ordinary practices of holding persons morally responsible and related reactive attitudes (such as blame, resentment, indignation, and moral approval) were wholly “internal” to the practices themselves and could be insulated from traditional philosophical and metaphysical concerns, including concerns about free will and determinism. This “insulation thesis” is a controversial feature of Strawson’s influential paper; and it has had numerous critics. The first purpose of this paper is to explain my own reasons for thinking that our practices of holding responsible cannot be entirely insulated from incompatibilist concerns about freedom and determinism. The second purpose is to argue that these incompatibilist concerns are in fact legitimate concerns: There are sound reasons to believe that our ordinary practices of holding persons morally responsible do require at least sometimes in our lives that we must be capable of acting freely in a manner that is not determined. I defend this thesis by spelling out why I believe various compatibilist strategies attempting to show that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism fail to show this. In the course of this critique, a general theme will emerge: In order to do full justice to our ordinary practices of holding persons responsible and the freedoms thus involved, one must distinguish between different types of freedom, and in particular, between freedom of action and freedom of will.     

Modified Frankfurt-type counterexamples and flickers of freedom

A great deal of attention has been paid recently to the claim that traditional Frankfurt-type counterexamples to the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP), which depend for their success on the presence of a perfectly reliable indicator (or prior sign) of what an agent will freely do if left to act on his own, are guilty of begging the question against incompatibilists, since such indicators seem to presuppose a deterministic relation between an agent’s free action and its causal antecedents. Objections of this sort have given rise to considerable efforts to construct alternative Frankfurt-type counterexamples that do not rely on prior signs of this kind and so do not presuppose determinism in a way that incompatibilists should find objectionable. One consequence of this shift in the way Frankfurt-type counterexamples are formulated is that it provides an opportunity for the forceful resurgence of certain versions of the so-called flicker defense of PAP. In this paper I develop two versions of the flicker defense, indicate their advantages over other versions of this strategy, and defend them against objections. Insofar as either of these is successful, it will show not only that PAP has yet to be falsified by any of the modified Frankfurt-type counterexamples currently on offer but that cases of this sort are in principle incapable of falsifying PAP.     

“Shining in the Light of Your Glory”: Finding the Simple Reading of Scripture

This essay argues that without allowing for a legitimate extra‐biblical reasoning for the appropriateness of God's “simplicity,” Christians will be compelled biblically to affirm that God, as such, has a body — or at least Christians will have to accept this as a theologically possible reading of Scripture that cannot be ruled out. Barnes first cites ancient philosophical sources that argue that God has no parts but is utterly simple. In Barnes's quick sketch, the main role is given to Plotinus and especially to the summation found in Alcuinus's Didaskalon X.7 (Alcuinus is known also as Albinus). Barnes then examines readings of Israel's Scriptures that indicate the bodiliness of God (YHWH). Most importantly, divine bodiliness comports with the “plain sense” of Scripture. Here he draws upon such works as Benjamin Sommer's The Bodies of God, Stephen Moore's “Gigantic God,” and Tryggve Mettinger's The Dethronement of Sabaoth; and he also makes reference to the work of the Jewish kabbalist scholar Gershom Scholem. Barnes carefully investigates such passages as Exodus 33, in which God is clearly presented as having bodily parts, including a “face.” As Barnes notes, the Fathers’ arguments for why God does not have a body are tied completely to their arguments for why God exists simply.     

The limits of limited-blockage Frankfurt-style cases

Philosophers employing Frankfurt-style cases to challenge the principle of alternative possibilities have mostly sought to construct scenarios that eliminate as many of an agent’s alternatives as possible—and all alternatives at the moment of action, within the agent’s control—without causally determining the agent’s actions. One of the chief difficulties for this traditional approach is that the closer one gets to ruling out absolutely all alternative possibilities the more it appears that agents’ actions in these cases are causally determined. “Limited-blockage” versions of these cases are meant to sidestep this worry by blocking all and only those alternatives that are intrinsically relevant to moral responsibility (“robust alternatives”) while leaving open all other alternatives, including a significant range of alternatives that are within the agent’s voluntary control at the moment of action. I argue that, owing to the fact that omissions (and not just actions) are capable of constituting robust alternative possibilities, limited-blockage cases cannot avoid collapsing into the more traditional sort of Frankfurt-style case to which they are meant to be an alternative and so are vulnerable to the very same concerns they are meant to avoid.     

Philosophy and Science Dialogue: Mental Causation

This paper is a dialogue between Thalia Wheatley and Terence Horgan. Horgan maintains that philosophy is a broadly empirical discipline, and that philosophical theorizing about how concepts work treats certain intuitions about proper concept-usage as empirical data. He holds that the possibility of strong multiple realizability undermines the psychophysical identity theory. He holds that the concept of causation is governed by implicit contextual parameters, and that this dissolves Kim’s problem of “causal exclusion.” He holds that the concept of free will is governed by implicit contextual parameters, and that free-will attributions are often true, in typical contexts, even if determinism is true. Thalia Wheatley holds that the concept of multiple realizability hinges on the level of abstraction discussed and that neuroscientific data does not yet support multiple realizability of mental states from specific, high resolution brain states. She also holds that compatibilism redefines the concept of free will in ways that bear little resemblance to the common understanding―that of being free to choose otherwise in the moment. She maintains that this folk understanding is incompatible with the brain as a physical system and is not rescued by concepts of context and capacity.     

The local problem of God’s hiddenness: a critique of van Inwagen’s criterion of philosophical success

In regards to the problem of evil, van Inwagen thinks there are two arguments from evil which require different defenses. These are the global argument from evil—that there exists evil in general, and the local argument from evil—that there exists some particular atrocious evil X. However, van Inwagen fails to consider whether the problem of God’s hiddenness also has a “local” version: whether there is in fact a “local” argument from God’s hiddenness which would be undefeated by his general defense of God’s hiddenness. This paper will argue that van Inwagen’s present account contains no implicit response to the “local” argument from God’s hiddenness, and, worse, the “local” argument brings to the fore crucial inconsistencies in van Inwagen’s account. These inconsistencies concern van Inwagen’s criterion for philosophical success—his methodological use of an “ideal audience” in an ideal debate—and a crucial premise in his argument: namely, that people who do not believe in God are culpably deceiving themselves regarding the manifest presence of God. These considerations will be a platform for my arguing that the failures of van Inwagen’s account amount to his ignoring the extra-rational, concrete aspect of grasping “spiritual propositions”—propositions which, in order to be affirmed, require the full self-understanding which precipitates out of the mind, body, and will of a particular existing individual.