Freedom and Determinism (Topics in Contemporary Philosophy)

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Freedom and Determinism

edited by Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O’Rourke, and David Shier

Topics in Contemporary Philosophy

Freedom and Determinism

Topics in Contemporary Philosophy Editors Joseph Keim Campbell, Washington State University Michael O’Rourke, University of Idaho David Shier, Washington State University

Editorial Board Members Kent Bach, San Francisco State University Michael Bratman, Stanford University Nancy Cartwright, London School of Economics Richard Feldman, University of Rochester John Martin Fischer, University of California, Riverside Nicholas F. Gier, University of Idaho Philip J. Ivanhoe, Boston University Michael McKinsey, Wayne State University John Perry, Stanford University James Rachels, University of Alabama at Birmingham Stephen Schiffer, New York University Harry Silverstein, Washington State University Brian Skyrms, University of California, Irvine Peter van Inwagen, University of Notre Dame

Freedom and Determinism

edited by Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O’Rourke, and David Shier

A Bradford Book The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

© 2004 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Stone Serif and Stone Sans by Interactive Composition Corporation and was printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Freedom and determinism / edited by Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O’Rourke, and David Shier. p. cm.—(Topics in contemporary philosophy) “A Bradford book.” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-03319-4 (hc. : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-262-53257-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Free will and determinism. I. Campbell, Joseph Keim, 1958– . II. O’Rourke, Michael, 1963– . III. Shier, David, 1958– . IV. Series. BJ1461.F755 2004 123'.5—dc22 2003066491 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Freedom and Determinism: A Framework

1

Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O’Rourke, and David Shier Determinism, Freedom, and Agency 1

19

Determinism: What We Have Learned and What We Still

Don’t Know

21

John Earman 2

Freedom and the Power of Preference

47

Keith Lehrer 3

Agency, Responsibility, and Indeterminism: Reﬂections on Libertarian

Theories of Free Will

70

Robert Kane 4

Trying to Act

89

Carl Ginet The Metaphysics of Moral Responsibility 5

The Sense of Freedom

103

105

Dana K. Nelkin 6

Libertarian Openness, Blameworthiness, and Time

135

Ishtiyaque Haji 7

Moderate Reasons-responsiveness, Moral Responsibility, and

Manipulation Todd R. Long

151

Contents

vi

8

Which Autonomy?

173

Nomy Arpaly 9

The Transfer of Nonresponsibility

189

John Martin Fischer The Compatibility Problem 10

211

Van Inwagen on Free Will

213

Peter van Inwagen 11

Compatibilist Options

231

John Perry 12

Freedom and Contextualism

255

Richard Feldman 13

Buddhism and the Freedom of the Will: Pali and Mahayanist

Responses

277

Nicholas F. Gier and Paul Kjellberg 14

After Compatibilism and Incompatibilism

Ted Honderich Index

323

305

Freedom and Determinism: A Framework Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O’Rourke, and David Shier

1

The Traditional Problem of Freedom and Determinism

Thoughts about freedom and determinism have engaged philosophers since the days of ancient Greece.1 On the one hand, we generally regard ourselves as free and autonomous beings who are responsible for the actions that we perform. But this idea of ourselves appears to conﬂict with a variety of attitudes that we also have about the inevitable workings of the world around us. For instance, some people believe that strict, universal laws of nature govern the world. Others think that there is an omnipotent God who is the ultimate cause of all things. These more global views suggest that each particular event—including each human action—is causally necessitated, and so they suggest a conﬂict with the claim that we are free. Hence, the problem of freedom and determinism is, at base, a problem about reconciling attitudes we have toward ourselves with our more general thoughts about the world around us. It is a problem about locating our actions within those streams of events that make up the broader universe. Freedom is usually discussed within the context of theoretical concerns about the nature of moral responsibility. For it is a basic assumption that some kind of freedom—call it “moral freedom”—is a necessary precondition for our being accountable for our actions. Moreover, even those who endorse moral nihilism, the claim that no one is ever morally responsible for anything, usually do so because they also believe that we lack moral freedom. Consequently, the assumption of freedom plays a role in our beliefs about the appropriateness of moral praise and blame. We ﬁnd it absurd to blame a rock that happens to crash through our living room window but acceptable to blame the child who threw the rock. And we would consider such blame more legitimate were the rock knowingly and intentionally

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thrown by an adult with normal cognitive capacities. In trying to uncover the basis for these differences in attitude, we encounter other, more fundamental distinctions in moral psychology between action and passion, belief and desire, reason and emotion, and control and compulsion. Not surprisingly persons in the ﬁelds of ethics, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy of law all share an interest in understanding the nature of moral freedom. This remains true for moral nihilists since some understanding of the nature of moral freedom is implicit in its denial. There are a variety of kinds of determinism that have been offered as potential threats to our freedom. For instance, there is logical determinism, the view that all propositions—including those reporting our future actions—are either true or false. There is also theological determinism, according to which an omniscient God knows about the future in complete detail. T. S. Eliot (1943) notes a problem between freedom and temporal determinism, which claims that time is another dimension like any of the other three spatial dimensions, so that the difference between what is in your past and what is in your future is a lot like the difference between what is to your left and what is to your right. Lastly, there is causal determinism, which claims that the past facts, together with the laws of nature, entail all future facts.2 Each of these determinisms is a global thesis, making a claim about all propositions. It is then suggested that this global property carries with it the kind of necessity that is itself a threat to our freedom. Of course, the term ‘freedom’ is also ambiguous. There is political freedom and freedom of religion. These and other freedoms are characterized in a negative way, as the absence of certain constraints on one’s activities or beliefs. Since there are many kinds of constraints, there are many negative freedoms. But the kind of freedom that metaphysicians are interested in—call it ‘metaphysical freedom’—can also be described in a positive way, as an active power to do things that are up to us. In this sense, metaphysical freedom seems more fundamental than the other, merely negative freedoms.3 Metaphysical freedom may be even more fundamental than moral freedom, for as the problems noted in the previous paragraph indicate, threats to our freedom can be presented without mentioning attributions of moral praise or blame. On the other hand, each of the determinisms noted above is also a potential threat to our moral freedom. By and large, folks in the twentieth century are concerned with moral freedom—the freedom-relevant condition necessary for moral responsibility—and causal determinism.

Freedom and Determinism: A Framework

3

For this reason, debates about freedom and determinism center on a set of distinct, though related, questions.4 1. What is the thesis of causal determinism? 2. What is the nature of moral freedom? 3. Is moral freedom compatible with causal determinism? 4. Is causal determinism true? 5. Are any persons morally free? The ﬁrst three questions are conceptual and, thus, the primary focus of philosophers is directed towards answering those questions. A provisional answer to (1) was given above, but more precisely, determinism is the conjunction of the following two theses: For every instant of time, there is a proposition that expresses the state of the world at that instant; If p and q are any propositions that express the state of the world at some instants, then the conjunction of p with the laws of nature entails q. (van Inwagen 1983, 65) Note that there are no temporal restrictions on p and q. Still if p is a proposition that expresses the state of the world at some time in the past, then when conjoined with the laws of nature it entails each and every future fact. Until recently, all parties in the freedom and determinism debate accepted a short answer to (2), regarding the nature of moral freedom. First, it was held that the kind of freedom required for moral responsibility was free will. Second, it was accepted that free will requires that persons have alternatives to at least some of their actions, where a person S has an alternative to an action iff S can do otherwise, or if S is able to do otherwise, or if it is within S’s power to do otherwise. Call the identiﬁcation of moral freedom with free will, the ‘traditional view’ of moral freedom.5 The traditional view makes it rather easy to understand the philosophical problems surrounding freedom and determinism, for free will is also a likely candidate for the more basic metaphysical freedom. According to the traditionalist, there are not three distinct kinds of freedom—metaphysical freedom, moral freedom, and free will. There is only one kind of freedom, free will, and it is essential to moral praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. Proponents of the traditional view tend to fall into well-deﬁned groups,

J. K. Campbell, M. O’Rourke, and D. Shier

4

depending on how they answer the remaining questions above. Compatibilists believe that determinism is consistent with the free will thesis—the view that at least some persons have free will—whereas incompatibilists believe that it is not. Soft determinists are compatibilists who accept both determinism and the free will thesis, whereas hard determinists are incompatibilists who endorse determinism but deny the free will thesis. Finally, libertarians are incompatibilists who deny determinism and endorse the free will thesis (van Inwagen 1983). The following chart should help the reader to keep track of the theories noted in this paragraph. (3) Compatibility? Compatibilism Incompatibilism

Yes No

Soft Determinism Hard Determinism Libertarianism

Yes No No

(4) Determinism?

(5) Freedom?

Yes Yes No

Yes No Yes

During the last century a few of the above theories began to look rather archaic. First of all, certain results in quantum mechanics led many philosophers eventually to reject determinism. According to the standard interpretation of quantum theory, there are facts about the sub-atomic level—facts like this electron has the property of “spin up”—that are not a logical consequence of any conjunction of past facts and laws of nature. Subsequently, many philosophers have abandoned the positions of soft and hard determinism since they both entail a positive answer to (4), and the acceptance of determinism. In addition, philosophers began to question the relevance of the concept of free will to moral praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. Motivation for the traditional view of moral freedom stems from an acceptance of something like the following principle: The principle of alternative possibilities (PAP): S is morally responsible for action a only if she has, or had, alternatives to a. But in an important and inﬂuential paper, Harry Frankfurt provides apparent counterexamples to PAP, cases in which agents perform blameworthy actions even though it appears that they could not have done otherwise. Frankfurt writes: Suppose someone—Black, let us say—wants Jones4 to perform a certain action. Black is prepared to go to considerable lengths to get his way, but he prefers to avoid

Freedom and Determinism: A Framework

5

showing his hand unnecessarily. So he waits until Jones4 is about to make up his mind what to do, and he does nothing unless it is clear to him (Black is an excellent judge of such things) that Jones4 is going to decide to do something other than what he wants him to do. If it does become clear that Jones4 is going to decide to do something else, Black takes effective steps to ensure that Jones4 decides to do, and that he does do, what he wants him to do. Whatever Jones4’s initial preferences and inclinations, then, Black will have his way. (Frankfurt 1969, 148–149)

Perhaps Black wants Jones4 to rob a bank, and that Jones4 robs the bank without the need of Black’s counterfactual intervention. It seems, then, that Jones4 is morally responsible for his action but that he could not have done otherwise. Call such examples ‘Frankfurt examples’. To accept that Frankfurt examples are genuine counterexamples to PAP is to accept a split between moral freedom and alternatives, for the Frankfurt examples suggest that one can have the former without having the latter. This means that the traditional view is wrong about the nature of moral freedom.6 Lastly, some philosophers have abandoned the traditional view because of the development of a number of persuasive formal arguments in support of incompatibilism, presented primarily by Peter van Inwagen (1975, 1983, 1989) and Carl Ginet (1966, 1990). These are all versions of the Consequence Argument. If determinism is true, then our acts are the consequences of the laws of nature and events in the remote past. 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. Therefore, the consequences of these things are not up to us. (van Inwagen 1983, 16)

Van Inwagen (1983) offers three formal versions of the Consequence Argument. In the third version—aptly called ‘the Third Argument’—he constructs a modal operator ‘N’ where ‘Np’ means ‘p and no one has, or ever had, any choice about whether p’ (1983, 93; 1989, 404). Intuitively, we can think of this as the unavoidability operator. Van Inwagen claims that according to the logic of this operator the following two inference rules are valid: (␣) From

p deduce Np

(␤) From Np and N(p→q) deduce Nq, where ‘ ’ represents broad logical necessity and ‘→’ represents material implication (1983, 94; 1989, 227). From the above rules and deﬁnitions, together with reasonable assumptions about the past and the laws of nature,

J. K. Campbell, M. O’Rourke, and D. Shier

6

one can show that no one has, or ever had, any choice about whether any true proposition is true, given determinism. Thus, the Third Argument apparently establishes incompatibilism.7 The three developments discussed above have led to a number of new theories in the freedom and determinism debate. Among the more attractive of these is semicompatibilism, inspired by the rejection of PAP and the success of the Consequence Argument (Fischer 1994). According to the semicompatibilist, moral freedom is not essentially linked to alternatives. The semicompatibilist can agree that free will is incompatible with determinism but also contend that determinism and moral responsibility are compatible. Moral freedom is best understood in terms of concepts like guidance control and reasons-responsiveness that rely on features about the actual causal history leading up to an action, instead of whether or not there are any alternatives to the action.8 Libertarianism is still widely held.9 Moreover, many incompatibilists deny the free will thesis altogether. Hard determinism is rarely endorsed, since few philosophers accept determinism, but in its place are successor views, like hard indeterminism, according to which incompatibilism is true, determinism is false, but the free will thesis is false anyway (Pereboom 2001). Most successor views differ from traditional versions of moral nihilism. Traditionalists begin with the Consequence Argument. Hard determinists then argue that determinism is true, and thus all human actions are unavoidable. Other traditionalists extend the Consequence Argument to cover cases of indeterminism, as well. For instance, after presenting the Third Argument one can go on to show that most propositions are unavoidable even if one assumes the truth of indeterminism (van Inwagen 1983, 1989). Proponents of successor views often believe that unavoidability is unimportant to moral freedom, given the Frankfurt examples. Instead, they claim that moral freedom is essentially linked to origination, and claim that origination is impossible under the assumption of determinism and unlikely at best even if indeterminism is true.10 In summary, the majority of contemporary philosophers agree that some kind of freedom—moral freedom—is required for moral responsibility. But they differ as to the nature of this freedom as well as some of the other necessary conditions for moral responsibility. Proponents of the traditional view continue to maintain that moral freedom is just free will, but a variety of philosophers have rejected the latter notion altogether. This is primarily

Freedom and Determinism: A Framework

7

due to the impact of the Frankfurt examples and formal arguments for incompatibilism. Moreover, while debate about the compatibility of moral freedom and determinism is still alive and well, most philosophers have rejected determinism given quantum mechanics. Gone are the labels of soft determinism and hard determinism, but the lion’s share of opinions on the nature of freedom and determinism still fall into three main groups: libertarians, moral nihilists, and compatibilists, including semicompatibilists. We now introduce the essays in this current volume. 2

New Work on Freedom and Determinism

As we have seen, there are essentially two projects that are important to contemporary philosophers working in the area of freedom and determinism: (a) understanding the nature of moral freedom and its relationship with moral responsibility, and (b) determining whether or not moral freedom is compatible with determinism. That is, contemporary philosophers are primarily concerned with questions (2) and (3) from our earlier list. However, one cannot address these questions without a provisional understanding of the general concepts involved—determinism and moral freedom—as well as a clearer sense of the type of events relevant to our concerns here, namely, actions. These presuppositional topics are the subject of the essays in our ﬁrst section, “Determinism, Freedom, and Agency.” We then turn to the nature of moral freedom and responsibility in “The Metaphysics of Moral Responsibility,” and ﬁnally, to questions about the compatibility of freedom and determinism in “The Compatibility Problem.”11 Determinism, Freedom, and Agency Many standard ways of treating the problem of freedom and determinism presume answers to questions (1) and (4) above. As it turns out, it is not easy to say what it would be for the world to be deterministic, and even less easy to see whether, on any plausible account of what determinism amounts to, the world is in fact deterministic. In “Determinism: What We Have Learned and What We Still Don’t Know,” John Earman brieﬂy reviews relevant parts of current physics with respect to their compatibility with determinism. He begins by distinguishing between determinism and prediction. While the latter may entail the former, the converse is false. Hence, one cannot infer from an inability to predict future states of a system that

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J. K. Campbell, M. O’Rourke, and D. Shier

the time evolution of the system is indeterministic. Earman’s review covers determinism and predictability not only of quantum systems, but also classical and relativistic systems. One of the interesting results he reaches is that, contrary to naive intuition, classical Newtonian physics is more hostile to determinism than either quantum mechanics or special relativity. Another is that the prospects for a deterministic theory unifying general relativity and quantum theory are rather grim. After noting various points of tension between determinism and each of these parts of current theory, Earman identiﬁes ways in which extensions of the theories might save determinism, but argues that, as things now stand, questions about the truth or falsity of determinism remain open.12 In keeping with the introductory nature of the ﬁrst section, the next two essays in the volume offer two distinct theories of moral freedom: a compatibilist account and a libertarian one. Both essays are exceptionally broad in their scope, covering over a half-century of scholarly research combined. Keith Lehrer’s “Freedom and the Power of Preference” is a break from his earlier views. In Lehrer (1980), the author argues that total integration of preferences is sufﬁcient for moral freedom. Since total integration is compatible with determinism, it follows that moral freedom is compatible with determinism, too. Lehrer now believes that total integration is not sufﬁcient for moral freedom because the integrated structure might be produced by another person and, thus, it would not be a preference structure of which the agent is the author. According to Lehrer’s new view, in order for our actions to be free they must be the result of a preference structure that the agent prefers to have, and one that the agent has because he prefers to have it. This is sufﬁcient, according to Lehrer, for the agent to be the author of his own actions yet is still consistent with determinism. In “Agency, Responsibility, and Indeterminism: Reﬂections on Libertarian Theories of Free Will,” Robert Kane embraces an incompatibilist theory of moral freedom. Kane is careful to distinguish between two requirements that are central to libertarianism. First, there is the condition of alternative possibilities (AP), which claims that alternatives are necessary for free will. Second, there is the ultimacy condition, which requires that the agent be the ultimate source of her morally free actions. Kane notes that although AP may be necessary for free will it is not sufﬁcient. Thus, an account of libertarian free will must add something else to the mere existence of alternatives. Kane adds the condition of ultimate responsibility,

Freedom and Determinism: A Framework

9

which includes the ultimacy condition. But Kane distances himself from other, more classic libertarian theories, like the libertarian agency theory, which holds that agent causation is sui generis and not reducible to event causation.13 Instead, Kane adopts a teleological theory that attempts to explicate moral freedom in terms of the reasons or purposes of the agent. Kane closes his essay with a lengthy response to allegations that the notion of indeterministic action is incoherent. The kinds of things that we are normally held responsible for are actions, or their consequences, so the problem of freedom and determinism is essentially a problem about reconciling free actions with determinism. Thus, in addition to delving into the intricacies of the latter view, theorists often engage in important work on the nature of human action. In “Trying to Act,” Carl Ginet offers four conditions, each of which he claims is sufﬁcient for the truth of sentences of the form, ‘S tried to a’. Ginet falls short of offering an analysis since he does not claim that any, or all, of the conditions are necessary for the truth of such sentences. Still, Ginet notes some important features that all four conditions share. For instance, in each condition S tries to a by doing something else which S believes is connected in a certain way with the possibility of doing a. To try to do a is to do something, even if one fails to do a, so these are also conditions for the truth of sentences reporting the performance of a certain class of actions. The Metaphysics of Moral Responsibility The papers in this section discuss question (2) in detail: What is the nature of moral freedom, the freedom-relevant condition for moral responsibility? Dana Nelkin’s “The Sense of Freedom” is a sustained discussion of the following principle: (R):

Rational deliberators, in virtue of their nature as rational

deliberators, necessarily have a sense that they are free. Establishing (R) is important for at least two reasons. First, it is one of the most central and universally agreed upon beliefs that we have about moral freedom. Second, philosophers like Immanuel Kant use (R) as an important premise in arguments against moral nihilism. After considering and dismissing another version of (R), Nelkin concludes that the ‘belief-concept’ reading of it should be accepted. Thus, according to Nelkin, all rational deliberators essentially believe that their actions are up to them in the sense that they are accountable for those actions.

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In “Libertarian Openness, Blameworthiness, and Time,” Ishtiyaque Haji argues against a traditional belief in moral theory that praiseworthiness and blameworthiness are essentially retrospective, that is, that we cannot hold a person responsible for an action until after the action has been performed. Against this, Haji argues in support of blame future, the view that it is possible for S to be morally blameworthy for doing a at t at some time prior to t. Haji’s intuitions run counter to those who believe in libertarian openness (L-openness), the view that if S has free will then it was always possible for S to do otherwise at any time prior to performing an action. Proponents of L-openness argue that we cannot be responsible for our future free actions since it is undetermined as to whether or not they will occur until the action is actually performed. But Haji rejects this argument by noting that one can construct Frankfurt examples in which S is morally responsible for performing some action even though the action is not L-open to S. Haji goes on to discuss a variety of conceptions of moral responsibility that might lie behind the rejection of blame future. Haji critiques all of these views and, instead, advocates the self-disclosure conception of moral responsibility that is consistent with blame future. The Frankfurt examples also play an important role in Todd Long’s “Moderate Reasons-responsiveness, Moral Responsibility, and Manipulation.” Long’s paper is a critique of John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza’s view of moral freedom (1998). According to Fischer and Ravizza, agents in the Frankfurt examples lack regulative control over their actions since they cannot do otherwise. But such agents have guidance control over their actions as long as their actions are a result of mechanisms that are moderately reasons-responsive (MRR). Moreover, it is guidance control, and not regulative control, that is the freedom-relevant condition for moral responsibility, according to Fischer and Ravizza. Long offers some Frankfurt examples that he thinks pose problems for Fischer and Ravizza’s theory. More specifically, the examples are such that the counterfactual intervention involves cases of direct manipulation of the inputs to the agent’s deliberative processes by either adding or replacing different reasons for action. Intuitively, in such cases the potential actions in the alternative sequence scenario—the actions that would result were the counterfactual intervention to be operative—arise from the same mechanism as those performed in the actual sequence scenario—the actions that do result, without the aid of intervention. But an important assumption of Fischer and Ravizza is that

Freedom and Determinism: A Framework

11

agents are morally responsible for their actions in the actual sequence scenario yet these same agents would not have been morally responsible for their actions were the counterfactual intervention to be enacted. Fischer and Ravizza are then faced with a dilemma. Either they must concede that there is more to moral responsibility than an action’s being the result of a mechanism that is MRR or they must give up their belief that their theory explains why agents in the Frankfurt examples would not have been morally responsible for their actions had the counterfactual intervention taken place. Long also suggests that agents may be morally responsible for actions even if they undergo external manipulations that are quite severe. Nomy Arpaly’s paper, “Which Autonomy?” is a general critique of the concept of autonomy, one of the more popular candidates for moral freedom. First, Arpaly discusses a variety of divergent accounts of autonomy that philosophers have offered. This alone poses a problem for such theorists since the diversity of such accounts has rendered the concept of autonomy practically meaningless. Arpaly goes on to offer substantive criticisms of each of these accounts and ends by advising that we might be better off dealing more directly with moral praiseworthiness and blameworthiness and abandoning the notion of autonomy altogether. We close the second section with an essay by John Martin Fischer entitled “The Transfer of Nonresponsibility.” Fischer’s contribution is part of a long-standing debate—one in which he has exerted substantial inﬂuence— on the Principle of the Transfer of Nonresponsibility (Transfer NR), a version of which was put forth by van Inwagen. Van Inwagen’s principle is formally identical to his rule (␤), noted above, only here ‘Np’ means “p and no human being, or group of human beings, is even partly responsible for the fact that p” (van Inwagen 1980). Both rule (␤) and Transfer NR can be seen as closure principles of unavoidability and nonresponsibility, respectively. Fischer formulates the principle as follows: Transfer NR: If p obtains and no one is even partly morally responsible for p and if p obtains, then q obtains, and no one is even partly morally responsible for the fact that if p obtains, then q obtains, then q obtains, and no one is even partly morally responsible for q. (Fischer, chapter 9) Transfer NR has recently come under attack by semicompatibilists, like Fischer, who argue that the Frankfurt examples are counterexamples to this principle too. To use an example from Fischer’s essay, suppose that q is the

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fact that an avalanche occurs and that the avalanche was started by an agent, Betty, but that the avalanche would have occurred even if Betty had not started it due to the fact that a glacier was eroding, p. No one is responsible for the fact that p, and no one is responsible for the fact that if p, then q, but it seems that Betty is responsible for the fact that q.14 Proponents of Transfer NR have tried to alter the principle to meet this counterexample. Fischer considers and responds to a variety of these reformulations. He concludes that the newer versions of Transfer NR cannot be used to support the incompatibilism of determinism and moral responsibility. At most, he says, they lead only to a dialectical stalemate. The Compatibility Problem The ﬁnal section of the volume contains essays on question (3) above, the issue of whether or not some substantive notion of freedom is compatible with the thesis of causal determinism. Like some of the other contributions in this volume, “Van Inwagen on Free Will” offers an important retrospective on an inﬂuential body of work given from the author’s own point of view. By now, many of van Inwagen’s views should be well known to the reader since they have had some bearing on almost all of the issues discussed above. Van Inwagen adopts the traditional view of moral freedom as free will and has offered compelling arguments in support of incompatibilism as well as the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility. In this essay, van Inwagen also discusses his thoughts on the Frankfurt examples, which he still ﬁnds unconvincing, and his argument for restrictivism, the view that we are rarely, if ever, free. He closes with some criticisms of the concept of agent causation. John Perry’s “Compatibilist Options” is both a defense of compatibilism and a direct response to one of van Inwagen’s arguments for incompatibilism, the ‘First Formal Argument’ (1975; 1983, 69–78). According to Perry, there are two distinct ways in which compatibilists can avoid a conﬂict between metaphysical freedom and determinism. They can adopt a soft view of laws of nature, and accept that laws are little more than true universal generalizations, or they can adopt a soft view of ‘can’.15 Perry advocates the second strategy. He endorses a hard view of laws of nature and then argues that metaphysical freedom and determinism are nonetheless compatible. In his discussion of van Inwagen’s argument, he notes that it involves a subtle ambiguity in the phrase ‘renders a proposition false’. He then rejects

Freedom and Determinism: A Framework

13

the argument by providing a counterexample to one of its key premises, the premise most similar to rule (␤). Many contemporary philosophers have noted structural similarities between rule (␤), Transfer NR, and the following: The principle of epistemic closure: From S knows that p and S knows that p entails q, deduce S knows that q. This latter principle plays an important role in arguments in support of skepticism, the view that we have no knowledge. Given the formal similarities of these various closure principles, it is fashionable of late to try to bring the technical apparatus from the epistemology debate to bear on the problem of freedom and determinism. For instance, John Hawthorne (2001) has recently put forth a view of contextualism according to which sentences about freedom are context sensitive. Thus, in ordinary contexts when an English speaker utters sentences of the form ‘S does a freely’, the sentence comes out true even if determinism is true. In “Freedom and Contextualism,” Richard Feldman argues against Hawthorne’s theory. Among his many reasons for rejecting contextualism, Feldman notes that the contextualist concedes too much to the incompatibilist for he admits that in philosophical contexts it is usually false to say that ‘S does a freely’ given determinism. In addition, Feldman claims that the contextualist fails to take our incompatibilist worries about moral freedom seriously. In “Buddhism and the Freedom of the Will: Pali and Mahayanist Responses,” Nicholas F. Gier and Paul Kjellberg provide a comparative discussion of freedom and determinism from an Asian perspective. With few exceptions, thinkers across the ancient world embraced determinism with no recognition that it might undermine moral responsibility. According to Gier and Kjellberg, this suggests that the issue of free will is a distinctively modern one, initiated by Augustine and carried over into European philosophy. Buddhist philosophers writing in the Pali language generally support a form of compatibilism that compares favorably with Lehrer’s idea that moral freedom lies in developing preferences that lead to the good life. Mahayanist Buddhist philosophers writing in Sanskrit embraced forms of idealism or skepticism that appear to dissolve personal agency altogether. Anticipating French deconstruction, Nagarjuna, one of the most sophisticated Buddhist philosophers, deconstructs the self and implies that the talk of freedom versus determinism is simply competing rhetorics that have no foundation in reality itself.

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J. K. Campbell, M. O’Rourke, and D. Shier

The volume ends with an original and controversial contribution by Ted Honderich. In “After Compatibilism and Incompatibilism,” Honderich endorses a theory of determinism, and then argues strongly for the startling thesis that both compatibilism and incompatibilism are wrong. Each claims that we have one settled conception of moral freedom, or one important conception, and this, he argues, is demonstrably false. The real problem of determinism has seemed to him until recently to be the practical one of dealing with the fact that we not only have attitudes consistent with determinism, but also attitudes inconsistent with it. But now he thinks there is a further problem. Reﬂection on your past life can issue in conﬁdence in determinism but also in feelings of moral responsibility akin to those that depend on indeterminism. On what fact can they rest? Honderich does not solve this problem directly but he does suggest two avenues of pursuit: embrace a radical theory about the nature of consciousness, or question longstanding assumptions about causation and explanation. His paper is a useful stopping place for this anthology since it suggests that no matter how much has been said about the issues of freedom and determinism there is always something new to add to the debate. Notes 1. See Aristotle (1963) along with writings by the Stoics and Epicureans in Long and Sedley (1987). This is disputed by Gier and Kjellberg, chapter 13, who argue that the problem is a modernist one. 2. For discussions of the problems of freedom and logical/theological determinism in ancient times, see Aristotle (1963) along with writings by the Stoics in Long and Sedley (1987). For more contemporary essays, see Fischer (1989) and Kane (2002, part 1). A more precise deﬁnition of ‘determinism’ is provided below. 3. See van Inwagen (1998, 365–366). The term ‘metaphysical freedom’ is van Inwagen’s. The term ‘active power’ comes from Reid (1983). 4. For a related, though somewhat different set of questions and problems, see van Inwagen (1983, 1–2) and Kane, chapter 3. 5. Following van Inwagen (1983, 8), we use the term ‘free will’ out of respect for tradition. By use of the term we do not suggest that there is some faculty, e.g., the will, that has the property of being free. To say that S has free will is just to say that S has alternatives, in the sense noted in this paragraph. This connection between the concepts of free will and alternatives has been accepted by virtually everyone throughout the history of philosophy. Frankfurt (1969, 1971) remains an exception.

Freedom and Determinism: A Framework

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6. Not all philosophers agree that the Frankfurt examples undermine PAP. See the articles in Fischer (1986, part 2), Fischer and Ravizza (1993, part 3), and Kane (2002, part 5). For discussions of the Frankfurt examples in this volume, see Haji, chapter 6, Long, chapter 7, Fischer, chapter 9, and van Inwagen, chapter 10. 7. Let ‘P0’ represent a proposition that expresses the state of the world at some time t0 before any human beings existed, let ‘L’ represent the conjunction of the laws of nature, and let ‘P’ represent any true proposition. Here is van Inwagen’s Third Argument (1983, 93–104; 1989, 404–405). (1)

((P0 & L) → P)

assumption of determinism

(2)

(P0 → (L → P))

from (1) by exportation

(3) N(P0 → (L → P))

from (2) by (␣)

(4) NP0

premise

(5) N(L → P)

from (3), (4) by (␤)

(6) NL

premise

(7) NP

from (5), (6) by (␤)

8. Fischer (1982, 1987, 1994) and Fischer and Ravizza (1998). For other theories of moral freedom along the lines of semicompatibilism, see Lehrer (1980) and the articles in Fischer (1986, part 1), Fischer and Ravizza (1993, part 2), and Kane (2002, part 4). This latter section includes discussions of the new compatibilists, who provide naturalistic conceptions of moral responsibility inspired by P. Strawson (1962). 9. For contemporary discussions of libertarianism, see O’Connor (1995) and Kane (2002, part 6). See also Kane, chapter 2, and van Inwagen, chapter 10. 10. For versions of the successor view, see Kane (2002, part 7), G. Strawson (1986), Pereboom (2001), and Honderich, chapter 16. The term ‘successor view’ is Kane’s. See also Kane, chapter 3, for a discussion of origination. Van Inwagen is not a moral nihilist though he does embrace a related view, called ‘restrictivism’, deﬁned below. 11. The expression ‘compatibility problem’ is from van Inwagen (1983, 2). 12. We thank Bruce Glymour for providing the basis of this paragraph. 13. See Reid (1983), Campbell (1957), Taylor (1963), and Chisholm (1964). For more recent versions of the theory, as well as criticisms of it, see articles in O’Connor (1995) and Kane (2002, part 6). Kane, chapter 2, and van Inwagen, chapter 10, contain interesting criticisms of the concept of agent causation from the libertarian perspective. 14. This is based on an example from Ravizza (1994, 78). 15. For compatibilists representing the former approach, see Lewis (1981) and Lehrer, chapter 2. For compatibilists representing the latter approach, see Moore (1912) and Lehrer (1976, 1980). Kane (2002, part 4) also contains some recent essays of interest on compatibilism.

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References Aristotle. 1963. Categories and De Interpretatione. J. L. Ackrill, trans. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Campbell, C. A. 1957. On Selfhood and Godhood. London: George Allen and Unwin. Chisholm, R. 1964. “Human Freedom and the Self.” The Lindley Lecture. Lawrence, Kans.: University of Kansas, Department of Philosophy. Reprinted in Pereboom (1997). Eliot, T. S. 1943. “Burnt Norton.” Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt, Brace. Fischer, J. M. 1982. “Responsibility and Control.” Journal of Philosophy 89: 24–40. Reprinted in Fischer (1986). . ed. 1986. Moral Responsibility. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. . 1987. “Responsiveness and Moral Responsibility.” In F. Schoeman, ed., Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions: New Essays on Moral Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . ed. 1989. God, Foreknowledge, and Freedom. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. . 1994. The Metaphysics of Free Will. Oxford: Blackwell. Fischer, J. M., and M. Ravizza, eds. 1993. Perspectives on Moral Responsibility. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. . 1998. Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frankfurt, H. G. 1969. “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.” Journal of Philosophy 66: 828–839. Reprinted in Fischer (1986). (All page references are to this latter book.) . 1971. “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person.” Journal of Philosophy 68: 5–20. Reprinted in Fischer (1986). Ginet, C. 1966. “Might We Have No Choice?” In K. Lehrer, ed., Freedom and Determinism. New York: Random House. . 1990. On Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hawthorne, J. 2001. “Freedom in Context.” Philosophical Studies 104: 63–79. Kane, R. 2002. The Oxford Handbook of Free Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lehrer, K. 1976. “‘Can’ in Theory and Practice: A Possible Worlds Analysis.” In M. Brand and D. Walton, eds., Action Theory. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Reprinted as “A Possible Worlds Analysis of Freedom” in Lehrer (1990).

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. 1980. “Preferences, Conditionals and Freedom.” In P. van Inwagen, ed., Time and Cause: Essays Presented to Richard Taylor. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Reprinted in Lehrer 1990. . 1990. Metamind. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lewis, D. 1981. “Are We Free to Break the Laws?” Theoria 47: 113–121. Reprinted in Lewis (1986). Philosophical Papers, volume 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Long, A. A., and D. N. Sedley, eds. and trans. 1987. The Hellenistic Philosophers: volume 1: Translations of the Principle Sources. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moore, G. E. 1912. Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press. O’Connor, T., ed. 1995. Agents, Causes, and Events: Essays on Indeterminism and Free Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pereboom, D. 1997. Free Will. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett. . 2001. Living without Free Will. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ravizza, M. 1994. “Semi-Compatibilism and the Transfer of Nonresponsibility.” Philosophical Studies 75: 61–93. Reid, T. 1983. Inquiry and Essays. R. E. Beanblossom and K. Lehrer, eds. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett. Strawson, G. 1986. Freedom and Belief. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Strawson, P. F. 1962. “Freedom and Resentment.” Proceedings of the British Academy 48: 1–25. Taylor, R. 1963. Metaphysics. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. van Inwagen, P. 1975. “The Incompatibility of Free Will and Determinism.” Philosophical Studies 27: 185–199. . 1980. “The Incompatibility of Responsibility and Determinism.” In M. Bradie and M. Brand, eds., Bowling Green Studies in Applied Philosophy, vol. 2: 30–37. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University. Reprinted in Fischer (1986): 241–249. (All page references are to this latter work.) . 1983. An Essay on Free Will. Oxford: Clarendon Press. . 1989. “When Is the Will Free?” In J. Tomberlin, ed., Philosophical Perspectives 3: Philosophy of Mind and Action Theory. Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview. Reprinted in O’Connor (1995). . 1998. “The Mystery of Metaphysical Freedom.” In P. van Inwagen and D. Zimmerman, eds., Metaphysics: The Big Questions. Oxford: Blackwell.

Determinism, Freedom, and Agency

1

Determinism: What We Have Learned and What We Still

Don’t Know John Earman

1

Introduction

The purpose of this essay is to give a brief survey of the implications of the theories of modern physics for the doctrine of determinism. The survey will reveal a curious feature of determinism: in some respects it is fragile, requiring a number of enabling assumptions to give it a ﬁghting chance; but in other respects it is quite robust and very difﬁcult to kill. The survey will also aim to show that, apart from its own intrinsic interest, determinism is an excellent device for probing the foundations of classical, relativistic, and quantum physics. The survey is conducted under three major presuppositions. First, I take a realistic attitude toward scientiﬁc theories in that I assume that to give an interpretation of a theory is, at a minimum, to specify what the world would have to be like in order for the theory to be true. But we will see that the demand for a deterministic interpretation of a theory can force us to abandon a naively realistic reading of the theory. Second, I reject the “no laws” view of science and assume that the ﬁeld equations or laws of motion of the most fundamental theories of current physics represent science’s best guesses as to the form of the basic laws of nature. Third, I take determinism to be an ontological doctrine, a doctrine about the temporal evolution of the world. This ontological doctrine must not be confused with predictability, which is an epistemological doctrine, the failure of which need not entail a failure of determinism. From time to time I will comment on ways in which predictability can fail in a deterministic setting. Finally, my survey will concentrate on the Laplacian variety of determinism according to which the instantaneous state of the world at any time uniquely determines the state at any other time.

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The plan of the survey is as follows. Section 2 illustrates the fragility of determinism by means of a Zeno-type example. Then sections 3 and 4 survey successively the fortunes of determinism in the Newtonian and the special relativistic settings. The implications of ordinary nonrelativistic quantum mechanics and relativistic quantum ﬁeld theory for determinism are taken up on section 5. Determinism in classical general relativistic physics is discussed in section 6. Section 7 contains some, necessarily speculative, comments on how determinism may fare in a quantum theory of gravity. Conclusions are presented in section 8. 2

Zeno’s Revenge: An Illustration of the Fragility of Determinism

Suppose that the world is populated with billiard balls. And suppose that the laws of motion for this world consist precisely of the speciﬁcations that when two balls collide they obey the standard laws of elastic impact and that between collisions they move uniformly and rectilinearly. And ﬁnally suppose that atomism is false so that billiard balls of arbitrarily small size can exist. Then à la Zeno we can string a countably inﬁnite number of unit mass billiard balls in the unit interval. Assume that at t t* all the balls in this inﬁnite string are at rest and that coming from the right is a cue ball of unit mass moving with unit speed (see ﬁgure 1.1a). In a unit amount of time an inﬁnite number of binary collisions take place, at the end of which each ball is at rest in the original position of its left successor in the series (see ﬁgure 1.1b).1 The time reverse of this process has all the balls initially at rest. Then suddenly a ripple goes through the string, and the cue ball is ejected to the right. Futuristic Laplacian determinism is violated since it is consistent with the laws of elastic impact that the string does not self-excite but remains quiescent for all time (Laraudogoitia 1996).2

(a)

(b) Figure 1.1 Zeno’s revenge.

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I see no non–ad hoc way to save determinism in this setting. If we cherish determinism we can only thank the Creator that he did not place us in a world where atomism is false and where Zeno can have his revenge. 3

Determinism in Newtonian Physics

One theme that will be sounded again and again in this section is that classical spacetimes provide unfriendly and even hostile environments for determinism. A related theme is that determinism in classical physics is inextricably linked to basic philosophical issues about the nature of space, time, and motion. To illustrate the latter theme I assert that Laplacian determinism implies that it cannot be the case that both (i) space is ‘absolute’ in the sense that it is a ‘container’ for bodies (e.g., shifting all the bodies in the universe one mile to the east results in a new state distinct from the original state), and (ii) all motion is the relative motion of bodies. The argument is simple. Assumption (ii) implies that only relative particle quantities, such as relative particle positions, relative particle velocities, relative particle accelerations, and so forth, and not absolute position, velocity, acceleration, and so forth, are well-deﬁned quantities. The appropriate classical spacetime setting that supports this conception of motion has three elements: planes of absolute simultaneity, which reﬂect the observer-independent nature of coexistence; a metric (assumed to be ⺕3) on the instantaneous three-spaces, which measures the spatial distance between simultaneous events; and a time metric, which measures the lapse of time between nonsimultaneous events.3 But if (i) is maintained in this spacetime setting, not even a weakened form of Laplacian determinism can hold for particle motions. In coordinates adapted in the natural way to the spacetime structure, the symmetries of the spacetime have the form x → x R(t)x a(t)

(1a)

t → t t const

(1b)

where R(t) is a time dependent orthogonal matrix and a(t) is an arbitrary smooth function of time. We can choose a(t) and R(t) such that a(t) 0 R(t) for t t* but a(t) 0 or R(t) 0 for t t*. Since a symmetry of the spacetime should be a symmetry of the laws of motion, the image under (1) of a solution of the equations of motion should also be a solution. But for

J. Earman

24

*

t=t

particle world lines Figure 1.2 An apparent violation of Laplacian determinism.

p ∉ D+ (Σ)

t space invader

Σ (plane of absolute simultaneity) Figure 1.3 Domain of dependence in classical spacetime.

the chosen forms of a(t) and R(t) the two solutions will agree for all t t* but will disagree for t t* since the two solutions (as indicated by the solid and the dashed world lines of ﬁgure 1.2) entail different future positions for the particles in the container space. To save determinism one can reject (i) and claim that the alleged violation of determinism is spurious on the grounds that once the container view of space is rejected there is no temptation to see the dashed and solid lines of ﬁgure 1.3 as different future histories rather than as different representations of the same history. To make good on this point of view it would have to be shown how to concoct deterministic and empirically adequate equations of motion that are formulated entirely in terms of relative particle quantities. As the history of mechanics shows, this is not an easy row to hoe. But that is a story I don’t have time to recount here.

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25

The alternative way to save determinism is to reject (ii) and beef up the structure of the spacetime by adding, say, inertial structure to make welldeﬁned quantities like absolute acceleration. This additional structure linearizes the transformations (1) to x → x Rx vt c

(2a)

t → t t const

(2b)

where R is now a constant orthogonal matrix and v and c are constants. The transformations (2) are, of course, the familiar Galilean transformations. In this spacetime setting (also known as neo-Newtonian spacetime) the above construction that undermines Laplacian determinism doesn’t work since if a transformation from (2) is the identity map for all t t* it is the identity map for all time. However, in neo-Newtonian spacetime other threats to determinism arise. Consider Newtonian gravitational theory written as a ﬁeld theory. The gravitational potential ␸ is governed by the Poisson equation 2␸ 4␲␳

(3)

where ␳ is the mass density. The gravitational force acting on a massive test body moving in the Newtonian gravitational ﬁeld is proportional to ␸. Even the weakest form of Laplacian determinism fails because if ␸ is a solution to (3), then so is ␸ ␸ f, where f(x, t) is any function linear in x. By choosing f(x, t) to be 0 for all t t* but different from 0 for t t*, we produce solutions for which the test body feels exactly the same gravitational force and has exactly the same motion in the past but feels different forces and, hence, executes different motions in the future. The nondeterministic solutions can be killed by excluding the homogeneous solutions to (3). This exclusion amounts to a declaration that the Newtonian gravitational ﬁeld has no degrees of freedom of its own and is only an auxiliary device for describing direct particle interactions. Let us then turn to the pure particle description of Newtonian gravitation. Consider a ﬁnite number of point mass particles interacting via Newton’s 1兾r 2 force law. Let’s simply ignore problems about collision singularities by focusing on solutions that are collision-free. Nevertheless, after many decades of work, it has been established that noncollision singularities can occur; that is, drawing on the inﬁnitely deep 1兾r potential well, the particles can accelerate themselves off to spatial inﬁnity in a ﬁnite amount of

26

J. Earman

time (Xia 1992). The time reverse of such a process is an example of ‘space invaders’, particles appearing from spatial inﬁnity without any prior warning. To put it crudely, you can’t hope to have Laplacian determinism for open systems, and for the type of interaction under discussion, the entire universe is an open system. To save determinism from this threat, three approaches can be taken. The ﬁrst, and least interesting, is to impose boundary conditions at spatial inﬁnity to rule out space invaders. This smacks of making determinism true by creating a postulate of wishful thinking. The second is to maintain the idealization of point mass particles while adding to Newton’s 1兾r 2 attractive force a short-range repulsive force which doesn’t affect predictions for particles with large spatial separations, but which is such that the total potential well is no longer inﬁnitely deep. One would then have to show that the combined force law gives rise to a well-posed Laplacian initial value problem. I am not aware of any results to this effect, but I see no in-principle obstacles to achieving them. The third alternative is to move from point mass particles to a particle with a ﬁnite radius, and to postulate that when two particles collide they obey, say, the laws of elastic impact. Even if it is assumed that atomism is true in a form that excludes the Zeno examples of section 1, this tack can run aground on at least two shoals. (a) If triple collisions occur the result is generally underdetermined since there will be more unknowns than there are governing equations. (b) Even if attention is restricted to binary collisions the uniqueness of solutions can fail if an inﬁnite number of particles are present in the universe. Turn off the gravitational interactions of the particles and suppose that they interact only upon contact. Lanford (1974) constructed a solution4 in which all the particles are at rest for all t t* but for any t t* all but a ﬁnite number of particles are in motion. Thus, the equations of motion don’t determine whether a quiescent past is to be extended into the future by a ‘normal’ solution in which the particles continue to be quiescent or by an ‘abnormal’ solution in which the particles appear to self-excite. Determinism can be saved either by banning inﬁnities of particles or by imposing boundary conditions at inﬁnity which prevent a too rapid increase in the velocities of particles as one goes out to inﬁnity. Either move smacks of making the world safe for determinism by ﬁat. A more interesting saving move would be to show that analogues to Lanford’s solution cannot be constructed if elastic collisions are replaced by a smooth shortrange repulsive force. I am not aware of any results to this effect.

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Let us now leave particles to consider pure ﬁeld theories. A familiar ﬁeld equation in Newtonian physics is the Fourier heat equation ⭸ 2 ␬ ⭸

t

(4)

where ␬ is the coefﬁcient of heat conduction. That (4) fails to be invariant under the Galilean transformations (2) is no cause for concern since the -ﬁeld is supposed to be a property of a medium, and this medium picks out a distinguished rest frame. What is of concern is that disturbances in the -ﬁeld are propagated inﬁnitely fast. As a result, (4) admits smooth solutions * with the by now familiar determinism-wrecking property that * 0 for all t t* but is non-zero for t t*—the ﬁeld theoretic version of space-invading particles. Because of the linearity of (4), if is a solution, so is *. Once again determinism can be saved by paring down the set of solutions by imposing boundary conditions at inﬁnity. Perhaps a more interesting move is to declare that heat is nothing but the kinetic energy of molecules and, thus, that the indeterminism in (4) is not disturbing since (4) is not a fundamental law. The fate of determinism then reverts to properties of the fundamental laws, which are taken to be the laws governing particle motion. Even if one is inclined to follow this line, it should not be allowed to disguise the disturbing point that the Newtonian setting is inimical to deterministic ﬁeld laws. The natural language for formulating laws governing ﬁeld quantities is that of partial differential equations. But the type of pde that admits existence and uniqueness for a Laplacian initial value problem are of the hyperbolic type, and hyperbolic pdes require a null cone structure for spacetime that exists naturally in the relativistic setting but can only be artiﬁcially introduced in the Newtonian setting. Although it is outside of my main focus, I will close this section with a few comments on epistemological matters. Ontological determinism is compatible with sensitive dependence on initial conditions. When measurement procedures for ascertaining the values of state variables are not error-free—as would seem to be the case for any actual measurement— sensitive dependence on initial conditions means that the link between determinism and prediction is weakened and even broken. Furthermore, a strong form of sensitive dependence on initial conditions (positive Liapunov components) plus the compactness of phase space implies ‘chaos’ in the form of higher-order ergodic properties, such as the Bernoulli property (see Belot and Earman 1997), which means that on a macroscopic

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scale a deterministic system can behave in a seemingly random and stochastic fashion. This raises the issue of whether and how critters such as us can be justiﬁed in believing that the stochastic behavior we are observing is due to indeterminism in the form of an irreducibly stochastic element or to deterministic chaos (see Suppes 1993). 4

Determinism in Special Relativistic Classical Physics

The prospects for determinism brighten considerably when we leave classical spacetimes for Minkowski spacetime, the spacetime setting for special relativistic theories. The combination of the null cone structure for Minkowski spacetime plus the prohibition of superluminal propagation kills space invaders and solves in a non–ad hoc way the open systems problem. Fudge-free examples of Laplacian determinism—no boundary conditions at inﬁnity needed—are now possible. Indeed, physicists are so convinced that Laplacian determinism is the norm in this setting that they sometimes use it to draw a distinction between fundamental and nonfundamental ﬁelds. A ‘fundamental ﬁeld’ (such as the source-free electromagnetic ﬁeld and the scalar Klein–Gordon ﬁeld) is one whose ﬁeld equations (respectively, the source-free Maxwell equations and the massive Klein–Gordon equations) have a Laplacian initial value problem that admits global existence and uniqueness proofs: given the appropriate initial data on a Cauchy surface (a spacelike hypersurface which intersects each timelike curve without an end point) there exists one and only one global solution (i.e., a solution valid for all of Minkowski spacetime) whose restriction to the chosen Cauchy surface agrees with the given initial data. The failure of ﬁeld equations to admit even local existence and uniqueness proofs is taken as an indication of an incompleteness of description. The failure of global existence and uniqueness— say, because the solutions develop singularities after a ﬁnite amount of time—is taken as an indication of an illicit idealization of description. A feel for why the relativistic setting is friendlier to Laplacian determinism than the Newtonian setting can be gained by introducing the notion of the domain of dependence D(兺) of some subset 兺傺 M of points 兺 of the spacetime manifold M. The future (respectively, past) domain of dependence D(兺) (respectively, D(兺)) is deﬁned as the set of all p 僆 M such that every past (respectively, future) inextendible causal curve through p intersects 兺. The total domain of dependence D(兺) of 兺 is then deﬁned as

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D(兺) 艛 D(兺). The idea is that, if the laws of physics are cooperative, the state on 兺 sufﬁces to ﬁx the state throughout D(兺); but for a point q 僆 D(兺) it is hopeless to try to determine the state at q from the state on 兺 since events at q can be inﬂuenced by a causal process that does not register on 兺. Using D(兺) we can give a general deﬁnition of a Cauchy surface that applies to general relativistic spacetimes (to be discussed in section 6) as well as to Minkowski spacetime and also—with suitable allowances—to classical spacetimes: it is a global time slice 兺 (i.e., a spacelike hypersurface without edges) such that 兺 is achronal (i.e., is not intersected more than once by any future directed timelike curve) and such that D(兺) is the entire spacetime M. The t const level surfaces of any inertial time t for Minkowski spacetime are, of course, Cauchy surfaces. But the level surfaces of absolute simultaneity of Newtonian spacetime are not Cauchy (see ﬁgure 1.3); indeed, in this case D(兺) 兺 for 兺 as t const. If determinism fares better in Minkowski spacetime, prediction certainly does not. The basic problem is that the very null cone structure that helps to make the special relativistic setting friendly to determinism makes it impossible to acquire the information needed for a prediction prior to the occurrence of the events to be predicted. To make this precise a few additional deﬁnitions are needed. Deﬁne the causal (respectively, chronological ) past of a point p 僆 M, J(p) (respectively, I(p)) to be the set of all q 僆 M such that there is a future-directed causal (respectively, timelike) curve from q to p. Then for a point p 僆 M take the domain of prediction P(p) of p to be the set of all q 僆 M such that (i) every past inextendible causal curve through q enters J(p), and (ii) I(q) 債 I(p).5 Condition (i) is needed to assure that an observer at p can, in principle, have causal access to all the processes that can inﬂuence the events at q, and condition (ii) is needed to assure that from the perspective of an observer at p the events to be predicted at q have not already occurred. The reader can now verify that for any point p of Minkowski spacetime, P(p) . 5 Determinism in Nonrelativistic Quantum Mechanics and Relativistic Quantum Field Theory To illustrate how using determinism to probe the foundations of physics can lead to interesting results, consider the following little puzzle. No ﬁeld equation for a scalar ﬁeld ␺ that is ﬁrst order in time and Galilean invariant

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can be Laplacian deterministic. For we can choose a Galilean transformation (2) with the property that it is the identity on the slice t 0 but nonidentity for t 0. By Galilean invariance this transformation will carry a solution of the ﬁeld equation to another solution, but the new solution has the same initial data ␺ (x, 0) as the original solution but different values for t 0. The puzzle concerns the Schrödinger equation ⭸␺ ˆ ␺ ih៮

H ⭸t

(5)

ˆ is the Hamiltonian operator. For a particle with mass m moving in where H h៮2 2 ˆ

an external potential V(x), H V. This equation seems to contradict 2m

what was said above since it is ﬁrst order in time, is (presumably) Galilean invariant, and is Laplacian deterministic in that ␺(x, 0) uniquely determines ␺(x, t) for t 0. The resolution is that ␺ does not behave like a scalar under a Galilean transformation. In fact, the transformation properties of ␺ needed to guarantee Galilean invariance of (5) implies a ‘superselection rule’ for mass which means that states corresponding to different mass cannot meaningfully be superposed. In some respects quantum systems behave more deterministically and more predictably than their classical counterparts. As an example of the former, consider again the problem of a ﬁnite number of point mass particles interacting via Newton’s 1兾r 2 law. The quantum Hamiltonian operator ˆ for this system is (essentially) self-adjoint, which implies that the evoluH ˆ t) is unitary and is deﬁned for all t. QM has tion operator Uˆ (t) : exp(ih៮H magically smoothed away the both the collision and noncollision singularities of classical mechanics. This magic does not work for all of the singularities of classical mechanics. For example, one could try to overcome the Lanford type singularity discussed above in section 3 for inﬁnite billiards by modeling the collisions of the balls with a short range repulsive force and then quantizing. Unfortunately, there is no well-deﬁned quantum dynamics for such a system if the repulsive force is sufﬁciently strong (Radin 1977). QM also overcomes one form of unpredictability that haunts classical mechanics since, in one sense, QM does not recognize any sensitive dependence on initial conditions. From the linearity and unitarity of the time evolution operator, it follows that 储␺1(0) ␺2(0)储储U(t)(␺1(0) ␺2(0))储储U(t)␺1(0) U(t)␺2(0)储储(␺1(t) ␺2(t))储: in words, if at t 0 two states are nearby, they remain nearby for all t 0 in the Hilbert space norm 储 • 储. This

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simple fact has caused some consternation since it isn’t evident how, consistent with the correspondence principle, chaos can emerge from QM in some appropriate classical limit (Belot and Earman 1997). None of the remarks so far touches the core problem of determinism in QM. But that problem is difﬁcult to discuss, or even to formulate, because it is bound up with a contentious issue about the nature of quantum observables; namely, under what conditions do the quantum observables, as represented by self-adjoint operators on a Hilbert space, take on deﬁnite values? One answer endorsed by standard textbooks on QM is that an observable A takes the deﬁnite value a at t iff the state ␺(t) is an eigenstate of the operator Aˆ with eigenvalue a.6 This eigenvector-eigenvalue rule—or any value assignment rule which says that an observable has a speciﬁed deﬁnite value just in case the state vector has some speciﬁed characteristic— together with deterministic Schrödinger evolution for ␺ would mean that Laplacian determinism holds for quantum systems.7 The well-known difﬁculty with the eigenvector-eigenvalue value assignment rule is that it implies the unacceptable result that, after an interaction with an object system, the pointer on the dial of a measuring instrument that couples to the observable whose value for the object system we wish to ascertain has no deﬁnite value if the initial state of the object system was a superposition of eigenstates of the observable being measured. One attempt to overcome this embarrassment involves ‘state vector reduction’: at some juncture during the measurement process, Schrödinger evolution ceases and the state vector jumps into a simultaneous eigenstate of the object observable and the macro pointer position observable that serves as an indicator of the value of the object observable. The violation of the Schrödinger equation is, of course, a violation of Laplacian determinism; but statistical determinism is maintained by the assumption that the propensity of the state vector to collapse into a given eigenstate is governed by the Born rule probability calculated from the state vector just before collapse. The collapse solution to the measurement problem comes at a high cost. The original theory with an embarrassing consequence has been replaced by a nontheory: the objection is not simply that the state vector reduction is a miracle—a violation of the Schrödinger equation—but that since ‘measurement’ is a term of art whose application is not speciﬁed by the theory, exactly when and under what circumstances the reduction takes place is

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left dangling. Some physicists have proposed to bridge this gap by describing a mechanism for state vector reduction by means of a nonlinear wave equation or a stochastic differential equation (see Ghirardi et al. 1986 and Pearle 1989). The extant state vector reduction schemes are nondeterministic; but it is an open question whether they must have this property. The major alternative route to a solution of the measurement problem involves a modiﬁcation of the eigenvector-eigenvalue value assignment rule rather than of the state vector dynamics. The different paths that branch off this no-collapse route can lead to quite different conclusions about determinism, as is illustrated by the Bohm interpretation, the modal interpretations, and the many worlds/many minds interpretations. According to the ﬁrst, particles always have deﬁnite positions, and these positions evolve deterministically via an equation of motion that is parasitic on the Schrödinger evolution of the state vector. Assuming that all laboratory measurements can be reduced to recording positions, the Bohm interpretation offers a deterministic explanation of how and when other quantum mechanical observables, such as spin, take on deﬁnite values. It is shown that the orthodox quantum mechanical probabilities are recovered for all times on the assumption that the initial probability distribution at t 0 over particle positions q is equal to the quantum mechanical prescription 冷␺ (q, 0)冷2. By contrast, modal interpretations don’t seek to preserve determinism but settle for the more modest aim of breaking the eigenvector-eigenvalue link open wide enough to make sure that measurements have deﬁnite outcomes. This aim is accomplished by a value assignment rule which makes use of a special decomposition of the vector for composite systems (the ‘biorthogonal decomposition’). This decomposition identiﬁes a privileged class of observables which are said to possess deﬁnite values without saying which particular values are possessed. Some modal theorists want to add to their value assignment rule a dynamics for possessed values. There is a plethora of such dynamical schemes (see Dickson 1998). Typically these schemes are not deterministic. However, a recent proposal by Ax and Kochen (1999) restores determinism by construing the phase of the state vector as an additional hidden parameter—the different unit vectors in a ray of Hilbert space are taken to correspond to different members of an ensemble, and the apparent indeterminism of QM is due to a random distribution of initial phases. Many worlds interpretations come in two main versions: the literal version according to which a measurement event corresponds to a physical

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splitting of the world observer (qua physical object), and the ﬁgurative version according to which it is not the physical world but the mind or mental state of the observer that splits. On the literal version determinism fails if there is a fact of the matter about which postmeasurement observer (qua physical object) is identical with the premeasurement observer. By the same token, measurement is not an indeterministic process if genidentity of observers is denied. A parallel conclusion holds for the many minds version, with minds in place of bodies. It is hard to take any of this seriously, not so much because of the metaphysical extravagances, but because it is not at all evident that the many worlds/many minds interpretation does resolve the measurement problem: it doesn’t explain exactly when and under what circumstances the splitting takes place, and it doesn’t explain why the splitting takes place in some bases of the Hilbert space but not others. There is no easy way to summarize the status of determinism in QM, but two points need to be underscored. The proponents of the Bohm interpretation claim that it recovers all quantum mechanical predictions, statistical and nonstatistical, about experiments. If this is correct, it means that in a world of ordinary nonrelativistic QM the fate of Laplacian determinism would have to be decided by nonempirical factors. The second remark concerns the claim, sometimes heard, that determinism is defeated by various no-go results for hidden variables—for example, those of the Kochen–Specker type and those that ﬂow from the Bell inequalities. What these no-go results show is that, consistent with certain plausible mathematical restrictions on value assignments and/or with the statistical predictions of QM, some set of quantum observables cannot be assigned simultaneously deﬁnite values lying in the spectra of these observables. By itself this hardly defeats Laplacian determinism; nor is it even a terribly surprising conclusion—after all, many classical quantities are best construed as having a dispositional character in that they only take on deﬁnite values in limited contexts. That it is impossible to view the values of quantum observables as supervening on more fundamental quantities whose temporal evolution is deterministic would require a different kind of proof, a proof whose existence is highly dubious in view of the example of the Bohm interpretation. We saw that moving classical mechanics from the Newtonian setting to the special relativistic setting improves the fortunes of determinism. The same cannot be said for quantum mechanics; for the fortunes of determinism in QM are bound by the knots of the measurement problem and

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the value assignment problem, and in the relativistic setting these knots are drawn even tighter. State vector reduction is supposed to take place instantaneously. Transposing this notion to the relativistic setting seems to require either breaking Lorentz invariance or relativizing states to spacelike hyperplanes (Fleming 1996), neither of which is an attractive option. The relativistic setting is also unkind to the modal interpretation because it is difﬁcult to reconcile the value assignment rule of this interpretation with Lorentz invariance (Dickson and Clifton 1998). Nor does the Bohm interpretation ﬁt comfortably with relativistic quantum ﬁeld theory (QFT) since the ontology of this theory is best construed not in terms of particles but in terms of local ﬁeld observables. The general idea of Bohmian dynamics can be applied to observables other than particle position. But in the absence of a demonstration that in measurement contexts the ﬁeld observables chosen for Bohmian treatment will exhibit the localization needed to explain measurement outcomes, one of the major reasons for ﬁnding the Bohm interpretation attractive has been lost (see Saunders 1999). Furthermore, when QFT is done on curved spacetime the dynamics for the quantum ﬁeld may not be unitarily implementable (see Arageorgis et al. 2002), making it harder to construct a ﬁeld theoretic analogue of the Bohm dynamics for particle position. 6

Determinism in Classical General Relativistic Physics

In Einstein’s general theory of relativity (GTR) we have to deal not with one spacetime setting but many since different solutions to the Einstein gravitational ﬁeld equations (EFE) 1 Rab 2 Rgab ␬Tab

(6)

give different spacetime structures. (Here gab is a Lorentz signature metric, Rab is the Ricci tensor [which is constructed from gab and its derivatives], R : Tr(Rab) is the Ricci curvature scalar, and Tab is the stress-energy tensor [which describes the distribution of the matter-energy].) A model of GTR is a triple M, gab, Tab, where M is a four-dimensional manifold (without boundary) and the metric gab is deﬁned on all of M. A dynamically possible model is one that satisﬁes (6) for all points of M. (Additionally, one may want to impose on Tab various so-called energy conditions that guarantee, for example, nonnegative energy densities.)

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null cones

t

timelike curve

Σ Figure 1.4 Behavior of null cones in anti–de Sitter spacetime.

To ﬁrst approximation we can take a spacetime M, gab of a dynamically possible model as a ﬁxed background on which a test ﬁeld propagates. And we can ask whether this propagation exhibits Laplacian determinism. For some spacetimes coming from dynamically possible models of GTR the issue of global Laplacian determinism for a test ﬁeld cannot even be stated since there may not exist any global time slices, as is the case with Gödel spacetime. In other cases the issue can be posed but has a negative answer because the spacetime admits global time slices but none of them is a Cauchy surface, as illustrated by the (covering space) of anti–de Sitter spacetime (see ﬁgure 1.4) where, in effect, the space invaders of Newtonian physics have returned in a general relativistic guise. Here again we have an illustration of the moral that determinism succeeds only with a little—or a lot—of help from its friends. Here the friends must ﬁnd a non-question-begging way to exclude such pathologies from the causal structure of general relativistic spacetimes. Treating spacetime as a ﬁxed backdrop against which nongravitational physics takes place is inimical to the spirit of GTR which implies that spacetime structure is dynamical. Strictly speaking, the evolution of the test ﬁeld has to be treated as part of the general problem of the coevolution of the metric and matter ﬁelds as governed by the coupled Einstein matter ﬁeld equations. For the sake of simplicity I will initially concentrate on the initial value problem for the source-free (Tab ⬅ 0) EFE 1 Rab 2 Rgab 0

(7)

Specifying the metric ﬁeld and its normal derivative on some spacelike slice 兺 does not sufﬁce to determine, via (7), the values of the ﬁeld at

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points of M to the future or the past of 兺. Indeed, specifying gab on 兺 and the entire causal past of 兺 does not sufﬁce to determine gab at points to the future. For if M, gab is a solution to the (7) and d : M → M is any diffeomorphism of M, then M, d*gab is also a solution.8 By now you know the trick: choose d such that d id for all points of M on or to the past of 兺 but d id for points of M to the future of 兺. Thus we get two solutions of (7) such that the metric ﬁelds are the same in the past but different in the future.9 Determinism can be saved by requiring of it only that the values of genuine physical magnitudes or ‘observables’ be determined, via the ﬁeld equations, from initial data. What then are the observables of GTR? If we have faith in determinism we can close the circle and require that whatever counts as an observable be such that its future and past values be determined by appropriate initial data (Bergmann 1961). From the above construction we see that the observables of GTR must be diffeomorphically invariant quantities.10 This means that none of the familiar local ﬁeld quantities—such as the metric ﬁeld or scalar ﬁelds formed from the metric ﬁeld—are observables. And in some situations, such as solutions with compact time slices, not even quasi-local quantities such as the integral of the Ricci curvature over a time slice are observables. Here I want to emphasize the contrast between the Newtonian and general relativistic cases. In the Newtonian case it was possible to save determinism from the kind of threat under discussion either by abandoning the notion that the spacetime manifold is a container for events or alternatively by retaining this notion and adding sufﬁcient absolute background structure to the spacetime. But in the general relativistic setting that eschews absolute objects, there is no choice; making GTR a safe haven for Laplacian determinism necessitates a radical revision of the surface level ontology and ideology of GTR as a theory of tensor ﬁelds on manifolds. One of the disconcerting features of the revision is that it seems to entail a completely frozen block universe—not only is there no shifting nowness, but there is a total absence of ordinary change since the values of observables of GTR do not change with time (see my 2002). So as not to sidetrack the discussion into these interesting but controversial matters, I will continue to discuss determinism in GTR in terms of the vocabulary of the surface level structure, which means that the statement of uniqueness results for the initial value problem will have to contain an escape clause of ‘up to a diffeomorphism’.

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Suppose then we are given a three manifold 兺 and initial data on 兺 for the source-free gravitational ﬁeld. Does this data ﬁx an appropriately unique solution to the source-free ﬁeld equations (7)? The answer is yes, at least locally: there exists a unique (up to diffeomorphism) maximal development M, gab of the initial data for which 兺 is a Cauchy surface; that is, M, gab cannot be extended as a solution to the source-free equations in any way that keeps 兺 a Cauchy surface.11 Extending this local result, which gives no information about the size of the maximal solution for which 兺 is a Cauchy surface, to a global result— especially to the very strong global result that requires the unique maximal development for which the initial value hypersurface is a Cauchy surface to be maximal simpliciter—can run into various kinds of problems. First, we might have made a poor choice of the initial value hypersurface; for instance, we might have chosen 兺 to be the spacelike hyperboloid of Minkowski spacetime pictured in ﬁgure 1.5. Obviously the maximal development of the initial data, induced on 兺 by the Minkowski metric, for which 兺 is a Cauchy surface—namely D(兺)—can be properly extended as a solution of the source-free ﬁeld equations. Second, and more interestingly, there might be no good choice for the initial value surface, as in the case of an inextendible spacetime, which is a solution of (7) and does not possesses any global Cauchy surfaces. This disturbing possibility can arise for two reasons. (a) The causal structure might be like that illustrated in ﬁgure 1.4. (b) A singularity might develop in a ﬁnite time from the regular initial data, as is indicated schematically in ﬁgure 1.6. Singularities can arise, of course, in the Newtonian and special relativistic settings, but because of the existence

null surfaces

D+ (Σ)

Σ

Figure 1.5 A bad choice of initial value hypersurface.

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singularity

D+(Σ)

Σ Figure 1.6 A naked singularity.

of a ﬁxed background metric these singularities are easily characterizable— for example, they occur at regions of spacetime where some physical ﬁeld ‘blows up’ or becomes discontinuous. But in the general relativistic setting there is no ﬁxed background metric, and the singularities at issue are singularities in the metric structure of spacetime itself. Since by deﬁnition a spacetime is a pair M, gab where gab is deﬁned at all points of M, we cannot think of singularities as objects that have spacetime locations. Attempts have been made to characterize spacetime singularities in GTR as boundary points that are attached to the manifold M; but these constructions all seem to involve counterintuitive features—for example, the boundary points may not be Hausdorff separated from interior points. And to make things even more complicated, the singularities that lead to a breakdown of Laplacian determinism need not be of the intuitive sort involving, say, a ‘blow up’ or wild oscillation of curvature scalars. In fact, one could simply dub any spacetime pathology which prevents moving from the local to global versions of Laplacian determinism in GTR a ‘naked singularity’. Then the task would be to classify and characterize these pathologies.12 Roger Penrose’s cosmic censorship conjecture surmises that the pathologies of naked singularities are not as bad in practice as they might seem in principle. Cosmic censorship comes in two versions, weak and strong. The weak version asserts that, generically, if naked singularities do develop from the gravitational collapse of suitable matter ﬁelds, then they will be contained inside black holes so that those fortunate observers who remain outside the black hole event horizon cannot ‘see’ the singularity and are,

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blackhole interior

39

singularity

ℑ+

ι0

horizon

collapsing matter r=0

(a)

singularity

ℑ+

ι0

horizon

collapsing matter

r=0

(b) Figure 1.7 Weak and strong cosmic censorship in black hole formation.

thus shielded by the one-way causal membrane of the horizon from whatever nondeterministic effects emanate from the singularity.13 The strong version of cosmic censorship conjectures that, generically, naked singularities do not develop from suitable matter ﬁelds, so that even the unfortunate observers who fall into a black hole do not ‘see’ the singularity. The strong and weak versions are illustrated respectively in ﬁgures 1.7a and 1.7b, which represent black hole formation in spherical gravitational collapse.14 The weasel phrases ‘generically’ and ‘suitable matter ﬁelds’ are essential to warding off potential counterexamples. For instance, the weak version of cosmic censorship can be violated using collapsing dust matter.

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But it seems wrong to lay the blame for the resulting naked singularity on the process of gravitational collapse itself since, even in Minkowski spacetime singularities in dust matter ﬁelds can develop from regular initial data. Thus, ‘suitable’ matter ﬁelds should be restricted to the ‘fundamental’ matter ﬁelds for which global existence and uniqueness properties hold in Minkowski spacetime (see section 4). But this restriction is not by itself enough to save weak cosmic censorship since special initial conﬁgurations of the Klein–Gordon ﬁeld (certainly a fundamental ﬁeld) can lead to naked singularities in gravitational collapse. Making precise the notion of nonspecial or generic initial conditions would require either a suitable measure on the space of solutions to Einstein’s equations (in which case, generic except for a set of measure zero) or a suitable topology (in which case, generic complement of a set whose closure has an empty interior). Since it is not clear what the relevant measure or topology is, the cosmic censorship conjecture is also unclear. Despite these difﬁculties however, a growing body of inductive evidence—for example, from the stability of black holes—suggests that some interesting form of weak cosmic censorship is probably true (Wald 1998). Opinion on the strong cosmic censorship conjecture is more mixed, in part because it is harder to state in a form that is both general and free of obvious counterexamples. Proving a general form of either the weak or strong version seems to be beyond the capabilities of present techniques for investigating the global existence and uniqueness of the solutions to nonlinear pdes. Supposing that cosmic censorship fails, it remains unclear how the fortunes of determinism are affected. Classical GTR places no restrictions on what nondeterministic inﬂuences can emerge from the naked singularities. But this does not mean that anything goes. If we are optimistic, we can suppose that even at the prequantum level there are additional lawlike regularities, beyond those codiﬁed in Einstein GTR, that govern these inﬂuences. And a quantum theory of gravity may add further restrictions or, even better, get rid of the singularities altogether. In closing this section I will note that while the fortunes of determinism becomes more perilous in passing from special to general relativistic physics, the fortunes of prediction perk up. For example, in various general relativistic spacetimes it is possible to have nonempty domains of prediction; indeed, it is possible for there to be points p 僆 M such that P(p) M (see Hogarth 1993).

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41

Implications of Quantum Gravity

Among the challenges facing physics in the twenty-ﬁrst century, that of producing a quantum theory of gravity is one of the most important and the most difﬁcult. At the present moment there are two leading approaches: the loop formulation, which is a version of the canonical quantization program that aims to produce a quantum theory of gravity by quantizing GTR, and string theory, which does not start with classical GTR but seeks to explain it as an outcome of some low-energy limit of vibrating string or branes. Both programs hold out the hope that the singularities of classical GTR will be smoothed away, which would be a boon for determinism. This hope is fueled by the ability of the quantum to smooth away classical singularities. In section 5 we saw a demonstration of this ability at work in ordinary QM which smooths away some of the collision and noncollision singularities of Newtonian point mass mechanics. Another demonstration comes from the fact that quantum particles shot at the timelike singularities (which violate cosmic censorship) of some general relativistic spacetimes have a well-deﬁned temporal evolution (Horowitz and Marolf 1995). However, there is an argument to the effect that we shouldn’t hope that quantum gravity will smooth away all of the singularities of classical GTR; for if, for instance, a quantum theory gravity smoothed away the singularity of the negative mass Schwarzschild solution, the theory would admit a nonsingular solution with an unstable ground state, which is a physical disaster (Horowitz and Myers 1995). String theorists can remain optimistic on the basis of the fact that their theory must entail a stable ground state; thus, insofar as string theory smooths away classical singularities, it must also contain a mechanism that excludes solutions such as a smoothed version of the negative mass Schwarzschild solution (Johnson et al. 2000). In the absence of a completed theory of quantum gravity, some insight into what may result from combining GTR and QM can be obtained from attempting to do QFT on a curved spacetime background. In even the simplest case of a linear scalar ﬁeld, determinism is crucial to the attempt: the standard construction of the algebra of ﬁeld observables relies on the deterministic character of (real) solutions to the Klein–Gordon equation, which holds when the spacetime background is globally hyperbolic ( admits a Cauchy surface). When global hyperbolicity fails, there is no accepted procedure for constructing the ﬁeld algebra, and when the reason for failure of global

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ℑ+

Σ2 horizon

ι0

Σ1

r=0

Figure 1.8 Black hole evaporation.

hyperbolicity is the presence of nasty causal structure—such as closed timelike curves—there may exist no global ﬁeld algebra consistent with the natural demand that the algebra, when restricted to sufﬁciently small globally hyperbolic neighborhoods, should agree with the algebra obtained by applying standard construction to those neighborhoods (see Fewster 1999). The next step up the ladder to quantum gravity involves the so-called semiclassical approximation in which the expectation value of the (renormalized) stress-energy tensor for quantum ﬁelds on a curved spacetime is inserted on the right hand side of the EFE (6), and the backreaction effects on the spacetime metric are calculated. Hawking found that the presence of quantum ﬁelds means that the black hole is not black but instead radiates with a thermal spectrum and that the backreaction effect of this Hawking radiation is to cause the black hole to evaporate (Wald 1994). If the evaporation is complete, the likely outcome—insofar as it can be described in terms of classical general relativistic spacetime structure—is a naked singularity (see ﬁgure 1.8). As a consequence, a pure quantum state at the time 兺1, before black hole formation, evolves into a mixed state at the postevaporation time 兺2. This pure-to-mixed transition is necessarily nonunitary, and the ‘information loss’ it involves has been the subject of a heated discussion in the physics literature (see Belot, Earman, and Ruetsche 1999 for a review). If the pure-to-mixed transition survives in the ﬁnal quantum

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theory of gravity, then so does a semblance of singularities as a sink for the missing information (Wald 1999). 8

Conclusion

One might have hoped that this survey would provide an answer to the question: If we believe modern physics, is the world deterministic or not? But there is no simple and clean answer. The theories of modern physics paint many different and seemingly incommensurable pictures of the world; not only is there no uniﬁed theory of physics, there is not even agreement on the best route to getting one. And even within a particular theory— say, QM or GTR—there is no clear verdict. This is a reﬂection of the fact that determinism is bound up with some of the most important unresolved foundations problems for these theories. While this linkage makes for frustration if one is in search of a quick and neat answer to the above question, it also makes determinism an exciting topic for the philosophy of science. Acknowledgment I am grateful to Rob Clifton, John Norton, and Laura Ruetsche for a number of helpful suggestions. Notes 1. There is, of course, a violation of conservation of energy and momentum in the overall process even though both energy and momentum are conserved in each collision. 2. This example also illustrates a violation of even the weakest version of Laplacian determinism according to which the future state of the world is determined by its entire past history. 3. For more details on various classical spacetime structures, see my (1992). 4. Solution in the sense that only binary collisions occur and each such collision obeys the laws of elastic impact. 5. This is a slight modiﬁcation of the deﬁnition given in Geroch (1977). Other deﬁnitions of prediction for general relativistic spacetimes are studied in Hogarth (1993). 6. This rule implies that an observable with a pure continuous spectrum never takes on a deﬁnite value. This awkwardness can be overcome by talking about approximate eigenstates.

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7. At least on the reasonable understanding that the failure of the theory to determine the nonexistent value of an observable does not represent a failure of determinism. 8. A diffeomorphism of M is a one-one map of M onto itself that preserves the differentiable structure (e.g., if M is a C manifold, the mapping must be C ). d*gab denotes the dragging along of gab by d. 9. This is a version of the notorious ‘hole argument’ which led Einstein to abandon his search for generally covariant ﬁeld equations from 1913 until late 1915; see Norton (1987). 10. In 1916 Einstein took the ‘observables’ of GTR (although he did not use this term) to be spatiotemporal coincidences, such as the intersection of two light rays (see Einstein 1916 and Howard 1999). In order to be adequate to the content of GTR, Einstein’s notion of coincidence observables has to be extended to ﬁelds. 11. M, gab is said to be a (proper) extension of M, gab iff the latter can be isometrically embedded as a (proper) subset of the former. For the details of the initial value problem in GTR, see Wald (1984). 12. For a more detailed discussion of spacetime singularities, as well as the cosmic censorship hypothesis (introduced below), see my (1995). 13. Being visible is not sufﬁcient to make a singularity ‘naked’ in the relevant sense; for example, the initial big bang singularity in Friedmann-Robertson-Walker spacetimes is not ‘naked’ because all of these spacetimes possess Cauchy surfaces. 14. Figures 1.7 and 1.8 use the conventions of conformal diagrams, which preserve causal relations but distort metrical relations in order to bring inﬁnities in to a ﬁnite distance; namely, null directions lie at 45° with respect to the vertical; ℑ stands for future null inﬁnity, the terminus of outgoing light rays; and ␫o stands for spacelike inﬁnity. The center of the spherical symmetry is labeled by r 0.

References Arageorgis, A., J., Earman, and L. Ruetsche. 2002. “Weyling the Time Away: The Aon-unitary Implementability of Quantum Field Dynamics on Curved Spacetime.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 33: 151–184. Ax, J., and S. Kochen. 1999. “Extension of Quantum Mechanics to Individual Systems.” Quant-ph/9905077. Belot, G. and J. Earman. 1997. “Chaos Out of Order: Quantum Mechanics, the Correspondence Principle and Chaos.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 28: 147–182.

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Belot, G., J. Earman, and L. Ruetsche. 1999. “The Hawking Information Loss Paradox: The Anatomy of a Controversy.” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 50: 189–229. Bergmann, P. G. 1961. “Observables in General Relativity.” Reviews of Modern Physics 33: 510–514. Dickson, M. 1998. “On the Plurality of Dynamics.” In J. Hellman and R. Healey, eds. Quantum Measurement: Beyond Paradox. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press. Dickson, M. and R. Clifton. 1998. “Lorentz Invariance in Modal Interpretations.” In D. Dieks and P. Vermaas, eds. The Modal Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Earman, J. 1992. World Enough and Spacetime: Absolute vs. Relational Theories of Space and Time. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Earman, J. 1995. Bangs, Crunches, Whimpers, and Shrieks: Singularities and Acausalities in Relativistic Spacetimes. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Earman, J. 2002. “Thoroughly Modern McTaggart: Or What McTaggart Would Have Said if He Had Learned the General Theory of Relativity.” Philosophers’ Imprint. Http://www.philosophersimprint.org. Einstein, A. 1916. “Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie.” Annalen der Physik 49: 769–822. English translation from W. Perrett and G. B. Jeffrey eds. The Principle of Relativity. New York: Dover, 1952. Fewster, C. J. 1999. “Bisolutions to the Klein–Gordon Equation and Quantum Field Theory on 2-Dimensional Cylinder Spacetimes.” Classical and Quantum Gravity 16: 769–788. Fleming, G. N. 1996. “Just How Radical Is Hyperplane Dependence?” in R. Clifton ed. Perspectives on Quantum Reality. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Geroch, R. 1977. “Prediction in General Relativity.” In J. Earman, C. Glymour, and J. Stachel eds. Foundations of Space-Time Theories, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 8. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press. Ghirardi, G. C., T. Rimini, and T. Weber. 1986. “Uniﬁed Dynamics for Microscopic and Macroscopic Systems.” Physical Review D 34: 470–491. Hogarth, M. 1993. “Predicting the Future in Relativistic Spacetimes.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 24: 721–739. Horowitz, G. T., and D. Marolf. 1995. “Quantum Probes of Spacetime Singularities.” Physical Review D 52: 5670–5675.

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Horowitz, G. T., and R. Myers. 1995. “The Value of Singularities.” General Relativity and Gravitation 27: 915–919. Howard, D. 1999. “Point Coincidences and Pointer Coincidences: Einstein and the Invariant Content of Space-Time Theories.” In H. Goenner, J. Renn, J. Ritter, and T. Sauer, eds. The Expanding Worlds of General Relativity. Einstein Studies, volume 7. Boston, Mass.: Birkhäuser. Johnson, C. V., A. Peet, and J. Polchinski. 2000. “Gauge Theory and the Excision of Repulsion Singularities.” Physical Review D 61: 086001. Lanford, O. E. 1974. “Time Evolution of Large Classical Systems.” In J. Moser, ed. Dynamical Systems, Theory and Applications. Lecture Notes in Mathematics, volume 38. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. Laraudogoitia, J. 1996. “A Beautiful Supertask.” Mind 105: 81–83. Norton, J. D. 1987. “Einstein, the Hole Argument and the Reality of Space.” In J. Forge, ed. Measurement, Realism, and Objectivity. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Pearle, P. 1989. “Combining Stochastic Dynamical State Vector Reduction with Spontaneous Localization.” Physical Review A 39: 2277–2289. Penrose, R. “Gravitational Collapse: The Role of General Relativity.” Revisita del Nuovo Cimento. Serie 1, 1 Numero Speciale: 252–276. Radin, C. 1977. “The Dynamical Instability of Non-Relativistic Many-Body Systems.” Communications in Mathematical Physics 54: 69–79. Rovelli, C. 1991. “What Is an Observable in Classical and Quantum Gravity?” Classical and Quantum Gravity 8: 297–316. Saunders, S. 1999. “The `Beables’ of Relativistic Pilot Wave Theory.” In J. Butterﬁeld and C. Pagonis, eds., From Physics to Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Suppes, P. 1993. “The Transcendental Character of Determinism.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, volume 18. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press. Wald, R. M. 1984. General Relativity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wald, R. M. 1994. Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime and Black Hole Thermodynamics. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press. Wald, R. M. 1998. “Gravitational Collapse and Cosmic Censorship.” In C. V. Vishveshwara, B. R. Iyer, and B. Bhawal, eds., Black Holes, Gravitational Radiation, and the Universe. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Wald, R. M. 1999. “Gravitation, Thermodynamics, and Quantum Theory.” Classical and Quantum Gravity 16: A177–A190. Xia, X. 1992. “The Existence of Noncollision Singularities in the N-Body Problem.” Annals of Mathematics 135: 411–468.

2

Freedom and the Power of Preference

Keith Lehrer

It is the power of preference that leads us to think and aver that things are up to us or in our power. Our preferences are the source of our freedom. But we must have our preferences because we prefer to have them and not because they are imposed on us. We have reasons for our preferences. Our reasons for our preferences must be our reasons because we prefer them to be. We must be agent and author of our preferences for them to be free. Our preferences, however, seem to be part of the causal order. So how can we have our preferences because we prefer to have them? How can things be reasons for our preferences because we prefer that they be? How can we be the agent and author of our preferences, when our preferences are part of the causal order? How, on the contrary, can we have preferences because we prefer to have them if they are not part of the causal order? When we reﬂect on how preferences empower us, we understand that we must empower them. But how? These are the questions I shall seek to answer. The keystone to the answer is a kind of special preference that loops back onto our preferences including itself. There is a minimal notion of freedom expressed by ‘can’ and ‘could have’. It goes this way. I do something freely if and only if I could have done otherwise. Extending the minimal notion of freedom to preference, I prefer something freely if and only if I could have preferred otherwise. The appropriate meaning of ‘could have’ required to articulate our freedom cannot be assumed to be contained in antecedent usage, however. On the contrary, we must construct the requisite meaning needed for an adequate theory of freedom. Let me return to a simple analysis, recognizing that this is theory construction, not semantics. We are trying to construct, then, an analysis of ‘can’ and ‘could have’ that will enable us to build a theory of freedom.

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To accomplish this, I shall need a notion of preference that I have advocated. You may wish to substitute some notion of preference you consider more satisfactory. I distinguish between desire and preference (Lehrer 1997). Desire I think of as something that arises in us without our bidding and often against our will. I suddenly desire to eat some chocolate as I am writing. Should I stop writing and get some chocolate? I have Ghirandelli semisweet chocolate in the kitchen. I have also eaten quite bit of this chocolate today. Then I have a desire to look at my paintings. I am a painter, and I like to look at my paintings. But once I do, I absorb myself in them for a while. So here I am, trying to write, distracted by desires to eat chocolate and look at my paintings. What a nuisance these desires are. They suddenly appear, these uninvited distractions. Go away, I want to write. But they do not go away. I prefer not to satisfy them, and, in fact, I continue to write. What I prefer is up to me. What I desire is not. I evaluate my desires and prefer to satisfy some and not others. So preference is typically the positive evaluation of something desired. But not always. Sometimes I consider some course of action and prefer to undertake that course of action without any desire to do so. I prefer to prepare the materials to pay my taxes, but I have no desire to do so. None whatsoever. It is rather, as I consider the consequences of preparing or not preparing the materials to pay my taxes, I evaluate preparing the materials as preferable to not doing so, and I prefer to prepare them without any desire to do so. There are many such cases of odious or burdensome obligations. Though I prefer to do what I am obliged to do, I have no desire for it. What this reveals is that preference is a different kind of state than desire, though both may inﬂuence what I do. I have proposed that preferences are states of a different level of mentality. So, I think of desire as arising without my bidding or approval, the states of a ﬁrst-level mind that are not up to me, as contrasted with preferences that are up to me. What I prefer as I evaluate what I desire or consider, either reﬂectively or spontaneously, at the level of the metamind, is where optionality and freedom enter the picture. Preference like choice, which is the immediate expression of preference, is a condition of our freedom. This discourse could become fully and completely a discussion of preference and what it is like. I have, however, discussed preference elsewhere and so, having noted the distinction between desire and preference, it is the application of the notion in a theory of freedom that will be my focus.

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Some have suggested that ‘I can do X’ might be analyzed conditionally as ‘I will do X if I prefer to do X’ and ‘I could have done X’ as ‘I would have done X if I had preferred to do X’.1 Now, in the normal case, my preferences will be up to me. Consequently, analyzing ‘I can’ and ‘I could have’ in this way will yield the result that when I can do something in the way analyzed, then it is in my power to do it. Further, if I both can do something and can do otherwise instead, then it is up to me whether I do it. But that result is only a material consequence, for it is possible that what I prefer is not in my power, not up to me. Consequently, we have not conceptually insured even a minimal doctrine of freedom with the satisfaction of the conditionally analyzed notion of ‘can’ and ‘could have’. Before rushing too quickly to the conclusion that the analysis is unsatisfactory, it is important to notice the importance and insight of it. It is the kind of freedom that we lack when in chains or imprisoned. It is the kind of freedom that people have fought and died for. If it is not all that there is to freedom, it is a great deal. Moreover, since preference reﬂects our evaluation of options, it is typically and normally an expression of choice. Whether I choose X or not-X typically depends on what I prefer. So, in the typical case, the conditional analysis of ‘can’ and ‘could have’ will capture a notion of freedom in a way that a conditional analysis in terms of desires would not. A person driven hither and thither by desire may appear more passive than active, more controlled than empowered. But preference is different. What we prefer reﬂects our evaluations of what is preferable, desirable, good for ourselves, and, ideally, good for others. Preference amalgamates these evaluations in a choice disposing state. However, even if the conditional analysis gives us most of what we value in freedom and perhaps most of what makes us uncomfortable as we deal with our freedom, a problem remains. Our preferences might be controlled by another and not be in our power or up to us. We must say something about freedom of preference as well as freedom of action based on the conditional analysis of freedom. I suggested in earlier work (Lehrer 1990) inﬂuenced by Frankfurt (1971), that we iterate the conditional analysis to provide an account of freedom of preference. Putting the matter in terms of ‘can’, we might add to the analysis of ‘I can do X’ as ‘I will do X if I prefer to do X’ the further conditional that ‘I will prefer to do X if I prefer to prefer to do X’, or to introduce a notation reﬂecting levels of concatenation of preference ‘I will prefer (1) to do

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X if I prefer (2) to do X’. Thus, ‘I prefer to do X’, expresses ﬁrst-level preference, and in our level-speciﬁed notion becomes ‘I prefer (1) to X’, while ‘I prefer to prefer to do X’ expresses second-level preference, and in our notation becomes ‘I prefer (2) to do X’. More generally, ‘I prefer (n 1) to do X’ is equivalent to ‘I prefer to prefer (n) to do X’. To avoid a problem arising about freedom at level (2) or beyond, we might add the perfectly general conditional, ‘I will prefer (n) to do X, if I prefer (n 1) to do X’ requiring that it hold for all levels of n. There is no vicious regress in the condition, since I do not have to do anything for the set of conditionals to be true. They can all be true. Moreover, there is no problem in principle of processing such higher order conditionals since, as the general conditional reveals, to process up a level I would only need to process whether I prefer what I preferred at the previous level, and the answer might be obviously, “Yes.” We are capable of processing things computationally, a step at a time, without grasping the whole sequence in a ﬂash of intuition. However, as some have correctly pointed out, van Inwagen and Segerberg,2 it might be that someone controls what I prefer at all levels and what I would prefer at all levels if my preferences were different so that my preference at all levels are in his power and not in mine. Our detractor who will introduce a demon or manipulator imagined to control my preference, perhaps by inserting a device, call it, as I have, a “braino,” in my brain so that when he types ‘pX(1)’ on his computer, I prefer (1) to do X and the same for any other level. I have two comments. First, there are no such manipulators. Once brainos start getting produced and installed, we shall have a problem about our freedom that we do not have at the moment. So, the analysis may have the virtue of being materially adequate and illuminating in our current state of technology. It could reveal the way in which our preferences can be in our power or up to us. They can be what we prefer them to be. However, it is important to go beyond the actual case to obtain further illumination and security for our analysis against preference control. Moreover, the way to accomplish this is not only clear but avoids the necessity of postulating an inﬁnite hierarchy of preferences, even hypothetically. What is needed for a satisfactory analysis is the satisfaction of two conditions. The ﬁrst is that I prefer to have the preferences I do have concerning X however far up the preference hierarchy they might extend or not extend. The second is that this preference to have the preferences I have

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is one that I have, not because it is manipulated by another, but just because I prefer to have it. Let us call the preferences we have at various levels concerning doing X my preferences structure for X. Now consider my preference to have my preference structure for X. Let us call that my power preference for X. I propose as one condition of freedom of preference that I prefer X and I have my preference structure for X because I prefer to have it. There are special features of the power preference and of my having that preference because I prefer to have it. First, my power preference for having my preference structure for X is itself a preference in that preference structure because it is itself a preference concerning X. Thus, it is a preference for having a preference structure that includes that preference. The preference refers to itself, as it is a preference for itself as well as other preferences in the structure. It is, therefore, an unstratiﬁed or level-ambiguous preference. On one standard account of level-ambiguous states, they are semantically ungrounded (Kripke 1975). Ungroundedness may be considered as a defect in the truth conditions for a sentence, but it is not a defect of a state intended to analyze freedom of preference. Second, the preference ends a possible regress of preferences with a loop. Theories of higher order preference that appear to require a complete hierarchy of preferences are often criticized on the ground that the requirement is psychologically unrealistic. We have noted that if preferences over preferences are considered computationally or functionally, it is not clear that any difﬁculty in principle results from such requirements. However, the addition of preferences past the second or third level, though it can be processed computationally, might lack efﬁcacy. So, there is an advantage in not requiring a hierarchy of preferences, and use of the power preference allows us to dispense with that requirement. The power preference ensures that any preference that one has at any level is one that one prefers to have, for that is what the power preference is a preference for. It allows, in principle, that freedom of preference could result from a ﬁrst-order preference for X and the unstratiﬁed power preference for X that would, in that case, be a preference for the ﬁrst-order preference and for itself. Moreover, the present account allows for the possibility that preferences that insure freedom might contain conﬂict between levels of preference. Frankfurt’s account and my own earlier account indebted to him require that the preferences insuring freedom be homogeneous in the sense that every preference in the structure be a preference for the preference of the

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preceding level. Such accounts require a conﬂict-free preference structure concerning X, while the present proposal allows for the possibility of freedom in spite of conﬂict. I might prefer at the second level not to have the preference at the ﬁrst level that I have. As I consider the resulting preference structure with the preference for X and the preference for not having that preference, however, I might ﬁnd that I prefer to have that preference structure, including the conﬂict, and thus have a power preference for having that preference structure for X. The conﬂict might strike me as representing moral or just prudential complexity. I might, for example, prefer to spend my resources on a friend who is hardly in need rather than on a stranger who is in acute need. After some struggle within, I might still prefer to spend my money on my friend, but admiring the nobility of people having broader humanitarian concerns prefer not to have that preference. As I consider that preference structure, I might prefer to have it, both because I prefer to spend money on my friend and also prefer to have different preferences expressing a nobler perspective. I prefer to have the preference structure that I have including the conﬂict at the second level rather than repudiating the conﬂict for the felicity of a homogeneous preference structure. Freedom of preference is, on the account I am proposing, compatible with conﬂict within the structure. Of course, it is essential that I not only have the power preference for X but that I have it because I prefer to have it. Otherwise, it may be that I have the preference structure for X because I am manipulated by the braino rather than because I prefer to have it. This requirement, which I shall call the primacy condition, should be understood to insure that the primary cause or explanation of the preference structure is the preference for the preference structure. There may, of course, be secondary causes or explanations. For example, suppose that you are the friend and prefer that I spend my money on you. If that is the primary cause or explanation of why I prefer to spend money on you, there is no reason to conclude that I have freedom of preference. I may be in your power, and my preferences as well, and so it is in your power what I prefer, it is up to you what I prefer, and I lack freedom. I am in your control. However, there is another possible manner in which your preference might inﬂuence my preferences which is compatible with my freedom of preference. I might prefer to do what you prefer in this instance because I prefer to have that preference structure. The primary cause or explanation

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of why I prefer what I do is that I prefer to have the preference structure I have, in this case, including a preference for what you prefer. It is not in your power or up to you what I prefer. It is in my power or up to me what I prefer, though, in fact, my preferences include a preference for what you prefer. Who has the power in the matter depends on whose preferences are the primary cause or explanation of my preferences. I am free in my preference for what you prefer if I prefer what you prefer because I prefer to have that preference. I am in bondage to you if I prefer what you prefer just because you prefer what you do. In short, if your preference is effective because I prefer that I have the preference structure I do and prefer what you prefer, then I am free and my preferences are in my power, while if your preference is effective just because you prefer what you do, then I am bound by your preferences and in your power. Once we have in mind the distinction between the case in which the power preference is the primary cause or explanation of the preference and the case in which it is not, we are in a position to deal with a central issue, that of the compatibility of causation and freedom. Moore noted a long time ago that, though there is a sense of ‘could’ that yields the result that under the assumption of determinism nothing ever could happen other than it did, it remains an open question whether this sense of ‘could’ is the one that is involved when, claiming that we are free, we avow that we could have done or preferred otherwise.3 The question of the compatibility of freedom and determinism remains open, and a sufﬁcient condition for freedom that is compatible with determinism can be based on what has been said above. To clarify the issue of compatibility, it is important to be clear about the logic of compatibility. It will sufﬁce for the purposes of the compatibilist to provide a set of sufﬁcient conditions for freedom that are compatible with the thesis of determinism. The principle is that if c entails f and c is consistent with d, then f is consistent with d. This shows that we do not need to concern ourselves with the question of whether a condition is necessary for freedom in order to employ the condition in an argument for the compatibility of freedom and determinism. That is important for two reasons. First, the necessary condition for freedom of action or preference might be some rather heterogeneous disjunction of conditions that is not very perspicuous. Second, and more important, it appears from the discussion above that we can formulate a sufﬁcient condition for freedom of action

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and preference in terms of the power preference and the primacy condition, even if such a condition should prove not to be necessary. Here, then, is a sufﬁcient condition. Let us begin with freedom of preference. Suppose I prefer to do something, to write this paper, for example. We are seeking a sufﬁcient condition for this freedom without worrying about whether it is necessary. If we add some bells and whistles that are not really needed for freedom of preference, that will not matter. So let us help ourselves to a set of conditions that are clearly sufﬁcient, that clearly insure freedom of preference. Here are the conditions I propose for our consideration. My preference for doing X is free if 1. I have a power preference for X, that is, I would prefer to have the preference structure for X that I have. 2. The power preference for X satisﬁes the primacy condition, that is, I would have the preference structure for X because I would prefer to have it. These conditions, though they insure that my preference is not manipulated by another might not provide adequate insurance that I could have preferred otherwise. So let us add a third condition to ensure that. 3. If I had preferred to have a preference structure with the preference to do otherwise, I would have had that preference structure with the preference structure to do otherwise because I would have preferred to have it. Conditions 1 and 2 ensure that I have the preference structure that I do because I prefer to have it, while condition 3 ensures that if I had had the preference structure to do otherwise, I would have had that preference structure because I preferred to have it instead. I claim that this is sufﬁcient for freedom of preference. I prefer to do X because I prefer to have the preference structure for X including that preference for doing X, and if I had preferred to have a preference structure with a preference to do otherwise, I would have had that preference because I preferred to have it. It is up to me what preference structure I have, both actually and counterfactually, and that sufﬁces for my freedom of preference. Whatever preference structure I have or would have concerning doing X, I would have it because I prefer to have it. It should be noted that the subjunctive formulation of conditions 1 and 2 in terms of ‘would’ requires not only that the person has the preference to do X because he prefers to have the preference structure containing this,

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but also that he would have it. This treats the very inﬂuential Frankfurt (1969) counterexamples to the principle of alternative possibilities by requiring alternative possibilities for freedom of preference. In these counterexamples, though a person does what he prefers, namely, to do X, and prefers to prefer to do X and so forth, there is an inactive counterfactual intervener with knowledge of what the person is about to prefer and the power, which he would have exercised if necessary, to make the person prefer to do X if the person were about to not prefer to do X. Such a person as described in the Frankfurt examples who prefers to do X would not have the preference to do X because he preferred to have that preference when he was about to not prefer to do X and the intervener caused him to have the preference to do X. The person would have the preference because the counterfactual intervener would intervene. So we have a sufﬁcient condition for freedom of preference when whatever preference structure I have or would have concerning doing X is one I would have because I prefer to have it. Suppose that I do something because I freely prefer to do it and I would have done otherwise if I had preferred otherwise which I would also have preferred freely. That is a sufﬁcient condition for freedom of action. I could have done otherwise. So from the three conditions formulated above we obtain an account of freedom of preference and freedom of action. Are the three conditions offered above compatible with determinism? They are. The reason is related to the remarks about the primacy of causation and explanation given above. You may cause me to prefer something without that destroying my freedom of preference if I prefer what you prefer because I prefer to have that preference structure and my preference for that preference structure is the primary cause or explanation. Similarly, some other reason or motive may cause me to prefer something without that destroying my freedom of preference. Suppose I prefer to respond to that reason or motive because I prefer to have a preference structure responding to such reasons or motives. Moreover, suppose my preference for that preference structure is the primary cause or explanation of it. That ensures my freedom. Furthermore, the assumption of the primacy of preference in causation and explanation is compatible with causation and explanation. These remarks introduce a further complication, and a necessary one in our theory of what is sufﬁcient for freedom. The complication concerns the inﬂuence of reasons or motives. Any compatibilist account must include a

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theory of how reasons can inﬂuence our preferences, indeed, cause us to prefer one thing rather than another, without undermining our freedom of preference. Moreover, one advantage of a compatibilist account of freedom of preference is that it permits us to explain the function and efﬁcacy of reasons and motives causally rather than leaving this unexplained. The problem is to explain the difference between causation that insures freedom and causation that creates bondage. The solution consists in part of a difference in how reasons or motives cause us to prefer what we do when we are free as opposed to when we are not. There is a system of reasons or motives to which I am responsive in the formation of preference. What those reasons and motives are may not be up to me. Recall that what we desire is often not up to us, though we may freely prefer to satisfy the desire or freely prefer not to satisfy it. In other cases, desires may overwhelm us, and we may seek the satisfaction of them obsessively or compulsively without doing so freely. What is the difference? The answer should be clear from the preceding remarks. The difference is whether we respond to the reasons we have because we prefer to do so. We are here going beyond the power preference, a preference for preferences for X, to a more complicated structure of preference for responding with preference to reasons. There is a special preference, which I shall call an ultrapreference, for the more complicated structure of responding to reasons with preference. Again, however, I may have the ultrapreference I do have for X, including a preference for responding to reasons, because I prefer to have it. Here, then, is the theory I am offering as sufﬁcient to enable us to distinguish between causation by reasons that insures our freedom of preference and causation that does not. Suppose I have a system of reasons SR for X. This system may include reasons for doing X and replies to objections to that course of action. Now suppose I have a system of reasons SR and respond to that system by forming a preference for X. Notice, ﬁrst of all, that I may prefer X under the satisfaction of the three conditions of freedom and, therefore, freely prefer X even though I form that preference in response to SR. That is so when I respond to the reasons because I prefer to respond to SR in that way, and I would respond otherwise if I preferred otherwise because I preferred to respond otherwise. I have an ultrapreference to respond to certain reasons for X by preferring X, and I have that ultrapreference because I prefer to have it. The primacy of causation and

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explanation obtained from my having the power preference and ultrapreference because I prefer to have them is what insures my freedom within the nexus of causation. We can now say that I freely prefer X because I prefer to have the preference structure that I have for X and because I have the reasons that I do for preferring X. The explanation of how both can be true is given by the ultrapreference that I have for responding to certain reasons that I have because I prefer to have it. We do not need to appeal to unexplained or mysterious factors to explain this kind of freedom. We do not need to suppose that the inﬂuence of motives is something other than causal. It is causal. It is just that the causal efﬁcacy of the reasons depends on my preference for responding in that way. That is what permits me to be rationally free in my preference at the same time that my preference is caused and, indeed, caused by the reasons that are part of the system of reasons. I respond to system of reasons because I prefer to do so. At this point, a question naturally arises concerning the relationship between the ultrapreference and the responsiveness to the system of reasons. One might ask whether I have my ultrapreference because I respond to the system of reasons I have or whether I respond to the system of reasons I have because of my ultrapreference? The answer is that both are true. I have my ultrapreference because I respond to the system of reasons, and I respond to the system of reasons because of my ultrapreference. The relationship of the system of reasons to the ultrapreference is one of mutual causal support and dependency. An analogy I have used before to explain the causal dependency is that of a keystone in an arch. The arch requires the keystone to stand, for otherwise it would collapse, but the other stones, constituting the system of reasons, are also essential to the arch. Moreover, the keystone, which is the ultrapreference, contributes to its own support by supporting the sides of the arch that support it. It is, in a way, self-supporting but only in relationship to the other stones. Finally, if there is a system of arches, corresponding to structures of reasoning for preferences, they may constitute a dome with a common circular keystone at the top. In that case, the circular character of the keystone is part of what makes it effective in supporting the dome of rational preference and the system of reasons, the arches, which, in turn, support it. All of this is only an analogy and a metaphor. The point of it is to illustrate that the relation of mutual support of the system of

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reasons and the ultrapreference can be interpreted causally without paradox. The notion of mutual causal support is a commonplace one. Nevertheless, the feeling might remain that something must come ﬁrst. Either we ﬁrst have a system of reasons that causes us to form the ultrapreference or we ﬁrst form the ultrapreference that creates the system of reasons. Sartre, who speaks of choice rather than preference, thinks there is a kind of ultrachoice that we must make without justiﬁcation and without excuse and that choice is both free and ﬁlls us with dread as we realize there is nothing to support it.4 Though I am indebted to Sartre for my conception of an ultrapreference, I do not agree with him that it is without justiﬁcation and without excuse. Preference, unlike mere desire, involves evaluation in terms of reasons we have for satisfying or not satisfying what we desire or consider. Thus, our preferences are formed with at least personal justiﬁcation, however fallible or fallacious the justiﬁcation might be. On the other hand, a hard determinist afﬁrming the incompatibility of freedom of preference and causation might argue that what reasons we have and what preferences we form based on those, including the ultrapreference itself, are caused by our having those reasons, or in some other way. So the reasons, the justiﬁers and excusers, cause our preferences, including our ultrapreference, and there is no room for freedom in causal sequences that lead to the formation of the reasons and from the formation of reasons to the preferences. Thus, the traditional dilemma. Either the reasons to which we respond cause the preferences including the ultrapreferences, and, therefore, are not free, or we respond to the reasons we do because of an uncaused free preference to respond to such reasons, an uncaused version of the ultrapreference, and our preferences are not caused. We can, as I have suggested, exit from this dilemma. The exit is supported by the keystone ultrapreference. We respond to the system of reasons we have because we prefer to respond in that way, that is, because of the ultrapreference for responding in that way. If the ultrapreference contains a power preference satisfying the three conditions given above, the ultrapreference is free. I may have it because I prefer to have it and, if I preferred otherwise, I would prefer otherwise because I would prefer to have that preference. Does that entail that my ultrapreference is itself uncaused and also without justiﬁcation? Does inserting causation and justiﬁcation destroy the freedom of the ultrapreference? Not at all. The

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ultrapreference, like other preferences, is justiﬁed by my evaluation in terms of my reasons to which I respond with preference. But which comes ﬁrst, the system of reasons supporting the ultrapreference or the ultrapreference for preferring the system of reasons? Neither. The system of reasons supporting the ultrapreference and the ultrapreference for the system of reasons stand or fall together composing an arch of reason capped with the keystone ultrapreference. The causal structure of the arch explains the possibility of compatibilism. The ultrapreference is a free preference causally supported by the reasons that justify it. There remains a question about the temporal order of the causal process, about the sequence of causality, and what occurs within it. Any answer to such a question is highly speculative. My proposal is that when we choose and decide we often simultaneously choose to make the reasons that support the choice effective as we make the choice. Of course, we may reﬂect on the reasons for and against performing an action. But when we choose, that choice may constitute, at the same time, a choice to respond to the reasons for it. The idea that we ﬁrst choose to make some reasons the effective ones in choice and then, after that, respond to the reasons by making the choice, though it may sometimes occur, does not seem the typical structure in choice. In effect, choosing a course of action, to write this paper, for example, and choosing to make the reasons in favor of the choice effective, that I committed myself to do so to a friend and former student, for example, seem to me to occur together and to depend on each other. I choose at the same time to make the reasons effective and to write the paper. Since preference to do something is a disposition to immediately choose to do it when the situation is propitious, the preference to write the paper and the preference to make the reasons for doing that effective are made at the same time. This may be obscured by earlier intentions and preferences that inﬂuence me. It remains up to me, however, to prefer to fulﬁll those intentions and to sustain the preferences. So the preference to act and the preference to make the reasons for the preference effective are simultaneous. The two preferences may, in fact, be included in one, the one may be the same, in a sense, as the other, but that claim takes me beyond what is required for my purposes. I leave it before us as a conjecture for evaluation. There remains a synchronic question. How does this structure of a system of reasons and an ultrapreference come into existence in the ﬁrst place?

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The simple answer is that it is caused. I am not sure how. However, I think that the rough picture is that we at a certain stage have no preferences. Only impulses and desires, perhaps informed by unreﬂective beliefs and impressions, that drive our behavior. We form patterns of action, patterns of responding to desires and beliefs, at the level of the ﬁrst-order mind unencumbered by the burden of ratiocination and higher-order evaluation. Then we acquire the higher-order mind, the metamind, that allows us to represent and think about our desires and beliefs, to prefer the satisfaction of some desires and not others, to accept some beliefs but not others, as we sort out the ﬁrst-order states. At this point, at the point of the intervention of the metamind, we go through a brief, somewhat confused period, of vacillation between mind and metamind, and, ﬁnally, we arrive at a state of preference and acceptance, of systems of reasons supporting preferences and preferences supporting reasons. That is my conjecture concerning the transition from mental causation to metamental causation and the freedom of preference. It is not more than a conjecture. The argument from what I have said to the conclusion of compatibilism is brief. Combine the account of freedom of preference in terms of the three conditions concerning the power preference stated earlier with the account of the structure of a system of reasons and the ultrapreference containing a power preference satisfying those conditions, and you have sufﬁcient conditions for freedom of preference. A sufﬁcient condition of freedom of action is easily obtained therefrom. Suppose I do something because I prefer to do it when my preference is free. Suppose in addition, I would have done otherwise if I had preferred to and that preference would have been free. On those suppositions, my action was free. Suppose my action and preference satisfy these sufﬁcient conditions for freedom. Is there anything in these conditions that entails that these structures of preference that sufﬁce for my freedom are uncaused? Nothing at all. Is there anything in this account which entails that something must be undetermined, that there must be some point at which there is no causal explanation for why I prefer one thing and not another? There need be no such point. If I were completely rational in my preferences, which I admit without regret I am not, all my preferences might be responses to reasons that causally support them. There might be causation all the way around, before and after my preferences. But some of them would be free. When I prefer what I do because I prefer to have the preference structure I do, including

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my ultrapreference, I have all the freedom of preference that interests me. Why should I wish, in addition, that the causal order should be undetermined? It may be undetermined, as many aver, but I am indifferent in consideration of my freedom, though curious for theoretical reasons, about whether they are right. Having the positive argument before us, let us consider the advantages and objections to it. First let us consider the advantages, and then we shall turn to the sticking points. The account accommodates many of the claims of libertarians without the assumption of indeterminism. Some, Reid (1788), Chisholm (1966), and Taylor (1966), for example, have said that freedom requires agent causality. I must be the author or agent of my preferences if they are free. But that claim leaves open the question of what is involved in an agent causing her own preferences. My claim is that an agent is the cause of her preferences when she has those preferences because she prefers to have them. Now, one might add, if one wishes, that the agent is a substance, and the substance causes her preference. My suggestion is that this causation amounts to nothing more than her having her preferences because she prefers to have them. What does she do to cause the preferences other than prefer to have them? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps she simply responds to the reasons to which she prefers to respond. Moreover, if she has the preferences because she prefers to have them, then she, and not another, is the agent or author of them. If another were the agent or author of them, then she would not have them because she prefers to have them but because the other prefers that she does. Many have argued that agency is to be explained in terms of rationality, like Kant (1993), or by identifying with the desire to act in terms of reasons, like Velleman (1992). Though acting from reasons may contribute to my sense of agency, it also may not, and so this identiﬁcation of agency with rationality and the desire to respond to reasons seems to me to reﬂect a rationalistic bias. I may feel alienated from the life of reason when reasons alone lead me to a course of action. Personally, I ﬁnd this familiar enough. The life of reason sometimes leaves me feeling that reasons are ruling my life, and I am bereft of any sense of agency in responding to them. I go where the reasons lead me feeling alienated from the process and with a diminished sense of agency. The problem in such cases is that my preference for acting according to the reasons I do is not a preference that I have

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because I prefer to have it. I have a sense of agency when I prefer what I do because I prefer to have that preference and when the effective reasons for the preference, if any, are effective because I prefer that they be effective. I am in this view close to the view that Frankfurt (1971) advances when he emphasized the importance of identifying with a preference for a sense of agency, but I suggest that my identiﬁcation with the preference is the result of having that preference because I prefer to have it and responding to my reasons for having the preference because I prefer to respond to them. There is also the issue of control and power. If I am free in my preferences, then they must be in my control, in my power. Suppose, then, that my preferences and the system of reasons that supports them are ones I have because I prefer to have them, and, moreover, are such that if I preferred not to have them, I would have that preference because I preferred to have it. Are my preferences in my control? I control them all right. I have them because I prefer to have them. If I preferred not to have them, I would have that preference because I preferred to have it. What I prefer is in my control in the sense that my preferences, whatever they may be, are ones that I have because I prefer to have them. I am in control. Do I have power over my preferences? They are in my power. I have the preferences I do because I prefer to have them. To avoid tedium, I proceed no further in this line of argument. Is the theory a theory of volitions? Preferences are like volitions. One problem with trying to analyze freedom in terms of volitions is that the theory appears to lead to an inﬁnite regress, when we try to analyze the freedom of volitions themselves, or, instead, a kind of surd when a philosopher claims that volitions make us free without need to explain what makes the volitions free. But the power preference avoids the regress and the surd. What makes the preference free is that we have the preference structure we do because we prefer to have it. What makes that preference, the power preference, free, is that we have it because we prefer to have it as a preference included in the preference structure. The power preference, since it is a preference we have because we prefer to have it, ties freedom in, down, and together in an explanatory loop. Finally, the theory avoids a kind of paradox of libertarianism. The paradox is that the libertarian insists on the importance of indeterminism and then faces the objection that the mere lack of causal determination does not seem to contribute in any positive way to the account of freedom.

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Ekstrom (2000), who provides us with a profound and articulate theory of libertarianism, tries to ﬁnd a useful place for indeterminism at the point of forming a preference in consideration of reasons in the process of deliberation.5 That is a plausible point for a libertarian to insert indeterminism. But what purpose does it serve? It is supposed to bolster the idea that it is up to me at this point what I prefer. But it is up to me only if I have some positive power to resolve the matter. The mere lack of determinism does not explain the positive power. The positive power, I propose, is captured by the primacy of the power preference, by my having the preference I do at that point, and responding as I do to the reasons I have, because I prefer to have those preferences and to respond in that way. In short, I propose that where the libertarian thinks she gains some advantage by introducing indeterminism into the picture at some point, what is needed is some account of positive empowerment. That is what the power preference gives us without appeal to indeterminism provided we have it because we prefer to have it. The advantages before us, let us look at the problems that confront compatibilism and explain how the sufﬁcient account for freedom solves them. First of all, incompatibilists will ask how it can be up to us or in our power what we prefer or do, if our actions and preferences are caused in a way that extends backward in time to conditions that are beyond our control. As Spinoza (1901) noted, if a projectile were conscious, it might reﬂect, “I could swerve to the left or to the right, but, I prefer to continue on this agreeable parabolic path.”6 Don’t we seem like the projectile if determinism is true? No doubt, some will ﬁnd that image so compelling that there is no convincing them otherwise. But notice that we do not believe that the projectile would swerve off the path if it so preferred. So, there is a difference at the level of action often noted by compatibilists from Moore on. Moreover, even if the projectile were conscious and felt inclined to continue on its parabolic path, it would not have a preference to move along that path because it preferred to have that preference any more than it would continue on that path because it preferred to do so. The causal role of preference in action and in the empowerment of preference is missing. That is why the example is both convincing and misleading. Let us, however, look at the harder arguments for incompatibilism. Both Ginet (1966) and van Inwagen7 have argued that if we have no choice about the past, which we do not, and if we have no choice about the laws

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of nature, which are part of their deﬁnition of laws, then we have no choice about the outcome of the past conditions and the laws of nature. Or to put it another way, there is nothing that we can do to render true claims about the past false or render true claims about the laws false, and, yet, if we can do otherwise than we do, then either the true claims about the past would be false or true claims about the laws would be false. Therefore, if we can do otherwise, we can render either the claims about the past false or the claims about the laws false. But we cannot do these things. So, if determinism is true, then we cannot do otherwise than what we do. Such arguments are very persuasive. How should we reply? My ﬁrst reply is that the word ‘can’ is highly ambiguous in a way that makes it very difﬁcult to argue in a cogent manner about the issue of compatibilism formulated in terms of ‘can’. As Moore (1912) noted, there is clearly a sense of ‘can’ that makes the argument offered sound. I have no doubt that there is a version of the argument that van Inwagen offers using ‘can’ as he intends so that he can meet the objections of his critics and argue that if determinism is true, then no one could have done otherwise— in his use of ‘can’. Similarly, there are other uses, meanings, of ‘can’, some of which I have proposed, from which compatibilism follows. Examples include conditional analyses and variations thereof in terms of accessibility relations to possible worlds, analyzing accessibility in ways that favor compatibilism. Formulating the matter in terms of ‘can’ is, I ruefully conclude, hazardous, and the question is easily begged. Nevertheless, I do think that the conditions that I have offered are sufﬁcient conditions, not only for freedom, but also for saying that a person could have done otherwise. So how do we avoid the argument that if determinism is true, then no one could ever have done or preferred to do anything other than what they did or preferred to do? There is a principle that ﬁgures into the argument in one form or another which says that if a person can do something, and something is a necessary condition for his doing it (like the falsity of either the past or the laws of nature), then, if the person can do the thing, then the person can bring about the necessary conditions for doing it as well. This is plausible. It says that if something is necessary to doing something, then if you can do the thing in question, you can bring about the necessary condition. Plausible, but false. One necessary condition of my writing this paper is the birth of my parents, but there is nothing I can do to bring about the birth of my parents. Similar

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criticisms hold for the general principle that says that if some condition is necessary for a person doing something, then if the person can do the thing, the person can bring about the condition. Now any incompatibilist worth his or her arguments will jump up and down and reply that it is only conditions that do not exist and which are necessary for doing something that a person must be able to bring about if they can perform the action. Again, however, this is false. If the conditions simply will occur if the person performs the action, that is all that is required. Now when we turn to what could have been, what a person could have done, we must say that any condition that is necessary for the person to have done the action is one that would have occurred. So, as Lewis (1981) noted, when we say that a person could have done something that she did not do, then, if determinism is true, we must conclude that if the person had done what she did not do, then the necessary condition of her doing it, namely, the falsiﬁcation of the statements about the past or statements of laws would have occurred. But we cannot conclude that the person doing otherwise would have brought about the occurrence of that condition. That would be a mistake. All we can conclude is that one of those statements would have been false. Now let us look at the power preference. Suppose I had preferred otherwise. Moreover, suppose that I had preferred otherwise because I preferred to have a preference structure containing that preference. Then a necessary condition for my preferring otherwise is that I not have preferred what I actually did and that all necessary conditions for that were satisﬁed. That includes that either the laws concerning my preference or the past would have been otherwise. I see no problem with this. It does not follow from the fact that I could have preferred otherwise that I could have thereby brought about the necessary conditions for so preferring, and, more specifically, it does not follow that I could have brought it about that the past or laws would have been otherwise. All that follows is that they would have been otherwise if I had preferred otherwise. You might inquire further what would have been otherwise—the past or the laws? Suppose it is the laws of nature that would have been otherwise. What that means, of course, is not that something would have been both a law and false but, rather, that something that was law would not have been law. Is that strange? Some, van Inwagen (1975) and Ginet (1966), have suggested that whether something is a law of nature does not depend on

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our choices or preferences, though van Inwagen (1983) has noted the possibility of voluntaristic laws. Most laws do not concern human choices and preferences. Such laws, the laws of chemistry, for example, do not depend on our choices and preferences. However, they are not laws concerning our choices and preferences, laws of the form, Lc, to the effect that under conditions C a person S will choose or prefer X, for example. Now consider laws like Lc, supposing there are some. What is the point of saying that they do not depend on human choices and preferences? They concern our choices and preferences, after all, and say that under conditions C people choose or prefer X. Such laws of the form of Lc clearly do depend on our choices and preferences. If we do not choose or prefer X under conditions C, then Lc would not be a law. So, there is nothing strange in the idea that if I had chosen or preferred other than X under C, then Lc would not have been a law, though, in fact, it is a law. Now we come to the critical objection, however. If Lc is a law, shouldn’t we conclude from this that no one could have not chosen or preferred X when they were in conditions C? No doubt that there is a sense of ‘could have’ that would warrant this conclusion, but, as I have noted before, we need the additional premise that when a person could not have chosen otherwise in this sense, then the person could not have chosen otherwise in the sense required for the person to be free to have chosen otherwise. And it is precisely this step I wish to question. Notice, that a law statement must be true, and there is a sense of ‘could have’ in which it seems obvious that no one can make what is true false and, thus, that no one could have made what is a true law statement false. But that sense of ‘could have’ does not deprive us of freedom because it rests on the assumption that no one can make something be both true and false, which is a tautology. That does not preclude us from saying what is required for freedom, namely, that somebody could have done something that would have made something false instead of being true, though, in fact, she did not, and it is true that she did not. Philosophers have thought, however, that there is a more important modal notion of ‘can’ connected with laws, a more signiﬁcant sense of ‘can’ and ‘could have’, that enables us to distinguish laws from mere accidental general truths. It is, for example, an accidental general truth that everyone in this room is older than four years old. The accidental character of the general truth might be captured by a modality, by saying that someone could

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have falsiﬁed this general truth by bringing her four-year-old to hear about freedom and the power of preference, but no one could have done anything to falsify any law of nature. I have two replies with which I shall conclude. First, it may be true of some but not all laws of nature, namely those concerned with matters other than human choice and preference, that they cannot be falsiﬁed by human choice or preference, but it does not follow from this that no law about human choice or preference can be falsiﬁed by human choice or preference. Second, and more crucially, there is another and, I believe, better way of distinguishing between laws and accidentally true generalizations than by appeal to what can and could not be. Laws warrant counterfactual inference of a kind that is not warranted by accidental generalizations. The speciﬁcation of the exact kind of counterfactual inference is a delicate matter requiring some subtle distinctions, but the general point is clear enough. The accidentally true generalization that all people in this room are older than four years does not warrant the counterfactual inference to the conclusion that if a four-year-old had been brought in to hear about freedom and the power preference she would have been older than four years old. Laws by contrast do warrant counterfactual conclusions about what would have been. So, if Lc is a law and I, in fact, do not choose or prefer X, someone would be warranted in inferring that if I had been in conditions C, which I was not, then I would have chosen or preferred X. The person would not, however, be warranted in inferring that I could not have chosen or preferred otherwise than X when I am in C. They could only infer that I would not. I conclude with the remark that this conception of a law is one that differs from what incompatibilists such as Ginet and van Inwagen have assumed about laws in their arguments for incompatibilism. Am I, therefore, just missing the point of their argument? One motivation for concern about the problem of freedom and determinism is that it appears that a scientiﬁc conception of the world based on the laws of nature and explanation is incompatible with the sort of freedom we believe ourselves to have. I have intended to allay this concern. The scientiﬁc conception of the world is, I suggest, one including statements of laws that warrant inference and counterfactual inference about the world. Some philosophers may go beyond this conception to one afﬁrming a thesis of laws that contain a kind of necessity that is incompatible with human freedom. If one builds

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incompatibility with freedom into the deﬁnition of laws by deﬁning the latter in such terms, then incompatibility will be the result. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that the scientiﬁc conception of the world based on laws that warrant inference and counterfactual inference are incompatible with our conception of human freedom. One important problem is to explain how human freedom can ﬁt into the causal nexus of inference and counterfactual inference warranted by laws. My explanation is that it is contained in the keystone loop of preference and ultrapreference that ties together our conception of ourselves as free with our conception of a causal order explaining our freedom. Causally explained freedom accounts for our place in nature. Notes 1. The classic statement of the conditional analysis was Moore (1912). 2. Peter van Inwagen and Krister Segerberg both communicated the objection to me in correspondence. Cf. Peter van Inwagen (1983), chap. 4. 3. Moore (1912), chap. 6. 4. I was not able to pin down this interpretation to a speciﬁc passage, for his prose has a charmingly diffuse character, but I am indebted to Sartre (1956). 5. See chap. 4. 6. See props. xlvii–xlix. 7. Originally argued in van Inwagen (1975), and more fully in van Inwagen (1983).

References Chisholm, R. 1966. “Freedom and Action.” In K. Lehrer, ed., Freedom and Determinism. New York: Random House. Ekstrom, L. 2000. Free Will: A Philosophical Study. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Frankfurt, H. 1969. “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.” Journal of Philosophy 68: 388–404. . 1971. “Freedom of the Will and Concept of a Person.” Journal of Philosophy 68: 5–20. Ginet, C. 1966. “Might We Have No Choice?” In K. Lehrer, ed., Freedom and Determinism. New York: Random House.

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Kant, I. 1993. Critique of Practical Reason. L. W. Beck, trans. New York: Macmillan. Kripke, S. 1975. “Outline of a Theory of Truth.” Journal of Philosophy 72: 53–81. Lehrer, K. 1990. Metamind. Oxford: Clarendon Press. . 1992. “Preferences, Conditionals and Freedom.” In K. Lehrer, Metamind. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Reprinted from P. van Inwagen, ed. 1980. Time and Cause. Dordrecht: Reidel. . 1997. Self-Trust: A Study of Reason, Knowledge and Autonomy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lewis, D. 1981. “Are We Free to Break the Laws?” Theoria 47: 113–121. Moore, G. E. 1912. Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press. Reid, T. 1788. Essays on the Active Powers of Man. Edinburgh: J. Bell. Sartre, J. 1956. Being and Nothingness. H. Barnes, trans. New York: Philosophical Library. Spinoza, B. 1901. Ethics. R. H. M. Elwes, trans. London: M. W. Dunne. Taylor, R. 1966. Action and Purpose. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. van Inwagen, P. 1975. “The Incompatibility of Free Will and Determinism.” Philosophical Studies 27: 185–199. . 1983. An Essay on Free Will. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Velleman, J. D. 1992. “What Happens When Someone Acts.” Mind 101: 461–481.

3

Agency, Responsibility, and Indeterminism: Reﬂections

on Libertarian Theories of Free Will Robert Kane

1

The Compatibility Question: AP and UR

Free will, as I understand it, is “the power of agents to be the ultimate creators and sustainers of their own ends or purposes.” Every word here is signiﬁcant. We create purposes by making choices or decisions. Hence the importance of free choice or decision for free will. We sustain purposes by making efforts to do so. Hence the importance of efforts of will (or striving will, as Brian O’Shaughnessy calls it) in my account of free will. More will be said about the terms ‘power’, ‘ultimate’, and ‘agency’ later. I think the notion captured by this deﬁnition is the traditional idea of free will that has been in dispute for centuries. I’ve tried to make the historical case for this in many writings and won’t repeat it here. In writings over the past two decades, I have sought to answer four questions about free will: (1) Is it compatible (or incompatible) with determinism? (2) Why do or should we want it? (3) Can we make sense of a free will that is incompatible with determinism? (4) Where and how might such a free will exist in the natural order and can it be reconciled with modern images of human beings in the natural and social sciences?1 These are the Compatibility, Signiﬁcance, Intelligibility, and Existence questions respectively. Throughout this century and notably in recent decades, the lion’s share of debate has been on the Compatibility question, as we all know, with some attention, but considerably less given to the other three questions. In writings over these two decades, including two books, I have tried to right this imbalance by giving an in-depth treatment to all four questions. In addition, on all four questions, I have tried to point current debates about free will in new directions. I focus on a few of these new directions in the present paper. Consider the Compatibility question. Most recent and

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past philosophical debate about this question has focused on the question of whether determinism is compatible with ‘the condition of alternative possibilities’ (which I call AP)—the requirement that the free agent ‘could have done otherwise’. As we all know, most arguments for and against incompatibilism revolve around AP in one way or another. I don’t think these debates are unimportant. Far from it. I have engaged in them myself and they continue. But I think that exclusive focus on AP and ‘could have done otherwise’ has led philosophers to ignore other important facets of the debate about Compatibility and Signiﬁcance questions. AP alone, I argue, provides too thin a basis on which to rest the case for incompatibilism. Debates over different interpretations of ‘can’, ‘power’, ‘ability’, and ‘could have done otherwise’ are symptoms of this fact. To see what I mean by saying AP provides too thin a basis for resolving the Compatibility question, consider certain kinds of acts I will call Austinstyle examples (after J. L. Austin who, among others, introduced examples of these kinds into free will debates in Austin 1956). Austin’s own example of this type concerned a three foot putt he was trying to make in a golf match, but missed by chance. Another example of this kind I have used is this: suppose I approach a coffee machine intending to press the button for black coffee, but have a brain cross as I stand before the machine and press the button for coffee with cream instead by mistake. Imagine in both these cases, Austin’s missing the putt and my pressing the wrong button, some genuine indeterminacy was involved in the efferent neural pathways of his arm and the impulses of my brain such that they were genuinely undetermined. They were still actions we performed, as Austin notes of examples of this type, but unintentionally, nonvoluntarily, by accident or mistake. In each case, we could have done otherwise (made the putt and pressed the right button since the outcomes were undetermined). So in each case we have actions that are (i) such that we could have done otherwise (AP) and (ii) that are undetermined. Yet neither is a free action in any normal sense of the word since neither was under our control. Now imagine a world full of Austin-style examples of this type; a world in which indeterminism is prevalent and agents can often do otherwise in an undetermined way in the Austin style—by accident, mistake, unintentionally or inadvertently. But imagine also that in this undetermined world, God has set all agents’ wills (their reasons, motives, intentions and purposes) so that they desire and intend to do only what God has

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predetermined. Austin might miss his putt, but his wanting and trying to make it rather than miss was preset by God. I might press the wrong button on the coffee machine but my wanting and intending to press the right button was predetermined by God. And so it is with all agents for all their acts in this world. I would argue that this is a world in which agents lack freedom of will, even though they are often capable of doing otherwise (have AP) and many of their acts are undetermined. They are not the sources of their own wills. All the ‘will-setting’ in this world is done by God and none by the agents themselves. This shows that being able to do otherwise (AP) even if the doing otherwise is undetermined is not sufﬁcient for free will (even if these two conditions of AP plus indeterminism should be necessary). This is one way of showing why AP is too thin a basis on which to rest the case for incompatibilism. The agents must be able to will otherwise as well as do otherwise. What we want for free will is not merely to be able to do otherwise but to be able to do otherwise (or more generally, to act either way) voluntarily, intentionally, and rationally, rather than one way voluntarily, intentionally, and rationally and the other only unintentionally, involuntarily, and by mistake or accident, as in the Austin-style examples. I call these requirements of more-than-one-way voluntariness, intentionality, and rationality the ‘plurality conditions’ for free will. By satisfying these conditions in a manner that was undetermined, agents would be engaged in their own ‘will-setting’; setting their wills (intentions and purposes) would not all be done by God or nature, society, or something else over which they had no control. AP is not unimportant for free will but it is important because of these strong requirements of ‘plurality’ and ‘will-setting’ for full-ﬂedged free will. I have therefore argued in my writings that more attention should be given to plurality conditions and will-setting in discussions of Compatibility and Signiﬁcance questions rather than to AP alone. But plurality conditions and will-setting are not enough. There is yet a third condition that has to be considered besides AP to get a fully adequate picture of the Compatibility debate. I have also argued that in the long history of the free will debate one can ﬁnd another criterion fueling incompatibilist intuitions that is even more important than AP, though comparatively neglected. I call it the condition of ultimate responsibility or UR. The basic idea is this: to be ultimately responsible for an action, an agent must be responsible for anything that is a sufﬁcient reason (condition, cause, or

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motive) for the action’s occurring.2 If, for example, a choice issues from, and can be sufﬁciently explained by, an agent’s character and motives (together with background conditions), then to be ultimately responsible for the choice, the agent must be at least in part responsible by virtue of choices or actions voluntarily performed in the past for having the character and motives he or she has now. Compare Aristotle’s claim that if a man is responsible for wicked acts that ﬂow from his character, he must at some time in the past have been responsible for forming the wicked character from which these acts ﬂow (Aristotle 1985). This UR condition accounts for the ‘ultimate’ in the original deﬁnition of free will: “the power of agents to be the ultimate creators and sustainers of their own ends or purposes.” Now UR does not require that we could have done otherwise (AP) for every act done of our own free wills—thus vindicating philosophers such as Frankfurt, Fischer, and Dennett, and others who insist that we can be held morally responsible for many acts even when we could not have done otherwise.3 But the vindication is only partial. For UR does require that we could have done otherwise with respect to some acts in our past life histories by which we formed our present characters. I call these ‘self-forming actions’, or SFAs. Consider Dennett’s comments on Martin Luther (1984, 133). When Luther ﬁnally broke with the Church in Rome, he said “Here I stand, I can do no other.” Suppose, says Dennett, at that moment Luther was literally right. Given his character and motives, he could not then have done otherwise. Does this mean he was not morally responsible for his act, or not acting of his own free will? Dennett says “Not at all.” In saying “I can do not other,” Luther was not disowning responsibility, but taking full responsibility for acting of his own free will. So ‘could have done otherwise’, or AP, is not required for moral responsibility or free will. My response is to grant that Luther could have been responsible for this act, even ultimately responsible in the sense of UR, though he could not then have done otherwise and even if his act was determined. But this would be so to the extent that he was responsible for his present motives and character by virtue of earlier struggles and self-forming choices (SFAs) that brought him to this point in his life where he could do no other. Often we act from a will already formed, but it is ‘our own free will’ by virtue of the fact that we formed it by other choices or actions in the past (SFAs) for which we could have done otherwise. If this were not so, there is nothing we could have ever done to make ourselves different than we are—a

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consequence, I believe, that is incompatible with our being ultimately responsible for what we are. So self-forming actions that are undetermined and such that we could have done otherwise are only a subset of all actions done ‘of our own free wills’ that satisfy UR. But if none of our acts were self-forming in this way, we would not be ultimately responsible for anything we did. If the case for incompatibility cannot be made on AP alone, it can be made if UR is added; and so, I suggest, the too-often neglected UR should be moved to center stage in free will debates. If agents must be responsible to some degree for anything that is a sufﬁcient cause or motive for their actions, an impossible inﬁnite regress of past actions would be required unless some actions in the agent’s life history did not have either sufﬁcient causes or motives (and hence were undetermined). These are the SFAs required by UR. Note that this argument makes no mention of AP or the power to do otherwise. When we focus on ‘could have done otherwise’ we are led to modal issues about ‘can’ and ‘power’, ‘possibility’ and ‘necessity’; when we focus on UR, by contrast, we are interested in a different set of issues about the ‘sources’ or ‘grounds’ or ‘explanations’ of our actions. Where did they come from? Who or what was their ultimate source? But surprisingly, this does not mean AP is out of the picture. For it can be shown that the self-forming actions (SFAs) required by UR must also be such that the agents could have done otherwise. (Thus the Consequence argument of van Inwagen, Ginet, and others is vindicated after all, but only for SFAs.) In other words, UR not only implies indeterminism, but by a different argumentative route, it also implies AP for some free actions. For, UR implies the requirements of will-setting and plurality conditions mentioned earlier for some free actions in our life histories (i.e., SFAs) and these conditions in turn imply AP. I forego the full argument for these entailments here. But let me say that they follow surprisingly from the requirement that to have free will one must not only be ultimately responsible for one’s actions but also for one’s will to perform those actions. The upshot is that UR is the root which leads by one pathway to indeterminism and by another to AP. I call this the dual regress of free will. A few other things to note about the formal deﬁnition of UR before I move on. The formal deﬁnition goes like this: (UR) An agent is ultimately responsible for some (event or state) E’s occurring only if (R) the agent is personally responsible for E’s occurring in a sense which entails that something the agent voluntarily did or

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omitted either was, or causally contributed to, E’s occurrence and made a difference to whether or not E occurred; and (U) for every X and Y (where X and Y represent occurrences of events and/or states) if the agent is personally responsible for X, and if Y is a sufﬁcient reason (condition, cause, or motive) for X, then the agent must also be personally responsible for Y. This deﬁnition has two parts, a Responsibility condition R and an Ultimacy condition U. U makes reference to the notion of a sufﬁcient reason for something’s being the case, in the traditionally broad sense of a sufﬁcient condition, cause, or motive. This traditional notion of a sufﬁcient reason is of course an ingredient of the notorious principle of sufﬁcient reason, regarded by Leibniz (1991) as the fundamental principle governing all reasoning about matters of fact. This same notion of a sufﬁcient reason, I argue, is an ingredient in the traditional idea of free will, if that traditional idea involves UR. Of course, the principle of sufﬁcient reason (as opposed to the idea of a sufﬁcient reason) is another matter. If everything in the universe had a sufﬁcient reason for being, as the principle insists, there could be no free will in the sense of UR. But the idea of sufﬁcient reason is quite another matter. Similar things may be said about another traditional principle of rationality in the history of philosophy, the so-called principle of plenitude: every genuine possibility must be realized. If this principle were universally true, free will would also not be possible. For it is essential to free will that some things that do not get realized were nonetheless genuinely possible. It should not surprise us that the principles of sufﬁcient reason and plenitude are in the same boat here with regard to free will. For it can be shown that these pivotal rational principles are equivalent to each other. 2

The Intelligibility Question

This different approach to the Compatibility question through UR raises a host of further questions about free will, including how actions lacking both sufﬁcient causes and motives could themselves be free and responsible actions, and how, if at all, such actions could exist in the natural order where we humans live and have our being. These are versions of the Intelligibility and Existence questions mentioned earlier, and to which I now turn. The Intelligibility question is connected to an ancient dilemma: if free will is

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not compatible with determinism, it does not seem to be compatible with indeterminism either. You might say the Compatibility question concerns the ﬁrst half of this dilemma, the Intelligibility question the second. I’ll not trouble you with a detailed account of the problems posed by indeterminism for free will which are familiar to anyone who has delved into the free will debates. Sufﬁce it to say that by various routes it has been argued and has seemed to many persons that undetermined choices or actions would occur as a matter of chance and hence would be ‘arbitrary’, ‘capricious’, ‘random’, ‘irrational’, ‘inexplicable’, ‘mere matters of luck’, and not under the ‘control’ of the agents, hence not free and responsible actions at all. What prompted me to begin thinking about free will thirty years ago was disenchantment with the standard incompatibilist or libertarian strategy for answering these familiar charges. The strategy behind all standard libertarian answers was this: indeterminism was required for free will all right, but all it provided was the causal gaps in nature needed for free will. Something else was needed to ﬁll those gaps, some additional form of agency or causation that went beyond causation in the natural order, whether deterministic or indeterministic. This general strategy led to numerous historical appeals to extra factors such as noumenal selves, immaterial minds, transempirical power centers, immanent causes, and the like, to account for libertarian free will with which we are all familiar. The other half of the standard strategy—equally important—was to say that this extra factor, whatever it might be, noumenal self, immaterial mind, or special agent cause, could not be determined because it was not subject to deterministic or causal laws of the natural order by its very nature. Perhaps it was outside space or time, or it was an agent, not an event, and hence not capable of being the effect of another cause. So standard libertarian strategies postulated an extra factor to explain free will; and they were aprioristic; they argued that this extra factor precluded determinism in principle. I was suspicious of both prongs of the standard strategy—the extra factors, whose operation often turned out to be mysterious or obscure, and the appeal to an a priori metaphysical resolution of the determinism problem. It seems to me that the question of whether or not we have free will is an empirical question which cannot be settled by postulating novel metaphysical entities that preclude determinism in principle. Where else to go then if one rejects both prongs of this standard libertarian strategy? In Kane (1989) I distinguished two radically different kinds of

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libertarian theories, which I called agent-causal or AC theories, and teleological intelligibility or TI theories. The agent-causal or AC theories are the best modern examples of the standard libertarian strategy. They have their origins in Berkeley and Reid, and able modern defenders including Randy Clarke (1993) and Tim O’Connor (2000). They postulate, in the words of O’Connor, “a sui generis form of causation by an agent that is irreducible . . . to event-causal processes within the agent,” a kind of nonevent or nonoccurrent causation. Teleological intelligibililty or TI theories, by contrast, try to make undetermined free actions intelligible in terms of reasons or motives, intentions or purposes (hence teleologically intelligible) without postulating sui generis kinds of agency or causation that cannot be spelled out in terms of events or states of affairs involving the agents. My theory is of this TI kind. I believe my 1985 book was the ﬁrst attempt in recent philosophy to work out a TI theory in detail, though the idea had been suggested earlier by some philosophers such as David Wiggins and Robert Nozick. Other TI theories have come along since then different from mine, by other philosophers including two appearing in this volume, Carl Ginet and Alfred Mele. (Others who have looked in a TI direction are Storrs McCall, Hugh McCann, and Laura Ekstrom.) But I won’t get into the nuances of different TI theories. I’ll merely note that they constitute another option to standard libertarian strategies exempliﬁed by AC theories, an option that has been growing in inﬂuence since I wrote in 1985. From this point onward, I’ll focus on my own TI approach. 3

Indeterminism and Responsibility

If you avoid standard libertarian strategies of postulating extra factors, then I believe you have to take a whole new look at the indeterminist problem from the ground up. The ﬁrst step is to note that indeterminism does not have to be involved in all acts done ‘of our own free wills’ for which we are ultimately responsible, as argued earlier. Not all such acts have to be undetermined, but only those by which we made ourselves into the kinds of persons we are, namely ‘self-forming actions’ or SFAs. Now I believe these undetermined self-forming actions or SFAs occur at those difﬁcult times of life when we are torn between competing visions of what we should do or become. Perhaps we are torn between doing the moral thing or acting from ambition, or between powerful present desires and long-term goals, or we

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are faced with difﬁcult tasks to which we have aversions. In all such cases, we are faced with competing motivations and have to make an effort to overcome temptation to do something else we also strongly want. There is tension and uncertainty in our minds about what to do at such times, I suggest, that is reﬂected in appropriate regions of our brains by movement away from thermodynamic equilibrium—in short, a kind of ‘stirring up of chaos’ in the brain that makes it sensitive to microindeterminacies at the neuronal level. The uncertainty and inner tension we feel at such soulsearching moments of self-formation is thus reﬂected in the indeterminacy of our neural processes themselves. What is experienced internally as uncertainty then corresponds physically to the opening of a window of opportunity that temporarily screens off complete determination by inﬂuences of the past. (By contrast, when we act from predominant motives or settled dispositions, the uncertainty or indeterminacy is muted. If it did play a role in such cases, it would be a mere nuisance or ﬂuke, as critics of indeterminism contend.) When we do decide under such conditions of uncertainty, the outcome is not determined because of the preceding indeterminacy—and yet it can be willed (and hence rational and voluntary) either way owing to the fact that in such self-formation, the agents’ prior wills are divided by conﬂicting motives. Consider a businesswoman who faces such a conﬂict. She is on her way to an important meeting when she observes an assault taking place in an alley. An inner struggle ensues between her conscience, to stop and call for help, and her career ambitions that tell her she cannot miss this meeting. She has to make an effort of will to overcome the temptation to go on. If she overcomes this temptation, it will be the result of her effort, but if she fails, it will be because she did not allow her effort to succeed. And this is due to the fact that, while she willed to overcome temptation, she also willed to fail, for quite different and incommensurable reasons. When we, like the woman, decide in such circumstances, and the indeterminate efforts we are making become determinate choices, we make one set of competing reasons or motives prevail over the others then and there by deciding. Now let us add a further piece to the puzzle. Just as indeterminism need not undermine rationality and voluntariness, so indeterminism in and of itself need not undermine control and responsibility. Suppose you are trying to think through a difﬁcult problem, say a mathematical problem, and

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there is some indeterminacy in your neural processes complicating the task—a kind of chaotic background. It would be like trying to concentrate and solve a problem, say a mathematical problem, with background noise or distraction. Whether you are going to succeed in solving the problem is uncertain and undetermined because of the distracting neural noise. Yet, if you concentrate and solve the problem nonetheless, there is reason to say you did it and are responsible for it even though it was undetermined whether you would succeed. The indeterministic noise would have been an obstacle that you overcame by your effort. There are numerous examples supporting this point, ﬁrst suggested by J. L. Austin, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, and others in the 1950s, where indeterminism functions as an obstacle to success without precluding responsibility. (They are variations on the Austin-style examples mentioned earlier.) Consider an assassin who is trying to shoot the prime minister, but might miss because of some undetermined events in his nervous system that may lead to a jerking or wavering of his arm. If the assassin does succeed in hitting his target, despite the indeterminism, can he be held responsible? The answer is clearly yes because he intentionally and voluntarily succeeded in doing what he was trying to do—kill the prime minister. Yet his action, killing the prime minister, was undetermined. Or, here is another example: a husband, while arguing with his wife, in a ﬁt of rage swings his arm down on her favorite glass-top table top intending to break it. Again, we suppose that some indeterminism in his outgoing neural pathways makes the momentum of his arm indeterminate so that it is undetermined whether the table will break right up to the moment when it is struck. Whether the husband breaks the table or not is undetermined and yet he is clearly responsible if he does break it. (It would be a poor excuse for him to say to his wife “chance did it, not me.” Even though there was a chance he wouldn’t break it, chance didn’t do it—he did.) Now these examples—of the mathematical problem, the assassin, and the husband—are not all we want since they do not amount to genuine exercises of (self-forming) free will in SFAs, like the businesswoman’s, where the will is divided between conﬂicting motives. The assassin’s will is not divided between conﬂicting motives as is the woman’s. He wants to kill the prime minister, but does not also want to fail. (If he fails therefore, it will be merely by chance.) Yet these examples of the assassin, the husband and the like, do provide some clues. To go further, we have to add some new twists.

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Imagine in cases of inner conﬂict characteristic of SFAs, like the businesswoman’s, that the indeterministic noise which is providing an obstacle to her overcoming temptation is not coming from an external source, but is coming from her own will, since she also deeply desires to do the opposite. Imagine that two crossing (recurrent) neural networks are involved, each inﬂuencing the other, and representing her conﬂicting motivations. (These are complex networks of interconnected neurons in the brain circulating impulses in feedback loops that are generally involved in higherlevel cognitive processing.)4 The input of one of these neural networks consists in the woman’s reasons for acting morally and stopping to help the victim; the input of the other, her ambitious motives for going on to her meeting. The two networks are connected so that the indeterministic noise which is an obstacle to her making one of the choices is coming from her desire to make the other, and vice versa—the indeterminism thus arising from a tension-creating conﬂict in the will, as I said. In these circumstances, when either of the pathways ‘wins’ (i.e., reaches an activation threshold, which amounts to choice), it will be like your solving the mathematical problem by overcoming the background noise produced by the other. And just as when you solved the mathematical problem by overcoming the distracting noise, one can say you did it and are responsible for it, so one can say this as well, I argue, in the present case, whichever one is chosen. The pathway through which the woman succeeds in reaching a choice threshold will have overcome the obstacle in the form of indeterministic noise generated by the other. Note that, under such conditions, the choices either way will not be ‘inadvertent’, ‘accidental’, ‘capricious’, or ‘merely random’ (as critics of indeterminism say) because they will be willed by the agents either way when they are made, and done for reasons either way—reasons that the agents then and there endorse. But these are the conditions usually required to say something is done ‘on purpose’, rather than accidentally, capriciously, or merely by chance. Moreover, these conditions taken together, I argue, rule out each of the reasons we have for saying that agents act, but do not have control over their actions (compulsion, coercion, constraint, inadvertence, accident, control by others, etc.).5 I show this for each of these conditions in turn in Kane (1996). Of course, for undetermined SFAs, agents do not control or determine which choice outcome will occur before it occurs; but it does not follow, because one does control or determine

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which of a set of outcomes is going to occur before it occurs, that one does not control or determine which of them occurs, when it occurs. When the above conditions for SFAs are satisﬁed, agents exercise control over their future lives then and there by deciding. Indeed, they have what I call ‘plural voluntary control’ over the options in the following sense: they are able to bring about whichever of the options they will, when they will to do so, for the reasons they will to do so, on purpose rather than accidentally or by mistake, without being coerced or compelled in doing so or willing to do so, or otherwise controlled in doing or willing to do so by any other agents or mechanisms. I show again in Kane (1996) that each of these conditions can be satisﬁed for SFAs as conceived above.6 The conditions can be summed up by saying, as we sometimes do, that the agents can choose either way, at will. Note also that this account of self-forming choices amounts to a kind of ‘doubling’ of the mathematical problem. It is as if an agent faced with such a choice is trying or making an effort to solve two cognitive problems at once, or to complete two competing (deliberative) tasks at once—in our example, to make a moral choice and to make a conﬂicting self-interested choice (corresponding to the two competing neural networks involved). Each task is being thwarted by the indeterminism coming from the other, so it might fail. But if it succeeds, then the agents can be held responsible because, as in the case of solving the mathematical problem, they will have succeeded in doing what they were knowingly and willingly trying to do. Recall the assassin and the husband. Owing to indeterminacies in their neural pathways, the assassin might miss his target or the husband fail to break the table. But if they succeed, despite the probability of failure, they are responsible, because they will have succeeded in doing what they were trying to do. And so it is, I suggest, with self-forming choices, except that in the case of self-forming choices, whichever way the agents choose they will have succeeded in doing what they were trying to do because they were simultaneously trying to make both choices, and one is going to succeed. Their failure to do one thing is not a mere failure, but a voluntary succeeding in doing the other. Does it make sense to talk about the agent’s trying to do two competing things at once in this way, or to solve two cognitive problems at once? Well, we now know that the brain is a parallel processor; it can simultaneously process different kinds of information relevant to tasks such as

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perception or recognition through different neural pathways. Such a capacity, I believe, is essential to the exercise of free will. In cases of self-formation (SFAs), agents are simultaneously trying to resolve plural and competing cognitive tasks. They are, as we say, of two minds. Yet they are not two separate persons. They are not dissociated from either task. The businesswoman who wants to go back to help the victim is the same ambitious woman who wants to go to her meeting. She is torn inside by different visions of who she is and what she wants to be, as we all are from time to time. But this is the kind of complexity needed for genuine self-formation and free will. And when she succeeds in doing one of the things she is trying to do, she will endorse that as her resolution of the conﬂict in her will, voluntarily and intentionally, not by accident or mistake. 4

Responsibility, Luck, and Chance

You may ﬁnd this interesting and yet still ﬁnd it hard to shake the intuition that if choices are undetermined, they must happen merely by chance— and so must be ‘random’, ‘capricious’, ‘uncontrolled’, ‘irrational’, and all the other things usually charged. Such intuitions are deeply ingrained. But if we are ever going to understand free will, I think we will have to break old habits of thought that support such intuitions and learn to think in new ways. The ﬁrst step is to question the intuitive connection in most people’s minds between ‘indeterminism’s being involved in something’ and ‘its happening merely as a matter of chance or luck’. ‘Chance’ and ‘luck’ are terms of ordinary language that carry the connotation of ‘its being out of my control’. So using them already begs certain questions, whereas ‘indeterminism’ is a technical term that merely precludes deterministic causation, though not causation altogether. Indeterminism is consistent with nondeterministic or probabilistic causation, where the outcome is not inevitable. It is therefore a mistake (alas, one of the most common in debates about free will) to assume that ‘undetermined’ means ‘uncaused’. Here is another source of misunderstanding. Since the outcome of the businesswoman’s effort (the choice) is undetermined up to the last minute, we may have the image of her ﬁrst making an effort to overcome the temptation to go on to her meeting and then at the last instant ‘chance takes over’ and decides the issue for her. But this is misleading. On the view I proposed, one cannot separate the indeterminism and the effort of will,

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so that ﬁrst the effort occurs followed by chance or luck (or vice versa). One must think of the effort and the indeterminism as fused; the effort is indeterminate and the indeterminism is a property of the effort, not something separate that occurs after or before the effort. The fact that the effort has this property of being indeterminate does not make it any less the woman’s effort. The complex recurrent neural network that realizes the effort in the brain is circulating impulses in feedback loops and there is some indeterminacy in these circulating impulses. But the whole process is her effort of will and it persists right up to the moment when the choice is made. There is no point at which the effort stops and chance ‘takes over’. She chooses as a result of the effort, even though she might have failed. Similarly, the husband breaks the table as a result of his effort, even though he might have failed because of the indeterminacy. (That is why his excuse, “chance broke the table, not me” is so lame.) Just as expressions like ‘she chose by chance’ can mislead in such contexts, so can expressions like ‘she got lucky’. Recall that, with the assassin and husband, one might say ‘they got lucky’ in killing the prime minister and breaking the table because their actions were undetermined. Yet they were responsible. So ask yourself this question: why does the inference ‘he got lucky, so he was not responsible’ fail in the cases of the husband and the assassin where it does fail? The ﬁrst part of an answer has to do with the point made earlier that ‘luck’, like ‘chance’, has question-begging implications in ordinary language that are not necessarily implications of ‘indeterminism’ (which implies only the absence of deterministic causation). The core meaning of ‘he got lucky’ in the assassin and husband cases, which is implied by indeterminism, I suggest, is that ‘he succeeded despite the probability or chance of failure’; and this core meaning does not imply lack of responsibility, if he succeeds. If ‘he got lucky’ had other meanings in these cases that are often associated with ‘luck’ and ‘chance’ in ordinary usage (for example, the outcome was not his doing, or occurred by mere chance, or he was not responsible for it), the inference would not fail for the husband and assassin, as it clearly does. But the point is that these further meanings of ‘luck’ and ‘chance’ do not follow from the mere presence of indeterminism. The second reason why the inference ‘he got lucky, so he was not responsible’ fails for the assassin and the husband is that what they succeeded in doing was what they were trying and wanting to do all along (kill the minister

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and break the table respectively). The third reason is that when they succeeded, their reaction was not ‘oh dear, that was a mistake, an accident— something that happened to me, not something I did’. Rather they endorsed the outcomes as something they were trying and wanting to do all along, that is to say, knowingly and purposefully, not by mistake or accident. But these conditions are satisﬁed in the businesswoman’s case as well, either way she chooses. If she succeeds in choosing to return to help the victim (or in choosing to go on to her meeting) (i) she will have ‘succeeded despite the probability or chance of failure’, (ii) she will have succeeded in doing what she was trying and wanting to do all along (she wanted both outcomes very much, but for different reasons, and was trying to make those reasons prevail in both cases), and (iii) when she succeeded (in choosing to return to help) her reaction was not ‘oh dear, that was a mistake, an accident—something that happened to me, not something I did’. Rather she endorsed the outcome as something she was trying and wanting to do all along; she recognized it as her resolution of the conﬂict in her will. And if she had chosen to go on to her meeting she would have endorsed that outcome, recognizing it as her resolution of the conﬂict in her will. Perhaps the problem is that we are begging the question by assuming the outcomes of the woman’s efforts are choices to begin with, if they are undetermined. One might argue that ‘if an event is undetermined, it must be something that merely happens and cannot be somebody’s choice or action’. But this assumption is clearly question begging in the extreme, as one can see by considering that it entails ‘all choices and actions must determined’ simply on the grounds that they are choices or actions. Well, perhaps indeterminism does not undermine the idea that something is a choice or action simply, but rather that it is the agent’s choice. But again, why must that be so? What makes the woman’s choice her own on the preceding account is that it results from her efforts and deliberation which in turn are causally inﬂuenced by her reasons and her intentions (for example, her intention to resolve indecision in one way or another). And what makes these efforts, deliberation, reasons and intentions hers is that they are embedded in a larger motivational system realized in her brain in terms of which she deﬁnes herself as a practical reasoner and actor.7 A choice is the agent’s when it is produced intentionally by efforts, deliberation and reasons that are part of this self-deﬁning motivational system.

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Well, then, perhaps the issue is not whether the undetermined SFA is a choice, or even whether it is the agent’s choice, but rather how much control she had over it. It may be true, as I argued earlier (in the discussion of plural voluntary control), that the presence of indeterminism need not eliminate control altogether. But would not the presence of indeterminism at least diminish the control persons have over their choices and other actions? Is it not the case that the assassin’s control over whether the prime minister is killed (his ability to realize his purposes or what he is trying to do) is lessened by the undetermined impulses in his arm—and so also for the husband and his breaking the table? And this limitation seems to be connected with another problem often noted by critics of libertarian freedom—the problem that indeterminism, wherever it occurs, seems to be a hindrance or obstacle to our realizing our purposes and hence an obstacle to (rather than an enhancement of) our freedom. There is something to these claims, but I think what is true in them reveals something important about free will. We should concede that indeterminism, wherever it occurs, does diminish control over what we are trying to do and is a hindrance or obstacle to the realization of our purposes. But recall that in the case of the businesswoman (and SFAs generally), the indeterminism that is admittedly diminishing her control over one thing she is trying to do (the moral act of helping the victim) is coming from her own will—from her desire and effort to do the opposite (go to her business meeting). And the indeterminism that is diminishing her control over the other thing she is trying to do (act selﬁshly and go to her meeting) is coming from her desire and effort to do the opposite (to be a moral person and act on moral reasons). So, in each case, the indeterminism is functioning as a hindrance or obstacle to her realizing one of her purposes—a hindrance or obstacle in the form of resistance within her will that has to be overcome by effort. If there were no such hindrance—if there were no resistance in her will— she would indeed in a sense have “complete control” over one of her options. There would no competing motives that would stand in the way of her choosing it. But then also she would not be free to rationally and voluntarily choose the other purpose because she would have no good competing reasons to do so. Thus, by being a hindrance to the realization of some of our purposes, indeterminism paradoxically opens up the genuine possibility of pursuing other purposes—of choosing or doing otherwise in

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accordance with, rather than against, our wills (voluntarily) and reasons (rationally). To be genuinely self-forming agents (creators of ourselves)—to have free will—there must at times in life be obstacles and hindrances in our wills of this sort that we must overcome. I think libertarians have traditionally tried to ignore this aspect of indeterminism. They knew it was required, but assumed it could be entirely circumvented by special agencies and would have no real impact on free will. But hindrances and obstacles and resistance in the will are precisely what is needed for free will, which, like life itself, exists near the edge of chaos. This is an aspect of what is called in religious terms the ‘problem of evil’. Recall Kant’s image of the bird that is upset by the resistance of the air and the wind to its ﬂight and so imagines that it could ﬂy better if there were no air at all to resist it (Kant 2003). But of course it would not ﬂy better, but cease to ﬂy at all. So it is with indeterminism and free will. It provides resistance to our choices, but a resistance that is necessary if we are to have free will. I conclude with one ﬁnal objection. Even if one granted that persons, such as the businesswoman, could make genuine self-forming choices that were undetermined, isn’t there something to the charge that such choices would be arbitrary? A residual arbitrariness seems to remain in all selfforming choices since the agents cannot in principle have sufﬁcient or overriding prior reasons for making one option and one set of reasons prevail over the other. This is again one of those truths that tell us something important about free will. In this case it tells us that every undetermined self-forming free choice is the initiation of what I have elsewhere called a ‘value experiment’ whose justiﬁcation lies in the future and is not fully explained by past reasons. In making such a choice we say, in effect, “Let’s try this. It is not required by my past, but it is consistent with my past and is one branching pathway my life can now meaningfully take. Whether it is the right choice, only time will tell. Meanwhile, I am willing to take responsibility for it one way or the other” (see Kane 1996, 145–146). The term ‘arbitrary’ as I have often noted comes from the Latin arbitrium, which means ‘judgment’—as in liberum arbitrium voluntatis, ‘free judgment of the will’ (the medieval philosophers’ designation for free will). Imagine a writer in the middle of a novel. The novel’s heroine faces a crisis and the writer has not yet developed her character in sufﬁcient detail to say exactly how she will act. The author makes a ‘judgment’ about that which is not yet determined by the heroine’s already formed past that does not give

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unique direction. In this sense, the judgment (arbitrium) of how she will react is ‘arbitrary’, but not entirely so. It had input from the heroine’s ﬁctional past and in turn gave input to her projected future. In a similar way, agents who exercise free will are both authors of and characters in their own stories all at once. By virtue of ‘self-forming’ judgments of the will (arbitria voluntatis) (SFAs), they are ‘arbiters’ of their own lives, ‘making themselves’ out of a past that, if they are truly free, does not limit their future pathways to one. In reply to the charge that they did not have sufﬁcient or conclusive prior reasons for choosing as they did, they may respond: “True enough. But I did have good reasons for choosing as I did, which I’m willing to stand by and take responsibility for. If they were not sufﬁcient or conclusive reasons, that’s because, like the heroine of the novel, I was not a fully formed person before I chose (and still am not, for that matter). Like the author of the novel, I am in the process of writing an unﬁnished story and forming an unﬁnished character who, in my case, is myself.” Notes 1. See especially Kane (1996), which provides an overview of philosophical debates about all four questions over the past ﬁfty years and further development of many of the ideas of this paper. Also, see an earlier work (Kane 1985). 2. For a formal statement and defense of this condition, see Kane (1996, ch. 3). 3. For defenses of this claim by these authors see the readings in Kane (2002) by Dennett, Fischer, and Pereboom. 4. Readable and accessible introductions to the role of neural networks (including recurrent networks) in cognitive processing include Churchland (1995) and Spitzer (1999). 5. We have to make further assumptions about the case to rule out some of these conditions. For example, we have to assume, no one is holding a gun to the woman’s head forcing her to go back, or that she is not paralyzed, etc. But the point is that none of these conditions is inconsistent with the case of the woman as we have imagined it. If these other conditions are satisﬁed, as they can be, and the businesswoman’s case is otherwise as I have described it, we have an SFA. I offer the complete argument for this in Kane (1996, ch. 8). 6. I show in greater detail that each of these conditions can be satisﬁed by SFAs in Kane (1996, ch. 8). 7. That some such motivational system is necessary to deﬁne personhood and agency has been persuasively argued by Fred Dretske (1988), David Velleman (1992),

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and Owen Flanagan (1992). In Kane (1996, 137–142) I call the realization of such a system in the brain the ‘self-network’.

References Aristotle. 1985. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Terence Irwin. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett. Austin, J. L. 1956. “Ifs and Cans.” Proceedings of the British Academy 42: 109–132. Churchland, P. M. 1995. The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Clarke, R. 1993. “Toward a Credible Agent-causal Account of Free Will.” Noûs 27: 191–203. Dennett, Daniel D. 1984. Elbow Room: Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Dretske, F. 1988. Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Flanagan, O. 1992. Consciousness Reconsidered. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Kane, R. 1985. Free Will and Values. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press. . 1989. “Two Kinds of Incompatibilism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50: 219–254. . 1996. The Signiﬁcance of Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press. , ed. 2002. The Oxford Handbook of Free Will. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Kant, I. 2003. Critique of Pure Reason. Tr. N. K. Smith. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Leibniz, G. W. 1991. The Monadology. In his Philosophical Essays, translated by R. Ariew and D. Garber. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett. O’Connor, T. 2000. Persons and Causes: The Metaphysics of Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press. Spitzer, M. 1999. The Mind within the Net. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Velleman, D. 1992. “What Happens When Somebody Acts?” Mind 101: 461–481.

4

Trying to Act

Carl Ginet

My topic is the concept of trying to perform this or that speciﬁc action. By an action I mean an event that begins with the agent’s volition to exert force with his body in a speciﬁc way (or, in the limiting case, in such a volition). Paradigmatic actions are, for example, raising a hand, rising from a chair, throwing a ball, opening a door, turning on a faucet, and uttering a sentence. Thus in being concerned with what it is to try to act in some particular way, I am not concerned with, for example, what it is to try to see (or hear) something or to try to remember (or forget) something or to try to feel glad (or sad). Nor am I concerned with what it is to try not to act in a certain way. No doubt these other things all have interesting conceptual connections to trying to act but exploring those connections is not on the agenda for this paper. 1

Preliminaries

First, let me state some preliminary points, before I get to the main question about trying to act that I want to talk about. These preliminary points are not all uncontroversial, and I’ll give a bit of an argument for some of them, but my purpose in stating them is not to persuade you of them, but to let you know what I am assuming in the rest of my discussion. 1. I individuate actions in such a way that, for example, my action of turning on my computer by pressing a button on the keyboard is a causally complex event that has, as a part, a distinct and more basic action of my pressing the button (as well as a nonaction part caused by that more basic action, namely, the computer’s turning on); and that more basic action has as a proper part a still more basic action of my exerting a certain force with my hand and index ﬁnger; and the latter action has as a proper part a most

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basic action of my willing to exert such a force. Thus my way of individuating actions is not the minimizing extreme that says that the only actions are the most basic ones. (Also, let me add, it is not the maximizing extreme that says that any two nonequivalent action descriptions pick out distinct actions, but I’ll not try to explain how I avoid that extreme.)1 2. The proposition expressed by a sentence of the form ‘S tried to A’ (where ‘A’ is a verb phrase signifying an action) does not entail that S A-ed. Nor does that proposition entail that S did not A. When one tries to do something one can succeed. 3. Trying to do something is always itself constituted by acting in some way or other. That is, the proposition ‘S tried to A’ entails that S performed some action. And the action that S performed cannot have been merely S’s deciding to A or any other act of mere deciding (mere intention forming). To try to do something, it is not enough just to have or form an intention. 4. The kinds of actions one can try to perform are limited to those one can try to perform without succeeding in performing them. One can try to A only if it makes sense to suppose that a person could unsuccessfully try to A. This means that, although one can try to open the door or try to exert force with one’s hand, one cannot try to will to exert force with one’s hand and one cannot try to decide to open the door (where ‘decide’ refers to the simple mental act that concludes deliberation rather than to the process of deliberation itself: one can, of course sensibly say, ‘I am trying to decide whether to take that job’, if one means that one is trying, by deliberating about the matter, to reach a decision).2 5. Given that A-ing is a kind of action one can try to perform, whenever it is true that S A-ed intentionally and with the intention of A-ing, it is also true that S tried to A. This is true despite the fact that in many contexts where a sentence of the form ‘S tried to A’ is uttered, the speaker intends her utterance to convey the information either that S failed to A or that S thought there was some chance of failing to A. Even when something of this sort is implicated by the utterance of ‘S tried to A’, it is not asserted and not entailed by the proposition expressed by the utterance. This is shown by the fact that a speaker can make true assertions with a two-sentence discourse like the following: ‘I’ve never had a paralyzed arm. Whenever I’ve tried voluntarily to move my arm, I’ve succeeded in doing so’. Such a speaker need not intend their quantiﬁer ‘whenever’ to quantify only over those past cases

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of their voluntarily moving their arm where they thought they might not succeed; it’s perfectly natural for it to be intended and interpreted as quantifying over all past cases of their voluntarily moving their arm. And when it is so interpreted, we would have no difﬁculty in taking what the speaker asserts to be true, even if we know that in a great many of the cases quantiﬁed over the speaker had no thought of the possibility of failing in their attempt to move their arm. 6. The verb ‘try’ does not signify a special kind of action.3 In particular, contrary to what some philosophers have claimed,4 it is not the case that trying is always a most basic action. When we have the thought that S tried to A, the action we think of as constituting her attempt to A—what she did that was her trying to A—need not be the most basic action she performed. This is shown by the acceptability of such an utterance as ‘The same attempt to turn on the computer I made earlier—namely, my pushing the “on” button on the keyboard—succeeded this time in turning it on’. Here the speaker implies that what the attempt consisted in was an action of pressing a certain button; and such an action is not most basic (because it includes the more basic action of the agent’s moving his hand and ﬁnger in a certain way). 2

A Sufﬁcient Condition: Intending the Action

Let me now turn to the question which it is my main purpose in this paper to address. What is the mental component of trying to act? It seems evident that an action can count as the agent’s trying to do a certain thing only if the agent has an appropriate intention concerning that action. What counts as an appropriate intention? It’s fairly obvious that if S intended her action to be an attempt to do a certain thing, then in that action S was trying to do that thing. That is, a sufﬁcient condition for the truth of ‘By Z-ing S tried to A’ is the following: (S0) S intended of her Z-ing that in so acting she would be trying to A. An obvious problem with S0 as an explication of the concept of trying to do something is that it employs the concept being explicated. To say that in Z-ing S tried to A if S intended in Z-ing to try to A is, to be sure, not absolutely trivial and uninformative; but we’d like to ﬁnd more informative sufﬁcient conditions, ones that do not employ the concept of trying to do something.

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One informative sufﬁcient condition is fairly obvious and simple: an action will count as an attempt to do a certain thing if the agent intends of the action that by it she will do that thing. That is, the following is a sufﬁcient condition for the truth of a proposition of the form ‘By Z-ing S tried to A’: (S1) S intended of her Z-ing that by so acting she would A. This is, I hazard to say, a minimally sufﬁcient informative condition. That is, no weaker condition, one entailed by but not entailing it that also eschews use of the concept of trying, is sufﬁcient. One thing entailed by but not entailing S1, is that S has a certain belief about her chances of A-ing by Z-ing. S1 entails the following: (B1) S believed of her Z-ing that by so acting she might A (that is, there was a serious chance she would A). This does not entail S1. This is shown by any case where S knowingly takes a chance that her Z-ing might bring about certain consequences, but does not intend by Z-ing to bring them about. For example, Hector might plug in the new electric heater, knowing that there is a chance that by so doing he might blow a fuse, but not with the intention of blowing a fuse. Such examples show also that B1 does not entail that by Z-ing S tried to A. In plugging in the new heater, Hector was not trying to blow a fuse. This nonentailment supports the claim that S1 is a minimally sufﬁcient condition for the truth of ‘By Z-ing S tried to A’. At any rate, the weaker B1 is not sufﬁcient. But S1, though minimally sufﬁcient, is not also necessary.5 Indeed, not even the weaker B1 is necessary. Suppose Sam is confronted with a large log that he would like to move. Suppose that Sam has no idea whether he can move the log by just pushing on it but wants to ﬁnd out. So he pushes on the log as hard as he can. That is, he tries to move the log by pushing on it, in order to ﬁnd out whether he can move it by that means. He cannot intend that his pushing will move the log, because he does not (yet) believe that he might move it by pushing on it, that there is a chance that his pushing on it would succeed in moving it. For all he yet knows, it may be far too heavy for him, or any human being, to move it just by pushing on it; and it would be semantically unacceptable to say of him that, although he does not know (and does not believe) that it is possible for him to move it by pushing on it, his intention/aim/purpose in pushing on it is to move it. So, for S’s Z-ing to count as S’s trying to A, though it is sufﬁcient that S intended of her Z-ing that by it she would A, it is not necessary. Some other

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sort of intention, with a different content, must be sufﬁcient to make it the case that by Z-ing S was trying to A. What other sort? The answer to this turns out to be less simple than one might have hoped. 3

A Second Sufﬁcient Condition: Intending to Find Out

One can start with the following fairly obvious thought: even if S did not intend that by her Z-ing she would A, S must have intended that her Z-ing have some sort of connection with the possibility of her A-ing. S must have an intention whose content relates her Z-ing to the possibility of her thereby A-ing in some way or other. The complications come when one asks what speciﬁc content or contents for this intention will make an intention such that, if S had that intention when Z-ing, then in Z-ing tried to A. There are, it turns out, several different contents that will do the trick. One we have already seen is our previous example where Sam’s pushing on the log counted as his trying to move it, despite his not intending that his pushing would move it. Though he did not intend to move it, he did intend that his pushing on the log would show him whether he was able to move it by that act of pushing on it.6 And, it seems clear, it is the presence of this intention that makes it right to count his pushing as his trying to move the log. After all, if he had not had any such intention having to do with the possibility of moving the log, but had instead intended only that by pushing on the log he would exercise his muscles, then it would clearly not be right to count his pushing on the log as his trying to move it. This example shows us a second informative sufﬁcient condition for the truth of ‘In Z-ing S tried to A’: (S2) S intended of her Z-ing that by so acting she would ﬁnd out whether she could A by that Z-ing. To have the intention ascribed to her in S2, S must believe that by Z-ing she might ﬁnd out whether she can A by that Z-ing. That is, S2 entails (B2) S believed of her Z-ing that by so acting she would ﬁnd out whether she could A by that Z-ing. But B2 does not entail S2. Suppose that Sam doesn’t know whether he can move the log by pushing on it and, moreover, he doesn’t care. He pushes on the log merely to exercise his muscles, but it occurs to him as he begins to do so that this action might show him whether he can move the log by

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pushing on it. So he believes of his pushing that by it he might ﬁnd out whether he can move the log by that pushing, but it is not among his intentions in pushing on it to ﬁnd this out. And therefore ﬁnding this out is not something he is trying to do by pushing on it. This supports a claim that S2 is minimally sufﬁcient for the truth of ‘In Z-ing S tried to A’; at any rate the weaker B2 is not sufﬁcient. Let me note that S2 covers an interesting class of cases of trying to A while not intending to A that was ﬁrst noted by Michael Bratman (1984). These are cases where S both Zs and Xs and intends to make it the case that either she As by Z-ing or Bs by X-ing, but does not intend to A by Zing and does not intend to B by X-ing: she intends the disjunction but does not intend either disjunct. This is because she does not know which attempt, the Z-ing or the X-ing, will succeed and believes that not both can. For example, S knows that the double doors before her open either toward her or away from her but not both, but she does not remember which way it is. So S pushes on the left door with her left hand and pulls on the right door with her right hand, with the intention that she will either open the left one by pushing on it or open the right one by pulling on it. In such a case S neither intends in pushing on the left door to open it nor intends in pulling on the right door to open it: for her to have both intentions would be irrational, given her belief that she cannot do both things, and there is no reason to attribute to her one intention rather than the other. But she is both trying to open the left door by pushing on it and trying to open the right door by pulling on it. And this is made true, I suggest, by the fact that she intended of her pushing on the left door to ﬁnd out whether she can open it by those means, and likewise for her pulling on the right door. 4

A Third Sufﬁcient Condition: Intending to Show Inability

Is the disjunction ‘S1 or S2’ necessary for the truth of ‘By Z-ing S tried to A’? No. Suppose Sam’s ﬁve-year-old daughter Suzy comes along and asks her father to push on the log and move it. Sam, having ascertained that the log is far too heavy for him to move, nevertheless pushes against it as hard as he can in order to show Suzy that he cannot move it by pushing on it. It would be correct to characterize Sam’s pushing on the log as his trying to move the log, indeed trying as hard as he can to move it. He makes an

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attempt to move the log in order to show Suzy that he cannot move it; and, of course, knowing that he cannot move it, he cannot intend of his pushing on it that he will thereby move it. To intend that one’s attempt will succeed, one need not believe that it will succeed, but one must not believe that it is impossible that it will succeed: one must believe that it has some chance of success. From this example we learn a third minimally sufﬁcient informative condition for the truth of ‘In Z-ing S tried to A’, namely, the following: (S3) S intended of her Z-ing that by so acting she would show R (some particular person or persons in the context) that she could not A by that Z-ing. S3, like S1 and S2, entails a belief of S’s about how her Z-ing is related to the possibility of her thereby A-ing. S3 entails (B3) S believed of her Z-ing that she would not A by so acting and might persuade R that she could not A by that Z-ing. But B3 does not entail S3. Suppose that while Sam is pushing hard on the log in order to exercise his muscles it occurs to him that his so doing might persuade Suzy, who is looking on, that he cannot move the log by pushing on it. Still it need be no part of his plan that by pushing on the log he will persuade Suzy of his inability. And if that is so, then, clearly, he is not trying by pushing on the log to persuade Suzy of his inability. This supports a claim that S3 is minimally sufﬁcient for the truth of ‘By Z-ing S tried to A’. At any rate, the weaker condition B3 is not sufﬁcient. 5

A Fourth Sufﬁcient Condition: Intending to Comply with a Command

Are we ﬁnished? Are S1–S3 all of the different minimally sufﬁcient conditions for the truth of ‘By Z-ing S tried to A’? I’m afraid not. Suppose Sam knows that the log is far too heavy for him to move by pushing on it. But Sam is a soldier under the command of Rudy, and Rudy has ordered Sam to try to move the log by pushing on it. Sam would very much prefer that Rudy not ﬁnd out that he (Sam) cannot move the log by pushing on it, but the penalty for refusing to obey a command would, in Sam’s view, be a worse consequence than Rudy’s knowing that Sam cannot move the log by pushing on it. So Sam pushes on the log as hard as he can in order to comply with Rudy’s command to try to move it by pushing on it, but very

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much regretting—certainly not intending—that by so doing he will reveal to Rudy that he cannot move it by pushing on it. And surely Sam’s pushing on the log does comply with Rudy’s order. He does try to move the log by pushing on it. He does so, despite not intending that he will thereby move it (he knows that it’s quite impossible for him to move it by pushing on it), despite not intending that he will thereby show someone that he cannot move it (he regrets that this will be revealed), and despite not intending to ﬁnd out whether he can move it (he already knows that he cannot). So this example reveals a fourth sufﬁcient condition for the truth of ‘By Z-ing S tried to A’: (S4) S intended that her Z-ing would comply with a command (or request) that S try to A by Z-ing. What belief about her Z-ing does this intention require that S have? Pretty clearly it requires that (B4) S believed that her Z-ing would comply with a command (or request) to try to A by Z-ing. It’s not clear to me, however, that in this case the entailed belief is a weaker condition than the intention that entails it. For one thing, it is unclear to me how one could believe that one’s action complies with a command without intending that it comply with it, given that ‘complying with a command’ means acting with the intention that one’s action be what was commanded. Of course, it is possible to believe that one’s action will satisfy the description given in a command or request without intending to be complying with that command and even without intending to be acting in such a way as to satisfy that description. One might be acting entirely out of other motives. Consider, for example, the parent of a child who has a game in which she “requests” the parent to do what she knows the parent is going to do anyway: “Please eat breakfast this morning.” “Please go to work today.” The parent knows that his or her actions will satisfy these requests, but to satisfy them is not among the parent’s intentions in so acting. In this case, though, the parent does intend that her action will satisfy the description that is in fact given in the child’s request; for example, that it will be her eating breakfast. But not even this intention need be present in an agent who believes at the time of her action that in the circumstances it will satisfy the speciﬁcation given in a request to her. Suppose Suzy is a

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guest for dinner at a friend’s house. She approaches the only remaining vacant chair at the table with the intention to sit in it. Just as she is about to sit, Rudy, who is already seated and whom Suzy intensely dislikes, says “Please sit where I can gaze at your beautiful proﬁle.” As Suzy sits she knows that her action will satisfy Rudy’s description—it will be sitting where he can gaze at her proﬁle—but she certainly does not intend of her sitting that it satisfy that description. Matters seem different, however, when the description in the command or request has the form that ‘S try by Z-ing to A’. For example, suppose Suzy regularly exercises her muscles by pushing against a certain large tree outside her house. Her daughter knows this, and as Suzy approaches the tree, her daughter says, “I order you to try to uproot that tree by pushing on it.” Now at the time of her action Suzy might or might not have the belief she would express by saying, “In pushing on this tree I am obeying my daughter’s order to try to uproot it by pushing on it”; but if she does have that belief, then she believes that in pushing on the tree she is trying to uproot it. And if she believes that, it is hard to see how she could at the same time lack the intention in pushing on the tree to try to uproot it. How could she think she is trying and not intend to be trying? And if she has that intention then she is trying to uproot it by pushing on it. There are, of course, other sorts of beliefs entailed by S4 that clearly do not entail it. For example, S can have the intention attributed by S4 only if S believes that she is Z-ing. But this belief by itself does not entail that S’s Z-ing is an attempt to A. So there seems no reason to suspect that S4 is not a minimally sufﬁcient condition for the truth of ‘By Z-ing S tried to A’. But, as you have no doubt long since been aware, there is a problem with S4: it is not as informative a condition as we’d like to have. It employs the concept we wish to use it to explicate, the concept of trying to do something. Is there any way we can reﬁne S4 so as to rid it of this feature? Let us approach this problem by considering the following question: if R asked S to try to A by Z-ing, what must R have believed about the possibility of S’s A-ing by Z-ing for this to be a serious request, one that R thought it was possible for S to comply with? It seems to me, for starters, that R need not have been joking if R had any one of the following beliefs: R believed that by Z-ing S might A. R believed that S believes that by Z-ing she might A.

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R believed that by Z-ing S would show someone, who needs convincing of this, that S cannot A by Z-ing. R believed that S believes that by Z-ing she would show someone, who needs convincing of this, that she cannot A by Z-ing. But these are not the only sorts of beliefs on R’s part that would show that R thinks it possible for S’s Z-ing to be S’s trying to A. Consider again the situation where Sam is a soldier under Rudy’s command. Being sadistic and enjoying for its own sake the exercise of his authority over Sam, Rudy seriously commands Sam to try to move the log by pushing on it as hard as he can, even though Rudy does not believe that there is any chance at all that Sam could move the log by pushing on it or that Sam believes that there is; and, moreover, Rudy does not believe, or believe that Sam believes, that there is someone around who needs to be persuaded of the fact that Sam cannot move the log by pushing on it. (For a less dark story, imagine that Rudy is not Sam’s commander but instead an eccentric friend who has offered Sam a large sum of money for just trying to move the log by pushing on it.) On the other hand, not just any action that Sam could perform is such that Rudy can seriously command Sam to try to move the log by performing that action, given that Rudy fails to believe (or believe that Sam believes) that there is any chance at all that Sam could move the log by that action or to believe (or believe that Sam believes) that there is someone around who needs to be persuaded that Sam cannot move the log by that action. For example, Rudy cannot seriously command Sam to try to move the log by whistling Dixie, if Rudy does not believe (or believe that Sam believes) that there is any chance at all that Sam could move the log by whistling Dixie or that there’s someone around who needs to be persuaded that Sam cannot move the log by whistling Dixie. What is the difference between pushing on the log and whistling Dixie, vis-à-vis the possibility of moving the log by such actions, that explains this? The difference, I think, is that, although Rudy does not believe that Sam can move the log by pushing on it, Rudy does believe (or believes that Sam believes) that pushing on the log is a sort of action that might, if it were performed with sufﬁcient strength or skill or in the right manner, succeed in moving the log; whereas Rudy does not believe (or believe that Sam believes) that whistling Dixie is a sort of action that might, if performed with sufﬁcient strength or skill or in the right manner, succeed in moving the log.

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Note that the belief that pushing on the log is a sort of action that might, if it were performed with sufﬁcient strength or skill or in the right manner, succeed in moving the log is entailed by the belief that Sam might move the log by pushing on it: one who believes the latter believes the former. The general lesson of these observations is that, when R orders S to try to A by Z-ing, S can take this order seriously (can suppose that R thinks it is possible for S to comply with the order) only if S thinks that R believes (or believes that S believes) that Z-ing is a sort of action by which someone might succeed in A-ing if they performed it with sufﬁcient strength or skill or in the right manner, or S thinks that R believes (or believes that S believes) that by Z-ing S would show someone that S cannot A by Z-ing. It is not necessary that the command (or request) have been that S try to A by Z-ing. The command might, for instance, have been just that S try to A or just that S Z. If the content of Rudy’s order were simply that Sam try to move the log, and in response Sam pushes on the log as hard as he can with the intention and belief that his so doing will comply with Rudy’s order and that it will do so because Rudy’s reason for giving the order was his belief (or belief that Sam believes) that pushing on the log, if performed in the right manner with sufﬁcient strength or skill, is a sort of action by which someone might succeed in moving the log, then it follows that in pushing on the log Sam was trying to move it. It is likewise if the content of Rudy’s order were simply that Sam push on the log. If in response Sam pushes on the log as hard as he can with the intention and belief that his so doing will comply with Rudy’s order and that it will do so because Rudy’s reason for giving the order was his belief (or belief that Sam believes) that pushing on the log, if performed in the right manner with sufﬁcient strength or skill, is a sort of action by which someone might succeed in moving the log, then it follows that in pushing on the log Sam was trying to move it. Or suppose that in response to either of those orders Sam pushes on the log with the intention and belief that his so doing will comply with Rudy’s order and will do so because Rudy’s reason for the order was that he believes (or believes that Sam believes) that by pushing on the log Sam would show someone that Sam cannot move the log by pushing on it. Again it follows that in pushing on the log Sam was trying to move it. What if Rudy’s command were that Sam should move the log by pushing on it and, as before, Sam believes that it is impossible for him to move it by

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pushing on it?7 Then Sam cannot intend that his pushing on it will comply with the order. The most he can intend is that it will be as good as he can do to comply with the order. But if he does intend this latter, then his pushing on it will be his trying to move it by pushing on it. Generalizing, we can say the following: If S believes (and intends) that her Z-ing will comply with the command, or will be as good as she can do to comply with it, and it will be so because the giver of the command believes (or believes that S believes) that Z-ing, if performed with sufﬁcient strength or skill or in the right manner, is a sort of action by which someone might succeed in A-ing then in Z-ing S is trying to A. And if S believes (and intends) that her Z-ing will comply with the command, or will be as good as she can do to comply with it, and it will be so because the giver of the command (or request) believes (or believes that S believes) that by Z-ing S would show someone that S cannot A by Z-ing, then in Z-ing S is trying to A. These conditionals hold whether or not the agent S believes that there is any chance she might A by her Z-ing, or believes that there is someone around who needs showing that S cannot A by Z-ing, or that Z-ing, if performed with sufﬁcient strength or skill or in the right manner, is a sort of action by which someone might succeed in A-ing. Thus, for example, if Rudy gives Sam the order to try to move the log by whistling Dixie and Sam thinks Rudy meant the order seriously because Rudy thinks that whistling Dixie in the vicinity of a large heavy object, if performed in exactly the right manner, is a sort of action by which someone might succeed in moving the object, then Sam can believe and intend that by whistling Dixie he is complying with Rudy’s order, even if Sam does not share Rudy’s belief about the object-moving power of whistling Dixie. This result gives us a way to formulate an informative condition that covers those new cases of trying to A by Z-ing that S4 brings in. The formulation is the following: (S4) S intended of her Z-ing that it would comply with a command (or request) to her and S also either (i) intended that it would do so for the reason that the giver of the command (or request) believes (or believes that S believes) that Z-ing, if performed in the right manner with sufﬁcient strength or skill, is a sort of action by which someone might succeed in A-ing or (ii) intended that it would do so for the reason that

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the giver of the command (or request) believes (or believes that S believes) that by Z-ing S would show someone that S cannot A by Z-ing. If in her Z-ing S has a complex intention satisfying the speciﬁcation in S4, then her Z-ing is her trying to A. 6

A Disjunctive Sufﬁcient Condition That May Also Be Necessary

So we have uncovered four different minimally sufﬁcient conditions for the truth of ‘S tried to A’. Are there any others? I can’t think of any, but at this point that does not strike me as compelling evidence that there aren’t any others. So I will conclude only that each of these four conditions is sufﬁcient and leave it an open question whether their disjunction is necessary. We can wrap it all up in one large statement as follows. S tried to A if there was an action of S’s, S’s Z-ing, such that either (S1) S intended of her Z-ing that by so acting she would A, (S2) S intended of her Z-ing that by so acting she would ﬁnd out whether she could A by that Z-ing, (S3) S intended of her Z-ing that by so acting she would show R (some particular person or persons in the context) that she could not A by Z-ing, or (S4) S intended of her Z-ing that it would comply with a command (or request) to her and S also either (i) intended that it would do so for the reason that the giver of the command (or request) believes (or believes that S believes) that Z-ing, if performed in the right manner with sufﬁcient strength or skill, is a sort of action by which someone might succeed in A-ing or (ii) intended that it would do so for the reason that the giver of the command (or request) believes (or believes that S believes) that by Z-ing S would show someone that S cannot A by Z-ing. S1–S4 specify four different intention contents each of which is such that, if S’s Z-ing is accompanied by an intention with that content, then S’s Z-ing is her trying to A. As far as I can discern, the only feature these intention contents have in common is that each speciﬁes some relation or other between S’s Z-ing and the possibility of S’s A-ing. It would be nice in a way—in that it would be more in accord with our preanalytic hopes—if there were something more speciﬁc tying together the sufﬁcient conditions for trying to act.

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But it is nice in another way—in that it is more interesting—that this concept is as complex and nonuniﬁed as this analysis makes it out to be. Notes 1. For a fuller explanation of my view on how to individuate actions, see Ginet (1990, ch. 3). 2. Here I agree with McCann (1975). 3. Here again I agree with McCann (1975). 4. For example, O’Shaugnessy (1973) and Hornsby (1980). 5. Here I disagree with McCann (1991). 6. I say ‘by that act of pushing on it’, which refers to the particular action he performed, rather than ‘by pushing on it’, which refers to the type of action, because there is the following possibility (brought to my attention by Richard Reilly): Suppose Sam decides that he will move the log off the driveway later, after lunch, if he can. Sam knows that, if he can move the log at all by pushing on it, he can move it all the way off the driveway by (a sustained period of) pushing on it. So he pushes hard on the log for a few seconds and it moves a little bit, whereby he ﬁnds out that he can move it off the driveway by pushing on it. But he did not try to push it off the driveway, because it was not his intention in pushing on it to ﬁnd out whether he could push it off the driveway by that act of pushing on it. 7. I’m grateful to Harry Silverstein for calling my attention to the import of this possibility.

References Bratman, M. 1984. “Two Faces of Intention.” Philosophical Review 93: 375–405. Ginet, C. 1990. On Action. New York: Cambridge University Press. Hornsby, J. 1980. Actions. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. McCann, H. 1975. “Trying, Paralysis, and Volition.” Review of Metaphysics 28: 423–442. . 1991. “Settled Objectives and Rational Constraints.” American Philosophical Quarterly 28: 24–36. . 1998. The Works of Agency. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. O’Shaugnessy, B. 1973. “Trying as the Mental ‘Pineal Gland’.” Journal of Philosophy 70: 365–386.

The Metaphysics of Moral Responsibility

5

The Sense of Freedom

Dana K. Nelkin

1

Introduction

We appear to have an inescapable sense that we are free, a sense that we cannot abandon even in the face of powerful arguments that this sense is illusory. It has often been suggested, perhaps most notably by Kant (1781Ⲑ1965 and 1785Ⲑ1981), that we have such a sense of freedom in virtue of being rational deliberators. More precisely, (R) Rational deliberators, in virtue of their nature as rational deliberators, necessarily have a sense that they are free. This claim has a great deal of intuitive plausibility: it is when we engage in rational deliberation about what to do that we are most likely to become aware that we have a sense of ourselves as free. Even skeptics about free will, who are convinced that they are not free, often admit to a sense that they are free when they deliberate about what to do.1 (R) constitutes a rare point of agreement among philosophers who are deeply divided on the question of whether we really are free. But while there are skeptics who accept (R) and lament the fact that we are thereby condemned to live under an illusion, there are others who have much higher hopes for (R): they take (R) to be the ﬁrst major step in arguments that we are in fact free. For example, after claiming that we have a belief in our own freedom “so necessary in most of our rational operations,” Thomas Reid writes that This natural conviction of our acting freely, which is acknowledged by many who hold the doctrine of necessity, ought to throw the whole burden of proof upon that side . . . . (Reid 1788/1983, 344)

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and Kant writes, Now I say that every being which cannot act in any way other than under the idea of freedom is for this very reason free from a practical point of view. (Kant 1785/1981, 50 [GW 448])2

It is important to determine whether (R) is true, then, for at least two reasons. First, if (R) is true and we are not free, then one of our most central conceptions of ourselves is both false and inescapable. On the other hand, if Reid and Kant are correct, and (R) can be shown to be true, then a major premise can be established in an argument that we are in fact free.3 Is (R) true? In this paper, I will explore two lines of reasoning supporting the conclusion that it is. I believe that one of these lines is promising, and will suggest some different ways in which it might be developed. I begin by offering a more detailed account of the sense of freedom attributed to all rational deliberators. As might be expected, philosophers have understood (R) in different ways. In section 2, I examine what I call the ‘indeterministic’ reading, according to which the sense of freedom in (R) is the belief that one can choose from a set of undetermined alternative courses of action. Although I argue that, on the indeterministic reading, (R) is false, I believe the ways in which it has been defended contain important insights. In section 3, I argue that we should adopt what I call the ‘belief-concept’ reading of (R), according to which the sense of freedom in (R) is the belief that one’s actions are up to one in such a way that one is accountable for them. 2

The Indeterministic Reading of (R)

According to the indeterministic reading of (R), all rational deliberators necessarily believe that they can choose from multiple future courses of action, none of which is determined. Perhaps the earliest adherent of the indeterministic reading is Aristotle. In the Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle claims that about other [things] not only existence and non-existence is possible, but also human deliberation; these are things the doing and not doing of which is in our power. (Aristotle 1984b, 1942 [EE 1226a, 26–27])4

As stated in this passage and elsewhere in Aristotle’s work, it initially appears that Aristotle is making the strong claim that indeterminism is required for deliberation rather than the weaker claim that a belief in indeterminism is required for deliberation. However, in several places, Aristotle

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qualiﬁes his claims about the proper objects of deliberation in a way that suggests that deliberation requires the belief that the object of deliberation possesses certain properties rather than that the object of deliberation actually possesses those properties.5 What is essential to deliberation are the subject’s epistemic attitudes about the object of deliberation, and, in particular, the belief that any object of one’s deliberation is possible but not determined. While the inspiration for the indeterministic reading can thus be traced to Aristotle, the view has many contemporary adherents, and some have thought Kant to be another advocate.6 Despite its long history and current popularity, I claim that the indeterministic reading is false. Let me begin by setting out one line of reasoning that might be used to support the indeterministic reading of (R).7 (i)

If one deliberates about an action, A, then one must believe that it is

in one’s power to do and to forgo A. But, (ii)

If one believes that it is in one’s power to do/forgo A, then one

must believe that there exist no conditions sufﬁcient to render inevitable either A or not-A. Therefore, (iii)

If one deliberates about A, then one must believe that there exist

no conditions sufﬁcient to render inevitable either A or not-A.8 Premise (i) has seemed to many to be an attractive thesis, but I will present several thought experiments designed to undermine it. Then I will go on to challenge what are perhaps even more basic assumptions on which the indeterministic view must ultimately rest: assumptions about the very nature and purpose of rational deliberation. First, consider the following case: imagine that you know that a brilliant scientist has the ability to ﬁddle with your brain in a way that causes you to act as she wishes you to. You know that she wants you to vote for Gore over Bush in the upcoming presidential race, and that if you do not decide to vote as she wishes, she will cause you to vote that way. So, for instance, you know that if you were to prepare to vote for Bush or otherwise fail to decide to vote for Gore, the brilliant scientist would cause you to vote for Gore. It seems to me that you could still evaluate the reasons for voting

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for each candidate and decide to vote for Gore on the basis of those reasons. In this case, contrary to (iii), you know that conditions exist which are sufﬁcient for your voting for Gore, while you nevertheless deliberate and decide to vote for him. Further, contrary to (i), you do not believe you could forgo the action upon which you decide.9 Now one might object that your voting for Gore as a result of deliberation and decision differs in kind from the action of voting for Gore as a result of the brilliant scientist’s interference with your brain. One might think that the actions are of different types, especially if one is convinced that types of actions are individuated in part by the types of causes they have.10 If this is so, the objection goes, then you do deliberate about something that you believe you could do or forgo: a particular type of voting for Gore. Although this objection has some force, I think that it can be met. For if you accept the initial description of the thought experiment, what you evaluate with a view to acting are the reasons for voting for Gore. The objection, by contrast, has you evaluating reasons for voting for Gore on the basis of deliberation and decision, where this action is something that you could do or forgo. Even if this sort of deliberation is possible, it remains a coherent part of the thought experiment that you deliberate and decide to vote for Gore. Thus, additional objects of deliberation that might be regarded as actions to be done or forgone within the thought experiment do not alter the fact that there is something about which one deliberates and decides, despite not believing that one could either do or forgo it. The objection might be pressed in the following way, however: consider a modiﬁed version of the original voting case (the ‘inevitability’ case) in which you believe it to be inevitable that, no matter what, the scientist will ﬁddle with your brain in such a way that you vote for Gore. To ensure that the case is one in which it is inevitable that your action will have the same cause in counterfactual circumstances, let it be built into the case that there is no possibility of overdetermination: you believe that, no matter what, the changes in your brain induced by the scientist will be the sole cause of your voting for Gore. In this case, the objection proceeds, surely you cannot deliberate, and the explanation is that you fail to believe that the action in question—voting for Gore in a particular way—is one that you could either do or forgo. If the lack of such a belief is the correct explanation of the failure of deliberation in this case, then such a belief must be a necessary condition for deliberation. Further, this conclusion shows that

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there must be a mistake in the description of the original voting case. In particular, the objection continues, the conclusion of the inevitability case reveals that the supposed lesson of the original case rests on a mistaken assumption about action individuation, a mistake that is successfully avoided in the inevitability case. The conclusion drawn about the inevitability case is questionable, however. It is clearly a case in which you believe that you will perform a particular action in a particular way and so lack the belief that you can either do or forgo an action. It may also be that you cannot deliberate in this case. But it is not the former point that explains the latter. Rather, the explanation for your inability to deliberate in such a case is that you do not believe that the deliberation and the resulting decision on your part could be causally efﬁcacious. Possession of the belief that one’s deliberation and decision could be causally efﬁcacious is a necessary condition for deliberation, and the lack of such a belief in this case is the explanation for any inability to deliberate.11 These two beliefs—that one’s deliberation could be causally efﬁcacious and that one’s future actions are undetermined—might easily be conﬂated. The idea that one’s deliberation and decision caused one to perform an action might be confused with the idea that one’s deliberation and decision resulted in one’s making an undetermined possibility actual. But if we are careful to distinguish between these two ideas, then we can resist the present challenge to the original voting case. At this juncture, the proponent of the indeterministic reading of (R) might point out that even if the original voting example is effective in raising questions about (i) and so about (iii), it remains the case that it is not an example in which the agent is said to believe that determinism is true. While it is perhaps true that, in one sense, the example is a case in which the agent believes that conditions exist which are sufﬁcient for his or her future actions, it is not true if by ‘conditions’ we mean ‘a previous state of the world together with natural laws’.12 Yet there are cases in which individuals can rationally deliberate despite lacking a belief in indeterminism. For example, consider the fact that there are determinists who deliberate. More particularly, suppose that a person believes that scientists have succeeded in creating a computer that predicts her actions on the basis of past states of the world and natural laws. This case is clearly one in which someone believes that there are conditions sufﬁcient for her performing the actual action she will perform and in which

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she believes that her action is physically determined.13 The question is, can such a person deliberate if she knows that such a computer is busy churning out its predictions? The answer seems to me to be “yes.” I can imagine that such a computer exists right now somewhere in Siberia, printing out predictions about my future actions. Even if I believed this to be true, and so did not believe it possible for me to perform each of a number of alternative actions, I would go right on deliberating about all sorts of things. To the case of the deliberating determinists, the following reply might be offered. Such people do exist, and while they believe that determinism is true, they also hold the contradictory belief that determinism is false.14 Thus, although there are those who believe that determinism is true, as long as they continue to deliberate their behavior manifests the belief that they can do or forgo the actions about which they deliberate, and thus manifests the belief that determinism is false. In fact, it appears that the proponent of the indeterministic reading could account for every purported counterexample to (i) or (iii) simply by attributing contradictory beliefs to every deliberator who claims to have a belief contrary to that attributed in (i) or (iii). However, the idea that deliberation manifests either of these beliefs can be seen to rest on still more fundamental assumptions which can themselves be questioned, assumptions about the nature and point of rational deliberation. For we can ask: what are the conditions under which we take a piece of behavior to manifest a belief? The answer is that, in general, we do so when we think that the behavior is rationalized by a belief, that is, when we think that the presence of the belief in question is part of the correct explanation of the behavior that makes it intelligible in the context of the agent’s beliefs, desires and actions.15 For example, consider the case of a store owner who hires a private detective to watch and report on his cashier’s behavior. In the absence of a belief that it is likely that the cashier is embezzling money, the store owner’s action does not make sense in light of his other actions and attitudes. Thus, this belief rationalizes his hiring of a detective. Given this general understanding of what it would be for an activity to manifest a belief, let’s consider why it might be thought that the beliefs attributed to deliberators by the indeterministic view are manifested in the activity of deliberation. I will focus directly on the belief attributed in (iii) for the sake of simplicity, although the reasoning can easily be transposed to account for the belief attributed in (i), as well. Here, then, is the question: in what way can the belief attributed in (iii) be said to rationalize deliberation?

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Either of two answers might be given, one having to do with the essential nature of deliberation, the other with its point, or purpose. Richard Taylor provides material for the ﬁrst sort of answer. He writes that if an agent, Adam, believes that conditions already existed sufﬁcient for his performing the action he will perform in the future, then “he can no longer deliberate about the matter because . . . he believes it is not up to him what he does; the matter has already been ‘decided’, one way or the other, and there is no decision for Adam to make” (Taylor 1964, 77). On one natural reading of this passage, the purpose of deliberation is to decide upon an action, where ‘decision’ is constituted by an agent’s closing all but one of several previously ‘open’ possibilities. It follows that if conditions exist sufﬁcient for a particular action’s being performed, and hence that there are no previously open possibilities to be closed or to be chosen to remain open by the agent, then there can be no true decisions on the part of anyone. It could then be argued that if an individual did not believe that his deliberation could succeed in bringing about a decision, then his deliberating would not make sense. Therefore, the belief that he could make a decision would rationalize his deliberation, and so that belief would be manifested in the activity of deliberation. Finally, given the present understanding of ‘decision’, it follows that one can only deliberate if one believes that there are open possibilities for one to close. The problem with this suggestion is that the understanding of ‘decision’ on which it is based ought to be rejected. For on the view that a decision is the closing of previously open possibilities, it is not strictly speaking true to say that someone has reached a decision if, for some reason, it cannot be carried out. Yet the naturalness of saying that someone made a decision that could not be carried out suggests that we do not normally think of a decision as being deﬁned by its effects. Rather, it is more natural to say that a decision is something like the formation of an intention which, depending on the circumstances, may or may not be carried out. According to this latter understanding of ‘decision’, we can successfully decide to do something even if the decision does not succeed in effecting anything, let alone in the closing of all but one of several previously open possibilities. The second way in which the belief attributed in (iii) might be said to rationalize deliberation involves a somewhat more modest view of the connection between determinism on the one hand, and deliberation and decision on the other. The idea is that if deliberation and decision are to have a

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point at all, then they must succeed in closing all but one of several previously open possibilities. This view is suggested by Aristotle, who, in arguing that it would be absurd to think that everything that happens, happens of necessity, claims that in that case “there would be no need to deliberate or to take trouble” (Aristotle 1984d, 29 [DI 9, 18b31–2]).16 On this view, one could be said to make a decision even if determinism were true, although in that case the decision would lack a point. It could then be argued that if an agent failed to believe that there was a point to making a decision, then it would not make sense for her to deliberate. Therefore, deliberation manifests the belief that there is a point to making a decision, and thus, that there are open possibilities to be closed by the agent as a result of deliberation and decision. But is it in fact true that rational deliberators can only take rational deliberation to have a point if they take it that their decisions result in the closing of all but one of several previously open possibilities? Of course, I take it that the original voting case provides a negative answer here. For I ﬁnd it perfectly coherent that the agent in that case does not believe that her purpose in deliberating is to change the course of events from what it would otherwise be, or even to ﬁnd out what she will do, and yet the possibility that she deliberates is perfectly intelligible. Yet merely appealing to this sort of case will not convince those who would attribute contradictory beliefs to the voter. I must say what it is that the case reveals about our attitudes toward the point of deliberation. And that is that reasons can motivate us to act in a certain way even if we know that we will act in that way no matter what. The case shows us that the possibility of acting on the basis of good reasons can itself be seen to have value, and so, one can take the activity of rational deliberation to have a point if one takes it that the activity can result in one’s acting for good reasons. And the possibility that rational deliberators could take deliberation to have a point in the absence of indeterminism undermines this kind of defense of the indeterministic reading. Thus, we have not been given sufﬁcient reason to conclude that the belief attributed in (iii) is manifested by rational deliberation. Each of the two attempts to provide an argument for the conclusion that rational deliberation manifests the belief attributed in (iii) relies on a problematic premise: the ﬁrst rests on a dubious assumption about the nature of a decision, the second on a questionable assumption about the point of deliberation. Of course, there may be reasons other than the two that I

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have considered here for accepting the conclusion. However, the burden rests with those who advocate the indeterministic reading; for the fact that the purported counterexamples to it can only be resisted at the cost of attributing contradictory beliefs to otherwise rational people provides some prima facie reason to reject the view.17 Having made it clear which aspects of the reasoning to the indeterministic reading I wish to reject, let me emphasize an aspect of the reasoning that I have not rejected. I believe that the general strategy of showing that the sense of freedom rationalizes the very activity of rational deliberation is a promising one, and I will pursue it in section 3. In particular, I will return to the idea that for rational deliberation itself to be an intelligible activity, deliberators must take such activity to have a point or purpose. For even if deliberation can be seen to have a point in the absence of indeterminism, it does not follow that it has a point in the absence of freedom. And if we refrain from prejudging the question of whether freedom requires indeterminism, it is possible that, in an important sense of ‘free’, we cannot take our deliberation to have a point if we do not have a sense that we are free. 3

The Belief-concept Reading

The Sense of ‘Freedom’ To explain the sense of ‘freedom’ in the type of reading of (R) I favor, it will be useful to borrow some terminology from John Rawls, and distinguish between the concept of freedom and particular conceptions of freedom (Rawls 1971, 5). First, there is a concept of freedom that all (or at least many) people grasp, even if they disagree as to the necessary and sufﬁcient conditions for its instantiation. There must be such a concept if compatibilists, incompatibilists, and those who believe freedom impossible are rightly said to disagree. Of course, it is possible to argue that the whole problem with the free will debate is that the participants are indeed speaking different languages, and that agreement could be reached immediately if this fact were only acknowledged. I think that this view gives too little credit to the participants in the debate, however, and that there is at least one important concept about which there is disagreement.18 Second, there are also different analyses of freedom offered (such as the ability to choose from among various undetermined actions or the ability

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to act in the absence of constraint). These are conceptions of freedom, attempts to spell out in detail the conditions under which actions are free. It is easy to describe various conceptions of freedom, then. But what is the concept of freedom? In my view, the concept of free agency is the notion of one’s actions being up to one in such a way that one is, in a basic sense, responsible or accountable for them. This account must be clariﬁed in various ways. First, let me emphasize that in identifying the concept of freedom in this way, I mean to suggest that the mutual implication between ‘free’ and ‘being up to one in such a way that one is accountable’ should be recognized by anyone in possession of the concept of freedom. Second, ‘responsibility’ and ‘accountability’, like ‘freedom’, each have many different senses. Perhaps ‘accountability’ has fewer meanings, and so there is reason to favor this term over ‘responsibility’. Third, it is also very important that ‘responsible’ and ‘accountable’ not be read as ‘morally responsible’ and ‘morally accountable’, despite the fact that the former locutions are often used as shorthand for the latter. I think that we have a more basic notion of responsibility (or accountability) that underlies various kinds of responsibility: responsibility for one’s productivity and creativity, moral responsibility, and so on. Responsibility in this basic sense is a necessary, but not sufﬁcient, condition for moral responsibility. The reason is that moral responsibility requires certain sorts of knowledge, both general and particular. But this does not mean that the concept of freedom I have characterized is a weak notion. It captures what is traditionally known as the ‘freedom’ condition for moral responsibility, while leaving open the question of how to characterize the ‘knowledge’ condition. And it provides the condition for the normativity required by moral responsibility, while leaving open the possibility that one who is free is not morally obligated. I believe that this concept remains neutral as among various particular conceptions of freedom. To see this, consider that an agent causationist might argue that if one’s actions are to be up to one in this way, they must be agent caused.19 Alternatively, one might argue that if one’s actions are to be up to one in this way, they must be determined by one’s valuational judgments.20 The ﬁrst of these views requires the truth of indeterminism, while the second does not. Some might argue that the true concept of freedom is not in fact neutral, and that the concept of freedom is just the notion that ‘one can choose

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from among alternative courses of action’ or that ‘one could have done otherwise’ or that ‘one is the undetermined source of one’s actions’. Yet, there have been numerous attempts to provide such conditions that do not allude to the choosing among alternatives, having the ability to do otherwise, or being undetermined. I do not mean to suggest that any such attempts have met with complete success, only that they have been genuine attempts. If the concept of freedom were the notion that one can do otherwise, then it would seem that agreement as to the entailment between freedom and the ability to do otherwise would be readily forthcoming. The fact that many who have attempted to provide necessary and sufﬁcient conditions for freedom have not granted the point suggests that the concept of freedom is not simply the notion that one can do otherwise. Further, even if we were to accept the point of the objection for the sake of argument, we can still accept that the notion I have described is an important condition for moral and other sorts of responsibility.21 Thus, if it can be shown that we must represent ourselves as free in the sense that I have described, that would be a signiﬁcant result. Further, if Kant and Reid are correct, and (R) is the ﬁrst step in a sound argument that we are free (in the sense speciﬁed in (R)), then that, too, would be a signiﬁcant result. Finally, the concept I have described satisﬁes widely accepted constraints on the notion of freedom that is at the heart of the free will debate. For example, philosophers often claim that the notion of freedom in which they are interested is a notion that applies to persons, but not to many nonhuman animals who are thought not to be persons.22 That is, there is a sense in which the actions of humans can be up to them, or be their own, in a way that the actions of a spider cannot. Since the notion of accountability might be thought to be limited in its applicability in such a way as to exclude many nonhuman animals, the concept that I have described matches this widely accepted feature of freedom. The readings I will consider in what follows take ‘free’ in the sense speciﬁed in (R) to pick out the concept of freedom. Hence, they are ‘conception-neutral’.23 The Sense of ‘Sense’ There are a number of different ways one might understand the ‘sense’ in ‘sense of freedom’, including ‘feeling’, ‘appearance’, ‘belief’, and ‘rational commitment’. I begin the next subsection by arguing that the sense of freedom in (R) is an epistemic commitment, or belief, that one is free. It

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does not follow from this reading that all rational deliberators can articulate their commitment without considerable probing and reﬂection; but it does follow that they actually represent themselves as free. In this respect, it is like the indeterministic reading of (R). In what follows, I call the conceptionneutral reading that understands ‘sense’ in this way, the ‘belief-concept’ reading. In the ﬁnal subsection, I consider a weaker reading of (R) according to which the sense of freedom is a rational commitment that one is free. Roughly, one is rationally committed to a proposition when reﬂection and recognition of the features of one’s own mental states and reasoning are sufﬁcient for one’s believing that proposition. But one need not actually believe that one is free in order to be rationally committed to the proposition. I call the reading of (R) that incorporates both the conception-neutral reading of ‘free’ and the rational commitment reading of ‘sense’, the ‘commitmentconcept’ reading. Although I believe that there is good reason to accept the belief-concept reading, it is true that even weaker premises are needed to support the commitment-concept reading, and thus, that the latter requires less in the way of defense. At the same time, as I will explain, both readings can do powerful explanatory and justiﬁcatory work. An Argument for the Belief-concept Reading We can begin by focusing once again on the nature of rational deliberation. Recall that one rationally deliberates when one considers and evaluates reasons with a view to deciding to act. The culmination of rational deliberation is the adoption, on the basis of one’s evaluation, of certain reasons as one’s reasons for performing an action, and the consequent decision so to act. In other words, the deliberator decides to act on the basis of those reasons. Given the nature of rational deliberation just described, deliberators are the sorts of beings who have a guiding conception of their purpose when they perform intentional, goal-directed actions. Further, it is important to note that they have a sense of their purpose whether or not they explicitly deliberate about what to do. For example, if a rational deliberator is engaged in seeking the latest international news, then she has a conception of the goal that deﬁnes her activity. If she does not conceive herself to be seeking the latest news, then whatever activity in which she is engaged, she is not seeking the news. This point applies to rational deliberation itself. Here, too, one need not be able to articulate one’s purpose in deliberating

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without considerable reﬂection, but one must have a conception of one’s purpose when one deliberates, namely, that of ﬁnding, adopting, and acting on good reasons. Accepting this point depends crucially on an understanding of the nature of rational deliberation as an activity directed by the agent toward a particular goal. The fact that a set of mental states constitutes a genuine piece of rational deliberation is determined not merely by the content of those states (e.g., ‘R is a reason to do action A’), and not merely by the fact that they tend to issue in action. It is also essential that the deliberator be thereby attempting to accomplish something, namely, the adoption of good reasons as her own. This requires that the deliberator have a guiding sense that her activity is aimed at this goal.24 If rational deliberators have a conception of themselves as seeking to adopt and act on good reasons, then they must take themselves to be capable, in general, of ﬁnding such reasons. This claim is independently plausible, but I believe it derives additional support from its being explained. Implicit in the sense of purpose that guides their intentional, goal-directed actions is a commitment to a plan (however incomplete) to achieve it. Yet if one does not view one’s purpose as attainable, then one cannot envision a plan for its implementation. In other words, in order to have a guiding conception about how one can achieve one’s purpose, one must believe that one can.25 It is not necessary for deliberators to believe that they must succeed on each occasion of deliberation; but they must believe that they have the ability to succeed in at least some typical situations. In other words, they must believe that they are the sort of being who, by engaging in the activity of rational deliberation, can succeed in ﬁnding and adopting good reasons for acting. Otherwise, it would not be possible to conceive of their activity as constituting a way of achieving their purpose. Thus, rational deliberators must take themselves to be the sorts of beings who can and do sometimes ﬁnd, adopt, and act on good reasons. If this is the case, then rational deliberators must believe that there are good reasons to be found, adopted, and acted upon. In other words, they must believe that there are reasons they ought to act upon. But if one is the sort of being to whom such ‘ought statements’ apply, then one’s actions can be rationally justiﬁed or unjustiﬁed. And that one’s actions are potential objects of this sort of justiﬁcation is the way in which one can be accountable for one’s actions.

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At this point, the question arises whether rational deliberators must believe that they are accountable simply because they believe that there are reasons upon which they ought to act. Of course, it is not true in general that an agent must believe the consequent of a true conditional when she believes the antecedent. But this is a special case. There is a tight conceptual connection between the idea of there being reasons upon which one ought to act and the idea of one’s being accountable; it seems that in order to see oneself as the sort of being to whom such reasons apply, one must see oneself as the sort of being who is accountable for his or her actions.26 Finally, then, we can see how one must believe that one’s actions are up to one in such a way that one is accountable for them: one believes that one’s actions can be performed as a result of one’s own adopted reasons and, further, that they are potential objects of rational justiﬁcation.27 Thus, by identifying essential features of rational deliberation, we can see why deliberators must have a sense of themselves as free (in the conceptionneutral sense). Objections, Replies, and Elaboration At this point, a number of questions might be raised about this line of reasoning. One natural question is whether rational deliberators can take their activity to have a purpose different from the one I identify. In particular, can rational deliberators who come to believe that they are not free continue to deliberate while taking themselves to have a different purpose in doing so? For example, they might take the purpose of their deliberation to be to achieve the maximal satisfaction of their desires, or to increase the beauty in the world by being a passive receptor of reasons. Although this objection has some force, I believe that its force can be defused by focusing once again on the nature of deliberation. It is compatible with the reasoning above that rational deliberators take their activity to have more than one point or purpose. The claim that those engaged in rational deliberation take their activity to have as its purpose their acting for good reasons is perfectly consistent with the claim that they also take that activity to have an additional, or further, point. For example, a rational deliberator might be asked to deliberate and decide on a course of action as part of her participation in a researcher’s psychological experiment. In deliberating, she might have as her purpose to please the researcher, but if she follows the researcher’s instructions to the letter, she must also take as

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her purpose to act for good reasons. In order to do so, she must take it that her deliberation can be efﬁcacious and that there are reasons on the basis of which she should act. Hence, as I argued earlier, she must have a sense that she is free. The fact that one can imagine a rational deliberator taking her activity to have any of a number of different points does not show that rational deliberators can avoid taking their activity to have the point of acting on the basis of good reasons.28 Further, in addition to consulting our intuitions about the nature of rational deliberation in the abstract (as I have so far been urging us to do), it is useful to consider in more concrete terms the question of whether rational deliberators must take deliberation to have a particular purpose. To this end, consider our own behavior when we believe that there are no good reasons for acting in a certain way. For example, suppose you are at an ice cream shop, having decided to buy an ice cream cone. You believe that all the ﬂavors are equally good. You don’t generally deliberate in such circumstances, but simply pick a ﬂavor at random. On my view, the reason for your lack of deliberation in such a case is that you see no point in deliberating. We see no point in engaging in the evaluation of reasons for acting when we think that there is no reason that we should act in a particular way. We are not in a position in which we could act for good reasons in choosing a ﬂavor of ice cream, hence we see no point to deliberating, and so do not engage in it. This thought experiment—together with the investigation into the nature of goal-directed intentional activity I sketched earlier—strongly suggests that the very activity of rational deliberation manifests the sense that there is a point or purpose to the activity. Further, these considerations suggest that rational deliberation manifests the sense that the point of one’s activity is to decide and ultimately to act on the basis of good reasons. At this point, a second objection might naturally arise: even if one has a conception of the purpose of one’s activity, one need not believe that one’s purpose can be achieved in order to be rational in engaging in it. In what follows, I defend the idea that one must believe that one has the general ability to succeed in order to have a conception of one’s purpose in performing goal-directed intentional actions. There is a long history of controversy on this and related questions, and I cannot do full justice to it here.29 But I will suggest one approach to it in the context of defending a key premise in the reasoning for the belief-concept reading. Let me begin

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by emphasizing that I am not relying on the claim that one must believe one can succeed on every occasion. Rather the claim is that one must believe one can succeed in typical circumstances when one attempts the relevant type of action. This point might be sufﬁcient to defuse the present worry about the belief-concept reading. For as I hope to show, those on both sides of the debate over the connection between intentional action and belief might be able to ﬁnd agreement once this point is noted. In thinking about the relation between intentional action and belief, intuitions about examples play an important role. Here is an example that provides support for the idea that one must believe one can achieve one’s purpose, when one has a conception of it in acting intentionally: I cannot intentionally engage in any activity that might be described as either ﬂying or trying to ﬂy, no matter how much I desire to and how much I ﬂap my arms. The natural explanation seems to be that I do not believe it possible for me to ﬂy. In fact, I believe that I lack the general ability to ﬂy. I can imagine circumstances in which someone else tries to ﬂy. But these circumstances include delusions on the part of the person making the attempt. If someone were to believe that his physical abilities were very different from what they are, or that the laws of aerodynamics or gravity were different from what they are, then he could try to ﬂy. (Of course, this would require a great number of changes in one’s belief system and probably a great deal of irrationality.) Here, it seems that what explains the difference between this person and me is the difference between our beliefs about what ﬂapping our arms could possibly accomplish. Those who argue against a necessary connection between belief and intentional action offer examples on the other side. Kirk Ludwig offers this one, among others30: A friend insists that I can make a basket from halfcourt. I believe it impossible for me to make a basket from that distance, and set out to show him that even if I try as hard as I can, I still can’t do it. I try, and, amazingly, make the basket. This appears to be a case in which I intentionally make a basket without believing that it is possible. According to Ludwig, my intentionally making the basket in this case shows that I also intended and tried to make it before surprising myself with my success. Since I have argued that rational deliberators engaged in intentional goaldirected activity have a sense of their purpose, the case seems to be one in which the sense of purpose is not accompanied by a belief that it can be achieved.

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Reasons might be offered to resist this example and others like it, but what is more important for our purposes here is the kind of example it is (and is not). For even those who argue that intentional action does not require the belief that success is possible agree that there are some things one cannot intentionally do (or even try to do), like ﬂying or making a basket from ten miles away. Some explanation for this fact is required. Ludwig, for example, acknowledges that you could not try to hit a home run by holding the bat in a “bunt” position.31 Why not? The reason, according to Ludwig, is that this stance and the limited motion it permits are not designed to bring about the end of hitting home runs. In cases like this in which one intentionally performs an action without believing that one can succeed, one might recognize that circumstances are special in such a way that one’s activity cannot succeed. This is a cashing out of the idea that in order to act intentionally, one must conceive one’s actions as of a type designed to bring about a certain end. If this is right, then we have a way to distinguish between the cases of making a basket from half-court and swinging “all out” for a home run on the one hand, and making a basket from Mars and a home run from a “bunt” position on the other. The view also suggests that we assume that when we act intentionally our actions are of a type that, under at least some typical circumstances, can succeed. Further, there is a rationale for this: if one views a certain kind of activity as one some of whose typical instances are successful in achieving their purposes, then one can have a conception of how they are successful. This makes it possible for us to envision our own activity of this type as a way of implementing a plan to achieve its purpose.32 Admittedly, it is difﬁcult to give criteria for ‘type’ of action here. But I think it is possible to rely on an intuitive idea. I can’t try to ﬂy, or make a home run from the bunt position, because these are not the kinds of actions at which I could succeed under anything like normal circumstances. I must believe that I have the general ability to succeed, if I have a sense of my purpose in acting.33 This conclusion is all that is needed in order to defend the belief-concept reading of (R) from the present objection. For even if one need not believe that one can succeed on a particular occasion of deliberation, one must believe that one has the general ability to succeed. One must take it that one’s activity is successful under at least some typical circumstances. Otherwise, one won’t be able to view one’s engagement in the activity as counting as

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a way of achieving the purpose of adopting good reasons for acting. Thus, one must believe that one is free in the conception-neutral sense. As I have argued, this reasoning should persuade those on a wide spectrum of views positing particular connections between intentional action and belief. However, others might worry that, according to this reasoning, rational deliberation requires too much in the way of conceptual development and self-reﬂection. Young children and nonhuman animals would appear to be counterexamples to the reasoning behind the belief-concept reading of (R) since they include rational deliberators who lack mentalstate and related concepts such as ‘action’, ‘reasons’, and ‘responsibility’, and those who have not reﬂected on the purpose of their activity. This sort of worry deserves to be taken seriously. However, I believe that the appeal of the alleged counterexamples is undermined by reﬂection on the nature of the central concepts in the reasoning behind the belief-concept reading.34 First, let me emphasize that rational deliberation as I understand it is itself a very sophisticated cognitive activity: the consideration and evaluation of reasons with a view to deciding to act, where one’s decision is based on one’s evaluation and adoption of reasons as one’s reasons for performing an action. Once this is understood, it becomes difﬁcult to maintain that young children and nonhuman animals provide counterexamples to the claim that all rational deliberators must have the concept of reasons, for example. For the cognitive sophistication required to engage in rational deliberation itself would seem to rule out at least some members of these groups, and, in particular, the very same members who are excluded from the possession of sophisticated concepts such as reasons. At the same time, it is important to emphasize once again that the concepts in question do not include the concepts of moral reasons and moral responsibility, but the concepts of reasons and responsibility in a basic sense. Thus, the argument for the belief-concept reading of (R) does not presuppose the possession of any moral concepts by rational deliberators. Recognition of the robust understanding of rational deliberation articulated above together with the relatively basic nature of the notions of reasons and responsibility should dispel the worry raised by the alleged counterexamples that there must be a faulty step somewhere in the reasoning behind the belief-concept reading. Finally, even if lingering doubts remain about the strength of the beliefconcept reading of (R), it is possible to adopt a weaker conception-neutral

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reading without giving up much of the explanatory and justiﬁcatory role of (R). According to the commitment-concept reading, rational deliberators are rationally committed, in virtue of being rational deliberators, to their being free. They need not actually believe that they are free, but they are in a state such that mere reﬂection and recognition of features of their own mental states and activity would sufﬁce for the beliefs in question. To reach this weaker conclusion, each premise of the reasoning for the belief-concept reading of (R) might be weakened in such a way as to incorporate rational commitment in place of belief, and thus, to require less in the way of selfreﬂection than the reasoning for the belief-concept reading. Equally importantly, the commitment-concept reading of (R) can do much of the work that the belief-concept reading can do. For it can explain the centrality of the belief that one is free for those (like us) who have reﬂected on the matter. And it can also play a powerful role in arguments like Reid’s and Kant’s that we are in fact free. To take the simplest example, Reid’s burden of proof argument set out earlier does not seem to lose much of its force when we substitute ‘rational commitment’ for ‘conviction’. Thus, even if we adopt the commitment-concept reading of (R) over the belief-concept reading, (R) remains an important thesis. Before concluding, it remains to consider one ﬁnal objection. Unlike the others, this one does not question the reasoning for the belief-concept reading of (R), but instead questions the meaning and signiﬁcance of the conclusion. The objection is that once we see that freedom in the conception-neutral sense is closely tied to the ability to act for good reasons, it is not clear that the notion of freedom in the conception-neutral readings of (R) is really the concept of freedom after all. The quality of ‘being chosen’ seems to fade into the background while the notion of rational capacity can be seen to undergird the conception-neutral notion of freedom described.35 In response, it is important to note that although the concept of freedom can be seen to be closely associated with reasons and accountability, this fact does not detract from its conception-neutral character. For example, nothing that I have said rules out the possibility that satisfaction of the concept of freedom as I have characterized it requires the falsity of determinism. Further, the concept, ‘freedom’, is not simply to be equated with the concept, ‘ability to respond to good reasons to act’. The concept of freedom, on my view, is that one’s actions are up to one in a particular and special way, namely, such that one is accountable for one’s actions. It is true that at least

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one way of one’s actions being up to one such that one is accountable for them depends partly on the agent’s ability to respond to good reasons for acting. But I believe that this is a connection that we should ﬁnd attractive, particularly once the connection between obligation by reasons and accountability is noted. For if one’s actions are up to one in such a way that one is (in a nonmoral sense) accountable for them, then we would seem to have just what is wanted in a ‘freedom’ condition for moral responsibility. Finally, even if we set aside the question of whether the concept of freedom is the concept of one’s actions being up to one such that one is accountable for them, the latter concept remains a signiﬁcant one. For it is one that provides an important condition for moral and other sorts of responsibility, and one that we care deeply about. In sum, the belief-concept reading of (R) faces important challenges. Yet an intuitively plausible line of reasoning gives it considerable resources with which to respond. As a result, the belief-concept reading (together with the weaker commitment-concept reading) remains a promising interpretation of the widely accepted idea that in virtue of being rational deliberators we cannot escape the sense that we are free. 4

Conclusion

Both the indeterministic reading and the belief-concept reading of (R) rest on reasoning that takes the sense of freedom to be a belief manifested by the very activity of rational deliberation. They diverge in the content of the beliefs each attributes to rational deliberators. Equally important is the difference between the notions of rational deliberation employed by each reading, for it is on this difference that the difference in beliefs ultimately rests. Unlike the indeterministic reading, the belief-concept reading takes the essence of rational deliberation to be the attempt to ﬁnd and adopt good reasons for acting. By building on the reason-seeking features of rational deliberation, it is possible to explain why rational deliberators must have a sense of their actions being up to them in such a way that they are accountable for them. At the same time, this focus on the reason-seeking features of rational deliberation makes the belief-concept reading of (R) particularly well suited to an antiskeptical argument in the spirit of Kant and Reid. For if rational deliberation is essentially a reason-seeking faculty, it is tempting to conclude that the simple possession of such a rational

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faculty could not be responsible for a false belief. Of course, turning this thought from a tempting idea into the conclusion of a sound argument that rational deliberators are free is a project of its own. Yet if the beliefconcept reading of (R) is correct, then we are at least entitled to a key premise in such an argument. Acknowledgments This paper is a longer version of a paper presented at the Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference 2001. I am very grateful to the organizers of the conference and the editors of this volume, Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O’Rourke, and David Shier, for the opportunity to be part of such a stimulating and constructive exchange of ideas. I would also like to thank my commentator, Ron Wilburn, and the audience for their helpful comments and for an excellent discussion. I presented an earlier version of the paper at the University of Virginia in February 2001, and I thank the audience for valuable discussion on that occasion. A number of people read versions of this paper and offered comments that caused me to improve the paper. For this, I am very grateful to Tal Brewer, Tyler Burge, Jim Cargile, Peter Hanowell, Barbara Herman, Andrew Hsu, Tina Huggins, Pat Matthews, Peter Murphy, Michael Otsuka, Derk Pereboom, Sam Rickless, George Thomas, and two anonymous referees for this volume. Notes 1. For example, Galen Strawson writes that a free will skeptic who concentrates on abandoning his “ordinary conception of freedom” may temporarily experience “a total paralysis of all purposive thought as it is ordinarily conceived and experienced” (Strawson 1986, 102). It is when we are trying to make decisions (moral and otherwise) that our belief in our own freedom is most acutely felt. (See p. viii, and chapter 3.) At the same time, Strawson argues that freedom is impossible and that our belief is false. It must be noted that Strawson does not accept (R), but rather the weaker claim that humans who rationally deliberate necessarily believe themselves free. Castañeda accepts something like (R), and at the same time accepts the possibility that the skeptic is right: if so, “the universe is ugly; given the biological and psychological primacy of practical over contemplative thinking, we are, thus, condemned to presuppose a falsehood in order to do what we must think practically” (Castañeda 1975, 134).

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2. Controversy abounds over just how Kant should be interpreted here. I will not enter into that controversy here. 3. I explore different ways this argument can be developed in Nelkin (in preparation). 4. See also Aristotle (1984c, 1798 [NE 1139a, 13–14]) for a similar statement. 5. See, for example, Aristotle (1984b, 1941 [EE 1225b, 34–36]) : “. . . nor does he even choose what is possible, generally, if he does not think it in his power to do or abstain from doing it.” See also, Aristotle (1984b, 1942 [EE 1226a, 25–26]) : “. . . about these [things the production of which is not in our power] none would attempt to deliberate except in ignorance.” These qualiﬁcations have suggested to some that what Aristotle meant in expressing the apparently stronger claim that deliberation requires indeterminism was actually the weaker claim that deliberation requires a belief in indeterminism. There is some dispute about this, however. See Gail Fine (1981, 572 and note 10) for a statement of this view, as against Sorabji (1980, 228 and 245–246), who credits Aristotle with the stronger claim and argues only that Aristotle should have offered the weaker. See my note 16 for further textual evidence in support of the view that Aristotle held the weaker thesis. 6. See, for example, Castañeda (1975) who accepts the indeterministic reading. Van Inwagen accepts something like the indeterministic reading of (R). (See van Inwagen 1983). He argues that deliberators must believe that multiple alternative possibilities are each within one’s power. However, van Inwagen stops short of claiming that deliberators must believe that these alternative possibilities are undetermined. Those who have understood Kant as advocating the indeterministic reading of (R) include Castañeda (1975, 134) and Thomas Hill (1985, 16–17). 7. See Richard Taylor (1964) and van Inwagen (1983, especially 152–161), for similar lines of argument. Taylor argues that a deliberator must not believe that she cannot choose among undetermined alternatives rather than that such a deliberator must believe that she can so choose. Van Inwagen adapts Taylor’s argument in order to argue for the presence of a belief. As mentioned in my note 6, van Inwagen argues that all deliberators necessarily believe that multiple alternative possibilities are within their power. 8. This is not the only line of reasoning that might be used in support of the indeterministic reading of (R). One might begin with the claim that one can deliberate only if one believes oneself to be the ultimate source of one’s actions, and infer that one must believe determinism to be false in order to do so. Although I believe the line of reasoning set out in the text to be the one most often deployed, much of what I go on to say addresses this second line, as well. 9. My claim here is analogous in certain respects to Harry Frankfurt’s claim to have found a counterexample to the ‘Principle of Alternate Possibilities’ (see Frankfurt 1969). That principle states that one cannot be responsible for an action if one cannot

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do otherwise. I claim here to have a counterexample to what might be called the ‘principle of belief in alternate possibilities’, the claim that one cannot deliberate if one believes that one cannot do otherwise. 10. See, for example, Davidson (1969, 179). 11. See Randolph Clarke (1992), for a similar line of reasoning against the indeterministic reading. 12. It might also be objected that while the original voting case shows that (i) and even (iii) are false, it is nevertheless a case in which the agent believes that there is something she can do or forgo (e.g., voting for Gore in a certain way), even if this is not the (primary) object of deliberation. Thus, the case leaves open the possibility of ﬁnding reasons other than (i) through (iii) for accepting (R), including the reasoning described in note 7. The case to follow in the text can be used to address this objection, as well. 13. An added virtue of this case is that it is immune to the sort of objection we saw earlier concerning action individuation. For if the agent believes that her future actions are determined by past physical states together with natural laws, then she believes that conditions are sufﬁcient for her performing a particular action in a particular way (i.e., with certain causal antecedents). 14. A similar sort of reply is suggested by van Inwagen. However, he offers the reply on behalf of free will skeptics who deliberate rather than on behalf of determinists who deliberate. See van Inwagen (1983, 157–158). 15. This notion of rationalization is somewhat broader than that introduced by Davidson (1963). In that paper, Davidson uses ‘rationalization’ to refer to a reason consisting of a desire (or other pro-attitude) toward actions of a certain type together with the speciﬁc belief that one’s action is of that type. My formulation allows for additional ‘background’ beliefs that are necessary for seeing the behavior as intelligible to count as rationalizing. The example which follows in the text is one in which the belief rationalizes the action in my sense even though it is not a belief of the speciﬁc form: ‘my action is of a certain type’. 16. This passage also provides further support for the claim that Aristotle did not hold the view that deliberation requires indeterminism. For if he had held that view, then it would have been natural for him to identify the claim that we could not deliberate as an absurd consequence of determinism. But in fact, he identiﬁes the weaker claim that deliberation would have no point as the absurd consequence of determinism. 17. There are ways to resist the indeterministic reading other than the one I have set out here. Some have described the phenomenology of deliberation and decision in a way that undermines the indeterministic reading (see, for example, Mele 1995, 133–136 and Strawson 1986, 115, note 30), and others have argued against the

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indeterministic reading by providing diagnoses of why we mistakenly take the view to be true. One such diagnosis is that the indeterministic reading of (R) is confused with the true claim that we human beings have a sense that our actions are undetermined. J. David Velleman (1989), for example, accepts this weaker thesis, and offers a psychological account of the phenomenon. A second kind of diagnosis is that the belief in the contingency of one’s future actions has been confused with a belief in the epistemic or, alternatively, the doxastic contingency of those actions. (See Dennett 1984, 112–113; Pereboom 1995, 32–33; Kapitan 1986; and Pereboom 2001, 136–137.) A related diagnosis has been offered by Philip Pettit (1989), who argues that the indeterministic reading has been confused with the following true claim: for each of a set of alternative courses of action under deliberation, a deliberator must not believe that it is not possible. Hilary Bok (1998) argues that while we have reason to regard ourselves as having genuine alternatives, this means that we must see ourselves as having alternatives in the sense that there are multiple actions we would perform if we chose (110–114). George Thomas (unpublished manuscript) defends what I take to be the most promising of these accounts: rational deliberators must believe that they can choose among alternate possibilities where the alternate possibilities are those actions that are not made impossible by anything that does not proceed via the process of deliberation itself. (See also Dennett 1984, 115–122 for a related suggestion.) I discuss all of these suggestions in Nelkin (in preparation). 18. See Honderich (1988) for the view that both compatibilists and incompatibilists make the mistake of focusing on one family of important human attitudes to the exclusion of another with which it is inconsistent. I cannot do justice to Honderich’s rich discussion here. For our purposes here, it is worth noting that it is consistent with there being a single concept of freedom, and even one to which all rational deliberators are in some way committed, that human beings often possess inconsistent attitudes concerning particular conceptions of freedom. 19. See, for example, Roderick Chisholm (1964). 20. See Watson (1975). 21. In this connection, see Frank Jackson (1998), who writes: “I ﬁnd compelling Peter van Inwagen’s argument that . . . determinism is inconsistent with free will. What compatibilist arguments show, or so it seems to me, is . . . that free action on a conception near enough to the folk’s [i.e., common-sense] to be regarded as a natural extension of it, and which does the theoretical job we folk give the concept of free action in adjudicating questions of moral responsibility and punishment, and in governing our attitudes to the actions of those around us, is compatible with determinism” (44–45). Although the concept that I offer is neutral as between compatibilism and incompatibilism, the spirit of Jackson’s point applies to it, as well. Even if one doubts that the concept I offer is the concept of freedom, one can still accept that it can do the theoretical work we want it to do, including supporting our attributions of moral responsibility.

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22. See, for example, Frankfurt (1971). 23. Bok has recently defended what might naturally be thought of as an explicitly compatibilist reading of (R). In particular, she argues that being practical reasoners gives us reason to regard ourselves as free in a compatibilist sense. We are free in the relevant sense when we can determine our conduct through practical reasoning, and we have genuine alternatives among which we can choose, where genuine alternatives are those actions we would perform if we chose to perform them. See especially Bok (1998, 118–119). 24. Strawson’s rejection of (R) may ultimately rest on an understanding of rational deliberation that differs from mine on just this point. For example, he describes the rational deliberation of an imaginary being, the Spectator, who is “experientially detached from her desires—from her motivations generally—in some curious way” (Strawson 1986, 234). For her, rational deliberation is a series of “practical-rational calculations going on in” a person in such a way that the person need have no sense that she is the decider and rational planner of action (Strawson 1986, 235). Although Strawson sees this as an anomalous case of rational deliberation, it reveals a possible divergence between his conception of rational deliberation and my own. For a less recent, but very explicit, example of a conception of rational deliberation very different from mine on this point, see Hobbes, who describes deliberation in the following way: “When in the mind of man appetites and aversions, hopes and fears, concerning one and the same thing arise alternately, and diverse good and evil consequences of the doing or omitting the thing propounded come successively into our thoughts, so that sometimes we have an appetite to it, sometimes an aversion from it . . . the whole sum of desires, aversions, hopes and fears, continued till the thing be either done or thought impossible, is that we call DELIBERATION” (Hobbes 1668/1994, 33). 25. Frederick Adams develops a similar idea in Adams (1995, 552). Adams there argues that all intentional action requires an attempt, and that trying to perform an action requires the lack of a belief that success is impossible. Thus, it would seem to follow that intentional action requires the lack of a belief that success is impossible. Sometimes Adams also seems to endorse the stronger claim that intentional action requires the belief in the possibility of success (see 553–554, for example). And the stronger claim ﬁts well with his reasoning that intentional action requires that one have beliefs about how to achieve one’s end. 26. As Burge has pointed out, one might have “incomplete mastery” of a concept, have false beliefs about even some of the essential properties of its instances, and yet have genuine beliefs employing the concept nevertheless. For example, one might believe that one suffers from arthritis, even if one believes it is not a disease of the joints. (See Burge 1979.) However, it may be that there are certain true beliefs that one cannot lack, and still be said to have the concept. The case at hand appears to be of this kind: it is constitutive of having the concept of having reasons that one believe one ought to act in certain ways if one has reasons to act.

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27. This idea, too, recalls Kant: “That our reason has causality, or that we represent it to ourselves as having causality, is evident from the imperatives which in all matters of conduct we impose as rules upon our active powers. ‘Ought’ expresses a kind of necessity and connection with grounds which is found nowhere else in the whole of nature . . .” (Kant 1781/1965, 472–473 [A457/B575]). 28. Along lines similar to the objection in the text, it might be argued that in rationally deliberating, one is sometimes guided only by the purpose of ﬁnding ‘the best thing to do’. Yet, as I argued earlier, if one’s activity toward the goal of ﬁnding ‘the best thing to do’ is to constitute genuine rational deliberation (as opposed to other activities that might aim at that goal, such as making a sacriﬁce to the gods), one must also be guided by the purpose of ﬁnding good reasons for acting. 29. For a small sampling of the literature on the connections among intentional action, intention, and belief, see Davidson (1985) who argues that intentional action requires the belief that one can succeed, Grice (1971), Harman (1976), and Velleman (1985) who argue that having an intention requires the stronger belief (or acceptance, in the case of Grice) that one will succeed, and Bratman (1986) who argues that (normally) having an intention and being rational requires that one not believe that one will not succeed. Many have argued against one or more of these claims. For example, McCann (1986) argues against all of these claims. Ludwig (1992) and (1995) also argues against all of these claims, and goes one step further. He defends the claim that one can be rational in both intending and acting intentionally even though one believes that one cannot succeed. (I am grateful to Kirk Ludwig for email correspondence about his view.) 30. See Ludwig (1992, 263). 31. See Ludwig (1995, 566–568). 32. Albritton (1985) argues that one can try to do what one believes is impossible, but, like Ludwig, also recognizes the need to account for cases like the ﬂying case. For example, he agrees that there are certain things he cannot try to do, including trying to jump over a building and even trying to do ﬁfty push-ups. His explanation for this fact is that “in his present cognitive position and state of mind that description of him [as trying] would be inept whatever he did,” and “It’s that nothing I can think of to do this evening would be rightly described as trying to jump over this building, in a straightforward sense, unless, for example, my beliefs were to alter or go very dim” (245). It seems to me that something important must be contained in the phrases ‘present cognitive position’ and ‘my beliefs’. It is tempting to take them to include the lack of belief that success is possible or the lack of belief that one has the general ability to perform these kinds of actions. 33. One consequence of this reasoning is that there is a certain kind of irrationality in simultaneously being a rational deliberator and a ‘practical reasons nihilist’ or even a skeptic about practical reasons. Against this, it might be argued that a skeptic

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about reasons could rationally deliberate (and be perfectly rational) simply by seeking reasons if they happen to exist. In reply, as argued earlier, one could not deliberate if one lacked the belief that one can succeed in at least some typical situations; otherwise, one would lack a conception of what one was doing in deliberating. Since deliberation requires such a conception, one must believe that one can sometimes succeed in ﬁnding reasons for acting. Signiﬁcantly, this leaves open the possibility of a rational skepticism about the possibility of ﬁnding reasons on a particular occasion. See also Burge (1998) for a different argument that ﬁnds a similar albeit more general target in a broad reasons skepticism. Burge argues persuasively that for one to fully understand reasons, “one must be susceptible to reasons” and “one must recognize” the effect of reasons on one’s judgments and inferences (250). 34. The initial appeal of the examples also fades upon examination of the growing body of work on infant and child development. Developmental psychologists are divided on the question of exactly when many of the relevant concepts, such as ‘self’, ‘goal’, ‘desires’, and ‘desires as reasons for acting’ emerge in the human infant and child. And while psychologists see the ﬁeld as one that is need of a great deal more research (see, for example, Wellman and Iagaki 1997, 2 and Meltzoff et al. 1999, 19), there is an increasing consensus that such concepts appear much earlier in human development than was previously thought. (See, for example, Wellman and Iagaki 1997 and the essays in part 2 of Malle, Moses, and Baldwin 2001. For example, it is argued that by the age of 18 months, many children not only have the mental state concepts of ‘desire’ and ‘intention’ but also understand that others have desires different from their own, and that others can intend to perform actions even though they are prevented from performing them (Meltzoff et al. 1999). Thus, there is good evidence that very young children have rich mental state concepts. Of course, it is true that even if this evidence were conclusive, it does not provide a positive argument for the belief-concept reading of (R). At the same time, the available evidence detracts considerably from the initial appeal of the alleged counterexamples. 35. The objection might be pressed in the following way: consider theoretical deliberation. When engaged in it, we can suppose that we have a sense that we can believe or judge for good reasons. But there is nothing like a sense of freedom associated with theoretical deliberation; to the contrary, we do not choose our judgments as we do many of our actions. So perhaps the sense of freedom as I have characterized it is not really a sense of freedom either. This way of pressing the objection raises a number of interesting issues regarding the relationship between rational deliberation and its theoretical parallel. For the objection makes a number of presuppositions including these: (1) that rational deliberation and its parallel in the realm of judgment differ in that freedom and ‘chosen-ness’ are associated with the former but not the latter, and (2) that the two forms of deliberation do not differ in any relevant way in the implications of their respective requirements that agents represent themselves as capable of responding well to good reasons. Both presuppositions might be challenged, and I discuss both options in Nelkin (in preparation).

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References Adams, F. 1995. “Trying: You’ve Got to Believe.” Journal of Philosophical Research 20: 563–570. Albritton, R. 1985. “Freedom of the Will and Freedom of Action.” Presidential Address. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 59: 239–251. Anscombe, G. E. M. 1957. Intention. Oxford: Blackwell. Aristotle. 1984a. The Complete Works of Aristotle. J. Barnes, ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. . 1984b. Eudemian Ethics. J. Solomon, trans. In Aristotle (1984a). . 1984c. Nicomachean Ethics. W. D. Ross, trans., revised by J. O. Urmson. In Aristotle (1984a). . 1984d. De Interpretatione. J. L. Ackrill, trans. In Aristotle (1984a). Bok, H. 1998. Freedom and Responsibility. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Bratman, M. 1986. Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Burge, T. 1979. “Individualism and the Mental.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4: 73–121. . 1998. “Reason and the First Person.” In C. Wright, B. Smith, and C. MacDonald, eds., Knowing Our Own Minds. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Castañeda, H. 1975. Thinking and Doing. Dordrecht: Reidel. Chisholm, R. 1964. “Human Freedom and the Self.” The Lindley Lecture. Lawrence, Kans.: University of Kansas Department of Philosophy. Reprinted in Watson (1982). Clarke, R. 1992. “Deliberation and Beliefs About One’s Abilities.” Paciﬁc Philosophical Quarterly 73: 101–113. Davidson, D. 1963. “Actions, Reasons, and Causes.” Reprinted in Davidson (1980). . 1969. “The Individuation of Events.” In N. Rescher, ed., Essays in Honor of Carl G. Hempel. Dordrecht: Reidel. Reprinted in Davidson (1980). . 1980. Essays on Actions and Events. New York: Oxford University Press. . 1985. “Reply to Pears.” In B. Vermazen and M. Hintikka, eds., Essays on Davidson Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dennett, D. 1984. Elbow Room. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

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Fine, G. 1981. “Aristotle on Determinism: a Review of Richard Sorabji’s ‘Necessity, Cause, and Blame’.” Philosophical Review 90: 561–580. Frankfurt, H. 1969. “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.” Reprinted in Frankfurt (1988). . 1971. “Free Will and the Concept of a Person.” Reprinted in Frankfurt (1988). . 1988. The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grice, P. 1971. “Intention and Uncertainty.” Proceedings of the British Academy. London: Oxford University Press. Harman, G. 1976. “Practical Reasoning.” Review of Metaphysics 29: 431–463. Hill, T. 1985. “Kant’s Argument for the Rationality of Moral Conduct.” Paciﬁc Philosophical Quarterly 66: 3–23. Hobbes, T. 1668/1994. Leviathan. E. Curley, ed. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett. Honderich, T. 1988. The Consequences of Determinism 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jackson, F. 1998. From Metaphysics to Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, I. 1781/1965. The Critique of Pure Reason. N. Kemp Smith, trans. New York: St. Martin’s Press. . 1785/1981. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. J. Ellington, trans. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett. Kapitan, T. 1986. “Deliberation and the Presumption of Open Alternatives.” Philosophical Quarterly 36: 230–251. Ludwig, K. 1992. “Impossible Doings.” Philosophical Studies 65: 257–281. . 1995. “Trying the Impossible: A Reply to Adams.” Journal of Philosophical Research 20: 563–570. Malle, B. and J. Knobe. 2001. “The Distinction Between Desire and Intention: A FolkConceptual Analysis.” In B. Malle, L. Moses, and D. Baldwin, eds., Intentions and Intentionality. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Malle, B., L. Moses, and D. Baldwin, eds. 2001. Intentions and Intentionality. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. McCann, H. 1986. “Rationality and the Range of Intentions.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 10: 191–211. Mele, A. 1995. Autonomous Agents: From Self Control to Autonomy. New York: Oxford University Press.

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. 2001. “Acting Intentionally: Probing Folk Notions.” In B. Malle, L. Moses, and D. Baldwin, eds., Intentions and Intentionality. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Meltzoff, A., A. Gopnik, and B. Repacholi. 1999. “Toddlers’ Understanding of Intentions, Desires and Emotions: Explorations of the Dark Ages.” In P. Zelazo, J. Astington, and D. Olson, eds., Developing Theories of Intention. London: Lawrence Erlbaum. Nelkin, D. In preparation. Rational Deliberation and the Sense of Freedom. Pereboom, D. 1995. “Determinism al Dente.” Nous 29: 21–45. . 2000. Living without Free Will. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pettit, P. 1989. “Determinism with Deliberation.” Analysis 49: 42–44. Rawls, J. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Reid, T. 1788/1983. Essays on the Active Powers of Man. In R. E. Beanblossom and K. Lehrer, eds., Inquiry and Essays. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett. Sorabji, R. 1980. Necessity, Cause, and Blame. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Strawson, G. 1986. Freedom and Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, R. 1964. “Deliberation and Foreknowledge.” American Philosophical Quarterly 1: 73–80. Thalberg, I. 1962. “Intending the Impossible.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 40: 49–56. Thomas, G. Unpublished manuscript. “Deliberation and Determinism.” Van Inwagen, P. 1983. An Essay on Free Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Velleman, J.D. 1989. “Epistemic Freedom.” Paciﬁc Philosophical Quarterly 70: 73–97. . 1985. “Practical Reﬂection.” Philosophical Review 94: 33–61. Watson, G. 1975. “Free Agency.” Reprinted in G. Watson (1982). Watson, G., ed. 1982. Free Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wellman, H., and K. Inagaki, 1997. The Emergence of Core Domains of Thought: Children’s Reasoning About Physical, Psychological, and Biological Phenomena. San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass. Wellman, H., and A. Phillips. 2001. “Developing Intentional Understandings.” In B. Malle, L. Moses, and D. Baldwin, eds., Intentions and Intentionality. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

6

Libertarian Openness, Blameworthiness, and Time

Ishtiyaque Haji

1

Introduction

Construe ‘action’ broadly to include mental actions such as decisions, as well as garden-variety actions like lighting a cigar, and intentional omissions. For the purposes of this paper, assume that being morally responsible for an action consists in being either blame- or praiseworthy for that action. According to an intuitively plausible thesis, moral responsibility is essentially ‘retrospective’, in that, necessarily, if a person is morally responsible for an action, then the time at which the person is responsible is later than (or the same as) the time at which the action is performed. It has been thought, for example, that when we speak of a person’s desert in connection with blameworthiness, the ‘desert base’—the fact or facts to which we appeal in order to explain this person’s desert of blame—necessarily precedes what is deserved. So proponents of this thesis are committed to its implication that a person cannot now be deserving of blame for an action yet to be performed by her.1 The thesis can be formulated more exactly in this way: Retrospective Responsibility (thesis RR): Necessarily, for any agent, S, time, t, and action, A, if S is morally responsible at t (and thereafter) for A, then for some t* identical to or earlier than t, S does A at t*. If this thesis is true, then, of course, the thesis of Prospective Responsibility (thesis PR): Possibly (i.e., it can be the case that), for some agent, S, time, t and action, A, if S is morally responsible at t (and thereafter) for A, then for some t* later than t, S does A at t*, is false.

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Not only is thesis RR intuitively attractive, it is invoked as a vital plank in debates over signiﬁcant moral issues. For example, in arguing for the striking view that one’s past voluntary actions are the only bases of desert, James Rachels (1991, 142–143) invokes the premise that people are morally responsible only for their past voluntary actions. John Cottingham (1992, 662) proposes that we cannot rectify an injustice prior to its occurrence. He thinks that this is so because “Verbs like ‘to rectify’ and ‘to correct’ share with many other verbs (including ‘to punish’, ‘to blame’, ‘to thank’, ‘to regret’, ‘to renounce’) what we might call an inherently ‘retrospective’ logic: we cannot understand such verbs without grasping that their use involves an intrinsic and automatic reference back to some past event or state of affairs.” In addition to its innate interest, views such as those of Rachels and Cottingham reveal that thesis RR is of substantive importance and merits close scrutiny. Contrary to conventional wisdom, though, I believe that thesis PR is true, and that the view that responsibility is essentially retrospective is thus to be eschewed. In the interests of brevity, in this paper I conﬁne attention to the version of thesis RR concerning blameworthiness (‘blame past’) that says that, necessarily, if one is blameworthy for performing an action, then the time at which one is blameworthy is later than (or the same as) the time at which one performs the action. The analogous version of thesis PR (‘blame future’) says that one can, as of a time, be blameworthy for an action—a ‘future action’—that one will perform later than that time. In what follows, I ﬁrst advance what I take to be one of the strongest lines of support for blame past. I then utilize Frankfurt-type examples to cast doubt on this line of support. Finally, I propose that a certain conception of moral responsibility—roughly, the conception that when one is morally responsible for an action, one discloses or expresses what one morally stands for in relation to that action—provides motivation for blame future. Before launching into a discussion of prospective blameworthiness, I should lay to rest the concern that I’m addressing a will-o’-the-wisp. Attending to this concern will lead to further reﬁnement of the thesis of prospective responsibility of interest. The concern is that if we allow that agents can be blameworthy for the consequences of their actions, as we surely should do, and we allow that a future decision or an act can be a certain consequence of one’s present action, why should we not be able to infer that agents can be blameworthy for their future mental or other

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actions? Why should the prospective blameworthiness thesis require special justiﬁcation? A number of considerations sustain the need for such justiﬁcation. For one thing, if it is uncertain that a particular consequence will occur from one’s present action—there is a chance that it will occur and there is a chance that it will not—then even should the consequence occur, we might well wonder whether one can, at the time of performing the action, be blameworthy then for its future occurrence. For another thing, it is important to bear in mind that blameworthiness for the consequences of our actions is, in Michael Zimmerman’s (1988, 55) terminology, “essentially empty.” Directly free actions are free independently of the agent’s having freely done something that brought about these actions; indirectly free actions derive their freedom from the freedom of other acts. Blameworthiness for a consequence that issues from an action (including a mental action such as a decision) with respect to which one is directly free, is wholly exhausted by (‘direct’) blameworthiness for that action, in the sense that blameworthiness for the consequence corresponds “with no entries in a person’s ledger above and beyond those already entered as a matter of direct culpability” for the pertinent action (1988, 54). Whereas it is relatively unproblematic that a person can now be blameworthy for certain consequences of, say, a decision for which he is directly blameworthy now, it is an open question whether a person can now be (directly) blameworthy for a decision that he will directly freely make an hour from now. This slight digression highlights the fact that the thesis of prospective responsibility to be argued for in this essay is really the thesis that we can be blameworthy (or, more generally, responsible) for future actions of ours that we can avoid performing. It can be recast in this fashion: Thesis PR*: Possibly (i.e., it can be the case that), for some agent, S, time, t, and action, A, if S is morally responsible at t for A, then for some t* later than t, S does A at t* and S could have avoided doing A at t*. 2

Libertarian Openness and a Defense for Blame Past

Although blame past is widely afﬁrmed, it is less than transparent what argument could be given in its support. Reﬂection, though, on remarks against ‘prepunishment’—which is punishment for an offense before the offense is committed—are suggestive. Fred Feldman (1997), for instance,

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offers a number of reasons against a legal system’s permitting prepunishment. One has to do with ‘openness’ of the future that is, he suggests, supposedly presupposed by responsibility. Pondering a case in which it seems likely that a person will commit some crime, Feldman (1997, 189) writes: We think he will deserve the legally mandated punishment only if he will be responsible for the crime; and we think he will be responsible for the crime only if he will commit it ‘freely’; and we think that if he will commit it ‘freely’, then it cannot yet be quite certain that he will commit it. There must still be some possibility that he will decide not to commit it. So we insist upon a legal system that prohibits punishment-in-advance.

One might exploit the suggestion in this passage that legally mandated punishment presupposes a sort of openness of the future to argue against blame future and, hence, to generate support for blame past. Suppose that although it is now true that, say, Bob will steal Ann’s car at noon, it is still ‘open’ to Bob, as of now, not to steal at noon. But then, it might be claimed, Bob is not now deserving of blame for stealing later. For, as of now, there is no relevant desert base. If Bob is blameworthy for doing something, he is blameworthy partly in virtue of the fact that he freely does that thing. But as of now, he has not committed any crime, and as of now, it is open whether he will commit any crime. So he cannot, as of now, be blameworthy for stealing Ann’s car at noon. I believe it is some libertarian notion of openness that lies at the heart of this entire line of reasoning. The notion requires elucidation before this reasoning can be clariﬁed and evaluated. The basic idea underlying libertarian openness (hereafter ‘L-openness’) is that if it is L-open to an agent to do something, A, at a time, t, then the agent can do something other than A at t consistent with the past and the laws of nature remaining unchanged. Somewhat more rigorously, it is L-open to S to do A at t if and only if S is not causally determined to do A at t. S is not causally determined to do A at t when S does A at t if and only if S does A at t, and there is a possible world that is (a) past-wise indiscernible (with respect to ‘genuine’ or nonrelational facts) from the actual one until just prior to either the moment at which S does A, or an earlier moment at which S does something else, B, such as forming a judgment to A or an intention to A; (b) governed by the same laws of nature as the actual world, and (c) such that, in it, S does other than A at t.2

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It’s important to distinguish between ‘indeterministic decision making’ and L-openness. I’ll use a Frankfurt-type example to illustrate the distinction. The typical Frankfurt-type example is one where an agent seemingly has various alternatives from which to choose. He makes his choice and performs the action in question not knowing that, had he revealed even the slightest inclination to act differently, something, a ‘counterfactual intervener’, would have forced him to act as he in fact did. Since he acted on his own, in that the intervener did not play any role in his action—it’s just that the intervener would have forced him to act as he did had he shown any signs of acting differently—it seems that nothing stands in the way of his being morally responsible for his deed.3 It will be useful, for later discussion, to summarize an imaginative nonstandard version of a Frankfurt-type case recently advanced by Alfred Mele and David Robb (1998, 101–102) in which ‘counterfactual intervention’ plays no role: At t1, Black initiates a certain deterministic process P in Bob’s brain with the intention of thereby causing Bob to decide at t2 (an hour later, say) to steal Ann’s car. The process, which is screened off from Bob’s consciousness, will deterministically culminate in Bob’s deciding at t2 to steal Ann’s car unless he decides on his own at t2 to steal it or is incapable at t2 of making a decision (because, for example, he is dead by t2). (Black is unaware that it is open to Bob to decide on his own at t2 to steal the car; he is conﬁdent that P will cause Bob to decide as he wants Bob to decide.) The process is in no way sensitive to any ‘sign’ of what Bob will decide. As it happens, at t2 Bob decides on his own to steal the car, on the basis of his own indeterministic deliberation about whether to steal it, and his decision has no deterministic cause. But if he had not just then decided on his own to steal it, P would have deterministically issued, at t2, in his deciding to steal it. Rest assured that P in no way inﬂuences the indeterministic decision-making process that actually issues in Bob’s decision.4

The case provides healthy support for the view that Bob is morally responsible for deciding to steal the car (and, subsequently, for stealing the car) even though he could not have decided (and then done) otherwise. Further, the case highlights the distinction between indeterministic decision making and L-openness. We can assume that it is causally undetermined that certain of Bob’s nonoccurrent beliefs will enter into his deliberations about whether to steal the car, and that if the beliefs do come to Bob’s mind, he will decide (on his own) to steal the car.5 In this sort of case, indeterminism is located relatively early in the causal pathway of an action at some point prior to the making of a decision, and the event that is

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nondeterministically caused, such as the forming of a judgment to do something, that, in turn, causes the relevant decision, is not a mental action. Alternatively, more apt for our purposes, it could be that the event that is nondeterministically caused is the making of a decision itself. Given this latter type of indeterminacy assumed to be present in Bob’s scenario, Bob’s decision to steal the car has no deterministic cause. His deliberation or decision making that culminates with the decision to steal is thus ‘indeterministic’. However, as Mele and Robb (1998, 103) emphasize, given the details of the case, any future open to Bob after the initiation of deterministic process P in which Bob is capable of making a decision includes his deciding at t2 to steal the car. It is not L-open to Bob at t2, then, to decide to steal the car at t2. For Bob cannot, as of t2, refrain from deciding to steal the car at t2. Appealing to the notion of L-openness, a defender of blame past (or a foe of blame future) might claim that such openness is incompatible with blameworthiness for a future action. For suppose it is L-open to S, as of t0, to do A at t1. Then, as of t0, both S can do A at t1 and S can refrain from doing A at t1. So, as of t0, there is a chance that S will not do A at t1. How, then, it might be challenged, can S at t0 already be blameworthy for what S will do at t1 (or, in short, for doing A at t1)? Prior to picking up the gauntlet, let’s note that if it is L-openness that is meant to underpin the view that blame future is false, some causal determinists may well regard the explanation of blame future’s falsity that invokes such openness with suspicion. Determinists hold that, for any given time, a complete statement of all the nonrelational or ‘genuine’ facts about that time, together with a complete statement of the laws of nature, entail every truth as to what happens after that time. Arguably, if causal determinism is true, then no one can ever do other than what he or she in fact does.6 If this is so, causal determinism is incompatible with L-openness. Yet, such determinists who are compatibilists about determinism and responsibility champion the view that people can be responsible for at least some of their actions. Suppose causal determinism is true, people can be blameworthy for some of their actions, and blame future is false. Then compatibilists can reasonably claim that the explanation of why blame future is false cannot, in any way, depend on L-openness. In the rest of this paper, though, I limit discussion to the L-openness rationale for the alleged falsity of blame future.

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141

Concerns with the L-Openness Rationale

The central claim embedded in the reasoning under consideration against blame future is this: if it is L-open to S as of t0 to do A at t1, then S cannot be blameworthy at t0 for doing A at t1. But I believe this claim can be resisted as the following example suggests. Suppose it is causally determined that Sid will enter a certain room at 11:30 A.M. and not leave that room by noon. Suppose wishing to kill Sid, Rob has hidden a bomb in the room. Nobody save Rob knows about the whereabouts of this bomb nor has any inkling about Rob’s intentions to murder Sid. The bomb can be activated by a remote control device in Rob’s possession. On the basis of indeterministic deliberation, Rob decides at 11:00 to activate the bomb at 11:30 by using the device. Once activated, the bomb will detonate at noon. Assume that, as of 11:00, it is L-open to Rob to act on his decision to activate the bomb at 11:30. He is resolute about his decision; once made, nothing whatsoever will change his mind. Further, nobody else will intervene as no one save Rob knows about his plan to kill Sid, and no one will uncover that plan even after Sid’s demise. Having executed his deadly decision at 11:30, Rob boards a plane to Brussels. The bomb detonates at noon and Sid is killed. The judgment that, as of 11:00 (and thereafter), Rob is blameworthy for Sid’s death at noon seems perfectly reasonable. It seems reasonable primarily because, as of 11:00, for all rhyme and reason, Sid’s fate is as good as sealed. Alternatively, we should note that, granting libertarianism, it is arguable that, even if one does in fact freely perform an action at some time, t2, then it was true though not settled at some earlier time, t1, that one would perform that action at t2. In this case (call it ‘bomb1’) Rob is responsible for, among other things, a ‘distal’ consequence of an action (activating the bomb) that he performed earlier. Suppose, to vary the case a bit, Rob decides resolutely at 11:30, on the basis of his own indeterministic deliberation, to push the ‘kill now’ button on the remote device at 11:45, a button that, if pushed, will result in the bomb’s going off at just about when the button is pushed. Assume that, as of 11:30, it is L-open to Rob that he will push the button at 11:45. But once he has arrived at the pertinent decision, Rob won’t waver; nothing will change his mind, and nobody will intervene. By 11:30 Sid’s fate is as good as sealed. In this variation, we are assuming that Rob acts with libertarian free will and freely pushes the button at 11:45. But then, arguably, it was true at, say, 11:30

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even though it wasn’t settled then, that Rob would push the button at 11:45. Call this case ‘bomb2’. Yet again it seems that the verdict that, as of 11:30 (t2), Rob is blameworthy for pushing the button at 11:45 (t3) is reasonable. Not everyone will agree with this verdict. One might contest that, in this context, ‘as good as sealed’ can only mean ‘nearly sealed’, and so ‘not sealed’. As long as the action is L-open, it cannot be settled or truly inevitable but only highly improbable, in which case the agent cannot be responsible for it until it occurs. In this respect, the case differs from one in which, say, should one now perform some action, it is inevitable that an upshot of that action will occur. In defense of my verdict, compare bomb2 with a modiﬁcation of Mele and Robb’s Frankfurt-type case. In the modiﬁed case, at t1, Black initiates a deterministic process P in Rob*’s brain with the intention of thereby causing Rob* to decide at t2 to press the ‘kill now’ button at t3 on a remote device, one just like the device that Rob has. Pressing the button will detonate the bomb in Sid*’s room. P, screened off from Rob*’s consciousness, will deterministically culminate in Rob*’s deciding at t2 to press the ‘kill now’ button at t3 unless he decides on his own at t2 to press the button at t3 or is decisionally incapacitated at t2. (Black is unaware that Rob* can decide on his own at t2 to press the button at t3; he is conﬁdent that P will cause Rob* to decide as he wants Rob* to decide.) It happens that Rob* decides on his own at t2 to press the button at t3, on the basis of his own indeterministic deliberation. Rob* is resolute about this decision, and once made, nobody or nothing will intervene. But if he had not just then decided on his own to press the button, P would have deterministically issued, at t2, in his deciding to press it. P in no way inﬂuences the indeterministic decisionmaking process that actually issues in Rob*’s decision. Now let’s add one more layer of complexity to the case. Imagine that, at t1, Black also initiated another deterministic process, Q , in Rob*’s brain with the intention of thereby causing Rob* to press the ‘kill now’ button at t3. Q, just like P, screened off from Rob*’s consciousness, will deterministically culminate in Rob*’s pressing the ‘kill now’ button at t3 unless he presses it on his own at t3 or is physically incapacitated at t3. (Black is, again, unaware that Rob* can press the button on his own at t3; he is conﬁdent that Q will cause Rob* to act as he wants Rob* to act.) It turns out that Rob* acts on his own at t3, pressing the button at t3 on the basis of his own indeterministic intention-forming capacities. We can suppose that,

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having made the indeterministic decision at t2 to press the button at t3, Rob* had to form various other intentions to see to it that he would press the ‘kill now’ button at t3. For example, he had to form the intention to switch on the remote device and to have the device handy so that he could press the ‘kill now’ button at t3. Assume that the processes culminating in these intentions are indeterministic. Had Rob* not, at t3, pressed the button on his own, Q would have deterministically issued, at t3, in his pressing it. Q in no way inﬂuences the indeterministic processes that actually issue in Rob*’s pressing the button at t3. In this modiﬁed version (‘bomb3’) of the Mele/Robb scenario, it certainly seems that Rob* is morally blameworthy at t2 for deciding at t2 to press the button at t3. Further, it also seems that, as of the time he makes his decision, he is blameworthy then, too, for his future action of pressing the button at t3. He is blameworthy, roughly, in virtue of the fact that, given the decision at t2 to press the button, Rob*’s pressing the button at t3 is inevitable. In bomb3, though, Rob* cannot refrain from making the decision that he does at t2 and he cannot refrain from pressing the button at t3. So it is not an option for an advocate of blame past to rejoin that, at t2, Rob* cannot already be blameworthy for pressing the button at t3 as it is L-open to Rob*, at t2, to press the button at t3. Assume that the actual sequence of events that culminates in Rob*’s pressing the ‘kill now’ button at t3 in bomb3 is type-identical to the actual sequence of events that culminates in Rob’s pressing the ‘kill now’ button at t3 in bomb2. The assumption is reasonable: In bomb3, Rob* decides at t2, on the basis of his own indeterministic deliberation, to press the ‘kill now’ button at t3; and, at t3, he presses the button on his own. Deterministic processes P and Q play no role whatsoever in the actual sequence of events that culminate in Rob*’s decision to press the button and Rob*’s pressing the button. Similarly, in bomb2, Rob decides on the basis of his own indeterministic deliberation, to press the ‘kill now’ button at t3; and, at t3, he presses the button on his own. One of the deep morals of Frankfurt-type cases is that responsibility depends on what unfolds in the actual sequence of events leading to action and not on ‘alternative’ sequences (such as, for instance, the alternative sequence in bomb3 in which process P inﬂuences Bob’s decision at t2). As the actual sequence of events culminating in action—the decision to press the ‘kill now’ button and pressing the ‘kill now’ button—in bomb2 and bomb3

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are (arguably) type-identical, if Rob* is blameworthy, as of t2, for pressing the button at t3 in bomb3, then Rob should also be blameworthy, as of t2, for pressing the button at t3 in bomb2. I see no reason to believe that Rob* is not, at t2, deserving of blame for his decision to press the button at t2 and for pressing the button at t3; indeed, there is every reason to believe that he is blameworthy, at t2, for these things. (Again, one cannot appeal to L-openness to argue against Rob*’s being blameworthy, as of t2, for pressing the button at t3. For in bomb3, it is not L-open to Rob*, as of t2, to press the button at t3.) But then, given type-identity of the actual sequences of events in bomb2 and bomb3, there appears to be no reason to deny that Rob (in bomb2) is also blameworthy, as of t2, for pressing the button at t3, even though in bomb2 it is L-open to Rob, as of t2, to press the button at t3.7 4

Blame Future and Conceptions of Responsibility

I want to end with the suggestion that the controversy over which of blame future or blame past is true can be explained partly by endorsement, at some level, of different conceptions of moral responsibility. Consider, for example, R. J. Wallace’s Strawsonian account of responsibility (1994, 91). On Wallace’s view, a person is morally responsible for some action if and only if it would be appropriate to hold her responsible for that action. As moral norms of fairness, Wallace contends, set the standards of appropriateness for responsibility ascriptions, this view is to be construed as the normative one that a person is morally responsible for an action if and only if it is fair to hold her responsible for that action. Wallace proposes that to hold someone morally responsible is essentially to be subject to the moral sentiments of guilt, indignation, or resentment in one’s interactions with the person. In cases in which the standard excuses such as coercion, physical constraint, duress, mistake, accident, and inadvertence apply, Wallace contends that the agent has not violated a moral obligation, and consequently, does not deserve to be subjected to the reactive emotions and the forms of sanctioning treatment that express them. With the exemptions— psychopathy, behavior control, stress, insanity, addiction, childhood, hypnotism, deprivation, or torture—Wallace submits that the agent has been deprived of the ability to grasp and apply moral reasons, and the ability to control her behavior by such reasons. But if holding an agent responsible involves judging it appropriate to sanction her morally, and to sanction her

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as a result of the violation of moral obligations for which there are moral reasons, then it will, once again, be unfair to do this if she lacks the ability to apply the moral reasons that sustain the obligations violated. Of pertinence to our present concerns is that, if one subscribes to such a normative conception of responsibility, then it is quite natural to afﬁrm blame past. For just as it may be unfair to blame a person for having done something that isn’t wrong in the ﬁrst place or (as with prepunishment) for not yet having committed a crime, so, it may reasonably be contended, it would be unfair to hold a person blameworthy now for an action that she has yet to perform. As we rarely know precisely what the future will bring, there is almost always the chance that the person won’t perform the pertinent action. It would, hence, seem unfair to react to this person, in advance of her performing this action, with resentment or indignation. John Fischer (1994), in an elegant paper, has recently proposed that the intuitive picture or conception of responsibility that fuels the view that alternative possibilities are required for moral responsibility is the conception that moral responsibility requires the ability to make a sort of difference to the world. Fischer explains that if one makes a difference in this sense, one selects which path the world will take among various paths that are genuinely accessible. One’s selection determines which way the world unfolds and one thereby makes a crucial difference. Again, if one is driven by this conception of responsibility, then one will be attracted to blame past. A proponent of this conception of responsibility might sensibly propose that as a prospective action has still to be performed, its agent has not yet made a difference regarding the pathway the world may take by selecting that action. Hence, the agent cannot, prior to the fact, be responsible for that action. Contrast these two conceptions of responsibility with a third according to which, roughly, when a person is responsible for what she does, she discloses what she morally stands for in performing that action. This sort of self-disclosure view has been proposed, among others, by John Dewey (1957, 160–161) who wrote: [W]hen any result has been foreseen and adopted as foreseen [by the agent], such result is the outcome not of any external circumstances, not of mere desires and impulses, but of the agent’s conception of his own end. Now because the result thus ﬂows from the agent’s own conception of an end, he feels himself responsible for it . . . . The result is simply an expression of himself; a manifestation of what he would have himself to be. Responsibility is thus one aspect of the identity of character and

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conduct. We are responsible for our conduct because that conduct is ourselves objectiﬁed in actions.8

Regarding blameworthiness, I have elsewhere (1998, ch. 9) argued for the condition that a person is blameworthy for an action only if she performs it in light of the belief that she is doing wrong. If this condition is in the right ballpark, then when a person is indeed blameworthy for an action, there is a very real sense in which she ‘discloses’ what she morally stands for in performing that action, as when she acts, she does so in light of certain of her moral beliefs. Responsibility has this sort of self-expressive requirement. To elaborate brieﬂy, according to the self-expressive conception, when one is responsible for what one does, one manifests or expresses in conduct what one would have oneself to be. Acting in light of certain moral beliefs, one discloses one’s moral stance vis à vis a particular episode in one’s life. When one is morally blameworthy for an action, for instance, one expresses ill will toward another, and it is the expression of such ill will that (in part) sanctions the judgment that one’s moral worth with respect to the relevant deed has been diminished. Analogously, when one is morally praiseworthy for an action, one expresses good will toward another, and it is the expression of such good will that (in part) validates the judgment that one’s moral worth vis à vis the relevant deed has been augmented. If this intuitive picture of responsibility is correct, then the time at which one discloses or expresses what one morally stands for in performing an action seems irrelevant to ascriptions or correct judgments of blameworthiness. In the sorts of cases considered in which prospective blameworthiness seems apt, at a time prior to the performance of the relevant act, the agent has, in a manner of speaking, disclosed his moral stance in relation to the act to be performed. In the modiﬁed version of bomb2, for example, Sid has, so to speak, disclosed at 11:30—the time at which he decides resolutely to press the ‘kill now’ button at 11:45—what he morally stands for in relation to his future act of pressing the ‘kill now’ button at the time when he does. Metaphorically speaking, the ‘statement’ about what he morally stands for—the statement that reveals something about his moral worth in connection to his future action—has already been ‘made’ at 11:30 but will not be ‘announced’ or ‘revealed’ to the world until the deed is actually done. Given this intuitive picture of responsibility, there is nothing untoward about, indeed, there is a lot to recommend, blame future.

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Needless to say, this is not the place to decide among the various possible conceptions of moral responsibility. My proposal is simply that if one ﬁnds the self-disclosure picture of responsibility promising, one may well be willing to renounce blame past in favor of blame future. In conclusion, focusing on central cases in which persons are morally to blame for their actions, a number of people have contended that blameworthiness, and responsibility in general, are essentially retrospective. I have proposed that this view is called into question by Frankfurt-type examples.9 Puzzling over why so many have been attracted to this mistaken view, I have further proposed that proponents of this view may be in the grips of a certain conception of responsibility, like Wallace’s normative conception, or the make-a-difference conception, that renders dim the possibility of prospective blameworthiness. Finally, I have suggested that there is an alternative, intuitive conception of responsibility—the self-disclosure conception—which lends support to the contrasting view that persons can be prospectively responsible for some of their actions. Acknowledgments I thank Randolph Clarke, Roderick Long, Michael McKenna, and Michael J. Zimmerman for their criticisms, comments, and suggestions. Notes 1. A number of people have endorsed this view or at least something very similar to it. For example, Wojciech Sadurski (1985, 117) says “desert considerations are always past oriented. When talking about desert, we are evaluating certain actions which have already happened.” Brian Barry (1965, 111) says, “Desert looks to the past—or at most to the present—whereas incentive and deterrence are forward looking notions . . . .” David Miller (1976, 93) claims that “Desert judgments are justiﬁed on the basis of past and present facts about individuals, never on the basis of states of affairs to be created in the future.” 2. Conditions (a), (b), and (c) are advanced and explained by Peter van Inwagen (1983, 136). 3. See Harry G. Frankfurt (1969). 4. Derk Pereboom (2000, 119–137) has advanced another sort of Frankfurt-type case involving indeterministic decision making. In his case, the counterfactual intervener

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makes the agent (in a nondeterministic world) decide to cheat on his tax deduction if he doesn’t (nondeterministically) do so on his own. The agent’s psychology is such that a causally necessary (but not causally sufﬁcient) condition for the agent to decide not to cheat is that a moral reason occurs to him with a certain force. Such a reason’s occurring to the agent is the cue for intervention. 5. Mele (1995, 211–221) discusses this sort of doxastic indeterminacy. 6. For a defense of this view see, for example, Carl Ginet (1983), John Martin Fischer (1994) and Peter van Inwagen (1983). 7. What of the following case though? In bomb4, it is open to Job, as of t0, to decide at t1 to press the ‘kill now’ button at t6 and to press the ‘kill now’ button at t6. If the button is pressed at t6, Cid will be blown to bits. However, unlike Rob and Rob*, Job is unsure about whether to kill Cid. Let’s suppose that he ﬁrst decides at t1, on the basis of his own indeterministic deliberation, to press the button at t6. A little while later, he changes his mind. At t3, he decides, again on the basis of indeterministic deliberation, not to press the button at t6. But he is still not settled in his mind about what to do. Just before t6, he decides on his own once again to press the button, and at t6 he presses the button. Is Job at, say, t2, blameworthy for pressing the button at t6? I confess to being unsure about this case. I’m inclined to say that he isn’t blameworthy at t2. If this verdict is correct, then there is a kernel of truth in the idea that L-openness is incompatible with blameworthiness for future actions. It’s this: both Rob and Rob* are resolute about their decision to kill. They successfully execute every element in their plan to kill without indecision or unsettledness of mind. It is as if, from their perspective, L-openness does not matter; from their perspective, every future includes the decision to kill and the subsequent killing. Similar things are not true of Job. 8. Gary Watson (1996) discusses aspects of Dewey’s view. 9. It appears that both Fred Feldman and Michael Zimmerman would agree with the conclusion that blame past is false. Feldman (1997) rejects the following view, DT: If at t, S deserves x in virtue of the fact that S did or suffered something at t’, then t’ cannot be later than t, primarily by appealing to putative counterexamples. He says that several people, including John Cottingham, have accepted DT or something very similar. Feldman claims that Cottingham seems to be asserting, among other things, that I cannot blame you for doing something unless you have already done it. However, Feldman claims: “If, as a result of your failure to drain the pipes, there is going to be damage to the plumbing later tonight when the temperature drops, I can blame you for the damage that is going to occur” (1997, 180–181). This example, though suggestive, falls short of establishing prospective blameworthiness both for future actions with respect to which one is directly free, and for noninevitable upshots of one’s present actions. Michael Zimmerman (1988) asks: if S wills (that is, roughly, decides) at t that e should occur, at what time is it true to the facts that S is blameworthy

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for willing e at t? The answer, he says, is: at that time at which it is true that (to speak tenselessly) S wills e at t. Zimmerman adds that if S wills e at t and is culpable for this, then S is culpable at t and forever thereafter. In addition, Zimmerman says that “if there can be true propositions about the free volitions and actions of persons in the future, then we should also admit that persons are forever (period) (that is, not just forever after, but also forever before) culpable for those volitions for which they are culpable.” (1988, 2, 40). Zimmerman seems to be suggesting that responsibility is not essentially retrospective. Even on this tenseless approach, one might still want an explanation of what conception of responsibility, if any, can accommodate prospective blameworthiness.

References Barry, B. 1965. Political Argument. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Cottingham, J. 1992. “Justice; Rectiﬁcatory.” In Lawerence Becker, ed., Encyclopedia of Ethics. New York and London: Garland Publishing. Dewey, J. 1957 (1891). Outlines of a Critical Theory of Ethics. New York: Hillary House. Feldman, F. 1997. “Desert: Reconsideration of Some Received Wisdom.” In F. Feldman, Utilitarianism, Hedonism, and Desert. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fischer, J. 1994. The Metaphysics of Free Will. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. . 1999. “Responsibility and Self-Expression.” Journal of Ethics 3: 277–297. Frankfurt, H. 1969. “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.” Journal of Philosophy 66: 829–839. Ginet, C. 1983. “In Defense of Incompatibilism.” Philosophical Studies 44: 391–400. Haji, I. 1998. Moral Appraisability: Puzzles, Proposals, and Perplexities. New York: Oxford University Press. Mele, A. 1995. Autonomous Agents: From Self-control to Autonomy. New York: Oxford University Press. Mele, A. and Robb, D. 1998. “Rescuing Frankfurt-style Cases.” Philosophical Review 107: 97–112. Miller, D. 1976. Social Justice. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Pereboom, D. 2000. “Alternative Possibilities and Causal Histories.” Philosophical Perspectives 14: 119–137. Rachels, J. 1991. “What People Deserve.” In John Arthur and William H. Shaw, eds., Justice and Economic Distribution. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

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Sadurski, W. 1985. Giving Desert Its Due: Social Justice and Legal Theory. Dordrecht: Reidel. van Inwagen, P. 1983. An Essay on Free Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wallace, R. 1994. Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Watson, G. 1996. “Two Faces of Responsibility.” Philosophical Topics 24: 227–248. Zimmerman, M. 1988. An Essay on Moral Responsibility. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littleﬁeld.

7

Moderate Reasons-responsiveness, Moral

Responsibility, and Manipulation Todd R. Long

I may be a bird in a cage, but at least it’s your cage. —Old 97’s

Frankfurt-type examples have proven to be quite helpful in our thinking about the relation between freedom and moral responsibility. Harry Frankfurt designed his own examples to show that an agent can be morally responsible even if that agent could not have done otherwise (Frankfurt 1997). Following Frankfurt’s lead, many philosophers have developed their own Frankfurt-type examples to extend our understanding and sometimes to exercise our intuitions about the limits of moral responsibility and freedom.1 In this essay, I join this enterprise by providing a novel Frankfurt-type example designed to reveal the limits of moral responsibility, given a new theory of responsibility developed by John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza. Although I am sympathetic to the mechanism-based theory of moral responsibility that Fischer and Ravizza (hereafter, F & R) argue for in Responsibility and Control, I believe there is trouble for the way in which they apply their theory to Frankfurt-type examples. I will show that F & R’s theory handles my test cases appropriately, but accepting my conclusion requires us (and them) to deny the seemingly plausible intuition that certain cases of rather severe external manipulation rule out moral responsibility. In what follows I ﬁrst summarize F & R’s notion of guidance control with an eye toward explaining their preferred notion of reasons-responsiveness (namely, ‘moderate reasons-responsiveness’). Second, I show how F & R want moderate reasons-responsiveness to hook up with the relevant deliberative mechanism. Third, I offer a new Frankfurt-type example that both challenges F & R’s own application of their theory to Frankfurt-type

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examples and threatens a certain appealing intuition that some people have about the relation between moral responsibility and external manipulation. 1

Guidance Control and Reasons-Responsiveness

In Responsibility and Control, F & R argue that, in the free will debate, guidance control is the freedom-relevant condition that is sufﬁcient for moral responsibility.2 Guidance control does not require the sort of regulative control that depends upon the existence of genuine alternative possibilities. Although regulative control often goes hand in hand with guidance control, F & R hold that moral responsibility requires only guidance control. Thus, we are morally responsible for our actions so long as we have guidance control, even if we lack regulative control. Pointing out that guidance control is the sort of control we ﬁnd illustrated in the Frankfurt-type actual-sequence examples, F & R conclude that guidance control is what ultimately grounds our ascriptions of moral responsibility. This is a familiar compatibilist claim. What sets F & R’s theory apart is that F & R ascribe guidance control to an agent insofar as that agent’s deliberative mechanism is appropriately responsive to reasons. Hence, their theory hinges on a satisfactory account of the deliberative mechanism operant in agents. I will return to mechanisms shortly. Another signiﬁcant feature of F & R’s notion of guidance control is their distinction between moral responsibility, on the one hand, and praiseworthiness or blameworthiness, on the other. F & R characterize their notion of moral responsibility as a “Strawsonian view” that “allows for moral responsibility for ‘morally neutral’ behavior. For instance, one can be morally responsible for simply raising one’s hand” (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, 8). All that is required for moral responsibility is that one be “an appropriate candidate for the reactive attitudes” (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, 7). So, one can be morally responsible for an action without being an actual target of a reactive attitude. Nevertheless, moral responsibility is connected to praise and blame; after all, one would not even be a candidate for praise or blame unless one were morally responsible, in F & R’s sense, for one’s actions. We can summarize the key point here by saying that although guidance control (and, thus, moral responsibility) does not necessarily imply praiseworthiness or blameworthiness, the latter do imply the former.3 F & R reﬁne their notion of guidance control by connecting it to the notion of reasons-responsiveness.4 Their idea is that we are morally responsible for an

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action when the mechanism that issues in that action is reasons-responsive in an appropriate way. We can get a quick handle on the concept of reasonsresponsiveness by thinking about contrasting cases. Consider Bill, who has a neurological disorder, which causes him to throw his head back violently every few seconds. Clearly, Bill lacks guidance control for his violent head movements. F & R claim that there is some physical mechanism issuing in Bill’s behavior that has nothing to do with responding to reasons; therefore, we do not judge him to be morally responsible for his head movements. Now consider Amy, who is deliberating about whether to give money to a worthy charity; as she deliberates she may consider reasons for and against giving the money. Suppose she decides to give the money. Since her giving the money is not induced by a process such as a neurological disorder, a psychotic impulse, or brain manipulation, F & R hold that Amy’s action is issued in by a mechanism that is responsive to reasons, and thus we think it proper to praise her for her charitable action; hence, she is morally responsible for her action. F & R settle on a version of reasons-responsiveness that they call moderate reasons-responsiveness (or, MRR).5 The following schema provides a fuller explanation of MRR: MRR:6 An agent’s responsibility relevant mechanism K is moderately reasons-responsive iff 1. K is regularly receptive to reasons, some of which are moral; this requires (a) that holding ﬁxed the operation of a K-type mechanism, the agent would recognize reasons in such a way as to give rise to an understandable pattern from the viewpoint of a third party who understands the agent’s values and beliefs; and (b) that some of the reasons mentioned in (1.a) are moral reasons; and 2. K is at least weakly reactive to reasons; this requires that the agent would react to at least one sufﬁcient reason to do otherwise (in some possible scenario), although it does not follow that the agent could have responded differently to the actual reasons; and 3. K is the agent’s own; being the agent’s own means ‘taking responsibility’ for K; this requires that the agent (a) sees herself as the source of her behavior (which follows from the operation of K); and (b) believes that she is an apt candidate for the reactive attitudes as a result of how she exercises her agency in certain contexts; and (c) views herself as an agent with respect to (3.a)–(3.b) based on her evidence for these beliefs.

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F & R hold that MRR is sufﬁcient for moral responsibility.7 Claims of sufﬁciency are customarily tested with speciﬁc cases. Any case in which an agent’s mechanism is MRR but the agent is not morally responsible for an action issued in by that mechanism will count as a counterexample to F & R’s claim of sufﬁciency. I will provide test cases in section 3. But ﬁrst a word about mechanisms. 2

F & R’s Human Deliberative Mechanisms

Determining which of various mechanisms is actually operant in a given case is an important issue for F & R’s account. What are the necessary and sufﬁcient conditions for a mechanism to be the relevant mechanism in a given case of deliberation? F & R offer little help: We cannot specify in a general way how to determine which mechanism is “the” mechanism that is relevant to assessment of responsibility. It is simply a presupposition of this theory as presented here that for each act, there is an intuitively natural mechanism that is appropriately selected as the mechanism that issues in action, for the purposes of assessing guidance control and moral responsibility. (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, 47)

Nonetheless, F & R provide examples intended to help. One of their examples, which is about a case of direct brain manipulation, is useful for my present project: Consider, again, our claim that certain sorts of “direct manipulation of the brain” rule out moral responsibility. When the scientists intervene and manipulate the brain in a way which is not reasons-responsive, this is sufﬁcient to undermine an agent’s moral responsibility for action. Similarly, when forms of subliminal advertising, hypnosis, brainwashing, and so forth yield physical mechanisms that are not reasons-responsive, they rule out moral responsibility. Thus the theory that associates moral responsibility with actual-sequence reasons-responsiveness can help to explain our intuitive view that certain sorts of direct interventions in the brain are inconsistent with moral responsibility. (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, 48–49)

Here is the crucial idea that F & R want us to get: any MRR mechanism that operates to issue in my actions is always a different mechanism from any one that would operate if my brain were monkeyed with to the point that I am no longer morally responsible for my actions. Hence, a brain-implanted mechanism that issues in an action would always constitute a different mechanism from an ordinary practical reasoning mechanism that issues in an action.

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So far, so good. However, F & R also think that there is a close connection between the distinction we’ve just noted and Frankfurt-style examples. Speciﬁcally, they hold that the mechanism operant in an actual-sequence case is always to be distinguished from the mechanism operant in an alternative-sequence case. Consider Fischer’s discussion of such cases in The Metaphysics of Free Will: In a Frankfurt-type case the kind of mechanism that actually operates is reasonsresponsive, although the kind of mechanism that would operate in the alternative scenario is not. In the Frankfurt-type case discussed above (in which Jones votes for Clinton on his own and Black does not actually intercede), Jones’ action issues from the normal faculty of practical reasoning, which we can reasonably take to be reasons-responsive. But in the alternative scenario, a different kind of mechanism would have operated—one involving direct electronic stimulation of Jones’ brain. And this mechanism is not reasons-responsive. Thus, the actual-sequence mechanism can be reasons-responsive, even though the agent is not reasons-responsive. (He couldn’t have done otherwise.) . . . Clearly, . . . it is crucial to distinguish between the kind of mechanism that operates in the actual sequence and the kind of mechanism that operates in the alternative sequence (or sequences).8 (Fischer 1995, 163)

I want to make two points about Fischer’s discussion here. First, let’s consider a couple of features of this alternative-sequence case: (1) There is brain manipulation that leads to a particular outcome; and (2) The agent would have done otherwise had there been no manipulation. Now, one might think that what underlies our intuition that the agent lacks moral responsibility in such a case is some kind of manipulation principle that addresses those features. As we have seen, F & R hold that a brain-implanted mechanism issuing in an action is a different mechanism from an ordinary practical reasoning mechanism. F & R say that this is just intuitively the case, but perhaps we can explain this intuition by drafting a manipulation principle that addresses the two factors we just noted about alternative-sequence cases: MAN: If a person S performs an action A at time tn only because another agent B, acting completely unbeknownst to S, has directly manipulated S’s brain earlier at t1 then S is not morally responsible for performing A.9 We might think that F & R would happily endorse such a principle, for it helps to explain the intuition that a person is not responsible for an action if her brain has been directly manipulated in a certain way. More speciﬁcally, it helps to explain the appealing intuitive view that a person is not morally responsible for performing an action if the action is such that he would have refrained from performing it if his brain had not been directly manipulated

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by an external source. This is, after all, true of Fischer’s Frankfurt-style case, wherein the agent is morally responsible in the actual sequence but is not morally responsible in the alternative sequence; and MAN would explain why Fischer concludes the quote above by saying that it is crucial to distinguish the mechanism operant in the actual-sequence case from the mechanism operant in the alternative-sequence case. This leads me to the second point I want to make. Clearly, it is crucial to make this distinction only if it is true that the mechanism operant in the alternative-sequence case is always a different mechanism from the one operant in the actual-sequence case. But since F & R give us so little to go on concerning what a relevant mechanism is, or how to differentiate mechanisms, I see no reason to think that the mechanism that operates in the actual sequence of a Frankfurt-type example must be different from the mechanism that operates in an alternative sequence of a Frankfurt-type example. As I will show in section 3, we can tell a Frankfurt-style alternativesequence story in which the mechanism issuing in the action is the very same mechanism as the one operating in the actual-sequence case. The basic idea that I will develop there is that the results yielded by the human deliberative mechanism will vary depending on its inputs. It is very plausible to think that differing inputs (e.g., reasons) will yield differing outputs (e.g., actions). And in their latest account, F & R grant that their concept of the relevant deliberative mechanism in a given case involves the idea that the same mechanism may operate on a variety of inputs: . . . a mechanism’s reacting differently to a sufﬁcient reason to do otherwise in some other possible world shows that the same kind of mechanism can react differently to the actual reason to do otherwise. . . . The picture here is of one kind of mechanism with different “inputs.” (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, 73–74)

F & R assume that in any Frankfurt-style example, the mechanism in an actual-sequence story is always a different one from the mechanism in an alternative-sequence story (call this F & R’s distinction thesis). But, given that the same mechanism can yield different outputs depending on its inputs, we can conceive an alternative-sequence case as one in which the only difference between it and the actual-sequence case is the inputs—the mechanism remains the same. In Fischer (1995), Fischer says little in support of his claim that the two mechanisms cannot be the same. Fischer suggests only that the mechanisms are different in the two cases because the causes are different; but that alone

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is not a good reason to accept his claim. After all, a light can be turned off by a human hand’s ﬂicking a light switch, and the same light can be turned off by falling plaster that strikes a light switch. Here we have two different causes for the light’s going out, but we have one and the same mechanism (the light switch). In Fischer and Ravizza (1998), F & R provide no additional reasons for thinking that the two mechanisms cannot be the same; rather, they just appeal to intuition to have us think that they must be different.10 I contend that, given the dearth of explanation F & R provide about mechanisms, it can be just as intuitive to think that some actual-sequence and alternativesequence scenarios involve the same, not different, mechanisms. 3

The Test Cases

In this section I will develop a basic Frankfurt-style actual-sequence example and then show three possible types of ways to get a different outcome in an alternative-sequence case. We will want to treat these examples as test cases for F & R’s thesis that MRR is sufﬁcient for moral responsibility, and we will want to ﬁnd out what light these examples shed on F & R’s distinction thesis. The basic story, which takes place in Germany during the 1930s, will involve some setup.11 Here is the basic story: Schmidt is a high-ranking ofﬁcial in the German government just prior to Hitler’s rise to dictatorial power. Having been raised by parents with a deep inner moral sense and resolve, Schmidt learned from an early age the difference between right and wrong. As he developed, so did his moral wisdom. Sufﬁce it to say that Schmidt developed into a man of impeccable moral judgment. Owing to Schmidt’s high rank in the German government, he is a member of a secret group that will decide by vote whether or not Hitler is to be given supreme power. Schmidt has known Hitler for many years. The two became friends when each was a budding young politician. During those early years, they shared with each other their dreams and ideas about how to build a better Germany. Schmidt was impressed with both the ingenuity of Hitler’s ideas and the deep moral sense that those ideas displayed. From the things that Hitler said to Schmidt during those early years, Schmidt had very good reasons to think that Hitler would be an honest, forthright, and morally upstanding asset to Germany’s future. However, several years before the vote is to take place, Schmidt begins to hear disturbing stories about

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Hitler. From reliable sources, he hears that Hitler has intentions of building up a master race of pure-blooded Aryans, driving non-Aryans out of the country, and perhaps killing those who do not leave. Schmidt develops deep doubts about Hitler’s moral character. Schmidt’s role in the decision is to cast the deciding vote, should the voting members reach a deadlock. The members do reach a deadlock, so Schmidt is called upon to cast the deciding vote. Schmidt deliberates. Waiting in the wings is Block, a malevolent being with extraordinary causal and predictive powers. Should it become clear to him that Schmidt is going to vote against Hitler, Block will take effective steps to ensure that Schmidt votes for Hitler. Otherwise, Block will do nothing. So, whatever Schmidt’s initial preferences and inclinations, Block will have his way.12 We can divide the basic possibilities here into two: Schmidt may deliberate and vote for Hitler. Although this would be a surprising outcome given Schmidt’s moral character and his serious misgivings about Hitler, this would be a possible case under F & R’s account of MRR; for F & R want their theory of moral responsibility to be compatible with cases of ‘weakness of will’.13 Note that in this case, which I will deem the Block/Schmidt actual sequence, Schmidt is both morally responsible and blameworthy. The other basic possibility is that Schmidt is such that, were Block not to intervene, he would vote against Hitler.14 Now let us consider what course of action Block will take, if he believes that Schmidt will vote against Hitler, to ensure that Schmidt acts as Block wants. There may be a multitude of actions that Block could take; however, as far as I can tell, there are only three types of action that Block could take. I will apply each of these three possible types in the following three cases respectively, each of which will be an example of what I will call an alternative sequence. Block/Schmidt Case 1: A minute before Schmidt casts his vote, Block becomes convinced that Schmidt is going to vote against Hitler.15 Block goes into action: rather than monkeying with Schmidt’s normal deliberative voting mechanism, Block bypasses it. Block manipulates Schmidt in some way such that Schmidt’s voting for Hitler is not related in any way to the reasons that Schmidt has for or against voting for Hitler. We might imagine him doing something directly to Schmidt’s nervous system that physically causes him to vote for Hitler. This is, of course, the kind of action that F & R think would occur should Block believe that he must act; for, in this alternative-sequence case, the

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mechanism that issues in Schmidt’s voting for Hitler (i.e., the one that Block uses) is a different mechanism than the one that would issue in Schmidt’s voting against Hitler. In the actual sequence, Schmidt’s action is issued in by a deliberative voting mechanism that is MRR. But in this alternative sequence, Schmidt’s action is ushered in by a different mechanism, a mechanism that has nothing to do with reasons-responsiveness. As F & R say, we would hold Schmidt neither morally responsible nor blameworthy for his voting for Hitler in this case. Furthermore, note that F & R are committed to thinking that this is the only kind of action that could occur if Block should intervene; for, as we saw earlier, F & R’s view is that we cannot hold Schmidt morally responsible in this case precisely because the mechanism that operates is not the same as the one at play in the actual sequence (which Schmidt has taken responsibility for).16 However, I see no reason to think that this type of action is the only possible way for Block to accomplish his work. Cases 2 and 3 demonstrate other types of action that could get the job done. Block/Schmidt case 2: A minute before Schmidt casts his vote, Block becomes convinced that Schmidt is going to vote against Hitler. Block goes into action: he adds new inputs into the very same mechanism that is operant in the actual sequence. Suppose that these new inputs come in the form of reasons for voting for Hitler. Block directly feeds into Schmidt’s deliberative voting mechanism enough reasons, or reasons powerful enough, to ensure that Schmidt will vote for Hitler. Because Block has extraordinary predictive powers, he knows which reasons will ensure that Schmidt’s deliberative voting mechanism yields a vote for Hitler, and Block provides those reasons as inputs for Schmidt’s deliberative voting mechanism.17 I have two things to discuss about this case. First, note that F & R do not consider this case as a possible way for Block to accomplish his desire. Their emphatic claim, that whenever there is intervention (in an alternative sequence) the mechanism is a different one from the mechanism that would have been employed had there been no intervention, commits them to thinking that this case is impossible. However, I do not see that this case is any less possible than the one that they prefer. Second, this situation prompts the key question: is Schmidt morally responsible for voting for Hitler? According to F & R’s account of MRR, the answer is “yes,” for Schmidt deliberates appropriately in this alternative sequence case; that is, as he comes to make his decision, Schmidt’s deliberative mechanism is

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regularly receptive to reasons, weakly reactive to reasons, and the mechanism is his own. In short, Schmidt meets all the conditions of MRR. Moreover, the deliberative voting mechanism that Schmidt employs is the same mechanism as the one operant in the actual sequence—that mechanism can yield varying outcomes in response to different reasons. So, despite Block’s intervention, Schmidt is morally responsible. Now, one might worry about whether Schmidt is, in fact, morally responsible in case 2. We may assume that, had Block not intervened, Schmidt would have voted against Hitler. Even though Schmidt chooses via his own deliberative voting mechanism, something seems wrong about saying that he is morally responsible for voting for Hitler. After all, we might think, if Block hadn’t monkeyed with the inputs (reasons) that Schmidt had on his own, Schmidt would have voted against Hitler. Let’s pause to consider why we might be inclined to think that Schmidt is not morally responsible in this case. I think it is because we are inclined to think that our principle MAN (above) is true: according to MAN, Schmidt is not morally responsible, since unbeknownst to Schmidt, Block manipulated Schmidt’s brain a moment before Schmidt acts; and had Block not manipulated Schmidt’s brain, Schmidt would have voted against Hitler. It is these facts that drive the intuitive sense that Schmidt is not morally responsible.18 It seems that Block’s action goes so far as to amount to the manipulation we had in case 1, even if the manipulation here occurs in a different way than it did in case 1. So case 2 appears to be a counterexample to F & R’s claim that MRR is sufﬁcient for moral responsibility. Block/Schmidt case 3: A minute before Schmidt casts his vote, Block becomes convinced that Schmidt is going to vote against Hitler. Block goes into action: he removes inputs from the very same mechanism in Schmidt that would have operated if Block had not intervened.19 The inputs that Block removes from Schmidt’s deliberative voting mechanism are Schmidt’s own reasons for voting against Hitler. Block knows which reasons to remove in order to ensure that Schmidt’s deliberative voting mechanism yields a vote for Hitler. Suppose that these reasons are in the form of Schmidt’s negative memories of Hitler during the last few years (the ones that point to Hitler’s diabolical intentions). The idea is that Block removes only the relevant memories—he does not remove whatever counts as the deliberative mechanism.20 So, when Schmidt deliberates during that moment before he casts his vote, the only memories he has of Hitler are

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from the early days when Hitler seemed to be a thoroughly good chap (perhaps Block would also leave in Schmidt’s brain morally neutral memories involving Schmidt’s associating with Hitler during the past few years). Thus, the only reasons that Schmidt has to go on as he deliberates are reasons to vote for Hitler. Is Schmidt morally responsible for voting for Hitler in this case? According to F & R’s account of MRR, the answer is “yes,” for in coming to make his decision, Schmidt’s mechanism meets all the conditions of MRR. Moreover, the very same deliberative voting mechanism is operant in this case as it is in the actual sequence. That mechanism can yield varying outcomes in response to different reasons. Schmidt exhibits guidance control in that the mechanism that actually issues in his action is MRR. So, F & R are committed to thinking that Schmidt is morally responsible, despite Block’s intervention. Nevertheless, it may seem that Schmidt is not morally responsible in this case. Although it is true that Schmidt’s mechanism is MRR, it seems plausible to suppose that Block has deprived Schmidt of some of his own reasons in such a way that he is not morally responsible for voting for Hitler.21 Moreover, note that if we are inclined to think that Schmidt is not morally responsible in this case, it is because we think that MAN (or something very much like it) is true. On MAN, Schmidt is not morally responsible, since he was not aware of Block’s manipulation a moment before Schmidt acted, and he wouldn’t have acted as he did if Block hadn’t intervened. 4

The Options for Fischer and Ravizza

What resources do F & R have to deal with these last two test cases? The answer will depend on whether they concede them to be counterexamples. If they do, then I doubt that they can ﬁx their theory without denying that MRR is sufﬁcient for moral responsibility. Here’s why: the only way around my counterexamples seems to involve construing the relevant deliberative mechanism broadly enough that it includes the inputs (i.e., the reasons) as part of the mechanism. On this construal, F & R would be entitled to conclude that Schmidt is not morally responsible in cases 2 and 3, because Schmidt has not taken responsibility for a mechanism that includes inputs that Block has either directly added or excised. This reply may seem promising, but it turns out to be deadly to their theory; for F & R want a

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general account that allows us to discern when an agent is morally responsible. Thus, what they need are mechanisms that are able to yield varying outputs (actions) depending on the inputs (reasons). But, on the present proposal, which has it that the mechanism includes the inputs, what we get in each case is an invariant mechanism. But if each mechanism is invariant, then we don’t have what is needed for a general theory. To their credit, F & R maintain that the mechanisms they are talking about can, in fact, deliver varying outputs in response to various reasons. However, this claim opens them to the kinds of counterexamples that I raise. Here is a more general point: no matter how broadly one tries to construe the mechanism (i.e., no matter how many inputs are included as part of the relevant mechanism), one must allow for inputs that are not included in the mechanism. We can then develop a counterexample that will exploit those nonincluded inputs. Hence, if they accept cases 2 and 3 as counterexamples, then I cannot think of any way to save their theory without dropping the claim that MRR is sufﬁcient for guidance control and thus for moral responsibility. So, one option in dealing with my counterexamples is for F & R to afﬁrm MAN (or something like it) and add conditions to MRR so that the theory gets the cases right. However, F & R need not accept my cases as actual counterexamples. They have another solution open to them that will save their theory. Here is the alternative solution: my cases are not counterexamples at all; Schmidt is morally responsible in cases 2 and 3, but he is not blameworthy. Although it is unfortunate that Schmidt’s action put Hitler in a position to carry out his horrible, unspeakable acts, and although we may assume for the sake of the thought experiments that had Schmidt voted against Hitler, Hitler would not have carried out his reign of terror, nonetheless in each of the two cases Schmidt did the best he could given the reasons he had. Assuming that he had no special reason to doubt his own faculties, it is clear that in each case Schmidt had very good reasons to vote for Hitler. Moreover, Schmidt voted in consonance with his reasons. Given his reasons, it would have been irrational for him to vote against Hitler. These facts show that Schmidt is morally responsible for his actions. So where do these considerations leave F & R? Either they can accept my examples as counterexamples, in which case they will need to go back to the drawing board in order to hash out the missing necessary condition(s) of MRR, or they can deny that my examples are counterexamples. If the

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latter, they will need to acknowledge a false assumption they seem to be under about Frankfurt-style cases. To make this point perspicuous, I want to draw out what I take my discussion to have shown about Frankfurt-style cases. The fundamental thing that Frankfurt designed these cases to show is that one can be morally responsible even if one couldn’t have done otherwise. But the alternative-sequence cases are diverse. Using my characters as examples, the leading idea of an alternative-sequence case is that every possible world where Schmidt on his own does not do the thing that Block wants is a world where Block intervenes such that Schmidt does what Block wants. I have shown that we can divide the alternative-sequence cases into two subcategories, one of which nobody seems to have noticed. There is the kind of case in which Block intervenes in such a way that Schmidt is not morally responsible for his action—that is, the case in which Block does something to Schmidt that physically (or otherwise) directly causes Schmidt to vote for Hitler. This is the kind of case that F & R and others have countenanced. The other kind of case is one in which Block intervenes to bring it about that Schmidt does what Block wants, but the intervention is such that Schmidt does not lack moral responsibility for his action. My examples show not only that Block can manipulate in a way that eliminates moral responsibility, but they also show that Block can manipulate in a way that does not eliminate moral responsibility. Now, I suppose that everyone will agree that Block could have successfully manipulated Schmidt by more ordinary means—by providing him with efﬁcacious newspapers, ﬂyers, and other documents, or by arranging a large enough bribe, or by some other means—and Schmidt would be morally responsible for his actions in each of those cases. The key point I have made is that the manipulative intervention that does not eliminate moral responsibility can be more severe than we might have thought. We are now in a position to state what I said above is a false assumption by F & R. They seem to assume that in all alternative-sequence cases, the intervenor’s manipulation eliminates moral responsibility on the part of the agent. My examples show that this assumption is false. There is another lesson to be drawn from my examples, which involve manipulation that does not rule out moral responsibility. This kind of manipulation can be so severe that it clashes with an intuition that many people have. That intuition is the driving force behind MAN, which says that if an agent is unknowingly manipulated in such a way that she performs

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an action that she wouldn’t have performed had there been no manipulation, then she is not morally responsible for her action. Despite the fact that MAN may seem intuitively right, further reﬂection reveals that there is little to recommend it. Consider Block/Schmidt cases 2 and 3. In each case, not only did Schmidt meet the conditions of MRR, but he also intuitively did the morally responsible thing, given the evidence he had to go on. And if we knew the relevant facts about each case, we might even praise him for his action, even as we deeply regret or deplore the trick Block played on him and the consequences that followed. This shows that MAN is false, for Schmidt did perform an action at time tn only because another agent, acting completely unbeknownst to Schmidt, directly manipulated Schmidt’s brain earlier at t1; and yet Schmidt is morally responsible for voting for Hitler, since he acted in consonance with his reasons in an appropriate way. The moral is that we are morally responsible for our actions when they are consonant with our reasons in an appropriate way (perhaps, when MRR is satisﬁed), but whether we are praiseworthy or blameworthy for our actions depends on additional facts about the cases. Counterexamples to MAN are plentiful. Although the intuition behind MAN may be appealing, it does not survive scrutiny. After doing this ground clearing, we are in a position to see that F & R’s theory does get the cases right. It implies that when the deliberative process as a whole is directly manipulated the agent is not morally responsible for actions issued in by that process. This is exactly right. The problem is in F & R’s assumption about how their theory applies to Frankfurt-style examples; for it does not, nor need not, imply that all alternative-sequence cases eliminate moral responsibility on the part of the agent. 5

Trouble with Intuitions

However, Fischer himself has responded to my examples by saying that intuitively Schmidt is not morally responsible in cases 2 and 3. Fischer infers from this intuition that the manipulation of the inputs makes the mechanism in those cases a different mechanism from the one operant in the actual-sequence case.22 I ﬁnd this response disappointing, for Fischer concedes that he has no principled way to distinguish the mechanisms in question. If MRR really is sufﬁcient for guidance control, and thus for moral responsibility, as F & R claim that it is, then an objection to my examples

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stands a chance only if we have reason to doubt that Schmidt meets the third condition of MRR. However, I think it is clear that Schmidt can easily meet that condition. In my examples I suppose that Schmidt (a) sees himself as the source of his behavior, which follows from the operation of the relevant mechanism, that Schmidt (b) believes that he is an apt candidate for the reactive attitudes (in the manner F & R specify), and that Schmidt (c) views himself as an agent based on his evidence for (a) and (b). Nothing about Block’s manipulation prevents Schmidt from meeting those conditions. To think that Schmidt fails to satisfy those conditions is to suppose that Schmidt would have to be responsible both for his prior evidence (or beliefs) and for the way in which he acquired that evidence (or those beliefs). But, surely this is to add too much to the notion of taking responsibility. Evidence (and reasons) supporting beliefs come to us from various directions and in many different ways. Some of it we are quite aware of, and some of it we are less aware of. Earlier I mentioned that nobody would balk at the suggestion that Schmidt could have been convinced to vote for Hitler by more ordinary external means (news reports, personal testimony, etc.). What is the relevant difference between manipulating the inputs in those ways and manipulating the inputs directly? Consider a case in which a group of conniving folk manipulate the inputs of someone’s deliberative mechanism by affecting the information that person gets. Suppose a group of Young Republicans who work at a news press manipulate the inputs that Karen’s deliberative voting mechanism receives by changing the text of Karen’s newspaper every time something good is said in print about a Democratic candidate. Would this prevent Karen from being morally responsible for her voting? If you are inclined to answer “yes,” then you owe us an explanation of why any of us are morally responsible for our acts of voting. After all, very few of us control the political reports or the political opinions that are propounded in our newspapers and other media; thus, most of us do not control the inputs our deliberative voting mechanisms receive. You can bet your bottom dollar that much of the political talk in newspapers is written with the intent of manipulating us to vote the way the authors want us to vote. On what basis should we judge ourselves as morally responsible for our voting but deny that Karen is morally responsible for her voting? My point is even more convincing when we turn our attention to advertising. The very livelihoods of advertisers depend on their ability to manipulate us into buying whatever marketers are selling. Advertising is a

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sneaky, subtle business, but are we to suppose that most of us are not morally responsible for our purchases? Despite the cunning powers of advertisers, surely most of us are not helpless victims of manipulation. Likewise for Schmidt in cases 2 and 3; he was no helpless victim. No one caused him to act by bypassing his deliberative voting mechanism. Schmidt actually weighed reasons in a regularly reasons-responsive way, and his deliberative voting mechanism was weakly reactive to reasons; moreover, that mechanism, which we may assume Schmidt used many times before, was one that he had clearly taken responsibility for. So, according to MRR, Schmidt is morally responsible in cases 2 and 3. F & R want their theory to capture our intuitions about moral responsibility. I grant that judging Schmidt to be morally responsible strains the prereﬂective intuition that some people might have about the cases. However, it is fairly common for us to ﬁnd that our prereﬂective intuitions about a matter are wrong, after reﬂection on the details; and, I have found that, after reﬂection, many people (philosophers and nonphilosophers) judge the cases as I do. Even so, I am not inclined to hang my case on any claim about how many people have a particular intuition. Instead, I put forward the following evidence for your consideration: (1) F & R want variant mechanisms; that is, they want any MRR mechanism to be able to operate on a variety of inputs and to produce a variety of outputs; and (2) F & R explicitly distinguish between moral responsibility, on the one hand, and praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, on the other. Consideration of (1) reveals that it will not do to build all the inputs into an MRR mechanism, but the only way to make sense of Fischer’s response to my examples is to think that Schmidt would have to be responsible for his input acquisition as well as for the mechanism itself. This amounts to building the inputs into the mechanism. Consideration of (2) reveals that F & R have the resources for their theory to get the cases right. Schmidt is morally responsible for voting for Hitler, although he is not blameworthy. If you are still unconvinced, suppose that Schmidt walked into the voting room and murdered the ofﬁcials who voted against Hitler. I think that we would all judge him to be morally responsible for the murders, even if we knew every detail about Block’s manipulation. But, then, what principled reason is there to deny that Schmidt is morally responsible for his voting? In summary, given that F & R explicitly distinguish between any MRR mechanism and its inputs, given that they explicitly distinguish between

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moral responsibility and praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, and given that they have no principled reason to judge Schmidt not to be morally responsible in cases 2 and 3, I think it is clearly more reasonable to judge Schmidt as morally responsible in those cases; furthermore, I think that this judgment is correct. 6

Conclusion

F & R are aware that, in failing to provide effective differentiation parameters for mechanisms, they open their theory to philosophical worries: Clearly, on the approach to moral responsibility we have begun to sketch, it is crucial to distinguish between the kind of mechanism that operates in the actual sequence and the kind of mechanism that operates in the alternative sequence (or sequences). We must confess that we do not have any general way of specifying when two kinds of mechanisms are the same. This is a potential problem for our approach; it will have to be considered carefully by the reader. (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, 40)

After carefully considering the point, I conclude that Block/Schmidt cases 2 and 3 reveal an actual problem for F & R’s characterization of their theory with respect to Frankfurt-style examples. As I have shown, there may be no distinction between the mechanism that operates in the actual sequence and the mechanism that operates in the alternative sequence (or sequences). The problem, however, is not insurmountable, although my examples show that a reasonable solution requires F & R to give something up: either they must give up the claim that MRR is sufﬁcient for moral responsibility, or they must give up their claim that MRR explains why all Frankfurt-style alternative-sequence cases yield agents who are not morally responsible for their actions. As I have shown, alternative-sequence cases need not yield agents who lack moral responsibility for their actions. MRR does rule out moral responsibility when manipulation is pervasive across the whole deliberative process, but it does not rule out moral responsibility when manipulation touches only the inputs to the deliberative process (even though the manipulation may be so severe that it conﬂicts with MAN). Since I think there is something right about connecting moral responsibility to reasons-responsiveness, I think it best to take the second horn of the disjunction. Not only is this solution plausible, but it also keeps F & R’s theory of moral responsibility intact.

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Acknowledgments Special thanks to Rich Feldman for many fruitful discussions about this paper. Thanks also to John Martin Fischer, Tom Senor, Michael McKenna, Joseph Keim Campbell, Allen Plug, Greg Wheeler, Tony Roark, Ken Himma, and an anonymous referee for this volume, as well as participants in the Rochester Philosophy Society (2000), the 52nd Northwest Conference on Philosophy (2000), the American Catholic Philosophical Association, Western New York (2000), the Society of Christian Philosophers, Eastern Region (2001), the Philosophy Writing Seminar at the University of Rochester (2001), and the Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference on Freedom and Determinism (2001), for helpful comments on this paper. Notes 1. For some of the works that have inﬂuenced my thinking, see Della Rocca (1998), Mele and Robb (1998), Widerker (1995a, 1995b, 2000), and Vihvelin (1998). 2. See Fischer and Ravizza (1998, chaps. 1–2). See also Fischer (1995, chaps. 7–8). 3. I thank Michael McKenna and Joseph Keim Campbell for bringing to my attention that F & R also mention an epistemic condition as necessary for moral responsibility. Though providing no analysis of the condition, F & R say that it is meant to capture the “Aristotelian intuition” that “in order to be praiseworthy or blameworthy, a person must know (or be reasonably expected to know) what he is doing” (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, 12). To use their example, if you were to run over a kitten hiding under your car but were ignorant of the kitten’s location, then, intuitively, you would not be morally responsible for its death. After noting this epistemic condition, F & R don’t mention it again but rather assume that it is met both in the examples that they discuss and in their claim that guidance control is sufﬁcient for moral responsibility. In my cases 2–3 from section 3 below, I also assume that F & R’s epistemic condition is met. It is possible that some epistemic condition would make trouble for my test cases, but I ﬁnd nothing in F & R’s discussion of their epistemic condition that implies that there is trouble for my cases; moreover, I doubt that there is a plausible, fully worked-out epistemic condition that would make trouble for my test cases. 4. Here I summarize Fischer’s discussion of reasons-responsiveness (Fischer 1995, 161–164). See also Fischer and Ravizza (1998, 41–46). 5. See Fischer and Ravizza (1998, chap. 3). I will use MRR to stand for both ‘moderate reasons-responsiveness’ and its cognate form, ‘moderately reasons-responsive’.

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6. Although this schema does not appear in Fischer and Ravizza (1998), I have done my best to reproduce faithfully the conditions of MRR as F & R present them. The schema contains quotations or near quotations of various claims made by F & R that are meant to explain what they summarize as follows: moral responsibility “requires that an agent act on a mechanism that is regularly receptive to reasons, some of which are moral reasons, and at least weakly reactive to reasons” (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, 82), and also that the agent takes responsibility for the mechanism (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, 242–243). Strictly speaking, on F & R’s theory, condition (3) is not a condition of moderate reasons-responsiveness but is rather an additional necessary condition for guidance control. However, for ease of presentation I speak of MRR as encompassing all three conditions. This does not affect F & R’s theory in any relevant way. 7. F & R make this clear in numerous passages in Fischer and Ravizza (1998). Here is a typical one: “Return to our account of moral responsibility for actions. On this account, an agent is morally responsible for an action insofar as he has guidance control of it, where guidance control consists in the action’s issuing from the agent’s own, moderately reasons-responsive mechanism” (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, 230). As I mention in note 4, F & R make such claims on the assumption that their epistemic condition is met. 8. I use Fischer’s earlier account here because of the detail. Here is the parallel account by F & R: “. . . in a Frankfurt-type case . . . the kind of mechanism that actually operates is reasons-responsive, even though the kind of mechanism that would operate—that is, that does operate in the alternative scenario—is not reasonsresponsive. . . . But in the alternative scenario, a different kind of mechanism would have operated—one involving direct electronic stimulation of [the agent’s] brain. . . . And this alternative sequence mechanism is not reasons-responsive” (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, 38–39). 9. I thank Tom Senor for calling to my attention, though not necessarily endorsing, a version of MAN. 10. F & R repeatedly say the following sort of thing: “the actual-sequence mechanism is, intuitively, the agent’s own, whereas the alternative-scenario mechanism is not” (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, 228). 11. This story is ﬁctional, but it is supposed to express the character of the historical Hitler. 12. Readers may note that Schmidt and Block are counterparts to Frankfurt’s Jones and Black, respectively. See Frankfurt (1997, 162). 13. Condition (2) of MRR allows for cases of ‘weakness of will’. See Fischer and Ravizza (1998, 42–44). In Fischer (1995), Fischer also wanted his theory to be compatible with cases of ‘actual irrationality’ (166–168), but it is unclear whether F & R maintain this claim in Fischer and Ravizza (1998).

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14. I put this as I do for two reasons (and I thank Michael McKenna for bringing this issue to my attention). First, I want to avoid the kind of criticism that David Widerker and others have brought against designing Frankfurt-type examples that both grant libertarian-free action and rule out alternative possibilities. Such examples would have it that the agent at least starts to choose before the intervenor intervenes. The concern is that if some kind of nondetermined act is allowed in the setup of a Frankfurt-type example, then there is no reason to think that the agent (Schmidt, in my cases) cannot do otherwise, regardless of the actions of the intervenor (Block, in my cases). So, as I characterize my cases, I don’t assume libertarianfree action on the part of Schmidt. This leads to my second point: F & R do not assume libertarian-free action on the part of agents in Frankfurt-type examples either. Their view is that such examples show that alternative possibilities are not required for moral responsibility even if determinism is true. My goal is to follow their lead to see where it gets us. If it turns out that there is some general problem along these lines, then my cases might be problematic as well. However, I think I avoid problems in this neighborhood by setting up the cases as I do; for, all I need is for it to be the case that every possible world in which Schmidt does not do what Block wants is a world in which Block intervenes. I need not tell a story about how Block does this. If someone demanded such a story, then it seems to me that luck on Block’s part could account for it. 15. Although in all three of my alternative sequence stories Block goes into action one minute before he thinks Schmidt will cast his vote, nothing signiﬁcant turns on Block’s timing. 16. F & R also consider a case in which scientists don’t directly cause the implantee to perform an action but rather the scientists implant a mechanism that is itself MRR, which issues in an action. Although this example is closer to my cases 2 and 3, it is still a case 1 type in virtue of the fact that the mechanism itself is implanted. 17. Of course, in order to avoid psychic shock or noticeable incongruence, Block may have to inject more than thoughts into Schmidt’s deliberative voting mechanism. I just intend the story to be one in which Block adds in addition to reasons whatever else is minimally necessary to ensure a vote for Hitler. 18. I am claiming neither that F & R explicitly endorse MAN nor that they are committed to it; rather, the point of MAN is to provide something other than mere intuition to explain why it may seem to us that Schmidt is not morally responsible in this case. 19. This possibility was suggested to me by Allen Plug in conversation. 20. Block may, of course, have to remove more than just some of Schmidt’s memories in order to avoid psychic weirdness in Schmidt, but the story is just that Schmidt removes whatever in addition to the relevant memories is minimally necessary in order to ensure a vote for Hitler.

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21. In order to motivate the worry that Schmidt is not morally responsible in this case, consider that it works as an amnesia case might. Consider Chuck, who has lost all memories of the last ﬁve years. Chuck has been married for ﬁve years, and his wedding anniversary was yesterday. Although Chuck knows the woman who is his wife (for he remembers having dated her), he did not know—indeed, could not have known—that yesterday was his wedding anniversary. So Chuck not only failed to buy his wife anything for their wedding anniversary, but he also failed to acknowledge their wedding anniversary at all. Assuming that Chuck had not been told earlier about his impending wedding anniversary, it seems clear that no one, not even Chuck’s wife, ought to hold him responsible for not doing something special for his wife on their wedding anniversary (even if she is a bit disappointed). Although Chuck’s relevant mechanism is MRR, we might think that he is not morally responsible for his lack of appropriate celebratory action, precisely because his amnesia has deprived him of the use of reasons that he once had. The idea here is that he is in no way responsible for the loss of those reasons, and so he is not morally responsible for failing to act appropriately. Compare case 3 to the reasoning in Chuck’s case: Schmidt is in no way responsible for the loss of his reasons to vote against Hitler, and so he is not morally responsible for voting for Hitler. However, as I argue in the main text, Chuck may be morally responsible for whatever actions he does perform, so long as he acts in an appropriate reasons-responsive way; just note that if he murdered his wife, he would be morally responsible. So long as we are careful to distinguish moral responsibility from praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, we should have no trouble seeing that Chuck is morally responsible for his actions, even though he is not blameworthy for failing to do anything special for his wedding anniversary. 22. Fischer made these claims during the question and answer session of my presentation of a version of this paper at the Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference on Freedom and Determinism, University of Idaho and Washington State University, April 2001.

References Della Rocca, M. 1998. “Frankfurt, Fischer, and Flickers.” Noûs 32: 99–105. Fischer, J. 1995. The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control. Oxford: Blackwell. Fischer, J. and Ravizza, M. 1998. Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frankfurt, H. 1997. “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.” In D. Pereboom, ed., Free Will. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett. Ginet, C. 1998. “Comments on John Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will.” Journal of Social Philosophy 29: 126–134.

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Mele, A. and D. Robb. 1998. “Rescuing Frankfurt-style Cases.” Philosophical Review 107: 97–112. Widerker, D. 2000. “Frankfurt’s Attack on Alternative Possibilities.” Philosophical Perspectives 14: 181–201. . 1995a. “Libertarian Freedom and the Avoidability of Decisions.” Faith and Philosophy 12, no. 1 (1995): 113–118. . 1995b. “Libertarianism and Frankfurt’s Attack on the Principle of Alternative Possibilities.” Philosophical Review 104: 247–261. Vihvelin, K. 1998. “John Martin Fischer, The Metaphysics of Free Will.” Noûs 32: 406–440.

8

Which Autonomy?

Nomy Arpaly

“When I make a word do a lot of work like that,” says Humpty Dumpty, “I always pay it extra.” Some words in philosophy have been working overtime, as, for example, anyone knows who has attempted to explain to a bewildered student the relations between various ‘externalisms’ and ‘internalisms’. It has to be admitted, though, that the multitude of meanings that ‘internalism’ has in our ﬁeld is not a real problem. Real problems begin when a term of art performs so many tasks that it becomes at least as elusive and complex as the natural language terms it was supposed to help clarify. I suspect that this is the case with the term ‘autonomy’. In philosophical discussions of moral responsibility, attention has shifted somewhat from questions of praise and blame, responsibility and lack thereof, to questions about autonomy: what it is, whether it exists, and so forth. I would like to point out that there are at least eight things that we sometimes call ‘autonomy’, and there is a need to tell them apart. In discussion, we sometimes act as if these eight things were one, or, more often, act as if intuitions concerning any one of them should be equally relevant to the agency theorist who is trying to ﬁgure out what true autonomy consists in. The discussion in this paper is meant to raise questions about the general usefulness of the concept of autonomy to our theorizing about moral responsibility—to make us wonder if a moral responsibility theorist would not be better off going back to investigating praiseworthiness and blameworthiness directly, ignoring intuitions regarding autonomy. (I do not intend to criticize or question the use of ‘autonomy’ in political philosophy, normative ethics, or any other context except the context of moral responsibility and descriptive agency theory.) Let us look at the various things that ‘autonomy’ means. One of these things is what I will call, for convenience, agent autonomy. Agent autonomy

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is a relationship between an agent and her motivational states which can be roughly characterized as the agent’s ability to decide which of them to follow: it is a type of self-control or self-government that persons (usually) have and that nonhuman animals do not have. This, of course, is a very broad construal of agent autonomy—different philosophers can agree that we, unlike other animals, ‘govern’ ourselves while having very different views as to what constitutes this governing and as to which parts of a person, if any, constitute the ‘governing’ self and the ‘governed’ self (i.e, a philosopher may think that our autonomy is a matter of our having second-order desires or that it is a matter of our having the ability to reﬂectively endorse our actions). Some idea of agent autonomy is at least implicit in any Kantian account of moral psychology, and has been at the center of the work of countless action and agency theorists of many stripes—some clear examples being early Harry Frankfurt, Gary Watson, David Velleman, Robert Noggle, Michael Bratman, and Keith Lehrer. Occasionally, authors use ‘autonomy’ to mean simply ‘agency’, and ‘autonomous action’ to mean simply ‘action’ (or ‘full-ﬂedged action’). This is not the way I propose to use the term ‘agent autonomy’. The way I use the term, not every theory of action is also a theory of agent autonomy nor does every theory of action include a notion of agent autonomy. Take, for example, Davidson’s theory of action, according to which a movement is an action if it is caused, in a speciﬁc way, by a combination of a desire and a belief. If my glancing at my watch is caused by a desire to know the time and a belief that looking at my watch will tell me the time, it is thereby an action. This theory of action stipulates that a person’s movement is her action as long as a certain relationship obtains between the movement and her mental states. Davidson’s theory of action does not go further and require that some relationship obtain between the agent and the mental events that cause her action. For my movement to be an action, it is enough, for Davidson, that it is controlled in a certain way by mental events that happen in my brain: there is no extra sense in which the relevant mental events need to be controlled by me, the agent. All of the desires that happen in me are my desires and can, with the help of beliefs, produce actions: none of these desires is more “truly my own” than others. While Davidson does, implicitly, have a notion of self-control—after all, he talks about akratic actions versus nonakratic actions—there is no direct way in which control over self (as opposed to control of desire and belief over

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movement) enters his deﬁnition of action. Akratic actions are irrational, but they are still actions, still my own, still performed for a reason. Thus Davidson’s theory of action is, in my terms, not a theory of agent autonomy, but a theory of action in which agent autonomy plays no role (as opposed to theories of action, like Velleman’s, in which it does play a role). It is also possible for a philosopher to have a theory of agent autonomy that is not identical to her theory of action—that is, a theory according to which the phrase ‘autonomous action’ is meaningful but contains no redundancy, as ‘nonautonomous action’ is also an action. I say more about this possibility elsewhere (Arpaly forthcoming). Next on the list is the quite distinct sense of ‘autonomy’ that designates the absence of various kinds of dependence on other people—autonomy as self-efﬁcacy, or having the ability to get along well in the world without requiring the help of others. In this sense of ‘autonomy’, a person can make herself more autonomous by learning how to drive, becoming rich, becoming knowledgeable, or gaining physical strength. This sense of the word ‘autonomy’ should not be confused with agent autonomy or selfcontrol because, after all, a rich or educated agent is no more agent autonomous than a poor or uneducated agent: agent autonomy, like Sartrean freedom, is the kind of thing which the slave in chains has just as much as her master. Often described as lacking autonomy are those people who seem to lack not efﬁcacy, but various kinds of independence of mind: servile and submissive people (Thomas Hill’s Deferential Wife in Hill 1991 is a classical example), and people who blindly accept the views of their gurus or their ‘communities’. The psychological situations of these persons are often undesirable, and in many cases they involve irrationality or vice. However, they are not always situations in which agent autonomy is lacking. In an old Eastern European joke, a man is urged to stop obeying his wife in every matter, and to start following his own free will, whereupon he replies that he always follows his own judgment, as freely as anyone, and it so happens that his own judgment tells him to ask his wife what to do and follow her advice. This ﬁgure of fun may be perfectly autonomous as an agent, perfectly self-controlled even though his psychotherapist is likely to tell him that, in a different sense, he needs to increase his autonomy. The feminist who argues that women should be made more autonomous and who then cites early Frankfurt’s or Bratman’s deﬁnitions of autonomy, or alternately faults Frankfurt’s deﬁnition of autonomy

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for not explaining why deferential wives are nonautonmous, is most likely making a sort of category mistake. An important concept of autonomy that I have not yet mentioned is the concept of normative, moral autonomy—the one invoked when people ask to be allowed to make their own decisions and to be free from paternalistic intervention. There are well-known Kantian arguments for a connection between moral autonomy and agent autonomy, and there is much to be said about them (I will return to some of them later), but I would like to point out that the word ‘autonomy’ in ‘respect for autonomy’—an almost pretheoretical notion in the United States of America—does not simply mean ‘agent autonomy’. To see this, it sufﬁces to look at a paradigmatic case of ‘autonomy violation’ in the normative sense. If someone steals from you, that person violates your autonomy in the normative sense, but, plausibly, you are not any less of an autonomous agent as a result. Or imagine that a doctor lies to a patient or withholds information from a patient about his condition, ignoring the fact that the patient is in the process of making an important employment decision to which his condition would be relevant. Many people would say, in this case, that the doctor made it impossible for the patient to make an autonomous decision. This is, however, not the sense of ‘autonomy’ that autonomous-action theorists are looking for. Suppose that the patient did, based on the false or incomplete information received from his doctor, make an employment decision. Are we, as agency theorists, to say that his decision was not agent autonomous? If we were to say that, we would have to hold that any decision based on mistaken beliefs or incomplete information is a nonautonomous decision. Given that people err frequently and have very incomplete information about the world, or the next move one’s opponent plans to make in chess, for that matter, that would again make autonomy too scarce a commodity, especially if one intends to make it the basis of moral responsibility. I have spoken of autonomy as self-control, autonomy as material and psychological independence, and normative autonomy. David Velleman makes an additional distinction between autonomy, which is some form of self-control, and authenticity, or being true to oneself (Velleman 2002). His distinction is driven by a reading of Frankfurt’s latest view of love, caring, and volitional necessity. Until about 1987, Frankfurt’s key examples of nonautonomous agents were examples of people whom we would normally

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regard as lacking in self-control or experiencing a lack of it—recall the unwilling addict, the man who is subject to attacks of rage, and other such weak-willed people. But as of “Rationality and the Unthinkable,” Frankfurt insists that some people are autonomous whom we would ordinarily regard as weak-willed (Frankfurt 1988). For example, he talks about people who resolve reﬂectively to press what they believe to be the button that would facilitate the dropping of an atomic bomb, but who ﬁnd that they “just can’t do it,” and also of a man who decides to spy on his bride-tobe and ﬁnds himself forced to stop because the idea revolts him too much. These people are not paradigmatic cases of self-control, but Frankfurt sees them not as weak-willed, but as constrained by their own deepest values, their volitional essences. Whatever these people may have consciously resolved, the values which stop them from dropping the bomb or snooping are truly their own—otherwise they would not have found themselves repulsed by their respective tasks. These agents are prevented from acting by what they care about—which, according to Frankfurt, makes them what they are. Velleman maintains that this is not truly a theory of autonomy, but is rather a theory of authenticity, or personal identity, or the real self. Here is what Velleman says: Even if I believed that a person had a motivational essence of this kind, I would not infer that his being governed by this essence was what made him autonomous. Being governed by such an essence might amount to authenticity, perhaps, but not autonomy. To see the difference, consider the paradigm case of inauthenticity, the person who manifests what D. W. Winnicott called a “False Self.” This person laughs at what he thinks he is supposed to ﬁnd amusing, shows concern for what he thinks he is supposed to care about, and in general conforms himself to the demands and expectations of others. The motives that his behavior is designed to simulate are motives that he doesn’t genuinely have. . . . But is this person lacking in self-control, selfgovernance, or autonomy? To be sure, he has a problem with autonomy, but his problem is one of excess: he is overly self-controlled, overly deliberate; his grip on the reins of his behavior is too tight, not too loose. His failure to be motivated from within his true self makes him inauthentic, but it seems to result from his being all too autonomous. (Velleman 2002, 97)

Velleman draws a distinction between authenticity, which he takes to be the same as being true to one’s values, and autonomy—self-control or selfgovernance. He reminds us that there are some people who have a strong measure of autonomy, are in fact known for their exemplary selfgovernance, but whose very self-control allows them to live out of touch

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with what one would be tempted to call their ‘real selves’. We can imagine a person who, like the young E. T. A. Hoffman, represses his passion for literature due to his conviction that he should become “a respectable citizen.” This person may be very autonomous, but it is natural to say that he is out of touch with his real self. On the other hand, Harry Frankfurt’s agents, who surrender to ‘volitional necessity’, may be very true to themselves, but they do not control themselves—it may be said that, on the contrary, their selves control them, as it were. This is not to suggest, by any stretch of the imagination, the romantic thesis that the autonomous and the authentic are always in conﬂict, but only to point out that sometimes they are, and that therefore they are not one and the same. Our talk of people being more ‘themselves’ or less so is not all of a piece, either. Peter Strawson, in “Freedom and Resentment,” discusses contexts in which we make statements such as “you must excuse her, she is not herself—she has been under stress” (Strawson 1962). This is a statement about what Velleman calls ‘authenticity’—the person’s action is claimed to be less blameworthy because, presumably, it does not reﬂect her true will but only the stress she has endured. Quite different is the kind of talk in which a person reports that she experiences her feelings or desires as alien, or feels ‘possessed’ or ‘violated’ by them or passive towards them, like Frankfurt’s enraged man1 who feels as if his anger is an alien intruder and thus not truly his own. It is the latter kind of talk that gave birth to the idea of external desires, and while many accounts of external desires have been given in terms of the structure of the agent’s will, the pretheoretical experience of ‘passivity’ toward one’s desires often serves as the intuition against which these accounts are often measured. For example, the fact that some of us do not experience our vices as alien led Frankfurt to reﬁne his account of externality so as to allow some unwanted traits (vices) not to be external, and the fact that some thoughts are experienced as alien has led him to suggest that there are external thoughts as well as external desires—thoughts toward which we feel ‘passive’ (Frankfurt 1988). Because autonomy is sometimes perceived as the absence of externality, its phenomenological face, the experience of passivity and alienation with respect to desires, is often assumed to be relevant to autonomy. The idea of external desires can be quite strange. If a Victorian lady experiences her sexual desires as alien, intrusive, ‘not truly her own’, our natural reaction is to tell her that she is wrong, that these desires are in fact

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her own, and only the false, asexual self-image that she acquired with her upbringing makes her experience them as threatening to her integrity as a person. We would think that she denies her real self. A person who ﬁrst discovers the presence of homosexual desires in himself is also likely to experience his desires as alien and he, too, would be urged to ‘accept himself for who he is’. Similarly, the man whom Frankfurt used as his key example of a person possessed by an external passion—namely, the man who feels possessed or violated by his outburst of rage—need not be the same person to whom we would be inclined to give the Strawsonian excuse of ‘not being himself’—he may in fact be revealing what we would call his true colors in his outbursts, however honestly he experiences his anger as ‘not himself’. It is perfectly possible for a person to wonder what came over him while his friends tell each other ‘he is very much himself today’. In other words, experiences of ‘being possessed’ are not always an indication that the desire in question is inauthentic. Nor are they always an indication of lack of agent autonomy or self control. Some addicts in religious twelve-step programs experience their sobriety as the will of God taking over, and their akratic, ego-distonic falling off the wagon as a manifestation of their willfulness. Or consider a person who experiences herself primarily as weakwilled, spineless, lazy, and passive. When this person, because of her lack of self-control, takes a course of action or inaction which she regards as utterly impermissible, she does not feel invaded or possessed at all. Instead, she sadly thinks: Here I go again. I hate myself.2 Imagine now that suddenly, in an emergency, our lazy person begins to act with admirable self-control. As her desires obey her reason and her actions follow her decisions, for a change, she may feel, paradoxically enough, as if somebody—somebody cool and competent—has taken over her. So far we have seen autonomy as self-control, autonomy as having power in the world, autonomy as psychological independence, autonomy as having moral rights, and autonomy as authenticity. The foregoing discussion of the external desires literature shows that we need to introduce another ﬁgure who, until now, has been lurking in the background of our discourse on autonomy: the ﬁgure of the autonomous person as the self-identiﬁed person, the person with a harmonious and coherent self-image who never experiences her desires as an external threat.3 Also lurking in this background are concepts of what may be called heroic autonomy, namely, ideals such as Spinoza’s freedom, stoic Apathia’s or

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Ataraxia’s, Aristotle’s life of contemplation, Freud’s or Jung’s ideals of the liberation that their methods were to aim at bringing, Nietzsche’s ideal of the free spirit, the condition of the person who may truly state “I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul,” and other states which are supposed to be desirable and only attainable by the very few. Some notions of heroically autonomous persons may be related to some of the autonomies mentioned before—that is, one may have an ideal of a heroic authenticity, heroic self-efﬁcacy, perfect inner harmony which leaves no room for externality, or an ideal combining all of the above. One may even imagine an übermench whose superhuman power consists of a truly incredible degree of agent autonomy—a person who always follows his inner party line, always does what he reﬂectively endorses or what his higherorder desires tell him, and so forth. However, agent autonomy per se, or at least a substantial degree of it, is supposed to be the default condition of the average adult human being, not merely of the übermensch. It is especially true that those who take agent autonomy to be a necessary condition for moral responsibility cannot mean by agent autonomy any condition that is too much of an ideal and too little of a human reality, unless they wish to imply that very few people are morally responsible. Similarly, those who take agent autonomy to be a necessary condition for action do not wish to imply that we rarely ever act. Thus, caution must be exercised when mixing intuitions about autonomy as an ideal condition for which humans aspire and intuitions about autonomy as a property that a great majority of humans actually possess to a large extent and most of the time. I have left for last one more thing that has often been associated and implicitly identiﬁed with the ability to respond to reasons—reasons in general and moral reasons in particular. Autonomy has also been associated with acting for good reasons—that is, with acting rationally. While it is not often argued, since Kant, that autonomy is the same as rationality or reasonresponsiveness (although David Copp argues for autonomy being identical with rationality in Copp forthcoming), intuitions about autonomy and the lack thereof are often inﬂuenced by intuitions about rationality or reasonresponsiveness and the lack thereof, ‘rational autonomy’ being a common expression and ‘irrational autonomy’ not being one. “When we act rationally,” says Elizabeth Anderson casually, “we act for reasons that we endorse. We do not follow blindly where our desires suggest. This is the autonomy of practical reason” (Anderson 1997, 92). On such a view, rational

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action is always agent autonomous action—is always an action in which the agent, whoever she is, exercises control over her desires. Acting for reasons we endorse is also many people’s idea of autonomy, and acting in ways that diverge too much from what we endorse is often regarded as nonautonomous. Rational and reason-responsive action is thought of as requiring deliberation or endorsement, and autonomous actions are also often regarded as the result of deliberation or endorsement. (Even some very un-Kantian thinkers connect deliberation or endorsement to autonomy. See, for example, Mele 1995, who argues that being an adequate deliberator is a necessary condition for being an autonomous agent.) Things that impair our ability to respond to reasons, such as alcohol and hypnosis, are supposed to impair our autonomy. Animals are often said not to respond to reasons, and they are often said not to be autonomous. Identifying reason-responsiveness with autonomy may seem to be a reasonable move if one thinks of acting for reasons as always being the result of agent endorsement, or at least as accompanied by it. Elsewhere, I have argued in various ways that acting for reasons as well as acting for good reasons (acting rationally) are not necessarily related to agent endorsement, self-control in the ordinary sense, or to deliberation: there are instances of one without the other (Arpaly 2000). Related, though different, arguments have been made in various talks by Thomas Scanlon and Peter Railton, and also by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio in Descartes’ Error (1994), and by Robert Audi (1990).4 Harry Frankfurt in “Rationality and the Unthinkable” tells that whereas a person who resolves to destroy the earth but cannot bring himself to do is somewhat irrational, a person who decides to destroy the earth and manages to follow through with his decision is truly insane— thus opening the possibility that the ‘failure of self-control’ experienced by the former may in fact be a triumph of his common sense (Frankfurt 1988). If any of these different arguments has merit, it seems less obvious that intuitions about self-control and agent endorsement belong with intuitions about rationality and reasons-responsiveness as providing the pretheoretical grounding for one coherent concept called ‘autonomy’. Of course, one would still be tempted to identify them if one assumes that whatever moral responsibility depends on is called ‘autonomy’ and if one surmises, correctly, that one cannot be morally responsible unless one acts for reasons. So far, we have seen eight meanings ‘autonomy’ can have, or at least eight things that the word ‘autonomy’ connotes in a way that invokes some

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pretheoretical intuitions. Whenever we ask ‘is so-and-so autonomous’ instead of ‘is so-and-so morally responsible’ we expose ourselves to a tendency to equivocate some or all of these eight meanings of ‘autonomy’, or at the very least, to be unduly inﬂuenced by intuitions about irrelevant senses of ‘autonomy’. Thus, phrasing questions in terms of the agent’s autonomy instead of in terms of her moral responsibility serves not to clarify, but to further obscure, the already difﬁcult question of her moral responsibility. Let us look at an example. It involves one kind of use, in the moral responsibility literature, of stories involving people who have acquired their current desires, beliefs, and values via being brainwashed. The premise, assumed to be obviously true, that these people lack autonomy, has been used in arguments for certain theories of responsibility such as that of Alfred Mele, or the theory of John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza.5 In his Autonomous Agents, Mele brings up the issue with an entertaining tale of two agents: Ann is an autonomous agent and an exceptionally industrious philosopher. She puts in 12 solid hours a day, seven days a week; and she enjoys almost every minute of it. Beth, an equally talented colleague, values a great many things above philosophy, for reasons that she has reﬁned and endorsed on the basis of careful critical reﬂection over many years. She identiﬁes with and enjoys her own way of life—one which, she is conﬁdent, has a breadth, depth and richness that long days in the ofﬁce would destroy. Their dean, who shall remain nameless, wants Beth to be like Ann. Normal modes of persuasion having failed, he decides to circumvent Beth’s agency. Without the knowledge of either philosopher, he hires a team of psychologists to determine what makes Ann tick and a team of new-wave brainwashers to make Beth like Ann. The psychologists decide that Ann’s peculiar hierarchy of values accounts for her productivity and the brainwashers instill the same hierarchy in Beth while eradicating all competing values—via new-wave brainwashing, of course. Beth is now, in the relevant respect, a ‘psychological twin’ of Ann. She is an industrious philosopher. . . . When she carefully reﬂects on her preferences and values, Beth ﬁnds that they fully support a life dedicated to philosophical work, and she wholeheartedly embraces such a life and the collection of values that supports it. (Mele 1995, 145)

It is often taken for granted that someone like Beth is not an autonomous agent—after all, Beth has been brainwashed by the Dean Who Shall Not be Named. The reaction that we have to Beth’s story, along the lines of ‘surely she cannot be autonomous if her state of mind has been compelled’, often serves as an intuition against which to check theories. It is used as such by proponents of historical views of autonomy, such as Fischer and Ravizza,

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and Mele himself is eventually moved by it to include in his own theory of autonomy the condition that the agent have no ‘compelled’ or coerced mental states which the agent did not arrange to have produced in her (Mele 1995, 187). But consider the following puzzle. There are cases of profound conversions in a person’s values that are just as inexplicable to their possessors, just as uninvited, and just as irrational as Beth’s conversion. For instance, many people have undergone shifts from being self-endorsed party animals to being self-endorsed industrious workers because of mysterious factors they regard as ‘age’ or the ‘drying up of hormones’. Other people begin to value parenthood—value, not just like—the moment their (formerly unwanted) children are born. Other people have converted from atheism to religion as the result of an experience of extreme loneliness and pain, and many peoples’ convictions, however well rationalized, are the result of irrational or a-rational factors so unconscious that the agent had about as much opportunity to subject them to reﬂective criticism as Beth had to scrutinize her brainwashing process. Those people are not nearly as obviously nonautonomous as Beth and are unlikely to be used as paradigmatic examples of lack of autonomy. And yet, the only thing that distinguishes them from Beth is that their irrational conversions are not the result of a deliberate and wrongful action by another human being, but her conversion is the result of such an action. A person who converted from atheism to religion as an irrational reaction to pain and extreme loneliness does not strike one as particularly nonautonomous, but a person who was deliberately placed in a state of pain and loneliness by a brainwasher to obtain the same result sounds considerably less autonomous. Why is that? I cannot but suspect that this has to do with the fact that brainwashed Beth, and not the ordinary irrational convert, lacks autonomy in two senses. First, she is quite obviously lacking autonomy in the sense of lacking independence of mind—in the same sense that a person who received all of her convictions from her mother is lacking in autonomy, only worse: after all, there exists another person, the dean, who has given her a substantial part of her value system. Second, it is obvious also that in the moral, normative sense, her autonomy has been violated, because she did not give her permission for the brain-washing operation; the dean violated her autonomy in the same sense that he would have violated her autonomy if he were to switch her long distance carrier behind her back. In these two senses, it is obvious that Beth is lacking autonomy. In other senses, it is not

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obvious at all that she lacks autonomy, or that she lacks it more than the other converts mentioned. Is present-day Beth autonomous in the sense of agent autonomy or selfcontrol? We would have to say she is—Mele himself states that she is the same as Ann in this way. She does things that she reﬂectively endorses, and cannot be regarded as ‘wanton’, compulsive, and so forth. Similarly, present-day Beth is not lacking autonomy in the sense of being particularly irrational or particularly unresponsive to reasons. It is true that the shift in her basic worldview was in fact irrational, or unresponsive to reasons, but again, even very rational people have had such shifts, and that does not make their current actions less rational or less responsive to reasons. In her current actions, including staying in the ofﬁce for long days, Beth may be as responsive to reasons as Ann is. One might wish to introduce a new sense of autonomy—a sense in which a person is autonomous only if all of her convictions are the result of reason-responsive processes or at very least intentionally induced by her in a self-controlled act of self-indoctrination. But this would be a heroic notion of autonomy, of little use to the moral responsibility theorist. If one wishes to maintain that only autonomous agents are morally responsible, one cannot say that the relevant sense of ‘autonomy’ requires a history that does not include irrational and uninvited changes of outlook due to growing up, growing old, falling in love, loneliness, parenthood, hormones, Prozac, or fatigue, because this would mean that very few people would be morally responsible at all. At the end of the day, the only ways in which Beth may be said to be nonautonomous involve the fact that her convictions are secondhand, the fact that the dean is in the habit of violating her rights, and the fact that she is not some sort of super-rational creature who never undergoes irrational or uninvited changes. Yet, neither independence of mind nor having one’s rights respected nor heroic autonomy seemed, prima facie, when considered by themselves, particularly relevant to the question of moral responsibility or lack thereof. Anyone who wishes to argue that Beth is not morally responsible for her actions would need to explain why having been irrationally inﬂuenced by an evil human being exempts her from responsibility in a way that having been inﬂuenced in a similar way by some unlucky chance of a force of nature does not. Is Beth responsible for her actions? I shall not answer this question here. For now, let me just point out that this is a real question (as Mele acknowledges) and intuitions run both ways, at times disturbed by personal identity

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concerns. One need only remember that Patty Hearst, after changing her values as a result of brainwashing, was still convicted for her crimes, to realize that the issue is complex. My point is that the language of autonomy obscures the complexity of the issue. It is not clear whether Beth is morally responsible. It seems obvious that in at least two senses, she is not autonomous. By substituting the question ‘Is Beth autonomous?’ for the question ‘Is Beth morally responsible?’—treating the questions as if they were identical—an author may prejudice the reader towards a negative answer to the question of Beth’s responsibility, turning a complex question into something trivial. Let us look at another case study—this time, not a quote from a philosophy book but a story by John Le Carre. Oliver Single is a young lawyer in a prestigious ﬁrm—an heir apparent to his illustrious father, Tyger Single, who heads the ﬁrm. The ﬁrm is heavily involved in organized crime. Oliver had always known that his father makes shady deals, but only gradually does he learn quite how shady. Even when he knows quite well that his father performs immoral actions, he still has no plans to leave his post. He enjoys the money and the prestige, and in addition, he loves his father deeply and wishes to please him. At a critical moment in the novel, Oliver defects from the side of his criminal family to the side of the law, in whose service he remains to perform some courageous, intuitively admirable acts. Here is how Le Carre describes Oliver’s defection: It is Midwinter, and Oliver is a little mad. That much he knows about himself, no more. The Origins of his madness, its causes, duration and degree, are not within his grasp, not now. They are out there, but for another time, another life, another couple of brandies. The neon-lit gloom of a December’s night at Heathrow airport reminds him of a boy’s changing room in one of his many boarding schools. Garish cardboard reindeer and taped carols compound his mood of unreality. Snowy lettering dangles from a washing line, wishing him peace and joy on earth. Something amazing is about to happen to him and he is eager to ﬁnd out what it will be. He isn’t drunk but technically he isn’t sober either. A few vodkas on the ﬂight, a half of red with the rubber chicken, a remy or two afterwards have done no more in Oliver’s eyes than bringing him up to speed with the furor already raging inside him. He has only hand luggage and nothing to declare except a reckless ferment of the brain, a ﬁrestorm of outrage and exasperation starting so long ago that is origins are impossible to peg, blowing through his head like a hurricane while other members of his internal congregation stand around in timid twos and threes and ask one another what on earth Oliver is going to do to put it out. He is approaching signs of different colors and instead of wishing him peace, joy on earth and goodwill among men, they are requiring him

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to deﬁne himself. Is he a stranger in his own country? Answer, yes he is. Has he arrived here from another planet? Answer, yes he has. Is he blue? Red? Green? His eye drifts to a tomato-colored telephone . . . It is familiar to him. Perhaps he noticed it on his way out three days ago and, unknown to himself, recruited it as a secret ally. Is it heavy, hot, alive? A notice beside it reads “If you wish to speak to a Customs ofﬁcer, use this phone.” He uses it. That is to say, his arm reaches out for it unbidden, his hand grasps it and puts it to his ear, leaving him with the responsibility of what to say. (Le Carre 1998, 90)

Much of the novel is built upon the reader’s admiration of Oliver and his defection, and this admiration assumes moral praiseworthiness—hence, moral responsibility. The sense that Oliver is morally responsible, that his defection is not just an accidental drunk action, comes from the feeling that his action is, after all, reason-responsive: it is not an accident that the action occurs right after his discovery of his father’s worst crimes, it is not an accident that Oliver has noted the red phone long ago, as if knowing without knowing that some day he’ll use it, and one even gets the impression that Oliver’s drinking on the airplane is taken as a preemptive tranquilizer to assist him in the hard task to come. Oliver’s action also appears to be authentic: something deep and real in him, his moral sensibility, ﬁnally revolts against his life as his father’s heir. On the other hand, as for self-control, Oliver does not seem to have much during his action, and Le Carre stresses again and again the passivity and turmoil which he experiences. He is alienated from his actions, and does not seem to identify with them. Le Carre’s description of Oliver’s dark night of the soul is rather credible, and may ring true to many people who have left a father, a religion, a marriage. Is Oliver autonomous? Is there any clear meaning to this question—or any good reason to ask it? “Of course,” some agency theorists will answer. “After all, there is a reason to ask if Oliver is morally responsible for his action, and the asking if he is autonomous is simply the same as asking if he is morally responsible. And may we point out that when we use the word ‘autonomy’, we do not mean any of eight things you have listed, for by ‘autonomy’ we mean simply that on which moral responsibility depends, whatever it turns out to be. Thus, there is also a reason to ask what it is that constitutes autonomy— this is simply the same as asking what it is that makes an agent morally responsible.” But I take myself to have demonstrated why this may not be the best way to pose the question of moral responsibility, as at least some of the meanings

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I have listed invariably get smuggled in, mixed together, whenever we use the word autonomy, thus inviting confusion. Furthermore, there is also the risk that ‘What is autonomy?’ is a bit too loaded a way to bring about the question of moral responsibility, focusing our attention on some kinds of solutions and not others. Perhaps we should simply ask what it is that makes an agent morally responsible, or praiseworthy, or blameworthy, and give a much overworked term of art a well-deserved rest. Acknowledgments This work, originally written for the Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference, appears in a modiﬁed form as a part of my book Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry Into Human Agency, forthcoming, Oxford University Press. Notes 1. Described in Frankfurt (1976). 2. It may be that it is common in North American culture to viscerally expect selfcontrol from one’s self and experience any failure of self-control as disturbing, bafﬂing, and surprising. On the other hand, Russian novels are full of people who perceive themselves and humans in general as weak and passive, and are pleasantly surprised, and grateful to God, for any exception to this (for example, Lebedeyev in The Idiot). 3. Timothy Schroeder and I presented an extended version of these arguments in Arpaly and Schroeder (1999). 4. Scanlon (2002), Damasio (1994), and Audi (1990). Railton’s work is yet unpublished, though it has been presented in many talks. 5. See Fischer and Ravizza (1998).

References Anderson, E. 1997. “Practical Reason and Incommensurable Goods.” In R. Chang, ed., Incommensurability, Incomparability and Practical Reason. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Arpaly, N. 2000. “On Acting Rationally Against One’s Best Judgment.” Ethics 110: 488–513. . Forthcoming. Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry Into Human Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Arpaly, N. and T. Schroeder. 1999. “Alienation and Externality.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 29: 371–388. Audi, R. 1990. “Weakness of Will and Rational Action.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 68: 271–281. Copp, D. In preparation. Rationality and Autonomy. Damasio, A. 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: G. P. Putnam. Fischer, J. and M. Ravizza. 1998. Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility. New York: Cambridge University Press. Frankfurt, H. 1976. “Identiﬁcation and Externality.” In A. Rorty, ed., The Identities of Persons. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. . 1988. “Rationality and the Unthinkable.” In H. Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hill, T. 1991. “Servility and Self-respect.” In T. Hill, Autonomy and Self-respect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Le Carre, J. 1998. Single and Single. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Mele, A. 1995. Autonomous Agents. New York: Oxford University Press. Scanlon, T. 2002. “Reasons and Passions.” In S. Buss and L. Overton, eds., Contours of Agency. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Strawson, P. 1962. “Freedom and Resentment.” Proceedings of the British Academy 48: 1–25. Velleman, D. 2002. “Identiﬁcation and Identity.” In S. Buss and L. Overton, eds., Contours of Agency. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

9

The Transfer of Nonresponsibility

John Martin Fischer

1

Introduction

In ancient times—some ﬁfteen years ago—I suggested that Frankfurt-type examples call into question the principle of transfer of nonresponsibility (which I then called, a bit too narrowly, the ‘principle of transfer of blamelessness’, following John Taurek’s usage in his fascinating Ph.D. dissertation at UCLA in 1972).1 In the introductory essay to my anthology, Moral Responsibility, I presented a somewhat informal version of van Inwagen’s modal principle (which he called principle ‘B’), and (following van Inwagen) explained how it could be employed as part of a ‘direct’ argument for the incompatibility of causal determinism and moral responsibility (i.e., an argument for the incompatibility claim that does not employ the claim that causal determinism rules out alternative possibilities): . . . if you are not morally responsible for one thing, and you are not morally responsible for that thing’s leading to another, you are not morally responsible for the other. [This, roughly speaking, is the principle of transfer of nonresponsibility.] Now, an argument . . . can be generated to show that causal determinism rules out moral responsibility. Given that you are not morally responsible for the past, and you are not morally responsible for the laws of nature, and assuming the principle of transfer of blamelessness [the principle of transfer of nonresponsibility], causal determinism seems to rule out moral responsibility. (Fischer 1986, 60)

Also, I told the following story: . . . a man [Green] walks along a beach and, noting that there is a child drowning, dives into the water and rescues the child. Though Green has had a device implanted in his brain [by scientists in a research institute in California—one might now say ‘crazed neurophilosophers in La Jolla’], the device does not play any role in Green’s decision to save the child (and his subsequent action). That is, the device monitors

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Green’s brain activity but does not actually intervene in it. Let us suppose that this is because the scientists can see that Green is about to decide to save the child and to act accordingly [they are morally good, albeit crazed, neurophilosophers]. But let’s also suppose that the scientists would have intervened to bring about a decision to save the child if Green had shown an inclination to decide to refrain from saving the child. That is, were Green inclined to decide on his own not to save the child, the scientists would ensure electronically that he decide to save the child and also that he act to carry out this decision. (Fischer 1986, 41)

Of course, this case contains the distinctive characteristics of a Frankfurttype case: a fail-safe arrangement that plays no actual role but the presence of which nevertheless ensures the actual result.2 I then suggested that the Frankfurt-type examples are plausible counterexamples to the principle of transfer of nonresponsibility, even though they would not be counterexamples to the parallel modal principle employed in the argument for the incompatibility of causal determinism and alternative possibilities (the principle of the transfer of powerlessness): . . . Green is not morally responsible for the fact that the scientists are ready to intervene, and he is not responsible for the fact that, if they are so ready, he will save the child. But he does seem to be morally responsible for saving the child. . . . So a compatibilist about determinism and moral responsibility might accept the ﬁxity of the past . . . the ﬁxity of the laws . . ., and the principle of transfer of powerlessness but might reject the principle of transfer of blamelessness. (Fischer 1986, 60–61).

Thus, semicompatibilism was born. Here I wish to defend the basic intuition, which I still believe is correct, that the principle of transfer of blamelessness (or, more broadly, nonresponsibility) is called into question by the Frankfurt-type cases, and that it cannot be employed in an uncontroversial, decisive argument against the compatibility of causal determinism and moral responsibility. 2 The Principle of Transfer of Nonresponsibility and a Preliminary Critique It will be helpful to have a slightly more careful formulation of the principle of transfer of nonresponsibility (Transfer NR): If (1) p obtains and no one is even partly morally responsible for p; and (2) if p obtains, then q obtains, and no one is even partly morally responsible for the fact that if p obtains, then q obtains;

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then (3) q obtains, and no one is even partly morally responsible for q. (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, 152) In Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility, Mark Ravizza and I criticize Transfer NR by presenting the following sort of Frankfurttype scenario: [In “Erosion”], Betty plants . . . explosives in the crevices of [a] glacier and [intuitively speaking, freely] detonates the charge at T1 causing an avalanche that crushes the enemy fortress at T3 [a result intended by Betty]. Unbeknownst to Betty . . . however, the glacier is gradually melting, shifting, and eroding. Had Betty not placed the dynamite in the crevices, some ice and rocks would have broken free at T2, starting a natural avalanche that would have crushed the enemy camp at T3. (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, 157)

Our contention is that Betty is (intuitively) morally responsible for bringing it about that there is an avalanche that crushes the enemy base at T3, despite the fact that no one is even partly responsible for the fact that the glacier is eroding, and no one is even partly responsible for the fact that if the glacier is eroding, then there is an avalanche that crushes the enemy base at T3. Thus, we reject Transfer NR.3 Now it might be objected that the potency of ‘Erosion’ as a counterexample to Transfer NR depends on its being a case of preemptive overdetermination. Consider, now, Transfer NR: If (1) p obtains and no one is even partly morally responsible for p; and (2) (i) p is part of the actual sequence of events e that gives rise to q at T3, (ii) p is a part of e that is causally sufﬁcient for the obtaining of q at T3, and (iii) no one is or ever has been even partly responsible for (2i and ii); then (3) q obtains at T3, and no one is or ever has been even partly morally responsible for q.4 But a case similar to Erosion, Erosion*, shows Transfer NR to be problematic. In Erosion*, the conditions of the glacier do actually cause the ice and rocks to break free, triggering an avalanche that arrives at the fortress precisely at the same time as the independent avalanche triggered freely by Betty. Each avalanche is sufﬁcient for the destruction of the fortress, and yet Betty seems

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to be morally responsible for bringing it about that there is an avalanche that destroys the enemy fortress at T3, just as in Erosion. Erosion* is analogous to Erosion in every respect, except in Erosion* the overdetermination is simultaneous, rather than preemptive. This difference does not appear to make a difference with respect to Betty’s moral responsibility. Thus, we reject Transfer NR. Consider the typical sort of example van Inwagen employs to motivate the acceptance of a principle such as Transfer NR or Transfer NR, ‘Snake Bite’ (van Inwagen 1983, 187). Imagine that John was bitten by a cobra on his thirtieth birthday, and no one was even partly responsible for this. Suppose, also, that if John was bitten by a cobra on his thirtieth birthday, then John died on his thirtieth birthday, and no one was even partly responsible for this fact. It seems to follow that John died on his thirtieth birthday, and no one was even partly responsible for the fact that John died on his thirtieth birthday. Similarly, suppose that an earthquake takes place in the middle of the Paciﬁc Ocean, and that no one is even partly morally responsible for this. Also suppose that if this earthquake occurs, then a tsunami will hit the coast of California, and no one is even partly responsible for this fact. It appears to follow that a tsunami will hit the coast of California, and no one is even partly morally responsible for this. Call this case ‘Tsunami’. These sorts of examples seem to support a principle of transfer of nonresponsibility. But Mark Ravizza and I contend that these examples, like the others invoked by van Inwagen (and other proponents of the idea of transfer of nonresponsibility), appear to support a transfer principle only because one pictures there being only one path to John’s death (or the tsunami’s hitting the coast of California), along which no agents act freely (Fischer and Ravizza 1998, 166). But the one-path cases are only a proper subset of all the cases involving a putative transfer of nonresponsibility. The mistake of the proponents of transfer is to generalize from a mere proper part of the space of relevant possibilities. 3

McKenna’s Critique of the Fischer and Ravizza Attack on Transfer

The Critique In an interesting recent paper, Michael McKenna has argued that the criticism of the transfer idea developed above is unsuccessful (McKenna 2001).

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He says: As Fischer and Ravizza observe, their reply relies exclusively upon examples that involve ‘two-path’ cases, i.e., cases in which the obtaining of the event is ensured by two different causal pathways to the same event. They do not object to Transfer NR as it applies to one-path cases, but hold that Transfer NR restricted to one-path cases cannot be used to show that moral responsibility is incompatible with causal determinism. This is because causal determinism does not rule out cases of overdetermination. They therefore hang their criticism of Transfer NR on counterexamples involving two-path cases of simultaneous overdetermination. (McKenna 2001, 45)

But McKenna is not sanguine about the prospects for our approach; he goes on as follows: This is not a convincing strategy. No doubt, Fischer and Ravizza are correct that causal determinism does not rule out overdetermination. But if determinism is true, then the manner in which the facts of the past and the laws of nature entail one unique future is not analogous to the manner in which one set of independently existing causally sufﬁcient conditions (for example, an erosion) ensures a subsequent event also ensured by some distinct set of independently existing sufﬁcient conditions (i.e., Betty’s action). Assuming determinism, the pertinent facts (consisting in the deterministic order of things) are not independent of an agent’s reasons for action, they constitute them! Therefore, at a deterministic world involving a typical case regarding a judgment of moral responsibility, the case is relevantly like a onepath, not a two-path case. (McKenna 2001, 45)

Although we had chastised van Inwagen for attending only to a proper subset of the relevant cases, the one-path cases, it is precisely McKenna’s point that these are the only cases relevant to causal determinism. Thus, he seeks to formulate a version of the modal principle that captures a restriction to one-path cases. Here is a slight reformulation of McKenna’s proposal, Transfer NR : If (1) p obtains and no one is or ever has been even partly morally responsible for p; and (2) (i) p is part of the actual sequence of events e that gives rise to q at T3; (ii) p is causally sufﬁcient for the obtaining of q at T3; and any other part of e that is causally sufﬁcient for q either causes or is caused by p; and (iii) no one is or ever has been even partly responsible for (2i and ii); then

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(3) q obtains, and no one is or ever has been even partly morally responsible for the fact that q obtains at T3. (McKenna 2001, 45)5 McKenna points out that Transfer NR does not rule out moral responsibility in cases of causal overdetermination, even in a causally deterministic world. But he says that it would be very implausible for Ravizza and me to hold that an agent can be morally responsible only in cases of simultaneous overdetermination. Indeed, McKenna credits both Carl Ginet and Eleonore Stump with pointing out that it would be a signiﬁcant problem for the Fischer/Ravizza approach if moral responsibility turned out to be incompatible with causal determinism in all one-path cases, which are, presumably, the vast majority of cases (McKenna 2001, 46 and note 39, 51). A Reply to McKenna McKenna’s paper contains many insightful and helpful points. He makes an important observation when he points out that the manner in which determinism ensures a unique future may well be crucially different from the manner in which one set of independent causally sufﬁcient conditions (say, erosion) ensures a subsequent event also ensured by some distinct set of independently existing sufﬁcient conditions (for example, Betty’s free action). I will return to this point below, and also in my discussion of Eleonore Stump’s defense of the transfer of nonresponsibility idea. But here I wish to disentangle different points. One contention of McKenna is that the validity of Transfer NR would pose signiﬁcant problems for a compatibilist about causal determinism and moral responsibility (like me). Granted. But I think a rather different issue is whether Transfer NR can be employed to establish the incompatibility of causal determinism and moral responsibility. Mark Ravizza and I contend that it is futile to seek to restrict the modal principle to one-path cases (as in Transfer NR ) precisely because this would render the principle unable to generate incompatibilism about causal determinism and moral responsibility (which is, after all, the conclusion of van Inwagen’s argument).6 To point out that Transfer NR poses problems for developing a plausible compatibilist theory of moral responsibility is one thing; to suppose that it generates a successful argument for incompatibilism is quite another. One possibility is that there are signiﬁcant problems for both compatibilism and incompatibilism, as Saul Smilansky has recently contended (Smilansky 2000).

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To see an additional problem with moving from there being a problem with compatibilism to the general thesis of incompatibilism, suppose causal determinism is true in a world, but that in the world in question some (morally signiﬁcant) behavior is the result of simultaneous overdetermination. Now that behavior, for all Transfer NR tells us, is such that the relevant agent can be held morally responsible for it. Thus, we do not (yet) have the incompatibility of causal determinism and moral responsibility— only the incompatibility of causal determinism with moral responsibility for some behavior. If there were a world—unusual as this would be—with all of the morally signiﬁcant behavior occurring as a result of simultaneous overdetermination, then Transfer NR would be entirely consistent with moral responsibility coexisting peacefully with causal determinism in this world. I ﬁnd this somewhat strange. Note what is happening with Transfer NR : the principle entails that when behavior is the result of one causally deterministic sequence, there cannot be moral responsibility, but when the behavior is the result of two or more such sequences, there may be moral responsibility. But if one causally deterministic sequence rules out moral responsibility, it would seem that two or more would be even worse. Transfer NR , however, gives us precisely the opposite result. Indeed, Transfer NR seems to entail, for the relevant sorts of normative notions, that two wrongs may well make a right.7 I conclude, then, that whatever problems such a principle poses for compatibilism, it cannot be employed as it is—without further resources—to generate a successful argument for the incompatibility of causal determinism and moral responsibility. But someone might reply that Transfer NR might be the ﬁrst step in an argument for incompatibilism. On this approach, one would employ Transfer NR to rule out moral responsibility in one-path cases, and then supplement it with the contention that merely adding causally deterministic paths (to a context in which there is no responsibility) cannot issue in moral responsibility. My reply to this sort of more complex argumentative strategy is to insist that I need not grant the ﬁrst step: the acceptability of Transfer NR in the context of one path. But can I produce any convincing counterexamples to Transfer NR ? Let us say that there is just one path to an outcome, and that this path is causally deterministic. Then of course it would be questionbegging, in the context in which Transfer NR is presumably employed (i.e., in an argument for the incompatibility of causal determinism and moral

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responsibility), to contend that nevertheless an agent is morally responsible for that outcome. But that would seem to be the only way one could produce a counterexample to Transfer NR . Thus, if McKenna’s Transfer NR actually succeeds in capturing a restriction of Transfer NR to one-path cases, then it is so constructed that it is impossible for there to be a non-question-begging counterexample to it. Now some philosophers might think this a good thing. But I believe that it can lead to a certain distinctive kind of stalemate—what I have called a ‘dialectical stalemate’. McKenna is aware of this possibility, but he nevertheless contends that Transfer NR can be supported; I will return to this claim below. I shall now turn to a discussion of Eleonore Stump’s defense of the transfer of nonresponsibility, which will raise similar issues to those we have just discussed. 4

Stump’s Defense of Transfer NR

Stump’s Defense In two separate places, Eleonore Stump has sought to defend the basic idea of the transfer of nonresponsibility, and thus the direct argument for the incompatibility of causal determinism and moral responsibility, against the attacks mounted by Ravizza and me. In the ﬁrst piece, “The Direct Argument for Incompatibilism,” Stump agrees that cases such as Erosion and Erosion* show the inadequacy of Transfer NR and Transfer NR (Stump 2000). But she, like McKenna, complains that these are two-path cases. She contends that no one-path case can similarly show the inadequacy of a suitably restricted transfer principle—a principle whose application is restricted to one-path cases. In the new piece, “Control and Causal Determinism,” she offers what she characterizes as a “signiﬁcant revision” of the argument in her ﬁrst paper (Stump 2002, note 16, p. 57). She says: “In their response . . . Fischer and Ravizza concede the general conclusion of my argument but argue that it constitutes only a stalemate between the incompatibilist and their position. Fischer and Ravizza are not right in this view, as I hope to show in the revised version of the argument I give in this essay” (ibid.). But this is a bit puzzling. I do not know what Stump means in saying that Ravizza and I “concede the general conclusion” of her argument. At the end of that ﬁrst paper, Stump says, “Consequently, Fischer and Ravizza have not succeeded in showing that the direct argument for incompatibilism fails.” I

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do not think we agreed with this conclusion. We did agree that we could not decisively show that a transfer principle restricted to one-path cases is unacceptable. But we also pointed out that it is not our obligation decisively to prove such a principle problematic, in order to show that one need not accept the argument for incompatibilism. Given that there are considerable attractions to compatibilism (for example, a compatibilist need not think that our very basic views of ourselves and others as morally responsible and as persons are held hostage to a possible scientiﬁc discovery by a consortium of scientists that causal determinism is indeed true), and given (what we argued) that a restricted transfer principle cannot be uncontroversially established (i.e., that one reaches a dialectical stalemate in seeking to argue for—or against—such a principle), we concluded that the incompatibilist’s argument is not persuasive. That is, in light of the fact that its central principle is essentially contested and cannot uncontroversially be supported, we showed that one need not accept the incompatibilist’s argument. We did think we were showing that the incompatibilist’s argument fails, insofar as we thought we were showing that it does not succeed within the relevant dialectic context. It will be useful to consider Stump’s new formulation of her argument, and to consider it in light of the discussion of McKenna’s Transfer NR in the previous section. She proceeds by considering Erosion* and constructing a dilemma. On the ﬁrst horn of the dilemma, one is to assume that the world of Erosion* is not causally deterministic and that Betty acts indeterministically (but in a way that supports the judgments that she is acting freely). Now Stump is willing to concede that this sort of example shows that Transfer NR, unqualiﬁed or restricted, is invalid; but she thinks that the principle can simply be qualiﬁed so as to rule out the counterexample and still get the desired incompatibilistic result. She says, . . . Erosion* shows that in cases of overdetermined effects, one of whose causes is an agent acting indeterministically, Transfer NR fails. But this is not enough to show that Transfer NR should be rejected. Because Transfer NR is a highly plausible principle, we can take Erosion* to show just that the principle needs to be restricted, to exclude such unusual cases as that in which an indeterministic agent is one of the causes of an overdetermined effect. (Stump 2002, pp. 40–41)

On the other horn of the dilemma, the assumption is that the world of Erosion* is causally deterministic. But now of course it will be questionbegging, in the relevant dialectical context (in which Transfer NR is being deployed in order to establish that causal determinism is incompatible

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with moral responsibility, and thus the compatibility of causal determinism and moral responsibility is in doubt) simply to assert that Betty is morally responsible for her behavior (and its upshots). But, as we saw in our discussion of McKenna’s Transfer NR , only if Betty is morally responsible can there be a counterexample to Transfer NR. Stump contends, then, that on the assumption of causal determinism, it would be question-begging to assert that Erosion* is a counterexample to Transfer NR.8 Reply to Stump I would contend that there is trouble for Stump’s incompatibilistic conclusion, on either horn of the dilemma. Consider, ﬁrst, the assumption of causal indeterminism. Here Stump suggests a restriction of Transfer NR to one-path contexts. She doesn’t actually present the principle, but if such a principle can be crafted, it will have exactly the same problems as McKenna’s Transfer NR . As I explained above, it will not be possible to employ this sort of one-path modal principle in a general argument for incompatibilism about causal determinism and moral responsibility. And if the single path contains some insuring factor as seems required in order to trigger the application of the modal principle, then it would seem that the principle is implicitly presupposing causal determinism. If this is so (and it explicitly is the case on the second horn of Stump’s dilemma), then it is admittedly impossible, within the relevant dialectical context (in which the compatibility of causal determinism and moral responsibility is at issue) to produce a non-question-begging counterexample to Transfer NR. But I contend that it is equally impossible (within the relevant dialectical context) to provide examples that give the necessary sort of support to the principle. That is, I believe that the current dialectical context is what I have characterized in previous work as a dialectical stalemate (Fischer 1994, 83–85). This is my characterization of a dialectical stalemate: Frequently in philosophy we are engaged in considering a certain argument . . . for some claim C. The argument employs a principle P. Allegedly, P supports C. Now the proponent of the argument may be called upon to support the principle, and he may do so by invoking a set of examples (or other considerations). Based on these examples (or other considerations), he argues that the principle and thus also the philosophical claim are to be accepted. But the opponent of the argument may respond as follows. The examples are not sufﬁcient to establish the principle P. One could embrace all the examples and not adduce P to explain them; rather, it is alleged that a weaker principle, P* is all that is

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decisively established by the examples (or other considerations). Further, P*, in contrast to P does not support C. Finally, it is very hard to see how one could decisively establish P. One reason it is so difﬁcult is that it at least appears that one cannot invoke a particular example that would decisively establish P without begging the question in a straightforward fashion against either the opponent of P or the opponent of C. Further, it also seems that one cannot invoke a particular example that would decisively refute P without begging the question against the proponent of P or the proponent of C. These conditions mark out a distinctive—and particularly precarious—spot in dialectical space. (Fischer 1994, 83)

But if in our discussion of the principles of the transfer of nonresponsibility we have reached one of these precarious spots—dialectical black holes, as it were—it must be the case that there is some alternative modal principle—an alternative to a suitably restricted Transfer NR, such as Transfer NR —which explains the relevant examples equally well but does not entail compatibilism. What is this competitor modal principle? In order to frame the principle, I will pause to describe what I believe is the basis of our intuitions in the two-path cases (and thus what explains why these cases are counterexamples to Transfer NR). Having done this, I will be in a position to frame an alternative modal principle that explains all of the uncontroversial cases as well as Transfer NR , but does not (together with other uncontroversial ingredients) entail incompatibilism. 5

A Compatibilistic Transfer Principle

Return to Erosion*. I would say (to a ﬁrst approximation, at least) that Betty is morally responsible for her behavior, and its upshot (the destruction of the enemy camp at T3), because she engaged in unimpaired practical reasoning—practical reasoning undistorted by factors that uncontroversially threaten moral responsibility, such as signiﬁcant delusions, psychoses, coercion, compulsion, irresistible impulses, clandestine manipulation, hypnosis, subliminal advertising, and so forth. I am inclined to say that she is morally responsible, in other words, because no uncontroversially responsibility undermining factor impairs (or in any way affects) her deliberations, her formation of an intention, and her action in accordance with it. This is so, even though there is a second path to the same upshot that is a noresponsibility path. The fact that the no-responsibility path is entirely separate insulates Betty’s path from it, and allows all parties to the disagreement

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about causal determinism and moral responsibility to agree that Betty is morally responsible here (apart from any special assumption, such as that causal determinism is true). Insofar as the no-responsibility path is separate, it is sequestered and cannot (in the economists’ term) “crowd out” the factors that intuitively ground moral responsibility. Erosion, which involves mere preemptive overdetermination, is an even clearer example of this sort of sequestration or partitioning. The problem with a one-path case is that there is a danger posed by the phenomenon of crowding out: one cannot so easily insulate what putatively grounds moral responsibility from alleged responsibility undermining factors. This is what McKenna has in mind when he says that the manner in which the facts of the past and the laws of nature ensure one unique future under causal determinism is not analogous to the way in which one unique future is ensured in a case in which there are two separate pathways (one of which is indeterministic) that overdetermine the behavior and consequences in question. As McKenna puts the point, “Assuming determinism, the pertinent facts (consisting in the deterministic order of things) are not independent of an agent’s reasons for action, they constitute them!” (McKenna 2001, 45). I concede McKenna’s contention about constitution, but I do not thereby accept that moral responsibility is necessarily crowded out. A onepath case could be thought of as two separate paths that are superimposed. Alternatively, I would recommend that we think of the one path as having (at least) two separate sets of features. Suppose Betty deliberates just as she actually does in the Erosion cases, but there is no “second path”—no glacier that will independently cause the upshot (the destruction of the enemy camp at T3). But imagine further that causal determinism obtains in the actual path that leads to Betty’s decision and action. One set of features entails that there is along this path just the sort of unimpaired deliberation that obtains in Erosion and Erosion*—practical reasoning and subsequent action undistorted by factors that uncontroversially threaten moral responsibility. But of course another set of features renders the actual sequence of events causally deterministic, and causal determinism is alleged by the incompatibilist to rule out moral responsibility. Note, however, that causal determination is not a factor that uncontroversially rules out moral responsibility. The features in virtue of which the actual path is causally deterministic are thus importantly different from a feature such as an avalanche caused by movements of a glacier, which

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uncontroversially fails to confer responsibility. A proponent of the incompatibility of causal determinism and moral responsibility is not entitled to help himself, at this point in the disagreement, to the claim that causal determinism crowds out moral responsibility. Note that if he were allowed to help himself to this contention, then there would be no point to looking for a modal principle, such as Transfer NR (or some restriction of it), because the incompatibilistic result would already have been achieved (startlingly easily) right from the start. On my view, then, causal determination and unimpaired deliberation can be superimposed upon each other without distortion of the deliberation. This is analogous to the possibility of superimposing (the precise technology is not important) two audio tapes—perhaps a tape of a woman singing and a tape of a piano accompaniment. When the tapes are put together (and of course this is how much music is actually produced), the piano need not distort, impair, or otherwise etiolate the singing. The same of course is true about the relationship between the singing and the piano. Similarly, a video tape of one character in a ﬁlm can be superimposed on a video tape of another character; what emerges may in no way obscure or change the original depiction of each of the characters. My claim is that the relationship between causal determination and undistorted human practical reasoning is relevantly similar: we can see the determination as being superimposed on the practical reasoning without thereby distorting it. Of course, it would also not be fair for me to say that it is obvious and indisputable that Betty is morally responsible for her behavior and its upshot in the one-path case under consideration; that would straightforwardly beg the question against the incompatibilist. Rather, my claim is that it cannot simply be assumed, within the dialectical context we are exploring, that causal determinism crowds out moral responsibility. Granted: the relationship between the causal determination and the practical reasoning is more intimate than (say) the relationship between the singing and the piano; but this difference in itself cannot be assumed to make a decisive difference. The above considerations suggest an alternative modal principle; call it Transfer NRC: If (1) p obtains and no one is even partly morally responsible for p; and (2) if p obtains, then q obtains, and no one is even partly morally responsible for the fact that if p obtains, then q obtains; and

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(3) on the actual path that leads from p’s obtaining to q’s obtaining, either there is no factor that at least prima facie could be thought to ground moral responsibility, or there is some factor that uncontroversially undermines moral responsibility (e.g., a factor that distorts or impairs the distinctive process of human practical reasoning); then (4) q obtains, and no one is even partly morally responsible for q. It will sometimes be helpful to refer to a path that meets conditions (1) and (3) as a “no-responsibility” path, just for simplicity’s sake. Transfer NRC is a plausible and attractive modal principle that explains why we transfer nonresponsibility in the clear and uncontroversial cases. For example, it explains why no one is even partly morally responsible for the fact that John dies (from a snakebite) on his thirtieth birthday in Snake Bite, and it explains why no one is even partly morally responsible for the tsunami’s hitting the coast of California in Tsunami. It has this implication in all of the examples invoked by van Inwagen in an attempt to support Transfer NR. Note that it does not entail that Betty is not morally responsible in Erosion or Erosion*. Note, further, that Transfer NRC cannot be employed as part of a direct argument for the incompatibility of causal determinism and moral responsibility that would appeal to those not antecedently committed to incompatibilism. Transfer NRC thus explains all the uncontroversial examples just as well as (say) Transfer NR (or an otherwise qualiﬁed version of Transfer NR that only applies to one-path cases), but does not help to yield incompatibilism. It is thus precisely the sort of principle whose availability shows that the attempt to employ some appropriately restricted version of Transfer NR to establish incompatibilism leads to a dialectical stalemate. McKenna is (to some degree) aware of the dialectical difﬁculties faced by someone who wishes to employ Transfer NR to argue for incompatibilism about causal determinism and moral responsibility (McKenna 2001, note 45, 51).9 In response, McKenna says that Transfer NR is not merely ad hoc, but is independently conﬁrmed by a range of cases: “. . . notice that cases like Snakebite can be used to conﬁrm the plausibility of Transfer NR as readily as they can the leaner Transfer NR (ibid.). I grant that these cases support Transfer NR as readily as they do Transfer NR. But this is not the issue. The point is that Snake Bite (and Tsunami and all the cases invoked by van Inwagen and other incompatibilists) are unable to support Transfer NR over Transfer NRC. So, as with dialectical stalemates in general, there is a competitor principle—Transfer NRC—which must be considered when

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we are evaluating Transfer NR . It is crucial here that the relevant data do not support Transfer NR over Transfer NRC, and Transfer NRC does not help to generate incompatibilism. I claim then that the attempt to employ Transfer NR, restricted so that it applies only to one-path causally deterministic contexts, as part of an argument for the incompatibility of causal determinism and moral responsibility, issues in a dialectical stalemate. This implies that such an attempt does not generate a successful argument for incompatibilism. I believe that there are certain reasons why compatibilism is attractive. Given these, I am inclined toward compatibilism. I would give up compatibilism if I believed there were a successful argument, employing principles that are broadly and strongly appealing (clearly appealing even to those not already committed to incompatibilism), that has as its conclusion incompatibilism. But I have yet to see such an argument. The argument that employs some restriction or qualiﬁcation of Transfer NR, employs a principle that can only be established by begging the question against the compatibilist; it does not employ a principle that is broadly appealing. Now I do not claim to have proved such a principle unacceptable. Indeed, I have admitted that I do not see how this would even be possible, given the dialectical niche in which it is embedded. Thus, I have certainly not refuted the direct argument for incompatibilism. But I do not feel any need to do so. It is not my obligation to provide a refutation of this sort of argument. Given that there are considerable attractions to compatibilism, and given that I have shown that there is no successful direct argument (of the sort we have been considering) for incompatibilism, I ﬁnd no reason (as yet) to abandon the compatibility claim.10 It is van Inwagen and Stump who claim to have a direct argument that purports to establish the untenability of compatibilism. If I have shown that their approach issues, at best, in a dialectical stalemate, then I have shown that they are wrong, at least if they are interested in doing something more than simply preaching to the converted. 6 Conclusion Certain

incompatibilists

about

causal

determinism

and

moral

responsibility—such as van Inwagen and Stump—have argued that one can employ a valid transfer principle to yield the incompatibilistic result. Transfer NR, originally suggested by van Inwagen, can be seen to be invalid

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by reference to two-path cases. Others, including Stump and McKenna, have suggested that if the modal principle is either reformulated or restricted in its applicability, the incompatibilistic result can still be achieved. In this paper I have sought to identify some problems with their strategy. It might be useful explicitly to distinguish between a ‘reformulation’ of Transfer NR and a ‘restriction’ of it. Both McKenna and Stump have commended a reformulation of Transfer NR so that it only applies to one-path cases. I have argued that such a principle does not yield the general incompatibilistic result, and that it is implausible insofar as it has the ‘two-wrongsmake-a-right’ problem. Further, I pointed out that, insofar as it is also understood so that it requires a causally deterministic context, then it issues in a dialectical stalemate; this provides an additional reason why it cannot be employed in an argument for incompatibilism, and also a reason why it need not be accepted as valid. Finally, Stump commends (as one horn of her dilemma) that Transfer NR be restricted in its application to contexts of causal determinism; here, again, this restriction issues in a dialectical stalemate. Restriction shares this latter problematic feature with reformulation. In her more recent paper on this subject, Stump reminds her reader that Ravizza and I criticize van Inwagen for focusing exclusively on one-path cases (Stump 2002, p. 42). We pointed out that among the two-path cases there is a subclass in which one of the paths to the outcome contains the sort of control that grounds moral responsibility. Stump says, “The question for Fischer and Ravizza, then, is whether causally determined decisions can be shown to belong to the relevant subclass of two-path cases” (ibid.). Stump goes on to argue that causally determined decisions cannot be shown to be part of the relevant subclass of cases. I do not see why causally determined decisions would need to be shown to belong to the sub-class of two-path cases to which Stump points. Rather, it would seem that they need to be shown to be analogous in relevant ways to these two-path cases. In the two-path cases in question, there is a path to the outcome along which there are no uncontroversially responsibility undermining factors. (For example, perhaps there is Betty’s unimpaired practical reasoning.) Similarly, in the one-path causally deterministic case, I have argued that there need not be any factor that is uncontroversially responsibility undermining. For example, Betty’s undistorted practical reasoning might issue in the decision in question, and the subsequent action. The fact that the actual ﬂow of events here is causally deterministic is not

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in itself a factor that uncontroversially undermines moral responsibility, and it cannot be assumed to crowd out Betty’s unimpaired deliberation. If it is taken to do so, then (as I argued above), a modal principle such as Transfer NR is rendered entirely supernumerary. Thus, certain causally deterministic cases are analogous in the relevant ways to the indicated subclass of twopath cases. I have contended that in the relevant two-path cases and in certain causally deterministic one-path cases there are no uncontroversially responsibility undermining factors. This is all that I need for my purposes in this paper. I acknowledge however that there is a gap between this point and the further point that present in these cases is a sort of control that grounds moral responsibility. I do wish to say that the sort of control that grounds ascriptions of moral responsibility can be present even in a causally deterministic sequence, but I certainly concede that the considerations invoked in this paper do not in themselves establish this result. If, however, I am correct about this further point, then this would show why all of the examples typically invoked by incompatibilists seem—but do not really—establish a transfer principle that could yield incompatibilism: they have carefully selected examples (such as Snake Bite and Tsunami) in which there is no path to the actual result that contains the appropriate sort of control. But even in a causally deterministic world, the actual sequence of events can contain such control, as I have argued elsewhere.11 In my view, the relevant sort of control consists in behavior that issues from the agent’s own, suitably reasons-responsive mechanism. Consider, ﬁnally, Thomas Nagel’s well-known skeptical worries about agency and moral responsibility in a causally deterministic world ﬁrst expressed in his essay, “Moral Luck”: The area of genuine agency, and therefore of legitimate moral judgment, seems to shrink under this scrutiny [from a perspective assuming causal determinism] to an extensionless point. Everything seems to result from the combined inﬂuence of factors, antecedent and posterior to action, that are not within the agent’s control. Since he cannot be responsible for them, he cannot be responsible for their results— though it may remain possible to take up the aesthetic or other evaluative analogues of the moral attitudes that are thus displaced. (Nagel 1979, 35)

Later, Nagel elaborates, saying, “The effect of concentrating on the inﬂuence of what is not under his control is to make this responsible self seem to disappear, swallowed up by the order of mere events” (ibid., 36).

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Part of Nagel’s worry—perhaps the basic thrust of it—is that it is unclear how human actions could be mere events, or persons mere things.12 This is a deep challenge, whether or not causal determinism obtains, and I have nothing particularly helpful to say about it. I simply wish to suggest that the ruminations in this paper can suggest a way of conceptualizing at least some—even if they are not the deepest—of the issues Nagel raises. Nagel appears to rely upon a transfer of nonresponsibility principle when he says, “Since he cannot be responsible for them [certain factors not within one’s control], he cannot be responsible for their results.” I agree that it is an effect of concentrating on what is not under one’s control that the scope of our moral responsibility seems to disappear. For example, when one focuses on the glacier and the natural forces that start the avalanche, and the way in which they lead to the destruction of the enemy camp, Betty’s responsibility is in danger of disappearing. But, as I have argued above, it would be a mistake to concentrate exclusively on those factors out of Betty’s control and the way in which they issue in the destruction of the enemy camp; that path is completely consistent with the existence of a path on which Betty’s agency and responsibility are robust. There can be cases—such as Erosion*—in which factors entirely out of an agent’s control and thus for which the agent is not even partly responsible result in certain upshots in a manner that is also entirely out of the agent’s control; yet, in these same cases, there can be a path to the relevant upshots along which the agent exercises control. If one focuses exclusively on the no-responsibility paths, the responsibility paths can seem to disappear, and nonresponsibility can seem to transfer to the upshots. But it is a mistake— a kind of metaphysical depression—selectively and exclusively to focus on the negative. If there is robust control in the actual sequence leading to an upshot, I cannot see why the agent should not be morally responsible for it. In a two-path case, it clearly is a mistake to focus solely on the nonresponsibility path, giving it hegemony and implicitly assuming that it crowds out the responsibility-conferring features found on a separate path. If there is just one path leading to the upshot in question, and this path is deterministic, it may nevertheless be the case that on that path the agent displays the distinctively human capacity for practical reasoning in a way that is neither impaired nor distorted by factors uncontroversially thought to rule out moral responsibility. This sort of one-path case is then relevantly similar to the two-path cases discussed above. Even in a casually

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deterministic context, the agent may act from his own, appropriately reasons-responsive mechanism. Thus, in my view, in such a context the agent may exhibit the characteristic sort of control—guidance control— that grounds moral responsibility, even though he is not morally responsible for conditions prior to his birth, and he is not responsible for the fact that those conditions issue in his behavior. In place of Nagel’s metaphysical depression, I have sought to lift our spirits (if offering the possibility of freedom and responsibility could do this). Although it might be supposed that my suggestion pertains more to Pandora than Pangloss, I nevertheless propose that the glass is half full. Acknowledgments I have read versions of this paper at the University of California, Santa Barbara; the Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference at the University of Idaho, Moscow; and the University of Texas, San Antonio. I have especially beneﬁted from helpful comments by Nathan Salmon, David Robb, Anthony Brueckner, Francis Dauer, Richard Glass, Kevin Falvey, Voula Tsouna, and Harry Silverstein. Notes 1. Fischer (1986, 60–61). 2. van Inwagen presented his principle, and the argument for incompatibilism that employs it in van Inwagen (1980), reprinted in Fischer (1986, 241–249). 3. I am indebted to Nathan Salmon for pointing out that, if the connective in (2) is interpreted as a material conditional, then Transfer NR is clearly valid. This is because any counterexample would have to be a case in which someone is at least in part morally responsible for q. It would seem to follow that someone is at least in part morally responsible for ‘q or not-p’. Thus (2) must be false. So any putative counterexample to the principle would be a case in which the second premise would have to be false, and thus it would not be a genuine counterexample to Transfer NR. I accept this point, but it also nicely shows why Transfer NR, so interpreted, cannot be employed in a sound, uncontroversial argument for incompatibilism. This is because in any “ordinary” context in which a compatibilist is inclined to say that an agent is morally responsible for q and causal determinism is assumed to be true, the compatibilist will point out that (2) is false, given that the connective is interpreted as a material conditional. So (given the dialectical situation) the incompatibilist will not be entitled to apply Transfer NR to get to the incompatibilistic conclusion.

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4. We consider such a principle in Fischer and Ravizza (1998, 161–163); also, for the formulation of the principle, I am indebted to McKenna (2001). 5. McKenna credits Al Mele and Ish Haji for help in formulating this principle. I am not certain that this formulation works to secure the desired restriction to one-path cases, but I shall accept it for the purposes of this paper. 6. Fischer and Ravizza (1998, 167). 7. Of course, Transfer NR does not entail that in a context of causal overdetermination there is moral responsibility; rather, it fails to entail that there is no responsibility. This seems to me to be sufﬁciently problematic. 8. Stump (2002); she goes on to explore whether Ravizza and I have available to us some reason to call the incompatibilist’s judgment into question, but she concludes (lamentably for us) that there is no such reason. 9. McKenna also credits Michael Zimmerman for bringing to his attention the dialectical difﬁculty in question. 10. As Michael Bratman has pointed out, there is an interesting parallel between my methodology here and John Perry’s approach to the mind–body problem in Perry (2001). Here Perry defends what he calls ‘antecedent physicalism’. By this he means that he ﬁnds physicalism antecedently plausible and sees his job as blocking dualistic challenges. 11. For a defense of this view, see Fischer (1994); and Fischer and Ravizza (1998). 12. He also articulates this worry in Thomas Nagel (1985, 126). Here he is explicit that the challenge appears whether or not causal determinism obtains.

References Fischer, J. 1986. “Introduction: Responsibility and Freedom.” In J. Fischer, ed., Moral Responsibility. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. . 1994. The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers. Fischer, J. and Ravizza, M. 1998. Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Frankfurt, Harry G. 1969. “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.” Journal of Philosophy 66: 829–839. Reprinted in Fischer (1986). McKenna, M. 2001. “Source Incompatibilism, Ultimacy, and the Transfer of NonResponsibility.” American Philosophical Quarterly 38: 37–52.

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Nagel, T. 1976. “Moral Luck.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supplementary volume 50. Reprinted in T. Nagel, ed. 1979. Mortal Questions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . 1985. The View from Nowhere. New York: Oxford University Press. Perry, J. 2001. Knowledge, Possibility, and Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Smilansky, S. 2000. Free Will and Illusion. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Stump, E. 2000. “The Direct Argument for Incompatibilism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 61: 459–466. . 2002. “Control and Causal Determinism.” In S. Buss and L. Overton, eds., Contours of Agency: Essays in Honor of Harry Frankfurt. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Van Inwagen, P. 1980. “The Incompatibility of Responsibility and Determinism.” In M. Bradie and M. Brand, eds., Bowling Green Studies in Applied Philosophy 2: 30–37. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press. Reprinted in J. Fischer (1986): 241–249. . 1983. An Essay on Free Will. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

The Compatibility Problem

10

Van Inwagen on Free Will

Peter van Inwagen

I can remember very clearly the ﬁrst time van Inwagen encountered the problem of free will. In the autumn of 1965 he was talking with a fellow graduate student at the University of Rochester, one Myles Brand, and made some remark that presupposed the incompatibility of free will and determinism. Brand told him—second-year graduate student to ﬁrst-year graduate student—that most philosophers believed that free will and determinism were compatible, and outlined some of the currently popular arguments for that position. As Athena from the head of Zeus, the argument that van Inwagen was to publish ten years later in “The Incompatibility of Free Will and Determinism” (1975) sprang from his head pretty much full-grown— although it made its entrance into the world by way of his ever-active mouth and not by Athena’s rather more unorthodox route. The argument had it roots in the following reﬂections. If free will and determinism coexist, then someone is able to do something not contained in that one possible future that is consistent both with the past and the laws of nature. Suppose that Alice, an inhabitant of a deterministic world, is able to do something she is not in fact going to do; suppose, to be speciﬁc, that although she is going to remain a prisoner, she is able to escape from her prison. Her ability to escape can be looked upon as an ability to divert the river of coming events into a channel through which it is not in fact going to ﬂow; to realize, that is, or to cause to be actual, a possible future that is not the future that lies before her, to cause to be actual one of those possible futures in which she escapes. And what would these possible but nonactual futures be like? Let’s say that the past of a possible but nonactual future is that possible past that would be the actual past if that future were the actual future. Any given future in which Alice escapes must either be a future whose past is the actual past and which is discontinuous with that past, or a

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future that is continuous with its past but whose past is not the actual past (a past different from the actual past all the way back to the Big Bang), or, ﬁnally, a future in which the world is governed by laws of nature that are not the actual laws. But Alice can bring about futures of none of these sorts. If it is insufﬁciently evident as it stands that she can bring about none of these futures, here is an argument. Let ‘Clio’ be a proper name for the actual past— thus, when I imagine, as I am about to, Alice using the name ‘Clio’ in another possible world, I imagine her referring to the past as it is in our world, not the past as it is in hers. Similarly, let ‘Nomos’ be a proper name for the actual laws of nature (which, remember, we are assuming to be deterministic). It would seem that if Alice is able to escape, she must be able in some sense to cause the actuality of or bring about or realize a future in which she could say, and in so saying speak truly, one of the following three things: There has been a causal break; the present state of affairs is not continuous with the past. The present is continuous with the past, but that past is not Clio; it is some other past (a past different from Clio all the way back to the Big Bang). The laws of nature are not Nomos, but some other set of laws. And, obviously, Alice is not able to get herself into a future in which she can say any of these things and be right. When van Inwagen got around to writing down the argument that had occurred to him in his conversation with Brand—he ﬁrst did this in a doctoral thesis he wrote under the supervision of Richard Taylor (de jure) and Keith Lehrer (de facto)—the argument he wrote down did not look much like the argument I have just set out. (It looked very much like the argument he would later publish in “The Incompatibility of Free Will and Determinism.”) Nevertheless, the central idea of both arguments was the same, and they no doubt stand or fall together. When van Inwagen had got his ﬁrst academic job and was trying to publish this argument, he found it extraordinarily hard to do so. The reason was simple: the conclusion of the argument was known to be false. The unanimous position of the referees whose reports were enclosed with the rejection letters could have been expressed in the following words, which I take from an essay by Donald Davidson, words as well known as they are ungrammatical: I shall not be directly concerned with such arguments [i.e., arguments for the incompatiblity of free will and determinism], since I know of none that is more than superﬁcially

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plausible. Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Moore, Schlick, Ayer, Stevenson, and a host of others have done what can be done, or ought ever to have been needed, to remove the confusions that can make determinism seem to oppose freedom. (1973, 137)

It’s not that no one was an incompatibilist in those days, of course. The volume that contained the essay from which my quotation from Davidson is taken also contained David Wiggins’s “Toward a Responsible Libertarianism.” Roderick M. Chisholm was an incompatibilist, as were Richard Taylor, Carl Ginet, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Peter Geach. Still, it can hardly be denied that incompatibilists were thin on the ground in the sixties and early seventies. Eventually, however, van Inwagen was able to publish two papers in which he argued for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. (He has always suspected that “The Incompatibility of Free Will and Determinism,” which had been rejected by many journals, was accepted by Philosophical Studies only because Sellars chose Keith Lehrer as its referee, but he has never known whether this suspicion was correct.) His other paper on the subject, “A Formal Approach to the Problem of Free Will and Determinism” (1974), had, in respect of publication, the advantage of making use of the then new and exciting apparatus of possible worlds. (This paper was strongly inﬂuenced by Montague’s “Deterministic Theories”(1974); the impetus for its writing was a suggestion of Rolf Eberle’s.) Van Inwagen summed up his thought on free will in his book An Essay on Free Will (1983), and has pretty much avoided learning anything about the problem since—other than by sitting about and thinking it over. (The publication of this book by Oxford University Press was due to the good ofﬁces of Tony Kenny and Derek Parﬁt, neither of whom could have had any sympathy whatever with its content, and van Inwagen has always been grateful to them for their generosity and has tried to imitate it. He has done his best to learn from them the hard lesson that a philosophical book that he regards as thoroughly wrongheaded can nevertheless be a good book.) Van Inwagen likes to think that this book bears a signiﬁcant share of the responsibility for the fact that incompatibilists are now much more common than they were thirty or forty years ago. In a paper that he read at a conference in the early nineties, van Inwagen made a remark to the effect that compatibilism was the standard view among philosophers. Michael Slote, who was in the audience, said that he thought that, on the contrary, incompatibilism had become the standard view, or at least the majority view.

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A few years later, van Inwagen asked Ted Warﬁeld whether he thought that was right. Warﬁeld, who comes as close as is humanly possible to knowing what every analytical philosopher thinks about anything, replied that he thought that the majority of analytical philosophers who had actually worked on the free-will problem were incompatibilists, and that the majority of analytical philosophers (full stop) were compatibilists. There was one passage in An Essay on Free Will that, after the publication of the book, van Inwagen became more and more worried about.1 (These worries were aggravated by pointed questions from Alex Rosenberg, and also, curiously enough, by a science-ﬁction novel by Larry Niven called Protector—a novel about which van Inwagen is ready to tell you considerably more than you want to know.) Van Inwagen had said in that passage that although no one was able to render a physical law false, it seemed that if there were psychological laws, and if we had free will, we had to be able to render these laws false. But that raises the question: if one has it within one’s power to render some proposition false, in what sense can that proposition be a law? As a sort of schematic example of a psychological law, van Inwagen proposed, “No one who has received moral training of type A in early childhood ever spreads lying rumors about his professional colleagues in order to advance his career.” He imagined someone asking, “Why does the pattern of behavior described in this statement occur if people don’t have to conform to it?” He answered this question as follows: “Perhaps it is just the people who have received moral training of type A in early childhood who see the point in not spreading lying rumors about their colleagues.” He gradually came to see, or to think he saw, that this response to the difﬁculty was facile, and that the difﬁculty he had his ﬁnger on was broader and deeper than the original puzzle about psychological laws. He gradually came to the conclusion that if one was faced with the necessity of doing either A or B, and that if one saw every reason to do A and no reason whatever to do B, then one would simply not be able to do B. From this conclusion it was no great leap to the slightly stronger conclusion that, if one was faced with a choice between A and B, and one was aware of considerations that could be brought in support of both alternatives, and if the considerations that supported A seemed to one clearly and decisively to outweigh the considerations that supported B, then one would simply not be able to do B. Van Inwagen defended, in “When Is the Will Free?” (1989), the thesis that the general principles about ability that lead philosophers to

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incompatibilism should lead anyone who accepts them to accept these conclusions as well. And he went on to argue that, since occasions that call for serious deliberation—occasions, that is, on which one is choosing between alternatives and it does not seem to one that (once all the purely factual questions have been settled) the reasons that favor either alternative are clearly the stronger—at best only a small proportion of the occasions on which we make a choice are occasions on which we make a free choice. (‘At best’ because there may be no free will at all; perhaps determinism is true, or perhaps—as Broad believed—free action is incompatible both with determinism and indeterminism and is therefore a self-contradictory idea.) Van Inwagen concluded that no action is free unless it is the outcome of deliberation in which one considers reasons that support that act, reasons that support various alternative acts, and in the course of which one ﬁnds no obvious answer to the question, ‘Which set of reasons should prevail?’ To take one example among many different sorts of possible example of the consequences of this position, if you answer the telephone ‘automatically’, if you answer the telephone without so much as considering the question whether you should answer it, your act is not a free act: you could not have done otherwise than answer the telephone; you were not able to let it ring till it fell silent; it was not within your power not to raise the receiver. After presenting arguments for this thesis, van Inwagen went on to attempt to show that it does not, or does not obviously, have a certain untoward consequence that it might be thought to have. He contended that from the premise that at best a very small proportion of our acts are free acts, the conclusion does not follow that only a very small proportion of our ascriptions of moral responsibility are correct. For, he maintained, although there is an inseverable connection between free will and moral responsibility, this connection, inseverable though it be, can be stretched exceedingly ﬁne. An example will illustrate his point. Suppose a man is driving drunk and that a pedestrian suddenly looms before him. He attempts to swerve, but too late: he hits and kills the pedestrian because his reﬂexes are impaired by alcohol. Compare his case with the case of a sober, able, and alert driver whose car strikes and kills a pedestrian in circumstances in which swerving in time to avoid the pedestrian would have required a reaction time smaller than that allowed by the speed of propagation of human neural impulses. In neither case was the driver able to avoid hitting the pedestrian who suddenly loomed before him, but when we consider the former case, we hold the

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driver morally responsible for the pedestrian’s death, and when we consider the latter case we do not. The relevant difference is, of course, that the man whose reﬂexes were impaired by drink, was, so to speak, able to avoid being unable to avoid hitting the pedestrian, and the sober and alert driver was unable to avoid being unable to avoid hitting the pedestrian. At the moment he ﬁrst saw the pedestrian, the drunk driver was unable to avoid hitting him, but he had earlier been able, or so we should suppose if we were judge or jury, to avoid driving with the impaired reﬂexes that were the cause of his fatal inability at the time of the accident. Van Inwagen suggested that this sort of case could serve as a model for the relation between ability and responsibility. Here is a second case, a case in which the inseverable connection between ability and responsibility, though it remains unsevered, as inseverable connections do, is stretched considerably further than it is in most philosophical examples concerning moral responsibility and the ability to do otherwise. Consider a man who is, in middle age, a corrupt politician and is, owing to his corrupted nature, unable to refuse bribes when he believes there is no signiﬁcant likelihood of the bribery coming to light. That is how he is, but how did he get that way? Suppose the answer is this: as a young man, he made a certain series of free choices, choices preceded by genuine deliberation, which collectively had the effect of establishing him in settled and unbreakable habits of venality. Van Inwagen argued—guided, I suppose, by Aristotle—that this politician can properly be held morally responsible for the baleful effects on the public welfare of the informal services he renders to his political cronies in return for money. And this despite the fact that he is unable, in middle age, to reject the bribes he is offered. He can properly be held responsible for, say, the deaths of the four children in the ﬁre in the building that wasn’t up to code, because he could, as a young man, have avoided becoming the sort of man who would be unable to resist the bribe offered by the slumlord who owned the building. Several philosophers have disputed van Inwagen’s conclusion that the principles that lead philosophers to incompatibilism entail that free acts, if they exist at all, are extremely rare, but van Inwagen has never been able to see any force in their arguments. Although he has published answers to them (1994), he is of the opinion that no answers were needed; that his original arguments were untouched by the arguments of his critics. One philosopher, who generally disagrees with van Inwagen about free will,

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Dan Dennett, agrees with van Inwagen that these arguments are unanswerable. As Dan put it, referring to “When Is the Will Free?”, “Thank you, Peter, for the lovely reductio of incompatibilism.” Now van Inwagen’s arguments for this conclusion, whether they are good or bad, presuppose that there is an inseverable connection between moral responsibility and the power to do otherwise, however ﬂexible this connection may be. The inseverable connection is this: if one is morally responsible for anything, it follows logically that one has had a free choice about something. But Harry Frankfurt has presented a famous argument that some have taken to refute this thesis.2 A signiﬁcant proportion of van Inwagen’s work on free will has been devoted to Frankfurt’s argument. And Frankfurt’s argument is important. If it is indeed true that one might be morally responsible for various things, despite one’s never having been able to do otherwise than one has done, then the problem of free will loses much of its interest—for the simple reason that most people would ﬁnd the thesis that we lack free will much less unappealing if this thesis could be shown not to entail that we can never be held to moral account for anything. I have said that Frankfurt’s argument has been taken by some to show that it is possible for one to be morally responsible for something even though one has never been able to do otherwise. The actual conclusion of Frankfurt’s argument, however, is this: the so-called principle of alternative possibilities is false, or at least not a necessary truth. (I’ll call it the principle of alternative possibilities. Frankfurt has recently presented an illadvised defense of his use of the adjective ‘alternate’ in his name for the principle. It is, I concede, uncharitable of me to mention this. I’ll attempt to atone for my lapse by very charitably saying nothing further about it.) This is the principle of alternative possibilities: A person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise. Van Inwagen has always thought that Frankfurt’s argument—which, of course, consists in the presentation of a certain sort of counterexample to the principle of alternative possibilities—has a great deal of force and has never been shown conclusively to be mistaken. His position has never been that Frankfurt’s proposed counterexamples to the principle of alternative possibilities fail; his position has been rather that even if these counterexamples

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succeed, even if the principle of alternative possibilities is false, the existence of moral responsibility nonetheless requires the existence of free will. I have used the qualiﬁed phrases ‘has a great deal of force’ and ‘has never been shown conclusively to be mistaken’ because, although van Inwagen is inclined to think that Frankfurt’s counterexamples show that the principle of alternative possibilities is false if it is meaningful at all, he’s also inclined to think that it’s meaningless. I’ll brieﬂy say something about why he’s inclined to think it’s meaningless. If the principle of alternative possibilities is meaningful, the following must be one of the particular statements the general principle endorses: Bill is morally responsible for lying under oath only if he could have done otherwise. Van Inwagen has never been able to convince himself that he understands sentences like ‘Bill is morally responsible for lying under oath’. It has always seemed reasonably plain to him that what one is morally responsible for is not one’s acts but the consequences of one’s acts, or, more exactly, certain of the consequences of one’s acts—for no one would suppose that one could be responsible for all the consequences of one’s acts. (When I say ‘it has always seemed plain to him’, I mean that it has seemed plain to him since he ﬁrst encountered the idea that what a person is morally responsible for is the consequences of his acts and not the acts themselves. Van Inwagen is sure that he ﬁrst encountered this idea in something written by P. H. Nowell-Smith; he cannot now remember where it was that NowellSmith made this valuable point.) And the consequences of one’s acts, it would seem, are members of the same ontological category or categories as the consequences of anything that takes place within the causal and temporal order; whatever ontological category one thinks the consequences of a person’s acts should be assigned to, one should assign them to the same category or categories as the consequences of an earthquake or a scientiﬁc discovery or a rise in the prime lending rate. There would seem to be two serious candidates for this categorial ofﬁce: ‘concrete event’ (for example, Caesar’s death), on the one hand, and something proposition-like on the other, ‘fact’, perhaps, or ‘state of affairs’ (for example, the fact that Caesar disregarded the soothsayer’s warning, or Caesar’s having chosen to believe that Brutus’ strong republican sentiments would never overcome his friendship with and personal loyalty to Caesar).

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Now if what one is responsible for is certain of the consequences of one’s acts (and if, for example, one’s telling a lie and the fact that one has lied do not count as ‘consequences’ of themselves), then it is doubtful whether ‘Bill is responsible for lying under oath’ makes sense, and it is therefore doubtful whether the principle of alternative possibilities makes sense, doubtful whether the sentence that formulates it means anything. Van Inwagen, as I have said, has long doubted whether the principle of alternative possibilities does make sense. But he has also been fairly sure that if he’s wrong about this and the sentence ‘A person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise’ does express some proposition, the proposition it expresses is false, and that Frankfurt’s counterexamples show this. To recapitulate, van Inwagen thinks that (a) the principle of alternative possibilities is either nonsensical or false, and that (b) moral responsibility nevertheless requires free will—that if anyone is morally responsible for anything, there must be something that person had a free choice about. He has defended the latter thesis by presenting other principles than the principle of alternative possibilities that have the consequence that moral responsibility requires free will, and presenting arguments designed to show that these other principles seem to be true and cannot be refuted by counterexamples in the style of Frankfurt’s counterexamples to the principle of alternative possibilities.3 One of these principles is A person is morally responsible for a certain state of affairs only if that state of affairs obtains and he could have prevented it from obtaining. (Or this was van Inwagen’s original formulation of one of these principles. He later came to think that the principle needed to be revised. The revised principle would look something like this: A person is morally responsible for a certain state of affairs only if that state of affairs obtains and there was a time at which he could so have acted that that state of affairs not obtain. The states of affairs quantiﬁed over in this principle are ‘proposition-like’: the state of affairs ‘Caesar’s having been murdered’ obtains because certain conspirators stabbed Caesar to death in Rome in 44 B.C.; but it, that very same state of affairs, could have obtained because Cleopatra poisoned him in Alexandria in 48—just as the proposition that Caesar was murdered is

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true because certain conspirators stabbed Caesar to death in Rome in 44 B.C. and could have been true because Cleopatra poisoned him in Alexandria in 48. This state of affairs may thus be contrasted with the concrete event the murder of Caesar, which would not have occurred if Cleopatra had poisoned Caesar in Alexandria in 48, although, in that case, there would have been a concrete event, which does not in fact exist, that would have been denoted by the words ‘the murder of Caesar’. (He has also endorsed a principle about concrete events that corresponds to or parallels the above principle about states of affairs.) Van Inwagen has never seen any need to rethink the position he took concerning this principle when he ﬁrst formulated it in the late seventies (with this minor qualiﬁcation: as I have said, he has come to prefer a revised version of the principle), to wit that it is extremely plausible that it entails that moral responsibility requires free will, and that it cannot be refuted by any adaptation of the counterexamples Frankfurt brought against the principle of alternative possibilities. This last point has been disputed, but van Inwagen has never been able to see any merit in the arguments by means of which the point has been disputed. He has responded to them (1997 and 1999), but, as far as he is concerned, his original arguments for this position are the only answer to these counter-arguments that was really needed. This brings us down to fairly recent times. (Or it does if we ignore two minor essays of the middle eighties. In one of these essays [1985a], van Inwagen defended the position that the ‘conditional-analysis’ argument for the compatibility of free will and determinism, and what he has dubbed the Mind Argument for the incompatiblity of free will and indeterminism—the latter argument is named for the journal, not for the human intellectual faculty—are inconsistent; inconsistent in this sense: from the soundness of either, the unsoundness of the other follows. In the other essay [1985b], he proposed a conditional-analysis argument for the compatibility of free will and indeterminism; this argument was, admittedly, a rather absurd argument; his point was that the unbiased inquirer should see that the conditional analysis argument for the compatibility of free will and determinism was equally absurd, and absurd for an exactly parallel reason.) Van Inwagen has thought little about free will in the last ten years, but he has thought enough about the topic to have changed his mind on one point and to have become increasingly insistent on another.4

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The point on which he has changed his mind is this: he now thinks that Rule ␤, as he presented it in An Essay on Free Will and other places, is wrong. This rule of inference was stated as follows: p, and no one has, or ever had, any choice about that. If p then q, and no one has, or ever had, any choice about that. Hence, q, and no one has, or ever had, any choice about that. Van Inwagen had thought that this rule was obviously valid, had made use of it in formulating one version of his argument for the incompatibility of free will and determinism (his favorite version, the version inspired by Carl Ginet’s “Might We Have No Choice?” [1966]), had said that, despite its seeming obviousness, it was nevertheless the weakest link in the chain of reasoning that led from the assumption of determinism to the conclusion that no one is ever able to do otherwise. And, although this principle is used in only one of the three formal versions of the argument he has presented, van Inwagen is on record as saying that, in his opinion, if Rule ␤ should turn out to be invalid, it would almost certainly be the case that the two versions of the argument that do not involve the concept ‘having a choice’ would also turn out to be invalid.5 Imagine, then, his embarrassment when Tom McKay and David Johnson (1996) presented a counterexample to Rule ␤—a ‘beta blocker’, to use the term that some wag (was it John Martin Fischer?) coined for counterexamples to Rule ␤. (Actually, McKay and Johnson presented a counterexample to a different rule of inference, but since the invalidity of that other rule implies the invalidity of ␤, they have for all practical purposes presented a counterexample to ␤. It is not, by the way, entirely clear why they proceeded in this indirect fashion, since the idea behind their counterexample to the other rule of inference can easily be adapted to produce a counterexample to ␤.6) Van Inwagen (2000, 8–9) has presented a revised rule of inference that is immune to McKay–Johnson-style counterexamples. Finch and Warﬁeld (1998) have proposed a different sort of revision that is also immune to these counterexamples, and McKay and Johnson themselves suggested some revisions that are, I think, workable. Unfortunately, these revised rules, although they are far from implausible, lack the ‘luminous evidence’ that was a striking, albeit illusory, property of the original Rule ␤. And this fact can very properly prompt the compatibilist to ask a pointed question

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along the following lines: “If the apparent intuitive obviousness of the original Rule ␤ turned out to be an illusion—since the rule has in fact turned out to be invalid—how much conﬁdence should we have in the revised versions? Nemesis, in the form of a counterexample, was all along lying in wait for Rule ␤; why should we not take very seriously the epistemic possibility that in some dark corner of logical space, cousins of this Nemesis patiently await their appointments with the revised rules?” This pointed question is pointed indeed. Van Inwagen admits that he has no good answer to this question, and that, in consequence, although he accepts the revised rule, he assigns its validity a rather lower subjective probability than the near certainty he once so conﬁdently assigned to the validity of the original ␤. He does, however, withdraw his assent to a thesis I mentioned a moment ago, the thesis that if Rule ␤ should turn out to be invalid, this would mean that there was almost certainly something wrong with the other arguments he has given for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. He withdraws his assent because the counterexamples that have shown the invalidity of Rule ␤, the McKay–Johnson counterexamples, depend on some unexpected properties of an English phrase—“has a choice about”—that played a key role in his formulation of the original principle. He is inclined to think that the ‘general idea’ behind Rule ␤ was sound, and that its invalidity stemmed from the fact that certain features of the English phrase unﬁt it for the task he assigned to it. When he made the statement from which he has now withdrawn his assent, he was assuming that if Rule ␤ were shown to be invalid, this would be because someone had shown that the general idea behind the principle was fundamentally defective. But the revised versions of the rule appeal to this same general idea; they are merely (it is hoped) adequate implementations of this idea, implementations from which a technical defect has been removed. I have said that in recent times, van Inwagen has changed his mind about one point and has become increasingly insistent on another. I have discussed the point on which he has changed his mind. The point on which he has become increasing insistent is this: free will is a mystery, a groundﬂoor, ﬁrst-water, Colin McGinn–style philosophical mystery. Free will is a mystery because, although it obviously exists—of course we sometimes confront a choice between A and B and are, while we are trying to decide whether to do A or to do B, able to do A and able to do B—it seems to be incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism, and thus seems to

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be impossible. When he says that free will seems to be incompatible both with determinism and indeterminism, van Inwagen means that there are good arguments for the incompatibility of free will and determinism and good arguments for incompatibility of free will and indeterminism, and that no one has ever identiﬁed a very plausible candidate for the ﬂaw in any of the arguments in either class. Van Inwagen, of course, believes that the arguments he has given for the incompatibility of free will and determinism contain no ﬂaws—or, at the worst, contain minor, technical ﬂaws that could be repaired without altering their essential points—and that there is some ﬂaw, or are some ﬂaws, in the familiar arguments for the incompatibility of free will and indeterminism. But as to the latter class of arguments—well, he’s damned if he knows what the ﬂaws in them might be. He simply hasn’t a clue. If you ask him how free will is possible, he can say only, “That’s a mystery.” This is, of course, a situation that a philosopher must regard as unsatisfactory, but van Inwagen has two consolations. First, he thinks that if he believed that an undetermined act could not be a free act, he’d be forced to believe something even more mysterious than what he now believes. He’d be forced to believe that at least one of the following three propositions was false: Free will is incompatible with determinism Some people are morally responsible for various things, but no one has free will People are sometimes morally responsible for various things. And the falsity of any of these propositions would be, in his view, an even greater mystery than the falsity of the proposition that free will is compatible with indeterminism. Second, there are lots of philosophical mysteries, most of which have nothing to do with free will. I might cite one or more of the great philosophical mysteries, such as ‘temporal passage’ or human consciousness. But I will mention instead two minor mysteries that are no less mysterious for being minor. I will mention two mysteries that carry much less emotional weight than the mystery of free will, or are, as one might say, unconnected with anything we care deeply about—unlike free will and time and consciousness, which are connected with many things that we care deeply about: the mystery of vagueness and the mystery of the Liar. It is obviously true that a currently living American male who is seven feet four inches tall is tall, and is tall without qualiﬁcation (i.e., is not

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simply tall to degree 0.99972 or something like that). It is obviously true that the president-elect, falsely believing himself to have lost the election, might address an audience and say, bitterly and sincerely, “Everything the president-elect tells anyone today is false.” I do not think that either of these obvious truths is free from apparent paradox—although, of course, no paradox can be more than apparent, for no truth can really imply a selfcontradictory statement or even a false statement. And yet there are very good arguments for the conclusion that each of these obvious truths entails various statements that are self-contradictory or at least obviously false. And I cannot ﬁnd any ﬂaw in these arguments, though, of course, there must be ﬂaws in them. Van Inwagen’s expectation is that some premise (or more than one) in the several arguments for the incompatibility of free will and indeterminism is false but seems to us to be an obvious truth—as was once the case with the proposition that there are twice as many natural numbers as there are even numbers, the Galilean law of the addition of velocities, the argument that, since space is unbounded, it must be inﬁnite, or the unrestricted comprehension principle in set theory. But if van Inwagen is wrong about this, the following is certainly the case: some proposition (or maybe there is more than one) about matters relating to free will, determinism, and moral responsibility that seems to us to be obviously true is false. Perhaps we shall one day discover what proposition this is, or what propositions these are, and it, or they, will come to have no more appeal to philosophers than the proposition that there are twice as many natural numbers as there are even numbers (which Galileo thought evident, despite his awareness that the two classes of numbers could be put into one–one correspondence) has for us. Or perhaps, as Chomsky (1988, 151–152) and McGinn (1993) have suggested, some evolutionarily contingent feature of the design of the human intellect renders it biologically impossible for us to think our way through the free will problem to a satisfactory conclusion. I will remark, because it makes a nice link with my next topic, that van Inwagen has strong, I might almost say fraternal, feelings for Chomsky when he considers Chomsky’s position on free will and determinism. Chomsky thinks that free will must be compatible with determinism, and that, nevertheless, it is a mystery how this could be. Van Inwagen thinks that free will must be compatible with indeterminism, and that, nevertheless, it is a mystery how this could be. Van Inwagen’s feeling is that Chomsky, although he is mistaken about a particular point (an

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important point, to be sure), appreciates the depth and difﬁculty of the free will problem, while the majority of van Inwagen’s fellow incompatibilists, although they are right on a particular point (and a very important point it is), do not really appreciate the depth and difﬁculty of the problem. I want to close by explaining why van Inwagen thinks one important group of incompatibilists, those who appeal to what is called agent causation, do not appreciate the depth and difﬁculty of the problem of free will. Many philosophers would agree with this judgment for the simple reason that they think that the concept of agent causation is incoherent, or think that agent causation is metaphysically impossible. Van Inwagen is inclined to agree with them (although he has no ﬁrm opinion on this question), but he has lately stressed a different point. It is this: suppose there is nothing conceptually or metaphysically impossible about agent causation; suppose in fact that agent causation is a real phenomenon and that an episode of agent causation ﬁgures among the antecedents of every voluntary movement of a human hand or limb or vocal apparatus. Van Inwagen’s position is that even if this is so, and even if (as some have argued) we understand the concept of agent causation at least as well as we understand the concept of event causation, all this does nothing to diminish the mystery of free will. I will try to explain why van Inwagen thinks this by considering a particular human action. Suppose Marie wants to vote in favor of the proposal before the meeting, and that, for this reason, she raises her right hand when the chair says, “All in favor . . .?” Suppose that one of the causal antecedents of her hand’s rising was a certain event in her brain that was undetermined by past events, that the state of her body and her immediate environment at the moment this brain event occurred was causally sufﬁcient for her hand’s rising, that if this event had not occurred, her hand would not have risen, and that she, Marie, a particular member of the metaphysical category ‘substance’ or ‘continuant’, was the cause—that is to say, the agent cause—of that crucial brain event. The friends of agent causation, if van Inwagen understands them, believe that these suppositions are sufﬁcient for her having freely raised her hand. If that is so, these suppositions must entail the following proposition: at some moment shortly before Marie raised her hand, she was able to raise her hand and she was able not to raise her hand. But van Inwagen doesn’t see why this entailment should be supposed to hold. In fact, he thinks he sees a good argument for the conclusion that it was not up to her whether her hand rose. Suppose God were

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miraculously to return the world to precisely the state it was in, say, one minute before Marie raised her hand, and that he then allowed affairs once more to proceed, without any further miracles. What would happen? What would Marie do? Well, if her raising her hand was a free act, and if free will is incompatible with determinism, then we can’t say. We can say only that she might have raised her hand and might not have raised her hand. If God were to cause this episode to be thus “replayed” a very large number of times, it might turn out that she raised her hand in thirty percent of the replays and refrained from raising it in seventy percent of the replays. This much is a simple consequence of incompatibilism, and it brings one of the main reasons philosophers become compatibilists into stark relief. It seems to lead us inescapably to the conclusion that on each particular replay, what Marie does on that occasion is a mere matter of chance. And if there are no replays, if there is only one occasion on which Marie is in this situation, it seems to lead us just as inescapably to the conclusion that on that one occasion what Marie does is a mere matter of chance. And if it is a mere matter of chance whether Marie raised her hand, then it cannot have been true beforehand that Marie was both able to raise her hand and able to refrain from raising her hand, for to have both these abilities would be to be able to determine the outcome of a process whose outcome is due to chance. It is true that we have, by stipulation, inserted into this process, this process whose outcome is due to chance, an episode of agent causation. But, if I may so express myself, so what? That doesn’t change the fact that the outcome of that process was due to chance. If God caused Marie’s decision to be replayed a very large number of times, sometimes (in thirty percent of the replays, let us say) Marie would have agent-caused the crucial brain event and sometimes (in seventy percent of the replays, let us say) she would not have. Surely, then, whether she agent-caused the brain event was a mere matter of chance? Whether her deliberations were followed by her agent-causing the brain event was, it would seem, a matter of chance; Marie, therefore, cannot have been both able to agent-cause the brain event and able to refrain from agent-causing the brain event, for to have both these abilities would be to be able to determine the outcome of a process whose outcome was due to chance—an impossible ability. I conclude that even if an episode of agent causation is among the causal antecedents of every voluntary human action, these episodes do nothing to undermine the prima facie impossibility of an undetermined free act. Postulating agent causation, therefore, does

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nothing to diminish the mystery of free will. Van Inwagen’s conclusion is that incompatibilists had better abandon the concept of agent causation, and seek a resolution of the mystery of free will elsewhere—if, indeed, there is an ‘elsewhere’. Notes 1. See van Inwagen (1983, 63–64). 2. See his classic essay, Frankfurt (1969). 3. Van Inwagen (1978). A somewhat condensed version of the arguments of van Inwagen (1978) can be found in van Inwagen (1983, 161–182). 4. See van Inwagen (2000). 5. At any rate, he is on record as saying things that commit him to this position. In van Inwagen (1983, 57), he said, “I am quite sure that any speciﬁc and detailed objection to one of the arguments can be fairly easily translated into speciﬁc and detailed objections to the others; and I think that any objection to one of the arguments will be a good objection to that argument if and only if the corresponding objections to the others are good objections to them.” One of the arguments referred to as “the arguments” in this quotation is the argument that explicitly appeals to Rule ␤; and he has said (van Inwagen 1989, 405) that if that argument is unsound, its unsoundness must be due to the invalidity of Rule ␤. And he has said (van Inwagen 1994, 95), “My position is that all (logically adequate) arguments for incompatibilism must make some sort of implicit or hidden or covert appeal to [Rule ␤].” 6. See van Inwagen (2000, 5–6).

References Chomksy, N. 1988. Language and Problems of Knowledge. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Davidson, D. 1973. “Freedom to Act.” In T. Honderich, ed., Essays on Freedom of Action. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Finch, A. and T. A. Warﬁeld. 1998. “The Mind Argument and Libertarianism.” Mind 107: 516–528. Frankfurt, H. G. 1969. “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.” Journal of Philosophy 66: 828–839. Ginet, C. 1966. “Might We Have No Choice?” In K. Lehrer, ed., Freedom and Determinism. New York: Random House.

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McGinn, C. 1993. Problems in Philosophy: The Limits of Inquiry. Oxford: Blackwell. McKay, T. and D. Johnson. 1996. “A Reconsideration of an Argument against Compatibilism.” Philosophical Topics 24: 113–122. Montague, R. 1974. “Deterministic Theories.” In R. H. Thomason, ed., Formal Philosophy: Selected Papers of Richard Montague. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. van Inwagen, P. 1974. “A Formal Approach to the Problem of Free Will and Determinism.” Theoria 40: 9–22. . 1975. “The Incompatibility of Free Will and Determinism.” Philosophical Studies 27: 185–199. Reprinted in G. Watson, ed., Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983; in D. Pereboom, ed., Free Will. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1997; in L. Waddell Ekstrom, ed., Agency and Responsibility: Essays on the Metaphysics of Freedom, Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000. . 1978. “Ability and Responsibility.” Philosophical Review 87: 201–224. Reprinted in John Martin Fischer, ed., Moral Responsibility. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. . 1983. An Essay on Free Will. Oxford: Clarendon Press. . 1985a. “On Two Arguments for Compatibilism.” Analysis 45: 161–163. . 1985b. “Compatibilistic Reﬂections.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 63: 349–353. . 1989. “When is the Will Free?” In J. Tomberlin, ed., Philosophical Perspectives 3: Philosophy of Mind and Action Theory. Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview. Reprinted in T. O’Connor, ed., Agents, Causes, and Events: Essays on Indeterminism and Free Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. . 1994. “When the Will Is Not Free.” Philosophical Studies 75: 95–113. . 1997. “Critical Notice: John Martin Fischer’s The Metaphysics of Free Will.” Philosophical Quarterly 47: 373–381. . 1999. “Moral Responsibility, Determinism, and the Ability to Do Otherwise.” Journal of Ethics 3: 341–350. . 2000. “Free Will Remains a Mystery.” The Eighth Philosophical Perspectives Lecture. In J. Tomberlin, ed., Philosophical Perspectives 14: Freedom and Action. Oxford: Blackwell. Reprinted in R. Kane, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Free Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

11

Compatibilist Options

John Perry

. . . those who accept that responsibility for a situation implies an ability to bring it about and, perhaps, an ability to prevent it, must explain how agents are able to do other than they are caused to do. Without it, they can give no defense of their counterexamples. With it, they can be conﬁdent that the Consequence Argument, by itself, is no refutation of their position. —Tomis Kapitan (2002, 154)

1

Introduction

Compatibilism is the thesis that an act may be both free and determined by previous events and the laws of nature. I assume that in normal cases a condition of a person’s performing an act freely is that the person is able to refrain from performing the act. Thus, I accept that if determinism entails that agents do not have this ability, we must give up compatibilism. In this paper I try to contribute to the rethinking of compatibilism by distinguishing between strong and weak accounts of laws and strong and weak accounts of ability. I argue that compatibilism is a tenable position when combined with either a weak account of laws, or a weak account of ability, or both. I shall concentrate on inﬂuential arguments for incompatibilism due to Peter van Inwagen, often called collectively the ‘consequence argument’. Some versions of the consequence argument seem to rely only on inescapable modal principles. In his excellent review and discussion of these arguments, Tomis Kapitan concludes that these principles are not so logically inescapable as to completely trap the compatibilist (Kapitan 2002). This is not to say van Inwagen’s arguments are fallacious, simply that they rely on certain principles about causation and ability that have not yet

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been fully articulated and defended. Kapitan says, just before making the remarks quoted above, that his assessment provides the compatibilist with “momentary breathing room at best” (2002, 154). I am trying to take advantage of the momentary breathing room afforded by Kapitan to explore and to a certain extent defend options available to the compatibilist. Using terms I explain below, my position is that van Inwagen’s arguments do show that the combination of compatibilism with a strong account of laws and a strong account ability (as I deﬁne these terms) is not tenable. The options, then, are a weak account of laws, a weak account of ability, or both. 2

Basic Argument

As a preliminary to considering a simple argument against compatibilism, let’s look at an even simpler argument. (1) ∀t ∀x (␾(x, t) → ␸(x, t 1)) (2) ␾(Elwood, t) (3) Elwood eats cookies at t 1 → ~␸(Elwood, t 1) (4) So, ~(Elwood eats cookies at t 1) Here ␾ is a complex state a person together with a suitably large surrounding region the person can be in at a time. If Elwood is in ␾ at t, then at t states of Elwood and the things around him make it the case that he really really does not want a cookie at t, that no one is about to persuade him to change his mind, that there are no forces about to impinge on him that will change his mind about cookies, or force him to eat one whether he wants to or not, and so forth. For simplicity we suppose that time is discrete, and t 1 is the next instant after t. ␸ is a state of Elwood and a suitably large region that will succeed ␾ according to the laws of nature. It makes it the case that Elwood does not have any cookies in his mouth. (1)–(4) constitute a valid argument. If Elwood is in a state that invariably leads to a state that precludes eating cookies, he will not eat cookies. However, it seems quite clear that we are not warranted in going further. To add to our argument: (5)

What’s more, Elwood cannot eat a cookie at t 1

would turn it from a valid to an invalid argument.

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Prior to being given some quite persuasive argument, we do not take doing something as a necessary condition of being able to do it, or being able to do something as a sufﬁcient condition for doing it. We do not take a person’s not doing something as a sufﬁcient condition for their being unable to do it. We accept the inference from ‘cannot’ to ‘does not’ and from ‘does’ to ‘can’. But we do not accept the inference from ‘does not’ to ‘cannot’ or from ‘can’ to ‘does’. If Elwood did eat a cookie at t 1, that would prove that one of the premises 1, 2, or 3 is false. But the fact that he can eat a cookie does not show that one of the premises is false. It merely shows that if he did do that thing that he is capable of doing, one of the premises would be false. Hence, the truth of the premises rules out his eating a cookie, but not his having the ability to eat a cookie. Now suppose we add another premise, to the effect that (1) is not merely a true universal generalization, but something that follows from the laws of nature. We derive (1) from premise (0): (0)

According to the laws of nature, ∀t ∀x (␾(x, t) → ␸(x, t 1))

Now we have the basic argument underlying those used by many incompatibilists, although there are many variations on the basic theme. The intuitive idea is that premise (0) provides enough extra strength to the premises to get not only to establish (4), that Elwood does not eat a cookie, but to establish (5), that he cannot eat a cookie. Van Inwagen often taps our intuitions that we cannot change the past or change the laws of nature. The idea is that if Elwood can eat a cookie, then he can falsify one of the premises. He cannot falsify any true statements about the past, so he cannot do anything at t 1 that changes the fact that he was in state ␾ at t. And he cannot falsify laws. So Elwood not only will not, but cannot eat a cookie at t 1, if determinism is true. Given this way of looking at the argument for incompatibilism, there is one basic strategy for the compatibilist. This is to deny that the replacement of (1) with (0) adds enough strength to the premises to validate the step from (4) to (5). There are two basic (and compatible) ways to implement this strategy: (i) adopt a weak theory of laws, and (ii) adopt a weak theory of ability, of can, and hence a strong theory of cannot. The compatibilist must maintain that it takes more extra power to rule out Elwood’s being able to eat the cookie than supplementing (1) with (0) provides, by adopting one or both of these positions.

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3

Some Preliminaries

Discussions of compatibilism usually employ, at least implicitly, two different concepts having to do with propositions and truth. Propositions are true or false. And propositions are made true and false by actions and other events. It will be helpful to be clear about these concepts, and how they are related, before plunging into the main items of business. Intuitively, many propositions are made true, or rendered true, by events that occur at some time, or through some interval of time. For example, the proposition that Nixon won the 1972 election was not made true or rendered true until the events of election day, 1972, or perhaps not even until inauguration day, 1973. What was the status of this proposition before then? One intuitive option is that propositions are not true or false until they are made true or false by events. On this view, many of our statements about the future express propositions that are neither true nor false when they are made, but become true or false when events make them so in the future. This option, though intuitive, does not mesh easily with the two-valued logic that most of us are taught and ﬁnd easy and convenient to work with. If we want our familiar logic to mesh smoothly with the concept of events making propositions true, the simplest way is to think of truth and falsity themselves as timeless properties of propositions, while the properties of being rendered or made true or false are properties that occur at times, or through intervals. ‘Timeless’ here simply means ‘not relative to times’. So it doesn’t follow from the fact that a proposition is timelessly true that it is true at every time in any interesting sense. We can say that I am six feet tall because if I stand erect, one part of my body—the top of my head— is six feet above the ﬂoor. It’s my whole body that is six feet tall. But I’m not six feet tall at every point on my body, if that means anything more than that I’m six feet tall. So we have two properties having to do with truth of propositions: being true or false, and being made true or false. The ﬁrst is not relative to times, the second is. This is the track I shall follow in this essay. All of the points I make, however, could be made in the more complicated system, in which some propositions have no truth value until they are made true by events. How are the properties of being true and being made true related? The obvious way is that: if a proposition is ever made true, it is true.

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It might be better to say it be true, using a tenseless form, and in fact I shall do so from now on, and say things like If a proposition is ever made true (or made false), then it be true (or be false). The fact that a proposition has not yet been made true (or made false) by events, does not imply that it be not true (or be not false). Compare: The fact that Gore has not yet been chosen as our next President does not imply that he is not our next president. If Gore ends up being nominated and elected in 2004, then he is our next president. If I call him ‘our next president’ now, I’m correct if the future goes one way, incorrect if it goes the other. It is possible to become rather puzzled by this. How can Gore be our next president now, if it hasn’t been decided yet? So he must not be our next president. By parity of reasoning, no one is our next president. That will be a constitutional crisis. But we can avoid the crisis. Being our next president is a property Gore has if at some point between now (summer, 2002) and January 2005 he is elected and inaugurated and Bush hasn’t been replaced in the meantime. It all works out, as long as we are careful about the difference between being our next president, a property Gore may have, and being elected and inaugurated as our next president, one that he does not yet have as I write this, in 2002. The fact that lots of propositions be true that have not yet been made true is sort of like that. It can be confusing. It may well be that from a metaphysical point of view our two-valued logic of propositions may not be optimal. Still, if we are careful, things will work out. It will be useful to have the following locution available: Events establish whether P if they make P true or make it false (make ~P true). Perhaps we should simply say ‘make whether P’, but that sounds even worse. It seems like there are lots of important propositions whose truth value is established not by being made true by events, but in some other way. For example, consider Pythagoras’s theorem, the proposition that the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. No event has ever made this proposition true, and none ever will. It’s not at all like the proposition that Nixon won the 1972 election. There is

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no sequence of events, ending at a certain time, the occurrence of which makes Pythagoras’s theorem true. So the converse of the principle above isn’t right; it is not true that if a proposition is true, then some events either have made, are making, or will make it true. It would not be correct to say that the truth of the proposition that Pythagoras’s theorem is independent of events; events do conform to it. But they don’t make it true. They reﬂect its truth. For propositions that report ordinary facts, such as the proposition that Eisenhower was president in 1954, or that Gore will be president in 2006, it is natural to use the term ‘because’: The proposition that Eisenhower was president in June, 1953 be true because of events that occurred prior to 1954, including his election in 1952 and inauguration in 1953. The proposition that Gore will be president in 2006 be true, if it be, partly because of events that have yet to occur. With propositions such as that Pythagoras’s theorem, a quite different kind of explanation of their truth seems appropriate, and of course there is a lot of philosophical controversy about what the correct explanation might be. I’ll simply say that such propositions are not made true by events, and leave it at that for now. Finally, and importantly, suppose that a true proposition, that is not made true by events, together with some other propositions, that have already been made true by events, entail a proposition that has yet to be made true. What should we say about that proposition? To return to our example, suppose that the laws of nature are not made true by events, and that these laws, together with propositions made true by events that have already happened, entail that Elwood will not eat cookies at future time t. I will say that although the proposition that Elwood will not eat the cookie at t has not yet been made true, it’s truth value has been settled. The proposition won’t be made true until the events that the laws of nature and the past determine have actually occurred: the time t has arrived, and Elwood says “no” to the proffered cookie, keeps his arms at his sides, and walks away. But these events were already entailed by a combination of propositions some of which were already made true and the rest of which aren’t made true by events at all. So the truth value of the proposition that he would not eat was, in that sense, already settled, before he refrained from eating.

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The two issues on which I believe the tenability of compatibilism turns are: Is the truth of laws established by the events that conﬁrm them and fail to disconﬁrm them, so that laws are laws because events conform to them? Or is the truth of laws established by something else, so that events conform to them because they are laws? The ﬁrst view is a weak theory of laws, the second a strong theory of laws. Can one have the ability to perform or refrain from an action A at time t, even though the issue of whether one will perform A at t or refrain from doing so has been settled before t? A weak account of ability will allow us to answer yes to this question; a strong account will force us to answer no. 4

Strong and Weak Laws

One option for the compatibilist is to adopt a weak conception of laws. On a weak conception of laws, (0) does not add much, if anything, to the argument of section 2. Laws are basically true generalizations, and true generalizations are made true at least in part by the events that, as we say, conﬁrm them. The laws that determine that Elwood won’t eat a cookie may be true, but, nevertheless, not be made true until the last human or the last cookie has passed out of existence. Elwood’s not eating cookies was part of the sequence that established the law, not something the law settled. The law and the facts leading up to Elwood’s choice may have determined that Elwood would pass up the cookie, but they did not settle it, for the law itself wasn’t made true until long after Elwood made his decision, and in fact his decision was part of what made it true. A person can make true generalizations false in the following sense: the generalization be true, but there is something the person could have done, or can do, such that if they had done it, or were to do it, the generalization would not be true. Suppose there were two soccer teams, Manchester United and Nottingham Sherwood. Suppose that Nottingham Sherwood existed from 1960 to 2000 and then was disbanded. During that time it played Manchester United eighty times and never won or tied. So it is a true empirical generalization that (G) For all soccer games g, if g is a game between Manchester United and Nottingham Sherwood, Nottingham Sherwood loses g.

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While by 1975 or so this may have seemed like a decree of God to the Nottingham fans, we’ll assume for now that it was really just a sad but true generalization. Suppose that in the second game between these two teams in 1978 they were in a 0 to 0 tie at the end of the game, and then Manchester won in overtime. In the last second of regulation play, Nottingham had a clear and easy shot on Manchester’s goal, that their best player missed. Nottingham’s worst player was watching a plane overhead skywriting advertisements for Guinness, and ran into their best player just as he kicked. I think the Nottingham fans at least would think that the Nottingham team could have won that game, even though they did not. And that means they could have made the true generalization G false. I think it is common sense to suppose that laws are not simply true generalizations. Suppose that one Nottingham fan says ‘We could have won that game in 1978 . . .’ Another particularly bitter Nottingham fan says, No, you are wrong. You have not grasped that it is an unshakable law of nature that Manchester United beats Nottingham Sherwood. It’s a law of nature because God decreed that Nottingham would always lose. Laws of nature are universal generalizations that God issued as ﬁats during creation week, and other things that follow from them. For reasons ﬁnite mortals can’t be expected to fathom, he often punishes the virtuous and rewards the wicked. And in this spirit he decreed that Manchester United would always beat Nottingham Sherwood. It seemed like Nottingham could win, but in fact it could not. This fan’s remark embodies the intuition behind the argument of section 2. Intuitively, laws are more than true generalizations, and (0) adds something substantial to the argument. You can make a mere generalization false; even if no one gets around to doing so, it remains true that someone could have. But laws are laws. You cannot make a generalization false, if it follows from the laws of nature. This is the strong conception of laws. But of course, one can have a strong conception of laws without believing in an unfathomable God or any god at all. Let’s remind ourselves of (1): (1) ∀t ∀x (␾(x, t) → ␸(x, t 1)) If (1) is true then there have not been, and will not be, times t and individuals x such that ␾(x, t) and ~␸(x, t 1). And (0) says that (1) is not simply true, but true according to the laws of nature.

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The question is, does (1) make (0) true, or does (0) make (1) true? Is (0) true because (1) has no disconﬁrming instances? Or does (1) not have disconﬁrming instances because of the truth of (0)—because (1) follows from the laws of nature? Is the truth of (0) one of those things, like the truth of Pythagoras’s theorem, that is established by something other than what happens? Is it the sort of things to which events conform, but do not make true? Or is it just a sort of fancy way of saying (1)? To return to our soccer fans. A third soccer fan, also a fan of Hume’s, may say: I don’t think (G) is a decree of God. But I agree with you that it is a law of nature. A law of nature simply is an exceptionless generalization that we have grown used to so that it shapes our expectations. And (G) certainly is that. This remark would express a weak conception of laws. It isn’t quite enough for (G) to be a law that it is true. More is required: that we use it to form our expectations. But that’s all. There is no big metaphysical condition, like a command from God, which is also required. Being a law is just being a true generalization that we have internalized so that our expectations about the future are shaped by it. On this conception, it is (1) being true that explains, or partly explains, that it is a law. (1) Explains (0), not the other way round. On either conception of laws, laws will have no disconﬁrming instances. On the strong conception, the fact that L is a law explains why events conform to it; the truth of the law is due to something other than the lack of disconﬁrming instances. If determinism is also true, laws and propositions about the past not only entail propositions about the future, but also settle them. On the weak conception of laws, however, the incompatibilist argument does not work. (0) adds nothing to the argument that might push the conclusion from (4) to (5). A Humean conception might add something to the requirement for being a law. (1) not only has to be true, but accepted and used to guide our expectations. But this doesn’t push us from (4) to (5). One option for the compatibilist, then, is to insist on this very weak, Humean conception of laws. What we do is up to us; laws are merely those descriptions of what we do that will end up being true once human actions are complete. Laws determine, but do not settle. I’ll call this view ‘existentialist compatibilism’.

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I ﬁnd existentialist compatibilism very appealing, but not wholly convincing. Consider the law that for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. On the weak conception, this is a law because there never have been and never will be any exceptions to it, and we are attuned to it: when we see a reaction, we expect an opposite and equal reaction. There is nothing about things that make this law true, except that everything conforms to it. It seems to me much more plausible that this law gets at something (or some things) about the universe that explains why things conform to the law and it has no disconﬁrming instances. I ﬁnd it hard to stick with the Humean conception of laws. One nontheistic but strong conception of laws holds that they are true generalizations that derive from the nature of things, and so describe constraints that form the structure of the world. These constraints are relations between types of things and types of situations. We can look on (1) as telling us that a certain relation holds between two types of events: coinstantiation. Whenever there is a ␾(x, t) type of event, there is a ␸(x, t 1) type of event. On the constraints view, there are other relations between types, such as causing, making happen, and forcing. These are the relations Hume wanted to reduce to, or eliminate in favor of, coinstantiation plus psychology. He called them ‘necessary connections’. I think that ‘necessary’ is rather confusing, given the uses of the term that are familiar in current philosophy. Causal relations are not necessary in the sense of being analytic, or in the sense of being true in all logically possible worlds, or even all metaphysically possible worlds. Still, causal relations between types of events are basic to the structure of the actual world. So (0) explains (1), not the other way around. I’ll call them structural connections. Structural connections are not necessary, like Pythagoras’s theorem, but they are not made true by events, either. Events conform to them because they capture factors about the world that shape events, not because they report events. On this conception, if a generalization is true according to the laws of nature, it reﬂects a constraint that holds among types of things or situations in virtue of their nature, or a necessary consequence of such constraints. Laws are rooted in the nature of matter, space, and time, or the nature of whatever else it is that makes up the universe. When one billiard ball hits another the direction and velocity of the second is determined by the direction and velocity of the ﬁrst in a certain way. What makes this so? Not

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some decree, sentence, statement, or proposition that truly describes it. Nor the facts about what has happened in similar situations in the past and will hold in the future. There are real connections between types of things and situations. This seems to be what Hume denied, or at least denied we could ever understand. Disagreeing with Hume makes me nervous, and I ﬁnd it hard to say what else there is about the universe, other than the ﬂow of events, that constitutes such constraints. Nevertheless, I can’t bring myself to accept any weaker conception of laws. On this conception, the states of Elwood that are involved in his being in ␾ cause him to not eat cookies. These states include such things as really not wanting to eat cookies, and seeing no reason to eat cookies. It seems to me that in this sort of case we are in touch with properties that cause us to take or not take certain actions in a pretty direct way. It seems in the nature of things that someone in such states would not take a cookie. It would be nicest, from a compatibilist point of view, to have a completely weak conception of laws. Nevertheless, this conception seems to hold some promise of ﬁtting into a compatibilist picture when combined with a suitably weak conception of ability. 5

Ability and Action

Consider this principle: (S) If x can perform A at t, then at no time earlier than t is it settled whether x performs A at t. A strong theory of can supports (S), while a weak theory does not. I’ll argue for a weak theory, and explain why it undercuts van Inwagen’s arguments. First an analogy. It’s 1956 and Elwood doesn’t buy a new Edsel. He thinks they are ugly, ungainly, and overpriced. He doesn’t want one. So he doesn’t buy one. Now does it follow that he can’t afford one? Of course not. He may have all the money he needs, and simply not want one. One question has to do with what he wants in a car and what he thinks about the Edsel. These facts, what he thinks about Edsels and what he wants in the way of a car, are pretty much located in Elwood’s head. At any rate, they are not located down the street at the bank. But that’s where the facts about how much money he has in his account, and how much credit the bankers will give him, reside. It

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may be that Elwood would rather be drawn and quartered or have rats gnaw out his eyes than buy an Edsel. But those facts about his mind don’t tell us anything about his bank account. He may be loaded, so he can easily afford a ﬂeet of Edsels. He can’t buy the car without money or credit, but he can not buy the car even though he has plenty of money and plenty of credit. We could put forward a little argument that Elwood won’t buy an Edsel: (1)

Reasonable people don’t buy cars that they think are ugly, ungainly

and overpriced and that they simply don’t want and have no other reasons to buy (law of nature). (2)

Elwood thinks Edsels are all of those things, and has no other

reason to buy one (fact about Elwood’s mind). (3)

So he won’t buy one (fact about Elwood’s action).

No conclusions about Elwood’s bank account can be validly drawn from this argument. It would be silly to draw the further conclusion (4)

So he can’t afford one (fact about Elwood’s bank account).

The premises don’t say anything about Elwood’s bank account or his credit. So no conclusions about his bank account or credit can be validly drawn. That’s the model for a weak account of ability. Whether Elwood performs A is one question, having to do with what he wants and believes. What he can do is something else, having to do with what abilities he has. If Elwood can’t perform A then he won’t. But it doesn’t follow from the fact that he won’t that he can’t. Of course, people’s basic abilities aren’t kept down the street in the bank. Elwood’s ability to pay for an Edsel may depend in part on his bank account. But his ability to write a check, or say, “Please, sell me an Edsel,” depend on facts about him. Still, facts about abilities are quite different than facts about desires and beliefs. Let us suppose—completely fancifully—in order to keep this important point vividly in mind, that one part of the brain has to do with what people actually do, and another has to do with what they can do. Let’s say the left side contains the desires and beliefs and the other stuff that actually motivates actions. The right side contains all the basic abilities, the repertoire of actions.1 The repertoire is tapped when one decides to do something that requires a certain ability. When I learn how to do something, to walk or pick up a glass of water or ride a bicycle or write a check or balance a checkbook or prove a theorem,

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things change on the right side of my brain. My repertoire of abilities increases. As I learn to do these things, the left side of my brain may change too. I may develop aversions to proving theorems and balancing check books, while learning to like riding bicycles, walking, writing checks, and drinking. Then we can predict that I’ll do a lot more riding bikes, walking, and drinking than theorem proving and checkbook balancing. What I want to do, and so what I will intentionally try to spend my time doing, depends on the left side. What I can do, depends on the right side. Given a weak account of ability, the fact that someone did not do something in the way that we would describe as ‘intentionally and of his own free will’ if we were not worried about determinism, and that his not doing that thing fell under a strong law of nature linking what one thinks and wants with what one does, could hardly have the implication that he could not do it. That he does not do it has to do with the lack of reasons he has for doing it, a fact about the left side of the brain. That he can do it depends on what is going on in the right side of the brain, a quite different question. If we put an account of abilities in the context of a theory of intentional action, the weak conception of ability makes a lot of sense. Here is a sketch of what is involved in an intentional action; the sketch is no doubt simpleminded and controversial, but I do not think adding sophistication and resolving disputes should affect the points I make (see Israel, Perry, and Tutiya 1993 and Goldman 1970). First, there is a motivating complex of cognitions. Such a motivating complex for an action A includes beliefs (broadly construed so beliefs include ﬂeeting perceptual beliefs, implicit beliefs, and so forth) and desires (broadly construed to include wants, urges, whims, and so forth) that rationalize A-ing. A set of cognitions C rationalizes an action A if A-ing will promote the satisfaction of the desires in C given the truth of the beliefs in C. In other words, when a person does something intentionally, there are a bunch of beliefs, perceptions, wants, desires, preferences, and the like, which for convenience, I’m just calling ‘desires and beliefs’, relative to which it is reasonable for him to do it. For example, if I intentionally order a vanilla ice-cream cone, the motivating complex might include the desire for a vanilla ice-cream cone; the perception of a counter, a server, cones, and vanilla ice cream; knowledge of English; a belief that I can afford it; a belief that it won’t do me any harm; a belief that I can get one by ordering it; a belief that I order one by asking for it; and so on.

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The motivating complexes cause volitions to perform basic actions, which will cause the basic action, if it is in the repertoire of actions—that is, if the person has the ability to do it. I think of the basic actions as bodily movements, and so use the term ‘execute’ for the special case of performing one of these basic actions: we execute movements, and thereby do lots of other things. I’ll try to order a vanilla ice-cream cone, by trying to execute coordinated movements of voice box, throat, lips, tongue, and the like that produce the sounds that will be recognized as the English sentence, ‘May I please have a vanilla ice-cream cone?’ If that is one of the things I can do, I’ll say it. These basic actions in turn cause various results, depending on the circumstances. And these results cause further results, depending on wider and wider circumstances. My words will cause events in the air between me and the ice cream server, in his ear, in his brain, and so on, until with a little luck I get my ice-cream cone. Here’s another example. I am on an airplane and desire a drink of water, and a steward comes by and holds out a tray full of water glasses. I believe that there is a glass of water on the tray in front of me, due to perception and trust in airlines to ﬁll glasses with water rather than gin or hydrochloric acid when they intend to offer them to passengers as water. I know that in these circumstances taking a glass from the tray and drinking from it is a way of quenching my thirst. I can’t think of any reason not to take a drink of water. My beliefs and desires rationalize the action of taking a glass from the tray and drinking it, for this will satisfy my desire for a drink of water, without leading to any untoward consequences, given the truth of my beliefs. This complex will then cause a volition to move in a certain way. Picking up a glass from a tray is a rather delicate movement, but even a klutz like myself can usually do it right. I can suit the movement to the situation based on perception, so that my hand moves to the glass and then brings it to my lips. An important piece of evidence that I can do this is that when I intend to get a glass of water, and see the glass in such and such a relative position, I usually move my hand in a way that succeeds in grabbing it and getting it to my lips. This is due to the ability to execute various movements, and know-how on my part that allows me to execute the right movements in the right situation based on perception. This is something I’ve gotten reasonably good at, thanks to years of picking up some things and dropping others.

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If there is a glass of water there, and it is reachable in the ordinary ways, and I have the ability to execute the needed movements in the circumstances, then I can take a drink of water. If there is a invisible shield between me and the glass, or if the steward is a smart aleck who will move the tray when I get close to it, or if he is an evil airline demon who has brought around glasses full of hydrochloric acid, then I cannot get a drink of water. So, part of the question of whether I can do it is a matter of the circumstances I am in. The other part has to do with what actions are in my repertoire. If I cannot reach as far as I need to, or grab the glass as ﬁrmly as required, then I cannot get a drink. A person has the ability to bring it about that R in circumstance K if (i) the person’s repertoire of basic actions includes some movement M such that (ii) executing M in K will have the result that R. These conditions for being able to bring it about that R can be met when a person does not in fact bring it about that R or even try to. Neither of the conditions depends on the person actually bringing it about that A. Neither of them require that he want to do so, or have a reason to do so. They do not preclude the person really really wanting not to A. The person may be willing to die rather than perform A. Conditions (i) and (ii) clearly can be satisﬁed even if the person’s not executing M falls under a law of nature to the effect that a person with his motivating complexes will not execute M. This weak account of ability does not support (S). On this account of ability, it does not follow from the fact that the (strong) laws of nature plus Elwood’s beliefs and desires settle that he will not raise his hand at t, that he does not have the ability to raise it at t. That this does not follow can be seen by considering our argument (0)–(5). With a weak theory of ability, it clearly does not work, even if we assume a strong theory of laws. Go down the steps. From (0) to (4) nothing is said about abilities. Then, in step (5), abilities are ruled out. It is a left-brain argument, with an invalid right-brain conclusion tacked on. It sounds sort of intuitive, but it just doesn’t follow. 6

Van Inwagen’s Arguments

Changing the Past Now let’s turn to one version of van Inwagen’s argument (1975, 23). The issue at hand is whether or not J could have raised his hand. Q is a

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proposition that rules out J having raised his hand at t. I’ll just take Q to be the proposition that J did not raise his hand at t. Call the laws of nature L and call the facts up until t that are relevant PF. Assume that we cannot change the past. Then, (1) If determinism is true, then the conjunction of PF and L entails that Q. (2) If J had raised his hand at t, then Q would be false. (3) If (2) is true, then if J could have raised his hand at t, J could have rendered Q false. (4) If J could have rendered Q false, and if the conjunction of PF and L entails Q, then J could have rendered the conjunction of PF and L false. (5) If J could have rendered the conjunction of PF and L false, then J could have rendered L false (since J cannot change PF). (6) J could not have rendered L false. (7) So J could not have raised his hand. This argument, if valid, clearly generalizes to any action whatever, and so rules out compatibilism. Premise (4) is false. The appearance of truth is due to ambiguity in ‘renders a proposition false’. We have to resolve the ambiguity in favor of the sense of ‘renders false’ in which step (3) follows from (2). In this sense (4) is false. One sense of ‘render a proposition false’ is to do something, which changes a proposition from being true, to being false. This seems quite impossible. Of course one can do something that makes a proposition that had looked like it was going to turn out to be true turn out to be false instead. It might seem virtually certain that one team is going to win a baseball game, but then the other team scores twelve runs with two outs in the ninth inning to win 12–11. They snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. But they do not really manage to change a proposition from true to false.2 It is crystal clear that in this sense of ‘render false’, (3) does not follow from (2). In this sense, (3) says that if J could have raised his hand at t, then J could have changed the truth value of that J does not raise his hand at t from true to false. But this does not follow from (2). The second sense of ‘render a proposition false’ is to do something which makes the negation of the proposition true, at a point in time at which nothing has yet made the proposition true or made it false. This concept of

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‘render a proposition false’ makes perfectly good sense. By eating a cookie at t, I render the proposition that I do not eat a cookie at t false. So, the proposition that I do not eat a cookie at t be false, and it be false because at t I (will refrain/refrain/did refrain) from eating a cookie. In this sense of ‘render a proposition false’, (3) does follow from (2), as van Inwagen’s argument requires. But (4) is false. It does not follow from the fact that one renders a proposition Q false, in this sense, and that some other proposition R entails Q, that one also renders R false. Let R be the following proposition. Recall that Q is the proposition that J does not raise his hand at t. Let t be some day after 1950: (R) Q & J’s mother ate a carrot in 1944. This proposition entails that J does not raise his hand at t. J can render the proposition Q false by raising his hand at t. If he renders Q false, R be false, too. But R may have already been rendered false by the time J renders Q false. This will be the case if J’s mother did not eat a carrot in 1944. In this case, J will not render R false, even though R entails Q and he renders Q false. It simply does not follow from the fact that J will render Q false that he renders false every proposition that entails Q. What does follow is that there is no true proposition that entails Q. Principles (i) and (ii) are clearly true, given the coherent concept of ‘render true’ and ‘render false’. (i) Suppose one does something that renders P true. Then no proposition that entails the falsity of P be true. (ii) Suppose one does something that renders P false. Then no proposition that entails P be true. Principles (iii)* and (iv)* do not follow, however: (iii)* Suppose one can do something that would render P true. Then no proposition that entails the falsity of P be true. (iv)* Suppose one can do something that would render P false. Then no proposition that entails P be true. Principles (iii)* and (iv)* simply amount to the principle that there is no difference between being able to do something and doing it—that can collapses into does, and does not into cannot. If I can drink a beer, I can render that I drink a beer true. So, given (iii)*, if I can drink a beer, no proposition that entails that I don’t drink a beer is true.

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So if I can drink a beer, that I don’t drink a beer isn’t true (since it entails itself), so it’s false, so I drink a beer. If I can do it, I do it. Can implies does. Suppose I don’t drink the beer. Then, that I don’t drink the beer is true. Then something is true that entails the falsity of that I drink the beer. Then, by (iv)*, I can’t render it true that I drink the beer. So I can’t drink the beer. Doesn’t implies can’t. Such a collapse of ‘can’ into ‘does’ and ‘doesn’t’ into ‘can’t’ is, of course, just what the incompatibilist wants and the compatibilist needs to avoid. If we accept (iii)* and (iv)*, the collapse would be completed without any appeal to determinism at all. But of course there is no reason to accept (iii)* and (iv)*. On the contrary, it seems quite clear that on the weak conception of ability, (iii) and (iv) are true instead: (iii) Suppose one can do something that would render P true. This does not imply that no proposition that entails the falsity of P is true. (iv) Suppose one can do something that would render P false. This does not imply that no proposition that entails P is true. Suppose J can raise his arm at t, but decides not to. Then that J does not raise his arm at t is true. This proposition entails itself. So J can raise his arm at t, even though a proposition that entails that he does not raise his arm at t is true. So (iii) is correct. Suppose J can refrain from raising his arm at t, but in fact he raises it. Then that J raises his arm at t is true. This proposition entails itself. So J can refrain from raising his arm at t, even though a proposition that entails that he does raise his arm at t is true. So (iv) is true. Now let’s return to the crucial part of van Inwagen’s argument: (1) If determinism is true, then the conjunction of PF and L entails that Q. (2) If J had raised his hand at t, then Q would be false. (3) If (2) is true, then if J could have raised his hand at t, J could have rendered Q false. (4) If J could have rendered Q false, and if the conjunction of PF and L entails Q, then J could have rendered the conjunction of PF and L false. Since van Inwagen’s argument proceeds by very general principles, it should work for any more concrete example we choose. So let: PF that at t 1 J really really does not want to raise his hand in the next instant.

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L that no one who at t 1 really really does not want to raise his hand in the next instant, raises his hand at t. Q that J does not raise his hand at t. This example meets the conditions of van Inwagen’s argument. That is, PF & L entails Q. We can certainly accept steps (2) and (3), given our understanding of ‘render Q false’. But step (4) does not follow. PF is the proposition that at t 1 J really really wants to not raise his hand in the next instant. So (4) says that if J could render Q false (i.e., if he could raise his hand at t), then he could render false the proposition: that L & at t 1 J really really wants to not raise his hand in the next instant. But there is nothing that J can do at t, the doing of which would make it the case that it was not true at t 1 that he really really wanted not to raise his arm at t. If J does raise his hand at t, that will show, given L, that PF is not true. However, that will not make PF untrue; it will not render PF untrue. If he raises his hand at t, that will be because he is in some state at t 1 than really really wanting not to raise his arm, perhaps in the state of wanting to raise it. In this case, PF be untrue, but it be untrue because the events at t 1 made it false, not because of what J does at t. If we go back to our simple picture of what it is to be able to raise your hand at t, this should be reasonably clear. There are two facts about J and raising his hand, with these possible combinations:

Can raise his hand Cannot raise his hand

Does raise his hand

Does not raise his hand

1. Possible 3. Not possible

2. Possible 4. Possible

The argument starts with the premises that J does not raise his hand, that is, he is in cell 2 or cell 4. It then hypothesizes that he can raise his hand, putting him in cell 2. From this it is supposed to follow that he changes the past, since the past determines that he will not raise his hand. But it clearly does not follow, for in cell 2 he does not raise his hand, just as the past determines will happen. I conclude, then, that as long as we have a weak, but realistic and commonsense concept of ability, we can be determinists and compatibilists, even if we accept a reasonably strong conception of laws.

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Van Inwagen’s ␤ Principle Van Inwagen has produced several arguments for incompatibilism. The one I have discussed is the one that seemed most intuitive and convincing to me. Recently more attention has been paid to another argument from his book An Essay on Free Will (van Inwagen 1983, 93–104; see also van Inwagen 2002). The key principles are: (␣)

p → Np

(␤) From Np and N(p→q) deduce Nq, where ‘Np’ means ‘p and no one has, or ever had, any choice about whether p’. We are thinking of p and q as propositions, and entailment as a relation between propositions. It seems we should accept if p entails q then

(p → q).

Then if we also accept (␣) and (␤) we’ll have to accept the rule, (␹) From Np and p entails q deduce Nq. Principle (␹) is fatal to compatibilism. If determinism is true, and p is the conjunction of the laws of nature and the facts up until life evolved on earth, and q is any proposition entailed by them describing an act, no one will have any choice whether q. A holder of a weak theory of action will reject (␤) and so be spared from (␹). The premises of the rule of inference (␤) imply nothing about the ability to bring it about that q, while the conclusion does. On a weak theory of action, (␤) is not valid. Recall the criterion for a strong theory of ability: (S) If x can perform A at t, then at no time earlier than t is it settled whether x performs A at t. To be settled at t is to follow from some set of propositions, each of which is either established or made true by time t. A strong theory of laws says that laws are either established or were made true a long time before humans began doing things. So, given a strong theory of laws and (S) and determinism, no one will be able to perform any act A at any time. A weak theory of ability denies (S). The weak theory holds that, since the question of whether a person has an ability at a given time need not be affected by his desires and beliefs, and yet it is his desires and beliefs that, together

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with the laws of nature, determine what he does, the fact that he will or will not do something does not preclude his having the ability to refrain or not refrain from doing it. The weak theorist thinks that a person can have a choice about something, in the sense that they have the ability to do it or refrain from doing it, even if that thing is determined by laws of nature that are established and facts that are already made true. The weak theorist, then, having rejected (S), need have no qualms about rejecting (␤). 7

Lewis’s Analysis

In “Are We Free to Break the Laws?” David Lewis distinguishes between the following claims: ‘I am able to do something such that, if I did it, a law would be broken’ and ‘I am able to break a law’ (Lewis 2001, 31ff). Suppose the laws of nature and the history of the world up until time t 2 entail that I will not take the glass of water at t, but I don’t. Suppose, as Lewis does, I cannot change the past. There seem two possibilities: (a) Something happened at t 1 that was contrary to the laws of nature, that is, a ‘divergence miracle’. (b) Everything up to and including t 1 was in accord with the laws of nature, but my action was not. Lewis thinks the fact that I can take the glass of water implies that I am able to do something such that, if I did it, a law would have been broken at some earlier time, but this requires only (a). He does not think I am able to break a law, which would require (b). I do not think the compatibilist need suppose that if I were to take the drink, any laws of nature would ever need to have been broken. There are auxiliary premises from Lewis’s metaphysics and analyses of causation, counterfactuals, and the like that lead him to this defense of compatibilism. But compatibilism by itself does not force us to the divergent miracles defense, and it does not seem to me the most plausible thing to say about cases in which one has the ability to do differently than one does. If I had taken the drink, freely and voluntarily, then surely my beliefs and preferences would have been different than they actually were. The most likely difference would be that I was thirsty. Assuming determinism, if I had been thirsty when the drink was offered, then something earlier also would have been different; perhaps I wouldn’t have taken a drink at the

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fountain before stepping on the plane, as I did, because the fountain was broken. And that would mean some earlier state of the fountain and its surroundings had been different. And so on. Tracing the changes back to the big bang, perhaps it might be a slight difference in the direction in which one particle began its travels through time. Or perhaps it goes back to a deistic god creating the initial state of the universe a very little bit differently. Or perhaps it just goes back, inﬁnitely. Who knows? It’s certainly amazing and weird and in my opinion somewhat depressing that the trail of differences that would have led to my being thirsty rather than not being thirsty should lead back even a couple of thousand years, much less to the beginning of time, or forever. Still, I can’t see why either (a) or (b) is required for me to take the glass. Assuming determinism, it follows from the fact that I can accept the drink and don’t, that I can do something such that if I did it either the laws of nature or the events up until that time would have been different than they in fact are. It does not follow that if I did what I can do any law would thereby be broken, or any divergence miracle would ever have occurred, or I would have changed the past in any way. I wouldn’t have had to change the past, because, according to determinism and the laws of nature, if I had been thirsty, the past would have been different. 8

Conclusion

A compatibilist can evade incompatibilist arguments by adopting a weak theory of laws, or a weak theory of ability, or both. My own inclination is in favor of a strong theory of laws and a weak theory of ability. Although I believe in compatibilism, I am somewhat skeptical about the truth of determinism. I would be happy if it were not true, for I think that determinism is a doctrine that is not very accommodating to important human hopes and aspirations. I don’t think the problem is that it rules out freedom, however. I hope I can address these issues in a helpful way on a future occasion. I’m sure I want to, but I’m not at all sure I have the ability to do so. Acknowledgments Early versions of this paper were presented at the 2001 Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference and the Philosophy Department Colloquium at the

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University of Nottingham. I received helpful criticisms and suggestions from members of both audiences. I received helpful comments from Michael Bratman, Joseph Keim Campbell, Eros Corazza and Michael O’Rourke on later versions. Campbell commented on several versions; he saved me from bad mistakes, and suggested helpful repairs. I am very grateful. Much of what I understand about these topics is due to John Martin Fischer, through many conversations and his works, especially Fischer (1994) and Fischer (1996). None of these folks is responsible for the mistakes that remain, although of course if the whole paper is mistaken, and I’m wrong about everything, and both determinism and incompatibilism are true, I’m not either. Notes 1. Let me emphasize that the right and left sides are chosen completely arbitrarily, simply as a way of easily visualizing the point. This is not an attempt to ﬁt agency into what is known, or thought, or imagined, or claimed, about the differences between the right and left side of the brain. 2. Note that even if we adopted the more complicated account of the issues discussed in section 3, so that propositions were neither true nor false until events made them so, making a proposition false would not mean changing its truth value from true to false. If we did things this way, we would have to say that when a set of premises entail a proposition about the future, the truth of the premises requires that the proposition will be true, not that it is true.

References Ekstrom, L. W., ed. 2001. Agency and Responsibility: Essays on the Metaphysics of Freedom. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Fischer, J. M. 1994. The Metaphysics of Free Will: An Essay on Control. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. . 1996. A New Compatibilism. Philosophical Topics 24: 49–66. Reprinted in Ekstrom (2001): 38–56. Goldman, A. 1970. A Theory of Human Action. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall. Hume, D. 1748. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. London. Israel, D., J. Perry, and S. Tutiya. 1993. “Executions, Motivations and Accomplishments.” Philosophical Review (October 1993): 515–540.

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Kane, R., ed. 2002. The Oxford Handbook of Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press. Kapitan, T. 2002. “A Master Argument for Incompatibilism.” In Kane (2002): 127–157. Lewis, D. 1981. “Are We Free to Break the Laws?” Theoria 47: 113–121. Reprinted in Ekstrom (2001): 30–37. (Page numbers refer to this latter work.) Locke, J. 1694. Essay on Human Understanding, 2nd edition. London. Van Inwagen, P. 1975. “The Incompatibility of Free Will and Determinism.” Philosophical Studies 27: 185–199. Reprinted in Ekstrom (2001): 17–29. (Page numbers refer to this latter work.) . 1983. An Essay on Free Will. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . 2002. “Free Will Remains a Mystery.” In Kane (2002): 158–177.

12

Freedom and Contextualism

Richard Feldman

There are striking similarities between the debate about freedom and determinism and the debate about knowledge and skepticism. In each case, the issue can sensibly be set up as a puzzle about an inconsistent triad of propositions, each of which seems to be true. Furthermore, there are positions one can take about one of these puzzles that have their analogues in positions one can take about the other. An optimist might think that insights achieved in one area will shed some light on the other. Such a person is, of course, doubly optimistic, thinking both that there are insights in the one domain and that these insights might be of value in the other. Some philosophers have thought that contextualist theories in epistemology have just this sort of value. John Hawthorne (2001) has recently defended this line of thought in print. While I agree about the potential value of insights in one domain for the other, I think that contextualism is of limited value in helping us to think about either freedom and determinism or about skepticism. I have previously argued for the limited value of contextualism in epistemology (Feldman 1999, 2001). In this paper I will summarize my arguments about contextualism and skepticism and then extend those arguments to contextualism and freedom. 1

Some Inconsistent Triads

Knowledge and Skepticism One way to set up skeptical issues is by considering the following three propositions: (A1) I know that I have hands. (A2) I do not know that I am no mere brain in a vat. (A3) If (A2) is true, then (A1) is false.

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Each of these three propositions seems, at ﬁrst glance to be true. (A1) reports the sort of everyday knowledge we all think we have. (A2) is true since I have no way to know that I’m no brain in a vat. Things could seem just as they do if I were a brain in a vat. (A3) requires a bit more explanation. First, the contained propositions in (A1) and (A2) should be understood in such a way that they are incompatible. That is, being a mere brain entails not having hands. The idea underlying (A3) is a principle of closure, roughly to the effect that if I know a proposition P, and P entails Q, then I know Q. There are many details here that need attention if a fully adequate closure principle is to be stated. For one thing, the closure principle should almost surely be restricted to known entailments. That is, if I know P, and I know that P entails Q, then I know Q. These details are important, and they may get in the way of generating any puzzle about skepticism based on the closure principle. However, the points I want to raise in this paper do not turn on details about the closure principle, so I will not go into them here. Stewart Cohen (1987, 1988, 1999) and Keith DeRose (1995), two leading defenders of contextualist theories in epistemology, set up their problem in roughly this way. The burden of their theories is to explain what to make of the seemingly incompatible intuitions that each of (A1), (A2), and (A3) is true. Cohen explicitly makes the issue one about an inconsistent triad. DeRose instead formulates the issue as one about what to say in response to the argument from (A2) and (A3) to the denial of (A1). There are other ways to set up the problem of skepticism, also based on inconsistent triads or their analogous arguments. For example, one could note that with respect to any belief one has, or at least any belief one has about the external world, there is some possibility of error. One could also note that a person who allegedly knows something could be in a situation that is introspectively indistinguishable from the situation of a person who lacks knowledge. And considerations along these lines could be used to construct an inconsistent triad. For example: (B1) I know that I have hands. (B2) There are possible situations in which a handless person is in a mental state introspectively indistinguishable from the state I am in. (B3) If (B2) is true, then (B1) is false. Roughly, any consideration that you think may be a key premise in a plausible argument for skepticism can be encapsulated in a triad like this.

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What should we say about these triads? Which elements should be given up? As contextualists seem to see things, a central part of solving the skeptical problem is ﬁguring out how to answer these questions. Freedom and Determinism The problems about freedom, determinism, and moral responsibility can also be set up as inconsistent triads. One version of the puzzle involves free action and determinism: (C1) People sometimes act freely. (C2) All human actions are causally determined. (C3) If (C2) is true, then (C1) is false. Variants of the puzzles could be developed that did not rely on the universal generalization in (C2). For example, puzzles could be formulated by saying of certain apparently free actions that they are causally determined. Also, the puzzles could be formulated in terms of claims about decisions rather than actions. Furthermore, analogous puzzles could be set up involving the ability to do otherwise or being responsible for one’s actions rather than acting freely. I will not consider these variations here. I believe that remarks similar to those I make below apply to all such puzzles. Each of (C1), (C2), and (C3) has some intuitive appeal. At least in our unguarded moments, we all assume that (C1) is true. In what we say, and what we do, we presuppose that we ourselves, and those with whom we typically interact, are free agents. And we assume that, at least sometimes, they could have done other than what they did and that they are responsible for what they have done. (C2) also seems to be true, or at least close enough to true for present purposes. Human beings are, according to many, animals that are part of the natural world. Our behavior is determined, or at least as close to determined as is the behavior of everything else around us. We are not, according to this common view, exempt from the causal laws governing the natural world. (C3) reﬂects the apparent conﬂict between (C1) and (C2). It has intuitive appeal, and there are much discussed arguments, which I will not consider here, that can be given in support. So all three propositions seem true. Yet one must be false. Which should it be? One way to conceive of the problem of freedom and determinism is as the problem of ﬁguring out what to say about this inconsistent triad of propositions.

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2

Context Sensitivity

The idea of context sensitivity is simple and familiar. It is crucial for present purposes to distinguish the sort of context sensitivity under discussion here from a very different sort. One philosopher (Annis 1978) has argued that for a person to know that some proposition is true requires that the person be able to answer all the objections to that proposition that are available in the setting in which the person is located. This view seems to have the implication that someone might know some proposition to be true in one setting but could lose that knowledge simply by moving to a place where people have some particularly difﬁcult objections to that proposition. On this view, the setting, or context, of the putative knower—the subject’s context—plays a crucial role in determining whether the person has knowledge. On this view, a person with the same reasons for believing the same true proposition might in one setting know that proposition, yet not know it in another. This is not the view under discussion here. Context sensitivity as it is invoked in recent discussions of skepticism has to do with the speaker’s context. Allegedly clear examples of this kind of context sensitivity involve familiar comparative words such as ‘tall’ or ‘wealthy’ or ‘big’. In a conversation about elephants we might say of Jumbo, the baby elephant, that he is not big, since Jumbo is much smaller than the average elephant. But when talking about the animals we saw at the zoo, we might say that Jumbo is quite big, since he is bigger than almost all the animals at the zoo. One idea about what goes on here is that sentences of the form ‘X is big’ are incomplete because they are implicitly relational. Things are not simply big or not big; they are big or not relative to some group or class: they are big for an animal at the zoo but not big for an elephant. But language works in such a way that we do not always have to mention the reference class explicitly. The prior conversation and other features of the setting, all making up the context, enable participants to understand the intended relativizations. The sort of context sensitivity just described has to do with the speaker’s context. The point can be illustrated most clearly by noting that two conversations about Jumbo might be going on simultaneously. In one, some elephant experts are discussing the relative size of some elephants. One of them says that Jumbo is not big. What the expert says is true. At that very moment, a child and his family are visiting the zoo. The child has tired of

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seeing the little animals and asks if there are any big animals in the zoo. The father says that there are, since Jumbo is big. This is true too. The expert’s statement and the father’s statement do not conﬂict, even though they are spoken at the same time. And there is nothing peculiar about Jumbo’s size that plays any role in this. Nor is there anything about perspective or opinion that plays a crucial role here. Jumbo, we may assume, is at the moment some fully determinate size. The predicate ‘big’ truly applies to a thing of Jumbo’s size in the context in which the father speaks. It does not apply to a thing of that size in the context in which the expert speaks. The lesson to learn from this is a familiar one: the same sentence can be used in different settings to say different things with potentially different truth values. 3

Context Sensitivity and the Puzzle about Knowledge and Skepticism

As it is applied to epistemology, the heart of the contextualists’ view is that the word ‘knows’, or sentences containing it, display context sensitivity. They think that all three elements of the inconsistent triads can express truths, but not in a single context. In ordinary contexts, ordinary standards for applying the word ‘knows’ are in place. By those standards, what’s expressed by saying something of the form ‘S knows that p’ is often true. But then, once we start talking about skepticism, the standards for applying ‘knows’ change. People rarely satisfy those higher standards. In those contexts, the things people say by uttering sentences of the form ‘S knows that p’ are typically not true. The skeptic’s denials are correct. Thus, in ordinary contexts, sentences like (A1) express truths. In those ordinary contexts, (A2) expresses a falsehood. When an ordinary speaker in an ordinary context utters the sentence ‘I know that I have hands’, that speaker says something true. However, in settings in which the standards for knowledge have been raised and skeptical issues have become salient, by uttering (A1) one would express something false. In these contexts, the proposition (A2) expresses is true. On the best, but not all, accounts, (A3) always expresses a truth. Analogous things apply to the second version of the epistemological puzzle. In ordinary contexts (B1) is true and (B2) is false. This is in part because among the possibilities relevant to the assessment of (B2) there are none

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that include my being a handless brain in a vat. Skeptical considerations expand the set of possibilities relevant to the assessment of (B2), enough to include some in which I am a handless brain in a vat having experiences just like mine. In such contexts, (B2) is true and (B1) is false. This description of the second puzzle accords well with David Lewis’s version of contextualism. He says that: S knows that P iff S’s evidence eliminates every possibility in which not-P—Psst!— except for those possibilities that we are properly ignoring. (Lewis 1996, 554)

Lewis’s solution, which ﬁts well with his more general view about language, is that the stock of possibilities which must be eliminated if we are to have knowledge varies with context. In effect, his view pins the context sensitivity of ‘knows’ on the context sensitivity of ‘all’. ‘All possibilities’ do not include possibilities that we can properly ignore. In ordinary contexts, we can eliminate all possibilities. This is in part due to the fact that in ordinary contexts the odd possibilities envisioned by skeptics are properly ignored and thus are not among ‘all’ possibilities. But in skeptical contexts there are additional possibilities, and we cannot eliminate them. His view is that various things that we say have the effect of enlarging the pool of possibilities. For example, mentioning a possibility makes it not properly ignored. The sort of contextualism about freedom that Hawthorne discusses is modeled on this proposal from Lewis. There is a detail worth mentioning about contextualist solutions to the skepticism puzzles. I did not say that in ordinary contexts one would express a falsehood by uttering (A2) or (B2). The reason for this is slightly tricky. Contextualists do not simply assert that there are differing standards for the application of the word ‘knows’. They say something about what brings about the raising of standards. (Curiously, less is said about what brings them back to normal.) The leading idea is that talking about skepticism and skeptical hypotheses raises the standards. So uttering sentences like (A2), by mentioning the skeptical hypothesis that I am a brain in a vat (or my lack of knowledge that I am not a brain in a vat), induces the higher standards. So, if I utter (A2), then I have raised the standards and made it true. But I do meet the ordinary standards for the application of the predicate ‘know that I am not a mere brain in a vat’. So, we can say that relative to the standards determined by ordinary contexts, (A2) is false. But if we were to say (A2), it would be true. This illustrates the point David Lewis put colorfully by saying, “Epistemology robs us of our knowledge” (1996, 550).

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Another detail is worth noting. Contextualism is a thesis about the function of the word ‘knows’. A completely accurate discussion of it would be conducted almost entirely in a metalanguage. Thus, contextualists do not hold that the standards for knowledge vary. Rather, they hold that the standards for application of the word ‘knows’ vary. If I use the words ‘knows’ or ‘knowledge’ in the present context, then the standards for their application are whatever standards are in place in the present context. However, since the metalinguistic talk is tedious and cumbersome, I will generally avoid it, provided there is little danger of misunderstanding. Contextualism is an explanatory hypothesis. The data to be explained are the seemingly conﬂicting things we are apt to say using the word ‘knows’. The proposed explanation appeals crucially to the idea that the standards for the application of that word vary, so that the things that appear to conﬂict do not really conﬂict. Any alternative explanation will imply that we are frequently making mistakes: either what we are apt to say in ordinary contexts is mistaken or what we are apt to say when we are inﬂuenced by skeptical considerations is mistaken. According to contextualists, it is better to think that the truth conditions for applying ‘knows’ have changed than to think we are routinely mistaken in this way. As I noted above, contextualists do provide some accounts of what makes the standards change. Exactly how they formulate their theories will depend in part upon what they think is required for knowledge. Presumably, they will ﬁnd some element of knowledge, or some condition on knowledge, that can vary in a suitable way. Thus, if knowledge requires justiﬁcation, then one could say that how much justiﬁcation is required varies contextually (Cohen 1999). If knowledge requires ruling out relevant alternatives, then one could say that which alternatives are relevant varies with context (Lewis 1996). If knowledge requires sensitivity to the truth value of the proposition in question through all relevant worlds, then one can say that the range of relevant worlds varies with context (DeRose 1995). Any such view about knowledge will be amenable to a contextualist treatment. To achieve the desired explanations of linguistic variation, contextualists will have to provide an account of contexts and their affect on the truth conditions for sentences using ‘knows’ that get the desired outcome, namely, that our utterances are by and large true. This will require a potentially complex theory about how features of a context alter the amount of justiﬁcation needed, or the set of relevant alternatives, or the set of worlds

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through which one must track a proposition. Contextualists have proposed accounts of these matters, but I will not go into those details here. It is possible to raise doubts about the speciﬁcs of their theories. But I think that there is a perspective from which those details do not matter. If they are right about the data—that our inclinations to afﬁrm and deny knowledge sentences varies with context—then it is at least in principle possible to ﬁgure out what features of the context cause those varying inclinations. And if there are factors that affect us—that is, if the variations are not random—it is possible to hold that the truth conditions for sentences using the word ‘knows’ somehow are also affected by those same factors. Thus, if there is any systematic way to account for the relevant changes in our linguistic dispositions, it is at least in principle possible to construct an account of the truth conditions for applications of the word ‘knows’ that appeals to those very factors (or correlates of them) so that we are systematically disposed to afﬁrm truths. Contextualists want to construct a theory that makes our seemingly inconsistent inclinations routinely correct. It is possible to construct such a theory. The contextualist solution to the problem of skepticism thus amounts to the following. In ordinary contexts, when we make claims using the word ‘knows’ we frequently say things that are true. But when the stakes are raised, as they typically are in discussions of skepticism, the skeptics are right. I ﬁnd this to be a disappointing solution to the problem of skepticism. I will explain why after looking at an analogous attempt to deal with the problems associated with freedom and determinism. 4

Contextualism and Freedom

Given the structural similarity of the puzzles about knowledge and about freedom, it is not surprising that contextualist responses to the latter puzzles are also possible. In broadest outline, the idea is that the truth conditions for sentences involving the key terms—‘free’, ‘morally responsible’, ‘could have done otherwise’—are context sensitive. In a recent paper, John Hawthorne has taken this approach to sentences using ‘free’ (2001). (In an older paper Terrence Horgan 1979 applied it to sentences involving ‘could have done otherwise’. I will not discuss his view here.) Although Hawthorne makes some remarks about ‘moral responsibility’ he does not claim that that phrase itself displays context sensitivity, and I know of no

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one who has. In this section I will spell out the key features of Hawthorne’s response to the puzzle about freedom. I should note at the outset of my discussion of Hawthorne’s paper that he concludes by saying that he does not conﬁdently believe the contextualist analysis he discusses. Rather, he thinks it deserves to be “taken seriously” and that it is a “worthy competitor to the more standard” views (2001, 77). It will be easier to proceed here, as Hawthorne does in his paper, as if he actually does accept the view he describes. Hawthorne’s proposal is modeled on David Lewis’s version of contextualism in epistemology. The idea is to make utterances of ‘S did x freely’ true in ordinary contexts but not true in special philosophical contexts. Hawthorne writes: When ordinary speakers utter English claims of the form ‘S did x freely’ (and their synonyms), they frequently speak the truth. But when our sphere of attention is widened by philosophical inquiry, we are rarely in a position to truly utter the English words ‘S did x freely.’ (2001, 68)

He gives an account of the meaning of ‘S did x freely’ that helps to account for this fact. The account will require a little explanation. It is: S does x freely only if S’s action is free from causal explainers beyond S’s control— Psst!—apart from causal explainers that we are properly ignoring. (2001, 68)

The idea is that in any context in which we talk about whether an action is done freely, we are considering only a certain set of potential causal explanations of the action. We say that an action is done freely when we think that there is no causal explanation of it within that set, and, if we are right about this, then what we say is true. In ordinary contexts, he suggests, we properly ignore as causal explainers hidden facts involving the “neurological springs of action” and explanations involving the laws of nature operating on “the distribution of microparticles in the distant past” (2001, 67). In ordinary contexts the sorts of causal explanations that would preclude the correct attribution of ‘free’ apparently include causal explanations involving macro processes occurring outside the individual. If, for example, I am caused to move to the left by a sudden gust of wind, then I did not move to the left freely. Ordinarily, this sort of explanation is not properly ignored. But if there is no such explanation of my move to the left, if the only causal explanations involve neurological events that we rarely think of, or complex processes going back to childhood and before, then there is

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no relevant causal explanation, since we can properly ignore those causal explanations. So in an ordinary situation, an utterance of ‘I did that freely’ would be true. For reasons that I hope are apparent, I will not go into the details of Hawthorne’s account of what determines which causal explainers are not relevant (i.e., which are properly ignored). If our inclinations to make utterances involving the word ‘free’ vary in the way he says they do, then there is some reason for this variation. Something about the situation prompts us to respond that way. He can then build into the account of relevant conditions factors that pick up on just those features in just the way needed to get the desired outcome. I grant that it is possible to do this, though I do not grant that it is possible to do that in a way that has any intuitive plausibility. In any case, I will not contest this point. It is relatively easy to see how to apply these thoughts to the puzzle about freedom and determinism.1 Recall the puzzle: (C1) People sometimes act freely. (C2) All human actions are causally determined. (C3) If (C2) is true, then (C1) is false. The contextualist resolution to the puzzle here is quite similar to the contextualist approach to the skepticism puzzle. It says that (C1) is true relative to some contexts and false relative to others, that (C2) is false in contexts in which (C1) is true and vice versa, and that (C3) is true in all contexts. Consider ordinary contexts ﬁrst. Here, only some sorts of causal explanations are relevant. Some are properly ignored. In such contexts (C1) expresses a truth. Some actions do not have ordinarily relevant causal explanations. But in such contexts (C2) is false. It says that all human actions are causally determined, but in an ordinary context, this is true only if all human actions have causal explanations among the sorts of explanations relevant in such contexts. They do not. So (C2) is false in such contexts. It might be a little better for Hawthorne’s account if we think of (C2) a little differently than we have so far. It is not immediately clear that the phrase ‘causally determined’ has the sort of context sensitivity under discussion. The key idea is that all human actions have a causal explanation involving factors the agent cannot control. But the domain of potential explanations varies with context. In some settings, when only ordinary explanations

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count, there is no such explanation for some actions. But when we expand the domain to include microphysical and ancestral explanations, then every action does have a causal explanation involving factors beyond the agent’s control. Consider next philosophical contexts in which a much larger set of causal explanations have been made relevant. In such contexts, (C1) expresses a falsehood, on the assumption that there is some causal explanation for all behavior. In such contexts, (C2) is true. Again, (C3) is true. It may be that uttering a sentence like (C2) has the effect of making all causal explanations relevant. That is, it may be that merely using a sentence like (C2) puts us into a context in which higher standards for applying ‘free’ are in place. This, too, is analogous to the epistemic case. Thinking about knowledge in terms of relevant alternatives makes the analogy even clearer. Philosophy has the unhappy consequence of expanding alternatives. Attributions of ‘knows’ require that the putative knower be able to eliminate all relevant alternative possibilities. Thinking philosophically about knowledge expands the set of alternatives we must be able to eliminate so much that it includes remote skeptical hypotheses that we are unable to eliminate. So, in such contexts, attributions of the word ‘knows’ are typically false. Similarly, attributions of ‘free’ require that there be no causal explanation of the action in question among the relevant causes. Thinking about determinism can expand the set of relevant causal explanations to include all the neurological and remote historical explanations that we typically ignore. There always are causal explanations in this expanded set. So, in such contexts, attributions of the word ‘free’ are typically false. Adapting Lewis’s remark about epistemology, we can say that the idea is that metaphysics robs us of our freedom. 5

Contextualism as a Response to Skepticism

I ﬁnd the contextualist solutions to these puzzles disappointing. In discussing my reasons for this, I want to separate questions about the truth of the claim that sentences about knowledge and freedom are context sensitive from questions about whether their context sensitivity is useful in resolving or clarifying philosophical issues. I will emphasize the second point, after brieﬂy discussing the ﬁrst.

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Is ‘Knows’ Context Sensitive? One might doubt that the sentences under discussion really do have context sensitivity of the sort contextualists say they have. Contextualists contend that people’s inclination to predicate ‘knows’ or ‘free’ vary in predictable ways. They offer semantical accounts that in effect track those changes. Typically, their view is that when confronted with skeptical hypotheses, people are unwilling to predicate ‘knows’. It seems to me that the facts about this are likely to be much more complex and variable than this suggests. Some people are not moved by skeptical hypotheses. They dismiss them as silly, frivolous, obviously false, and not worth taking seriously. They continue to be willing to afﬁrm knowledge sentences. Contextualists must say that such people are somehow not keeping track of the relevant standards and are mistaken. Furthermore, contextualists must say that people lose track of their own assertions in a surprising way. Suppose that in some ordinary setting you utter the sentence ‘I know that I ate breakfast this morning’. Suppose that, given contextualist views, this is true. You then go to philosophy class and discuss some arguments concerning skepticism, and start to worry. You say, ‘I do not know that I ate breakfast this morning’. You might go on to say that your earlier claim was mistaken, that you were overlooking important skeptical considerations when you made your earlier claim. But on contextualist views you should say that the utterance you made earlier was true. You should think at the later time that you were right earlier as well. You should think that the case is something like one in which you say ‘I am hungry’, then eat a big meal and say ‘I am not hungry’. There is no contradiction here, and, on contextualist views, the change in your claims involving knowledge sentences is comparable. Or, to take an even more similar case, if you ﬁrst say of the baby elephant Jumbo, ‘He is big’, and then see the adult elephants and say, ‘Jumbo is not big’, any worry that you have contradicted yourself is easily set aside. You can explain that you meant something like ‘big for an animal’ and ‘not big for an elephant’. There is no contradiction. Knowledge attributions do not seem similar. It seems, at least to me, that when skeptical doubts affect me, I am entertaining doubt about the very thing I conﬁdently asserted at another time.2 There are alternative explanations of our varying inclinations regarding knowledge sentences. Brieﬂy, one possibility is that changes in circumstances make us more or less cautious about asserting one and the same

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thing. When what turns on the truth of a sentence increases, there may be some tendency to be more cautious about asserting it. Thus, it may be that hearing about skeptical possibilities also has the effect of making us more cautious about predicating ‘knows’ without a change in the meaning of the word. In addition, saying that someone knows something suggests that the person could defend the thing known from objections. (I do not mean to suggest that knowledge implies having this ability.) By mentioning odd scenarios one calls to mind possible objections that may be harder to respond to. Realization of this could make us less willing to attribute knowledge. It need not change the truth value of such attributions. It is also possible that consideration of skeptical hypotheses and arguments affects our willingness to attribute knowledge for a different reason. Reﬂecting on those hypotheses and arguments may make salient reasons for thinking that we lack knowledge, reasons that are temporarily persuasive. There are some propositions that at least some of us do not have stable attitudes about. Perhaps propositions ascribing knowledge are like that, so we change our minds. The contextualist’s claim that knowledge sentences are context sensitive does not strike me as clearly true. There are plausible alternative explanations of our varying inclinations. Conceding Too Much to Skepticism Contextualists sometimes describe themselves as presenting a response to skepticism. It is true that contextualists do provide a way to make our ordinary assertions using the word ‘knows’ true. Still, contextualists concede a great deal to skeptics. This can be seen by considering a brief statement to which, as I understand it, contextualists are committed. But before making the statement, I must properly set the stage. I can do that by explicitly calling attention to the skeptical hypotheses and arguments that have been mentioned earlier in this paper. These hypotheses involve such possibilities that I am a brain in a vat or the victim of an evil demon. I will now write explicitly in the object language. What follows is, according to contextualists, true. We know hardly anything. Skepticism is the correct solution to the puzzles about knowledge. (A1) and (B1) are false. We do not know where we are, who the president is, or many of the things we typically believe. Moreover, we do not know those things when we are at home with our

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families and have left our ordinary philosophical thoughts behind. We know very little about the world around us. You might think that contextualists are not committed to the part of this about ordinary contexts. But they are. Contextualism holds that the truth conditions for sentences using the word ‘knows’ are determined by the speaker’s context. By mentioning skeptical hypotheses and arguments prior to the passage highlighted above, I put us in what contextualists regard as a high standards context. In that context, when we speak about ourselves and others we should say that we all lack knowledge. If you thought otherwise, you were confusing this version of contextualism with the version I mentioned and set aside at the outset, the version that said the putative knower’s context was somehow signiﬁcant. Thus, the contextualist solution to skeptical problems is to concede that the skeptics are right. That is, when we are in a philosophy talk or class and we are discussing skepticism, the skeptics are right. But I think that is a mistake. As a ‘solution’ to the problem of skepticism, this is hardly edifying. Now, this may be a largely verbal issue. Contextualists think that in the current context the standards for attributing ‘knows’ are very high. We do not meet those standards. And I agree that we do not meet the standards they think are now in place.3 So contextualists might be able to console me, even here in the current context, by saying that we do often meet the standards required for sentences using the word ‘knows’ to be true in ordinary contexts. Speaking casually and loosely, and ignoring the need for the metalanguage, contextualists can say that we should not feel too bad because we do meet the ordinary standards for knowledge. As a response to skepticism, then, this is an old solution dressed up in new clothing. The old solution said that there were two senses of ‘knows’. One was a strong sense, and in that sense, we know little. The other is a weaker sense, and in that sense we know much.4 And, oddly, it is their assertion of this latter claim that leads to my central complaint about contextualism as a response to skepticism. Failing to Address Some Central Skeptical Worries My main complaint is not that contextualism concedes too much to skeptics. Just the opposite. I think that the primary interesting problem about skepticism is not a debate about whether we meet some outrageously high standards for knowledge. We do not, and there’s not much more to be said

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about that. I think that the interesting issue concerning skepticism has to do with whether we actually do meet the ordinary, lower standards for knowledge. The most powerful skeptical arguments conclude that we do not meet those standards. It is thinking through that issue that strikes me as the fundamental challenge posed by skepticism. And contextualism is entirely irrelevant to that issue. I should be careful about what I mean by this. Contextualist philosophers may have something to say about what the ordinary standards for knowledge are and why it is true that we meet them. That would be of value in responding to skeptical arguments designed to show that we do not meet the ordinary standards. The fact that there are some other extraordinarily high standards that we do not meet is simply irrelevant to this fact. Here is another way to put the point. One central part of the challenge of skepticism arises from the need to respond to arguments alleging that our reasons for believing much of what we ordinarily believe are not very good, not good enough for knowledge and perhaps not good enough for some lower level of justiﬁcation. These arguments prompt us to consider carefully the reasons we have for believing the things we typically believe. One such argument asserts that our ordinary beliefs provide no better explanations of our basic perceptual data than do rival explanations involving dreams, hallucinations, evil gods, or computer simulations. Related arguments are based on the claim, endorsed by Lewis, when he asks the rhetorical question, “What (non-circular) argument supports our reliance on perception, on memory, and on testimony?” (1996, 551). There are in the philosophical literature a variety of responses to the arguments I’ve just alluded to, none entirely satisfying. The existing views seem to amount to stipulation that we do know what we think we know, avowals of faith in the powers of human cognition, questionable appeals to inference to the best explanation, the assertion that commonsense views are ‘intrinsically rational’ and so on. I think that some accounts of knowledge, those that drop justiﬁcation or good reasons as necessary conditions of knowledge, also contribute to less than edifying responses to skepticism. They may make it true that we have knowledge, but seem to concede that our reasons for our ordinary beliefs are not as good as we thought they were. To concede this, but nevertheless insist that we have knowledge is, as I see it, to win the battle but lose the war. Skepticism is centrally about whether we have good reasons to believe

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what we do. If knowledge is attained by having beliefs that are causally connected to the facts in the right ways, or by reliable means of belief acquisition, then we may have knowledge without having good reasons. But this in no way deals with skeptical questions about the quality of our reasons. Contextualist considerations simply do not have much to say about this. To defend the claim that ordinary claims to knowledge (or good reasons) are true, contextualists must avail themselves of one of the responses just mentioned. The distinctive addition made by contextualists is the contention that there are some other contexts in which higher standards are in place, standards that we do not meet. Whether or not this is true, it is the merits of the case concerning ordinary standards that matters most as a response to skepticism. 6

Contextualist Solutions to Puzzles about Freedom

Points analogous to those just discussed apply to the contextualist solution to the free will puzzle. Is ‘Free’ Context Sensitive? I will discuss this point only brieﬂy. We can raise doubts about whether ‘free’ is context sensitive in the way Hawthorne’s contextualist theory implies. First, it seems to me that our intuitive judgments about whether we are free do not vary in just the way Hawthorne’s account would predict. Some people, at least, are not moved by arguments for incompatibilism or the mention of deterministic explanations. Contextualists must say that they are simply misunderstanding the language or the context when they maintain that they are free even in the light of such considerations. Second, when people are moved by considerations about determinism to say that they are not free, I think that they typically regard this conclusion as incompatible with their ordinary attributions of the word ‘free’. But if the contextualist account is right, their denials in philosophy class are not inconsistent with their afﬁrmations outside of class. It’s surprising that it often does not seem that way to competent speakers of the language. This point may well be most compelling to incompatibilists. If contextualism is right, then incompatibilists should nevertheless agree that ordinary

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claims to be free are true. I doubt that they do. Those who get worried when they encounter arguments for the lack of freedom, such as the consequence argument, should, if contextualists are right, think that the conclusion that argument leads them to is not the denial of what they were inclined to assert prior to ﬁrst hearing the argument. But, in my experience at least, no one does. Finally, there are alterative explanations of the varying intuitions and linguistic inclinations contextualists say we have. It is possible that focusing on certain facts or arguments causes varying reluctance to assert the same thing. It is possible that varying salient considerations make us sometimes believe and sometimes deny the same thing. There is, at least, room for debate about these matters. We can wonder what best explains these varying intuitions. There is, then, room to doubt that there is context sensitivity here at all. This issue is much more complex than my treatment here touches on. One complication is that the word ‘free’ is ambiguous as well. There is the sort of metaphysical freedom philosophers concern themselves with, autonomy that some psychologists focus on, as well as political freedom. This makes things even messier. But suppose that ‘free’ is context sensitive. Does that help us see our way through the issues? Conceding Too Much to the Incompatibilists It seems to me that contextualist considerations leave unanswered many of the central questions at the heart of the controversy about freedom. Notice that Hawthorne, in spite of describing his view as ‘compatibilist’ at one point, is committed to almost everything incompatibilists say. Compatibilists— real compatibilists as opposed to metalevel compatibilists like Hawthorne— think that some actions are free even if they are causally explained by factors that they are not ignoring.5 Incompatibilists disagree. Now let’s assume that determinism is true. I call your attention to that fact, and particularly to the fact that there are processes in your brain that causally explain all of your behavior. I have thereby set the stage. According to contextualism, the following is true: No one ever acts freely. No one is morally responsible for their behavior. No one could have ever done anything other than what they actually did. Moreover, in ordinary situations when people are not thinking about

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processes in their brains that cause their behavior, they are not free. No one is ever free. Freedom is an illusion. The points here are exactly analogous to the points made about contextualism and skepticism. If philosophical settings make the standards such that the sentences ascribing ‘free’ are not true, then in philosophical settings such as this one, the incompatibilists (and those who deny that we are free) are right. The philosophical debate, which obviously occurs in philosophical contexts, is won by the incompatibilists. Indeed, the compatibilists lose without much of an argument in Hawthorne’s account. They capitulate from the outset. Failing to Address Some Central Worries Just as contextualism fails to address some central issues associated with skepticism, I think that contextualism fails to address some of the central philosophical questions associated with freedom. Real compatibilists think that actions are free if and only if they are caused in the right way. So they think the absence of causal explanations of the sort mentioned by Hawthorne is not necessary for freedom. Further, and more crucial to my current concerns, is that they think that the absence of a causal explanation for an action is not sufﬁcient for that action to be free. The problem here is that, according to compatibilists and many incompatibilists, random actions are not free actions. So, a central question in the free will controversy is how to make sense of the free actions. There is some inclination to think that causally determined actions cannot be free, but also some inclination to think that causally undetermined actions cannot be free. So one crucial part of the free will controversy concerns whether any good sense can be made of an indeterministic account of freedom. Recall that Hawthorne’s account states only a necessary condition for true ascriptions of ‘free’. He is explicit about the failure of this as a sufﬁcient condition. And this is for good reason. Actions that are completely random would also satisfy the speciﬁed necessary condition. Yet they are not free actions, in the relevant sense of ‘free’. A question then arises as to what Hawthorne might add to his account in order to state sufﬁcient conditions for free actions. In the epistemological case my contention was that contextualists need some account of why we do in fact satisfy the ordinary standards for knowledge (or justiﬁcation). Contextualism by itself did little to help here. It could

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work mainly by making use of some independent account, involving best explanations, intrinsic rationality, or stipulation. The situation with respect to contextualism and freedom is similar, though perhaps worse. What might Hawthorne say are sufﬁcient conditions for free action? Could he make use of existing accounts, in the way contextualists about knowledge can make use of existing fallibilist accounts of justiﬁcation? One standard view holds that actions are free when they are agent caused. But if free actions are agent caused, then they are agent caused even when all explanations are considered. Contextualism is irrelevant here. Our actions are correctly described as ‘free’, or else as ‘not free’ depending on whether or not we are agent causes. Context shifts would make no difference. So Hawthorne cannot add a condition requiring agent causation to get a sufﬁcient condition for free action. Hawthorne might add to his stated condition a second condition requiring that the action be caused by a decision of the agent, where this decision is free from causal explainers outside the agent’s control. But there are examples of random decisions, not under the agent’s control, that result in actions that are not free. This condition is not sufﬁcient for free action. Hawthorne might try adding a condition requiring that the action be caused by a decision of the agent, where this decision is under the agent’s control. Given my compatibilist inclinations, this seems ﬁne to me. It is exactly what real compatibilists say. There are, of course, hard questions about exactly what it means to say that a decision is under an agent’s control. Some might think that this is a large part of what the free will problem is about in the ﬁrst place. It is hard to see that contextualism sheds any light on it. But, furthermore, it is hard to see why one should not say that this condition, whatever exactly it is, is satisﬁed even if all causal explanations are considered. That is, it is hard to see why this condition is not satisﬁed in philosophical contexts in which we do consider ancestral and neural explanations. In other words, if Hawthorne were to accept this account of when an action is free, he should just accept real compatibilism. Contextualism itself contributes little, or nothing, to an explanation of how actions can be free. As I see it, among the central philosophical questions arising in connection with freedom and determinism are these: is the (or a) sense of the word ‘free’ such that it can apply to actions even though they are determined? Is this sense one that properly grounds ascriptions of responsibility and

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control? Is it one that properly grounds assessment of blame and the application of punishment? Another set of questions arises for incompatibilists, especially if the answers to the questions just listed are negative. Is the (or a) sense of the word ‘free’ such that it can apply to actions that are not causally determined? Is this sense one that properly grounds ascriptions of responsibility and control, that properly grounds attributions of blame and the imposition of punishment? I ﬁnd little of any help in thinking about these matters coming out of contextualist considerations. Contextualism, as developed here, apparently yields negative judgments about our freedom in philosophical contexts. But it says little about why this is true, other than to endorse incompatibilist intuitions. It fails to engage considerations that support compatibilism. Furthermore, it is not really designed to explain or support an understanding of ‘free’ that would help incompatibilists. Indeed, as I understand it, it does not help with this at all, since it does not address the question of how causally undetermined actions could be other than random. 7

Conclusion

Part of the problem with contextualism, both with respect to freedom and with respect to skepticism, seems to me to arise because of the way contextualists pose the problems. The problems are said to be explaining our seemingly varying intuitions. We sometimes say one thing and we sometimes say another. Perhaps our intuitions do vary, and what we are inclined to say varies accordingly. If so, these facts warrant explanations. But there is another fact that warrants attention. It is that in philosophical contexts in which all the relevant causal (or skeptical) alternatives have been made salient, there are puzzles about exactly what to say or think concerning our freedom or our knowledge. There are competing considerations all at one time, and the hard question is to ﬁgure out what to make of them. Contextualism, at least as I’ve described it here, does not really address this in any developed way. It just concedes the issues to the incompatibilists and the skeptics. The denials of incompatibilism and skepticism—compatibilism and fallibilism—are in certain ways analogous. One such way is that their

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advocates are willing to assert the key sentences in the face of all the alternatives. When confronted with skeptical possibilities, fallibilists remain willing to say ‘I know’. Similarly, when confronted with all the possible causal explanations of behavior, compatibilists are willing to say, ‘I am free’. They have things to say in support of those attitudes. Contextualism, as presented here, simply says that in the contexts in which they speak, they are wrong. Contextualists add that those very sentences express truths in ordinary contexts, but they have little to say about why that is the case. I conclude that contextualism may at best provide ways to explain some varying linguistic dispositions and may contribute to ways to retain the truth of some ordinary utterances. But it saves our ordinary utterances at the expense of addressing some of the central philosophical arguments that lead people to question those utterances in the ﬁrst place. Words such as ‘knows’ and ‘free’ may be context sensitive. The philosophical issues remain unresolved. Acknowledgments Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference, Saint Cloud State University, and Cornell University. Peter Murphy commented on the ﬁrst occasion and Michael Fara on the third. I am grateful to them, as well as to members of the audiences, for helpful comments. Notes 1. Hawthorne does not explicitly apply his contextualist solution to the inconsistent triad under discussion here. He does explain the varying truth conditions for sentences containing the word ‘free’. Some of the details in my account of the resolution of the puzzle are based on my way of extending his remarks to the puzzle. 2. See Schiffer (1996) for a defense of a somewhat similar view. 3. This depends, of course, on the details of just what the current standards for knowledge are. 4. See, for example, Malcolm (1952). 5. Metalevel compatibilism is the thesis that ordinary assertions made by saying ‘S did X freely’ are compatible with determinism.

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References Annis, D. 1978. “A Contextualist Theory of Epistemic Justiﬁcation.” American Philosophical Quarterly 15: 213–219. Cohen, S. 1987. “Knowledge, Context, and Social Standards.” Synthese 73: 3–26. . 1988. “How To Be a Fallibilist.” In J. Tomberlin, ed., Philosophical Perspectives 2: Epistemology. Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview. . 1999. “Contextualism, Skepticism, and the Structure of Reasons.” In J. Tomberlin, ed., Philosophical Perspectives 13: Epistemology. Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview. DeRose, K. 1995. “Solving the Skeptical Problem.” Philosophical Review 104: 1–52. Feldman, R. 1999. “Contextualism and Skepticism.” In J. Tomberlin, ed., Philosophical Perspectives 13: Epistemology. Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgeview. . 2001. “Skeptical Problems, Contextualist Solutions.” Philosophical Studies 103: 61–85. Hawthorne, J. 2001. “Freedom in Context.” Philosophical Studies 104: 63–79. Horgan, T. 1979. “‘Could’, Possible Worlds, and Moral Responsibility.” Southern Journal of Philosophy 17: 345–358. Lewis, D. 1996. “Elusive Knowledge.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74: 549–567. Malcolm, N. 1952. “Knowledge and Belief.” Mind 51: 178–189. Schiffer, S. 1996. “Contextualist Solutions to Scepticism.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 96: 317–333.

13

Buddhism and the Freedom of the Will: Pali and

Mahayanist Responses Nicholas F. Gier and Paul Kjellberg

Without cognising free will as a philosophical problem, [the Buddha] takes it for granted that the innate character of each being leaves him the freedom to decide about the actions that determine his future. —H. W. Schumann (1973, 53) There is free action, there is retribution, but I see no agent that passes out of one set of momentary elements into another one, except the [connection] of those elements. —The Buddha1 [Aristotle] did not do too badly without [the will]. —W. F. R. Hardie2 [Nagarjuna’s philosophy] is not an incoherent mysticism, but it is a logical tightrope act at the very limits of language and metaphysics. —Jay L. Garﬁeld (1995, 102)

Buddhist philosophy generally divides itself into an early stage in which most of the texts are written in Pali, a language closely related to Sanskrit, and a later Mahayanist movement based on writings in Sanskrit. Those who favor a Mahayanist perspective are sensitive about the adjective ‘early’, because they believe that the roots of Mahayana are just as old as the Pali texts, which were not written down until circa 80 B.C.E. Pali Buddhist philosophy is generally empiricist and realist in its epistemology and ontology, whereas most Mahayanist philosophers embraced various forms of idealism and even skepticism. Buddhists, along with most all ancient philosophers, embrace a universal determinism of cause and effect, but they have never acknowledged the problem of free will, which, as we will argue in the ﬁrst section, appears to be a distinctively modernist phenomenon. For purposes

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of this discussion, free will is deﬁned as a power truly our own independent from causal determinants. In sections 2–5 we will analyze the issues of this book from the Pali perspective. Here we will ﬁnd a more robust view of the self, best interpreted in functionalist terms, and also a realist view of causality. We will argue that these Buddhists would join the compatiblists of this book in their defense of moral responsibility. When we turn to the Mahayana schools, we will discover that it is much further removed from the free will–determinism debate. Mahayanists take the Buddha’s idea of ‘no self’ much more radically and they also generally reject a realist view of causality. In the last two sections we will offer two views of Nagarjuna, one from ‘constructive postmodernism’ as opposed to ‘deconstructive postmodernism’ with which Nagarjuna is usually associated. (Because of space limitations, we will just brieﬂy mention Yogacara idealism, the other major Mahayanist school.) While we would like to support a constructive postmodernist Nagarjuna, the texts actually do not allow us to do this. This means that while Pali Buddhists can embrace real agency in the world, Nagarjuna and his followers appear to argue that any positive view of the self will prevent us from escaping the cycles of existence. In this view the self is completely deconstructed and all that we are left with are competing rhetorics of freedom and determinism. We are delighted that we have been invited to contribute to this book and to offer a Buddhist perspective on these fundamental issues. We believe that Euro-American philosophers have much to learn from the Asian philosophical tradition. Many of them are still unaware of the degree of philosophical sophistication Asian thinkers have attained. Finally, we want to emphasize that we are only teachers of Buddhism and not experts with knowledge of Pali or Sanskrit and all their voluminous texts. We rely heavily on the best work in the ﬁeld and trust that we have used it accurately and responsibly. 1

Free Will as a Modernist Phenomenon

One possible reason for the failure of Asian philosophers to address the issues of this book is the common observation that Asian thinkers, especially those of the Indian subcontinent, are far more interested in absolute spiritual freedom than freedom of the will. Rather than a freedom somehow

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related to the world of cause and effect, the Indian yogis appear mostly concerned with a freedom that transcends the physical world entirely. With this vision in mind the casual determination of karma is not a problem at all, as karmic bondage is a state of all beings until ﬁnal liberation. Hindu scripture describes the saints as veritable supermen. For example, the Taittiriya Upanishad tells us that the yogi “attains . . . independent sovereignty,” and enjoys a bliss that is a billion times greater than that of the highest gods (1.6, 2.8). In the Maitri Upanishad the ascetic surpasses Brahman, the Godhead, and “will go [yet further], he [will surpass] the gods in the realm of divinity. . . .” (4.4). In the Shvetashvatara Upanishad yogis gain incredible powers: they “shall roll up space as if it were a piece of leather” (6.20); and a yogi in the Taittiriya Upanishad boasts that “I am the ﬁrst-born of the world-order, earlier than the gods, in the navel of immortality. . . . I have overcome the whole world” (3.5). Such a view has been called ‘spiritual Titanism’, an extreme form of humanism in which humans take on divine attributes and prerogatives (Gier 2000). In the Pali texts the Buddha rejects these incredible claims of the Hindu and Jain yogis. He was particularly critical of their claims to omniscience. He did, however, embrace their subordination of the gods and the requirement that they had to be reincarnated as humans in order to be liberated. Therefore, the Buddha and most of his followers are not spiritual Titans, primarily because they rejected the divinity of the saint and sought Nirvana in this world rather than in some otherworldly domain. The Buddha also believed that the body was constitutive of personal identity (Sankhya-Yoga and Jain dualists rejected this) and that the emotions and senses were not evil. Finally, the Buddha distinguished between Nirvana in the body and Nirvana at the end of the cycles of existence. Because the Buddha was a strict empiricist and because ﬁnal Nirvana was beyond the experience of anyone, he declined to say anything about it at all. However, the Buddha and many of his disciples presumably did live in a constant state of embodied Nirvana and the best one-word deﬁnition of this state is ‘freedom’. We will analyze the meaning of this freedom in compatiblist terms in the fourth section. There is a deeper and more philosophically interesting reason why the Buddha would have found free will a nonissue. This may be the same reason that Greeks and Romans generally did not ﬁnd it a problem.3 It is also connected to why American pragmatism did not address the issue, and

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why comparisons of Wittgenstein and the Buddha have become a veritable scholarly industry.4 None of these thinkers divided up the world in the ways discussed below, speciﬁcally a distinctively modernist separation of the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ that produces the conﬂict between an internal freedom and external causality. Intellectual historians are now getting a better idea about why we ﬁnd the ﬁrst discussion of free will, as Euro-Americans now debate it, in the writings of Augustine of Hippo. This fact is supremely ironic: Augustine believed in the absolute sovereignty of God and the corollary doctrine of divine omnicausality. If free will requires a power truly our own, then Augustine’s God eliminates any possibility of such freedom. In fact, no medieval Christian philosopher, not even Aquinas, solved this basic problem.5 In the Condemnations of 1277, the Church declared that God’s power was limited only by law of contradiction. The full implications of this view were elaborated by William of Ockham, who declared that it was logically possible (although not very probable) that while we assume that everything operates according to the laws of causality, God could in fact be causing all effects directly out of his potentia absoluta. It is important to note that, except for some Stoic discussions, divine power was generally not an issue for Asians nor was it for Greek and Roman philosophers. Was the challenge posed by divine omnipotence, the most radical idea of divine power in the history of religion East or West, the catalyst for problematizing human will power and its freedom? (Commentators have also speculated that the paucity of psychological terms in Augustine’s Latin may have hindered his analysis. Sanskrit is much richer in this regard.) This could very well be the historical clue for the later development of distinctively modernist forms of thought. With Ockham the via moderna was in full bloom and Aquinas’s natural theology was in serious trouble. The resultant split in reason and faith gradually led to the other dichotomies of modernism, the seeds of which were planted in the late medieval period. Luther’s nominalist teachers would have ﬂinched if they had known that he called reason “a whore,” but they had opened the ﬂoodgates for the radical ﬁdeism of the Reformation. Faith returned to the inner world, while reason found new triumphs in empirical science. The basic issues of early modern European philosophy arose out of this intellectual milieu. Modernism gave new meaning to what it means to be a subject, and the primary source of this innovation was the ego cogito of Descartes’s

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Meditations. The pre-Cartesian meaning of ‘subject’ (Gk. hypokeimenon; Lat. subiectum) can still be seen in the subjects one takes in school or the subject of a sentence. In this ancient sense all things are subjects, things with ‘underlying [essential] kernels’, as the Greek literally says and as Greek metaphysics proposed. After Cartesian doubt, however, there is only one subject of experience of which we are certain—namely, the human thinking subject. All other things in the world, including persons and other sentient beings, have now become objects of our thought, not subjects in their own right. Cartesian subjectivism gave birth simultaneously to modern objectivism as well; and, with the inﬂuence of the new mechanical cosmology, the stage was set for uniquely modern forms of otherness and alienation. 2

The Buddha and Modernist Dichotomies

Modernism is a form of thought that loves to dichtomize. It separates subjects from objects, the inner from the outer, the private from the public, fact from value, religion from science.6 (Making these distinctions has great advantages but also, as postmodern critics have shown, profound liabilities as well.) If the freedom of the will is something subjective and causality is something objective, and if free will happens only in an internal realm and cannot happen in an outer realm of cause and effect, then free will and moral responsibility are indeed problems of supreme signiﬁcance. It is no accident, then, that modern philosophy generated other related problems as well. The issue of the freedom of the will was joined with the problem of the ontological status of the external world, the problem of the knowledge of other minds, and the rejection of the idea of moral facts—in sum, the table of contents of an introductory text in modern European philosophy. None of these problems and none of these modernist distinctions appear in the voluminous records of the Buddha’s forty-ﬁve years of daily philosophical conversations. Was he philosophically naive or was he right in his assumptions about the nature of reality and knowledge? If one, for example, does not make a ﬁrm distinction between the inner and the outer, then there can be no talk about free events inside us and determined events outside of us. Neither can there be a problem of the ontological status of the external world and the skeptical impasses that arise from this. The Buddha’s empiricism was ﬁrst compared to Hume’s, but the most accurate

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parallel is to James’s radical empiricism. James and the Buddha observed that basic experience does not divide into inner and outer; rather, the inner ﬂows into the outer and the outer ﬂows into the inner. (One could perhaps read Hume in the same way.) It is only by some Cartesian method of systematic doubt that an inner world of ideas and perceptions is separated from an outer world of physical things. The Buddha and James also claimed that basic experience does not divide into facts and values, because as the Buddha said: “What one feels, one perceives; what one perceives one reasons about.”7 What one feels is obviously ﬁlled with values and emotions. Critics might agree with James and the Buddha that there are no ontological bifurcations in our immediate experience, but they still might object that even though their ‘inner’ ﬂows into their ‘outer’, their ‘inner’ does not ﬂow into another’s ‘inner’. The Buddhists disagree but for a reason that many Euro-American philosophers will reject outright. The Buddha and his disciples claimed to have ESP powers and they said that they could read the contents of other people’s minds. Speciﬁcally, the Buddha claimed to be able to determine the balance on anyone’s karmic mortgage. Quite apart from the validity of ESP, one could argue that we do in fact read other people’s minds through their body language, as many people do in fact carry their emotions on their sleeves. (Is this what Wittgenstein meant by “meaning is a physiognomy”?) The Buddhists would say that this minimal capacity that all of us have is simply the potential for anyone to use the faculty of mindfulness to a very high and sensitive degree. Although usually referred to as a virtue, mindfulness (sati) is more accurately called the faculty (indriya) by which Buddhists control the six senses (the mind is included) and their moral development. 3

Buddhist Compatibilism

Earlier we distinguished between Nirvana at the end of existence and Nirvana while embodied, which can be described as state of contentment (sukha as an equivalent to the Greek eudaimonia) and as freedom from all craving. In the terms of Keith Lehrer’s analysis in this volume, the Buddhist is free from distracting desires (Lehrer’s example is a craving for chocolate) and disciplines herself, in a way similar to Lehrer’s writer, to act on her spiritual preferences. Lehrer claims that “our preferences are the source of our freedom,” and Buddhists would agree that we empower them as well as

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they empower us. Buddhists would also agree with Lehrer that what we prefer is always our option while what we desire wells up in us involuntarily. By giving in to her cravings the Buddhist would continue the cycles of existence forever, something she, or any other clear-minded person, does not prefer. By choosing meditation and other spiritual disciplines as preferences, she prepares herself for the ultimate preference: Nirvana and freedom from Samsara (the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, of which Nirvana is the end). Furthermore, note that this Buddhist is an agent of her preferences, as Lehrer explains, rather than being just a passive victim of her desires. Finally, with regard to the problem of preference control, the nontheist Buddhist does not have to contend with an omnicausal deity, who, according to Augustine and Luther, empowers us to turn to God as well as to turn away from divine grace. Most Buddhists also do not have to contend with mad neurophilosophers from Southern California to control their preferences. While the issue of free will does not arise in Buddhism, it is indisputable that it embraces a universal determinism: every effect, without exception, has a cause. The idea that the will is uncaused or is self-caused violates the Buddhist principle of interdependent coorigination (prattiyasumutpada): nothing in the universe can originate itself as substances allegedly do or the will is said to do. Buddhist causality, however, is seen as a cosmic web of causal conditions rather than linear and mechanical notions of pushpull causation. Furthermore, the Buddha claimed that we are morally responsible only for those actions that we intend. He took strong exception to the Jain theory that we suffer from accidental karma, such as stepping on a bug that we do not see. The Jains, another Indian religion contemporary with Buddhism, charged that the Buddha’s qualiﬁed determinism would lead to antinomianism and ethical subjectivism. Only their strict determinism, they claimed, would maintain objective ethical standards. The Buddha countered, however, that if the mind is always subject to the control of the past, then there could never be any liberation, nor could there be any moral responsibility. The Buddha proposed that the ‘freedom of the mind’ works in the following way: “If I were to oppose the formation of the cause of sorrow, by opposing this formation I would become dispassionate. Also, if I were to become evenminded in respect to this cause of sorrow, if I were to develop this evenmindedness, I would become dispassionate.”8 The Buddha also claimed that personal temperament and circumstances

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qualify the effects of past causes such that there is no strict correspondence between cause and effect. The most famous example is the analogy of a lump of salt, ﬁrst placed in a cup of water (representing the corrupt person) and then placed in a lake (representing the Buddhist saint). The effect in the former is obviously different from the latter. This example has become controversial, because the salt is usually seen as an evil intention, having disastrous consequences in the sinful person but virtually no effect on the saint. The Jains’ fears appear to be vindicated: can the saint commit a sin and not be harmed or even blamed for it? Pali Buddhist ethics can be called a contextual pragmatism, which can be best explained by the famous motto “They who know causation (prattiyasumutpada) know the Dharma.”9 This can be read as they who know their own causal web of existence know the truth (i.e., the true facts of their lives) and they will know what to do. The truths we discover will be very personal truths, moral and spiritual truths that are, as Aristotle says, “relative to us.” This is not simply a cognitive knowing but a practical grasp of what is appropriate and what is ﬁtting for us and our surroundings. Being mindful is deliberately forming preferences over the desires that might lead us out of our own personal means and the virtue we have developed there. Like phronesis, Buddhist mindfulness is primarily nonsensuous, correct perception. Note also the Buddha’s ethical naturalism, outlawed in European philosophy after Hume, and the bold fusion of fact and value, a topic we will not pursue further. Both Aristotle and the Buddha thought it was always wrong to eat too much, but each person will ﬁnd his or her own relative mean between eating too much and eating too little. Such a view is not relativistic in the nonnormative sense, because the principal determinants for eating just right are primarily objective not subjective. If people ignore these objective factors—for example, temperament, body size, metabolism, and other physiological factors—then their bodies, sooner or later, will tell them that they are out of their respective means. If people are unmindful, they allow unhealthy eating habits to take them in one direction or another, but the mindful stay within their respective means. Therefore, the mindful ones are free, while the ones tending to either extreme are not. We can now deﬁne Buddhist free agents as those who are keenly aware of the effects their actions have on themselves and others. They are free from ego attachment and craving either for ascetic deﬁciency or indulgent

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excess, representing karmic bondage rather than karmic freedom. Free and mindful agents know what their needs are and what their preferences should be; and, on the basis of that knowledge, they can separate desires from cravings, deﬁned as desires that either cannot be fulﬁlled, or for things that are simply not needed. Moral freedom lies in the ability of agents to form desires that are consonant with their needs and personal circumstances. In terms of the contemporary free will debate, the Buddhists believe in ‘free action’ but have no conception of ‘free will’, as a self-determining power that moral agents somehow possess. For the Buddha the deepest and subtlest craving is the desire for a selfdetermining and independent self—in a word, a soul substance. It is a supreme irony that what European philosophers assumed is necessary for true human freedom is actually the cause of its greatest bondage. If we qualify the term properly within the context of Buddhist relationality, the word ‘autonomy’ can be used to describe Buddhist agents who are not controlled by craving; rather, they live freely in a personal mean between the extremes of debauchery and self-mortiﬁcation. Interestingly enough, liberal political theorists, taking seriously conservative critiques of social atomism, are now proposing the idea of a ‘situated’ autonomy.10 Although Nomy Arpaly does not discuss this idea of autonomy in her chapter in this book, it is clear that Pali Buddhists would afﬁrm her concept of agent autonomy, where agents learn to control their cravings and act on their preferencecs. 4

Causality, Conditionality, and Moral Responsibility

The Buddha’s qualiﬁed determinism has led David Kalupahana to speak of Buddhist ‘conditionality’ rather than causality.11 For him Buddhist conditionality represents a middle way between strict determinism and the destruction of freedom on the one hand, and an equally unacceptable indeterminism on the other. Because the Buddha rejected both material and mental substances, Buddhist conditionality amounts to causality with substance metaphysics. We should envision, as we have been forced to do in contemporary physics, all events conditioning one another rather than physical and mental causes pushing, pulling, or otherwise interacting with one another. Incredibly enough, action at a distance has now been conﬁrmed between pairs of subatomic particles, although physicists still do not understand how this can happen. Therefore, Buddhist conditionality could

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possibly be used to explain the actions of subatomic particles, which are currently impossible to understand according to classical science’s view of causality. In fact, Jay Garﬁeld has recommended Buddhist conditionality as a unifying theory for philosophy of science.12 Buddhist conditionality is summarized by the following formulas: “When this is present, that comes to be; from the arising of this, that arises. When this is absent, that does not come to be; on the cessation of this, that ceases.”13 Moving from facts to values, the principle of conditionality is summarized as a twelve-fold chain starting with ignorance, then unmindful action, a resultant distorted consciousness, and then nine other conditions that lead to rebirth. If anyone of these conditions is not present, then rebirth in a next life will not happen. One might see it in terms of Aristotle’s formal causation, as the following authors do: “As a theory of causation, this ‘dependent coarising’ concerns the formal concomitances among things rather than their material derivation from one another. It resembles a medical diagnosis in several ways. By showing that the ailment depends on a series of conditions, it indicates the point at which the series can be broken and so facilitates a cure” (Robinson and Johnson 1992, 17). The language of causality tends to simplify the explanation of an effect, while the language of conditionality makes it much more complex. The doctrine of interdependent coorigination compels the Buddhist to take a much more comprehensive view of causality. The full complement (samagri) of conditions must be present in order for an event to happen and for us to fully understand how it happened. Taking an example offered by Edward Conze, we might say that a bullet was the cause of a man’s death. If we then think about the conditions of his death, there might be no end to the search for relevant conditions, including the fact that the sun provided the light for the killer to shoot. Conze offers another example: while sunspots cannot be said to cause economic crises, their occurrence does indeed appear to coincide with and therefore condition them. Scientiﬁc causality is particularly circumscribed, as Conze explains: “. . . the modern idea of causality is governed by the ideal of prediction. The concrete totality of events is set aside, certain sectors are ‘isolated’ and observed on their own, with the intention of ‘controlling’ events” (1962, 149). Conze brings the discussion back to the basic issue of modernism: “When [modern scientists] speak of a cause they mean the general cause of

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this kind of event, taken in the abstract, whereas the Buddhists are interested in the concrete conditions of this particular concrete event.”14 Therefore, Conze concludes that “the Buddhist doctrine of the multiplicity of conditions seems to make a decision on the ‘freedom of the will’ unnecessary. If the total number of conditions is unlimited, and most of them are unknown, it is impossible to say which condition of necessity brings about which event” (1962, 146 fn.). We partially disagree with Conze. It is clear that the Buddha did indeed reject the existence of any self-causing agents, but did afﬁrm that all events have a multiplicity of conditions. Therefore, Pali Buddhism falls under the general rubric of compatiblism and ‘soft’ determinism. These Buddhists believe that we are morally responsible for our own character and intentions, which although completely conditioned by antecedent events, are nonetheless what we truly want and should do. Recall that the Buddha claims that we are responsible only for those actions that we intend. In Sanskrit karma means ‘action’, so it follows that Buddhist karma is volitional action only. Seeing the law of karma as a psychological law allows us to avoid both the extravagance and absurdities of the common view of it as a cosmic law with inscrutable laws of retribution. (It also means that we may also see, as some Buddhists do, the six realms of existence as a metaphor for the ‘animal’, ‘angelic’, and ‘demonic’ moments of one single life span.)15 Therefore, the law of karma can be conceived as the rather trivial truth that all actions have consequences. Returning to causality as conditionality, we can now state the following conditionals concerning moral responsibility: “If we act motivated by greed, hatred, or delusion, we are planting the seed of suffering; but when our acts are motivated by generosity, love, or wisdom, then we are creating the karmic conditions for abundance and happiness.”16 For the Buddhists, karma works at two levels—one immediate and one delayed. In any of our acts we can immediately experience the results depending on whether they were done, for example, out of love or hatred (of which only the truly obtuse person will claim to be unaware). Later on, these seeds of our actions will produce their inevitable fruits and, following the principle of interdependent coorigination, these fruits will ﬁnally ripen. The ripening of karmic action is a pervasive metaphor in all Buddhist literature.

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5

The Pali Self as Functionalist

The Buddha’s response to the axial age’s discovery of the self was strikingly unique: he proposed the doctrine of no-self (anatman), which literally means no atman, the Hindu soul substance. This conceptual innovation was so provocative that it was bound to invite misinterpretation, and unfounded charges of Buddhist “nihilism” continue even to this day. The Buddha anticipated Hume’s view that the self is an ensemble of feelings, perceptions, dispositions, and awareness (the skandhas) that is the center of agency and moral responsibility.17 The Buddha’s view, however, is different from Hume’s (1978), primarily because the Buddha appeared to support real causal efﬁcacy among internally related phenomena. (We believe that Hume may have been misled by the current scientiﬁc model of externally related atoms.) While Hume deconstructed any theory of causality, the Buddha reconstructed causal relations with his theory of interdependent coorigination. The Buddha agrees with Hume about the absence of causal power but disagrees with him about the absence of causal relations. As the Pali philosopher Buddhaghosa said: “There is no real production; there is only interdependence.”18 This is the same as saying that causality has been replaced by conditionality. The Buddha rejected the soul-as-spiritual-substance view of the Upanishads, Jainism, and Sankhya-Yoga, and he deconstructed the ‘spectator’ self of these philosophies 2,500 years before recent thinkers dismantled the Cartesian self. As opposed to strict deconstruction, for example, Pali Buddhists hold that selves, though neither the same nor different throughout their lives, are nevertheless responsible for their actions. (Pali Buddhism, therefore, should be aligned with the school of constructive postmodernism.) These selves are also real in the sense that they are constituted by relations with their bodies, other selves, and all other entities. This is why the Pali self should be viewed in relational or process terms rather than the skeptical implications of the no-self doctrine, which many later Buddhists supported. The Pali self is relational primarily in the sense of its dependence on the ﬁve skandhas and the internal relations this dependence entails. Another positive way to express nonsubstantiality is to describe the Buddhist self as ‘functional’. In fact, each of the skandhas should be seen as functions rather than entities. On this point, Kalupahana makes good use of James, who while denying a soul substance, maintained that consciousness

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is a function. As Kalupahana states: “Rupa or material form accounts for the function of identiﬁcation; vedana or feeling and samjna or perception represent the function of experience, emotive as well as cognitive; sanskara or disposition stands for the function of individuation; vijnana or consciousness explains the function of continuity in experience.”19 Both Kalupahana and Peter Harvey describe the Pali self in the positive terms of psychophysical unity, process, and interrelation. According to Harvey, the Buddha never rejected the existence of a life principle (jiva), which “is not a separate part of a person, but is a process which occurs when certain conditions are present . . .” (1993, 31). Not only are there signiﬁcant parallels to James, but the Buddha’s process self compares favorably to that of today’s process philosophers, following in the footsteps of Whitehead and Hartshorne, who are also the founding fathers of constructive postmodernism. From this analysis we can clearly see that the Pali self is a robust personal agent fully capable of maintaining its personal integrity and taking full responsibility for its actions. (This of course assumes the truth of compatiblism.) This view of the self is also fully somatic, giving full value to the body and the emotions. At the same time it is embedded in a social and organic nexus of cosmic relations. Hindu philosopher Surendra Verma is unduly puzzled when he asks how it was possible for the Buddha to be ﬁlled with thoughts and emotions and “at the same time preaching . . . the nonexistence of the soul” (1970, 7). Like many other commentators, Verma simply does not understand the meaning of the Buddha’s Middle Way, in this case the mean between annihilationism (no self at all—substantial or otherwise) on the one hand and eternalism (substantial self) on the other. What appears not only puzzling but impossible is for the Hindu atman or a Stoic soul— pure spiritual substances all—to have any relation at all with the ﬁnite world, let alone with the emotions and the body. In his very instructive comparison between Aristotle and the Buddha, Damien Keown proposes that the function of moral choice is found in prohairesis and cetana respectively. Both of these terms have been connected with the European will, but no simple identity can be assumed. (The etymology of cetana gives the root as cit, which means ‘to think’, and its basic meaning is ‘visible’ or ‘distinguished’, as in that which appears in the mind.) Both of them are neither emotive nor cognitive; rather, they operate as a fusion of the two. Aristotle’s description of prohairesis as either “intelligence motivated by desire or desire operating through thought”20

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can also be applied to the Buddhist cetana, which, as Keown states, “would . . . embrace a continuum that runs from predisposition through choice to action” (1992, 218). As one of our readers suggested, cetana combines thinking and desire, a project that the Japanese Buddhist Nishida attempts in An Inquiry Into the Good.21 Both Aristotle and the Buddha refuse to dichotomize the self and to compartmentalize a ﬂow of experience that resists such divisions. That is why cetana is sometimes identiﬁed with karma itself (as we have seen, deliberate intentions are the only karmic actions) or with the skandha of sanskara, a person’s dispositions that carry karma from one life to another. Therefore, both Aristotelian and Buddhist philosophy operates very nicely without a concept of the will. Such a strategy does better justice to experience and does not generate unnecessary philosophical problems, a primary one being the freedom of an alleged independent, self-determining will. 6

Nagarjuna and the Self

A South Indian philosopher sometimes called the “second Buddha,” Nagarjuna stands ambivalently at the beginnings of Mahayana philosophy. His arguments are subtle, sophisticated, and complex. Their interpretation is made more difﬁcult because they are written as beautifully crafted quatrains whose density require extra concentration and persistence. As a transitional thinker, Nagarjuna is taken by some commentators (David Kalupahana and Jay Garﬁeld) as continuing the Pali tradition and by others (Frederick Streng and T. Wood) as making a clean break with it. The latter school of interpretation reads Nagarjuna’s quatrains as thoroughly dialectical refutations of any positive thesis, even the minimalist claims of Pali realism. There is general consensus that the Yogacara school of Vasubandhu and Asanga reject Nagarjuna’s views, whatever they are, in favor of an idealism instructively similar to Euro-American schools.22 Unfortunately, we do not have space to deal with Yogacara other than an indirect way. As we have seen, Pali Buddhists do not deny the appearance of an empirical self (jiva); rather, they deny that, corresponding to this appearance, there is anything enduring, separate, or independent. These may just be three different ways of saying the same thing, but since they represent three different types of Buddhist arguments, they merit separate presentations. First, there is no self that endures. What we see is constantly changing and

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there is nothing that stays the same. The traditional argument here proceeds by elimination: the physical bodies change; feelings, beliefs, desires, and intentions all change; consciousness is intermittent; and our selfconceptions change over time. None of the things we can point to as the self remains the same. Therefore the self does not endure. The argument is similar to the one given by Hume. Second, the self is not separate from the causes and conditions that give rise to it. A standard metaphor for this comes from the Dhammapada, a Pali text from the third century B.C.E. The appearance of a rainbow arises out of a certain combination of mist and light. Remove either one of these and the rainbow no longer exists. Similarly, the appearance of a self arises out of conditions: oxygen, food, parents, and so forth. Without them, there would be no self. This argument can be made on a general level, as just done, or on a particular level. You wouldn’t be the person you are if your family, friends, and acquaintances all weren’t the people they are, if you hadn’t had the experiences you’ve had, lived in the society you live in, and so on. If we deﬁne the constellation of these conditions as one’s ‘world’, we can say that the self cannot be separated, either practically or logically, from the world in which it exists. Again we can say that causality has been replaced by conditionality. Third, the self is not independent, which is a rough approximation of a Sanskrit term svabhava, meaning ‘self-nature’ or ‘own being’. Nagarjuna uses reductio ad absurdum arguments to demonstrate the incoherence of attempts to say anything about an independently existing self. If the self existed on its own, it could not change or stay the same, could not be uniﬁed or composite, could not know or be known, and so forth. And yet, if we cannot say that the self really exists, by the same token we cannot say that the self really does not exist. We cannot say anything at all about it as an independently existing thing. What we are left with is an empirical or a thoroughly conventional self, depending on the way we read Nagarjuna. The Pali versus Mahayana distinction is now not very helpful, so henceforth we will distinguish between ‘constructive postmodernism’ (CPM) and a skeptical ‘deconstructive postmodernism’ (DPM). Many commentators have interpreted Nagarjuna as anticipating the deconstruction of French postmodernism.23 We prefer to interpret the Buddha’s philosophical intentions as anticipating CPM, but we are not certain that Nagarjuna can be

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interpreted under this rubric. We have already referred to more detailed discussions of these two positions in the endnotes, but sufﬁce it to say that CPM is generally realist and supportive of the canons of logic and evidence, while DPM rejects realism and any logocentric methodology. Nagarjuna is a consummate logician and never rejects logic as a standard, so this obviously causes problems for any DPM reading of him. Nevertheless, in our conclusions we will assume that Nagarjuna cannot be fully accommodated within the CPM model. Let us compare the translations of two quatrains on ‘agent/producer’ and ‘action/product’ to demonstrate not only the different interpretations but also the difﬁculty in deciphering the poetry of Nagarjuna’s The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way. (Hereafter the Karika, an abbreviation of the Sanskrit title Mulamadhyama-karika.) Here are Jay Garﬁeld’s and Frederick Streng’s translations of the last two verses of chapter 8: Action depends upon the agent. The agent itself depends on action. One cannot see any way To establish them differently.

The producer proceeds being dependent on the product, And the product proceeds being dependent on the producer. The cause for realization is seen in nothing else.

From this elimination [‘giving up’] of [substantial] agent and action, One should elucidate appropriation [‘acquiring’] in the same way. Through action and agent All remaining things should be understood (Garﬁeld).

In the same way one should understand the ‘acquiring’ on the basis of the ‘giving up’ of the producer and the product. By means of [this analysis] the product and Producer all other things should be dissolved (Streng).24

Even without knowing Tibetan (the original Sanskrit text has been lost), we can see that Garﬁeld’s translation is more elegant. Moreover, we can see Streng’s skeptical conclusion that distinctions between agents, their actions, and all other things “should be dissolved.” (The Yogacara idealist would say “dissolved in the Buddha Mind.”) Garﬁeld’s rendering is very different: he takes Streng’s “giving up” only as denying agents and their actions any selfbeing, not rejecting their existence altogether. We propose that the phrase ‘phenomenal self’ be used for the Pali tradition and CPM interpretation while reserving ‘conventional’ as a placeholder term for the deluded self who thinks it lives in a real world of interdependent things and events. This conventional self exists only by

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analogy to the appearance of the color spectrum as it is refracted through a prism. If the prism represents ignorance, then upon enlightenment the phenomenal world proves to be an illusion. If we complete the analogy by speaking of the white light that is refracted, the Yogacara idealists would call that the Buddha Mind while the skeptical Nagarjuna would deny its existence as well. For Mahayana Buddhists following the skeptical Nagarjuna the conventional self has a practical purpose only. Clinging to a notion of self that has self-being, its own perceptions and possessions is the origin of suffering. The use of conventions is governed not by their truth or reference to reality, but by their effectiveness in diagnosing the human predicament and allowing us to see the ‘emptiness’ (shunyata) of all things that we thought were permanent and that we thought were somehow ours. From this standpoint, appeals to determinism in one moment and to personal responsibility in the next do not represent an inconsistency; rather, it is a recognition that different forms of rhetoric will be effective in different situations. (By contrast the Pali Buddhists have a realist concept of truth and meaning and that is why they are able to embrace a compatibilist position on free will.) If the self is thoroughly conventional, then to ask whether it is free or determined is like asking ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ Zen Buddhists were profoundly inﬂuenced by what they took to be Nagarjuna’s skepticism. Not all quatrains in the Karita, however, give us equally plausible readings. Here are two in Garﬁeld’s translation that summarize nicely the point of the preceding paragraph: If there were no self, Where would the self’s (properties) be? From the paciﬁcation of the self and what belongs to it, One abstains from grasping onto ‘I’ and ‘mine’. When views of ‘I’ and ‘mine’ are extinguished, Whether with respect to the internal or external, The appropriator ceases. This having ceased, birth ceases (18:2,4).

This quatrain can be rendered intelligible from either a CPM or DPM position, but other quatrains in this chapter appear to give the former approach no support: What language expresses is nonexistent. The sphere of thought is nonexistent.

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Unarisen and unceased, like Nirvana Is the nature of things.

One can salvage the CPM position only by some clever qualiﬁcations, and then only partially. When Nagarjuna speaks of denying existence, he denies only absolute existence, the negation of which is absolute nonexistence. (Nagarjuna agrees with Parmenides in rejecting this as inexpressible and meaningless.) But from a CPM standpoint, the nonexistence in this quatrain must be a relative nonbeing that corresponds to the relative being of interdependent existence that is expressible and meaningful. (A thing’s relative nonbeing is everything that it is not, which is actually all the other things that it is dependent on.) The CPM interpretation of this quatrain runs aground with the conclusion that Nirvana and all things are ‘unarisen and unceased’. This quatrain appears to undermine the DPM interpretation as well, because it implies that Nirvana is the only ‘thing’ that has self-being. Tibetan Buddhists inﬂuenced by Yogacara idealism hold that Nagarjuna intended only to reject the self-being of phenomenal reality, not the ultimate reality that is the Dharmakaya. This is the cosmic body of the Buddha into which all selves that reach Nirvana dissolve. Here is one of their own quatrains: If emptiness were the method, then Buddhahood could not be. Since other Than this cause there would be no other fruit, The method is not emptiness.25

Not many Mahayana Buddhists, except those in some Zen schools, were willing to follow Nagarjuna in rejecting all metaphysical views of the Buddha and his cosmic body. While Nagarjuna’s deconstruction is logically rigorous, it was obviously not religiously satisfying for most Buddhists. 7

Nagarjuna on Causes and Conditions

In his interpretation of the Karita Garﬁeld maintains that Nagarjuna preserves a distinction between conditionality and causality. Garﬁeld maintains that Nagarjuna holds a positive view of conditionality as explained above, and he demonstrates that Nagarjuna rejects only the view of causes as having some occult power to produce effects. For this argument let us look at the ﬁrst verse of the ﬁrst chapter of the Karita:

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Neither from itself nor from another, Nor from both, Nor without cause, Does anything whatever, anywhere arise.

This is the famous Buddhist ‘neither-nor dialectic’ in action—also called the ‘four-cornered negation’ in Indian logic.26 It is meant to exhaust any possibility of ‘causality talk’, and each of the four options actually represent previous Indian philosophical schools. The ﬁrst chapter’s second verse contains a very rare phenomenon in the Karita, a positive view of conditionality that Nagarjuna does not dialectically destroy: There are four conditions: efﬁcient condition; Percept-object condition; immediate condition; Dominant condition, just so. There is no ﬁfth condition.

The fourth verse makes it clear that causality understood as a metaphysical power is not a part of conditionality: Power to act does not have conditions. There is no power to act without conditions. There are no conditions without power to act. Nor do any have the power to act.

We will now offer an example (inspired by Garﬁeld) that demonstrates how one can conceive of conditionality in its four instances without causality. A person takes a match and strikes it, which is the efﬁcient condition. The match lights because there is enough oxygen, it is not too wet, and the tip of the match has not worn to the point of nonignition, which are some of the immediate conditions. The percept-object conditions are those within any perceiver that allows the eyes to see. Finally, the person has struck the match so that she can see whether what she took for a snake in the dark was perhaps just a piece of rope. This is the dominant condition, the purpose of any action; a Buddhist ‘ﬁnal cause’ if you will. Please note that our example has not appealed to any occult causes or powers as a way of explaining what happens. There are of course other translations and interpretations of these quatrains, some of which support the skeptical DPM position. These readings generally tend to conﬂate causes and conditions, and in alternative

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translations of verses three and ten Nagarjuna appears to reject the existence of relational existence and the impossibility of anything whatsoever arising. Here are the two quatrains from A. L. Herman’s revision of Theodore Stcherbatsky’s translation: In these four conditions we can ﬁnd No self-nature (svabhava) Where there is no self-existence, There can be no relational existence (parabhava). If existing things have no self-nature Then they have no real existence The [formula] ‘this being, that appears’ Then loses every meaning. (1: 3,10)27

Note here the clear negation of the two principal features of the doctrine of interdependent coorigination: the denial of relational existence and the rejection of conditionality. This view of Nagarjuna’s argument anticipates Bradley’s famous attempt to show that an ontology based exclusively on internal relations is just as unintelligible as one based on external relations. We summarize Bradley’s argument as follows: If A is internally related to B and R is the relation, one would then need R to relate R to A, R that relates to R to B, R that relates R to R ad inﬁnitum. Bradley’s conclusion is that either A and B are totally separate or they are identical (1930, 18). Therefore, a putative realism of distinct but interrelated entities by necessity collapses into either an absolute monism (the Yogacara position—they would have loved Bradley) or a denial of any intelligible view of reality at all (the DPM Nagarjuna). Appealing to Whitehead’s (1978) doctrine of asymmetrical relations (e.g., that the present is internal to the past but the past remains external), one could assume that the Buddha would agree with him, because he did not explicitly afﬁrm a doctrine of full internal relations as some Mahayanist Buddhists did. The presence of asymmetrical relations would save Buddhism from the extremes related above and keep the CPM interpretation alive. Garﬁeld’s translation of the two passages above allows us to reject the deconstruction of dependent beings: The essence of entities is not present in the conditions. If there is no essence, there can be no otherness-essence. If things did not exist without essence, the phrase ‘When this exists so this will be’, would not be acceptable. (1. 3,10)

We take this to mean that if any being lacks self-existence, then any being other than it does also. It also follows that if some beings were substances,

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we could not afﬁrm the Buddhist law of conditionality. The CPM interpretation of Nagarjuna appears to dissolve his doctrine of two truths, which Garﬁeld formulates as “the conventional truth of the reality and interdependence of all phenomena and the ultimate truth of their emptiness of inherent existence” (1995, 225). From the standpoint of CPM these two truths are the same: real interdependence ontologically implies that no being can have self-existence. 8

Conclusions

The traditional libertarian, who believes with Kant that, in the absence of freedom, there cannot exist anything of absolute value in the world, may wonder if there is any role left for freedom in Buddhism. Normally we assume that there has to be a self or an agent in order for there to be freedom, but this is just the presumption the skeptical Nagarjuna questions. If we cannot call the karmic web free since it lacks a self, by the same token we cannot call it determined, since nothing outside of it is causing it. To the extent that people identify a self, that self is determined by causes outside of it. The more cultivated they become on the Buddhist model, the less they think this way. The less who thinks this way? A question that the European philosopher might ask. Nagarjuna’s answer is no one, really. The nonpersonal web of causes and conditions sheds the delusion, or, rather, ceases to give rise to it. Thus you get the seemingly paradoxical lines from, for instance, The Diamond Sutra, that “even though inﬁnite beings have been saved, none have been saved.”28 Thus while we would assume that there has to be a self in order for there to be freedom, Nagarjuna would say that there is freedom only to the extent that there is not a self. The familiar correlation in the European tradition of selfhood and freedom is reversed: rather than correlates, selfhood and freedom are antitheses. The reason this matters for the skeptical Nagarjuna is the connection between the self and suffering. The belief in a self that is enduring, separate, and independent, gives rise to desires that are ultimately unsatisﬁable precisely because no such self exists. If all talk of the self or anything else is conventional, and if no one set of conventions is more right than the others, what then governs the choice among conventions? The First Noble Truth of Buddhism, enunciated by the Buddha upon his enlightenment, is

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that all egocentric existence suffers. This is not to say that every moment is agony, which would obviously be false, but that the process of existing, thinking one is a substantial self, is inherently painful. Even the joyful moments take their character from the absence of, or absence of awareness of, discomfort. Our unwillingness to acknowledge this fact and our stubborn insistence that suffering is avoidable only compound the difﬁculties. More particularly, suffering is caused by belief in a self that does not exist. Thinking in terms of a self that is enduring, separate, and independent causes people to search for a happiness they cannot ﬁnd precisely because such a self does not exist. The desire to alleviate suffering by eliminating the belief in a self is the motive force of Buddhism. It is easy to see how, in the Mahayana tradition, one would not be able simply to alleviate one’s own suffering without relying on the notion of self that caused the suffering in the ﬁrst place. As a result, motivation must come from the desire to alleviate the suffering of all sentient beings. This realization led to the Bodhisattva ideal, enlightened beings, in one sense greater than the Buddha himself, who vow to delay Nirvana until all other beings have entered before them. The silence of all forms of Buddhism on the debate about free will ﬁrst stems from its refusal to divide up the world in the modernist ways discussed above. Second, it is silent because it rejects a substantial selfdetermining self in the Pali tradition and any notion of an individual self in the Mahayana tradition, whether it be Yogacara idealism or Madhyamaka, the school of philosophers inﬂuenced by Nagarjuna. If this is true, then contemporary interest in the debate must be premised on certain assumptions about the self and personhood. We see this clearly in Harry Frankfurt’s now classic essay where he claims that one of the desiderata of a theory of free will is that it demarcate the ‘essential difference’ between people and animals (1971, 6). Buddhists, however, see people on a spectrum of beings, between animals, who are unable to diagnose the origin of their suffering or to take steps to alleviate it, and putative deities who, because of their constant state of bliss, lack the incentive to act. Thus, while Frankfurt and the Buddhists both observe the same phenomenon of ﬁrst- and second-order desires, one reason the Buddhists do not assign it the same weight is because they refuse to distinguish people from animals for moral purposes. Anticipating Tom Regan’s approach to animal rights, the Dhammapada assumes that animals have interests and that “life [is] dear” to them (10:3).

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The second requirement for a theory of free will, according to Frankfurt, is that it should explain why freedom of the will is regarded as desirable. For the Buddhists, the existence of orders of desire is an observed fact, of utility in alleviating suffering but of no intrinsic value. Frankfurt’s presumption, right or wrong, that freedom is a valuable thing, is a European notion that can be traced back, as we have seen, to Augustine and medieval Christian discussions about sin, salvation, and divine power. The two Buddhist traditions respond in signiﬁcantly different ways: the Pali tradition afﬁrms the preference for Nirvana over Samsara, while Nagarjuna proclaims, in Nancy McCagney’s translation, “There is no distinction whatever between Samsara and Nirvana; there is no distinction whatever between Nirvana and Samsara” (1997, 209; Karita 25.19). Zen Buddhists took this to mean that having a preference for Nirvana is a form of craving, so Nirvana would come to only those without any desire at all, in a moment not of their choosing, right in the middle of the natural course of events. Hence, the Zen master’s resort to the koan’s non sequitor, which is designed to destroy the craving for salvation. Ideally, the monk has neither preferences nor nonpreferences and cannot be said to be free in the way that Lehrer has deﬁned it. We have argued that these different estimations of the signiﬁcance of the free will question are predicated on different ideas about the self. These ideas about the self may be rooted in still deeper suppositions about moral signiﬁcance. In the religious traditions of Europe, the moral signiﬁcance of creatures is primarily predicated on a will that is truly their own: people are thought to have earned salvation or damnation to the extent that they have had a choice. In the Buddhist tradition, moral signiﬁcance is predicated on the ability to feel suffering: concern is due not just to rational beings, but all sentient beings. Both of these could be contrasted, for instance, to Native American religions, which accord moral signiﬁcance to mountains and rivers, which presumably can neither choose nor feel but which still play a role in the cycle of life. Our coverage of Buddhism has been very general and we have been forced to be selective in what we have discussed. Our purpose here has not been to argue the truth of compatiblism or incompatiblism, nor has it been our intent to conclude that Buddhists or Euro-American philosophers are right or wrong. Rather, our principal purpose has been to draw attention to background assumptions from which the current debate has arisen and to

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offer a different and arguably challenging perspective from Asia. What we hope we have demonstrated is that presumptions about selfhood and moral signiﬁcance inﬂuence our intuitions and the questions we regard as important to ask. And if indeed it should turn out that belief in a deluded form of self is the origin of suffering, or that animals and even mountains and rivers are worthy of moral respect, then these are not things we would want to take for granted as we reﬂect, as did Frankfurt, on “our most humane concern with ourselves and the source of what we regard as most important and most problematical in our lives” (1971, 6). Acknowledgments We would like to thank Joseph Keim Campbell and Michael Myers for very constructive comments and criticisms, and we are grateful to Michael O’Rourke and P. J. Ivanhoe for their encouragement. Notes 1. Cited in Stcherbatsky (1958, 133). 2. Cited in Keown (1992, 215). 3. One could say that the issue was ﬁrst raised by the Stoics, who criticized Epicurus’s attempt to introduce indeterminism among the atoms, but what is entirely missing from Greco-Roman philosophy is the concept of a fully self-determining will. Furthermore, Epicurus’s indeterminism is no more successful in addressing free will than those who would now want to appeal to Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle. Finally, it is clear that modernist concepts such as autonomy and the separation of fact and value were indeed anticipated and afﬁrmed by some ancient schools of thought, such as Sankhya-Yoga, Jainism, Indian and Greek atomism, and Chinese Mohism. 4. For example, see Hudson (1973, 1985), Gudmunsen (1977), and Katz (1983). 5. See Gier (1991). 6. See Gier (2000, chap. 2) and the Series Introduction by David Ray Grifﬁn in any volume of SUNY Press’s Series on Constructive Postmodern Thought. 7. Mahavedallasutta, I.293. 8. Majjhima Nikaya II.214ff., cited in Gomez (1975, 84–85). We are indebted to Gomez for both texts and insights.

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9. Majjhima Nikaya I.190–191, cited in Kalupahana (1976, 64). The pronoun has been changed to “they” to avoid the exclusive “he.” 10. See Galston (1991, passim, 230), and Galston (1995) for a revised view of the self. See Macedo (1990, passim, 220–221), for “situated autonomy.” 11. See Kalupahana (1976, chap. 3). 12. Garﬁeld (2002, 73–76). “All of the standard desiderata of good theories apply— economy, elegance, predictive power, conﬁrmation, coherence with other theories, and so on . . . . Then we can pay attention to . . . interdependence, and its multiple, multidimensional, inter- and intra-level character—and let a thousand entities bloom, requiring of each only that it genuinely toil and spin, accomplishing some real explanatory work . . .” (75). 13. Kalupahana (1976, 28). Reading Kapulahana more carefully than her teacher, Gier’s student Kaylani Merrill shows that Buddhist conditionality has a different logic. The Buddha used a Pali locative absolute to describe conditionality. The grammar of ‘when that, then this’ is opposed to the ‘if, then’ formula found in European forms of sentential logic. See Kalupahana (1992, 57). 14. Conze (1962, 149). The difference between abstract and concrete here can be explained with the distinction between rational or aesthetic order. See Gier (2001). 15. Bhikkhu Buddhadasa recorded a long tradition of a metaphorical interpretation of the realms of existence. See Buddhadasa (1972). 16. We are indebted to Joseph Goldstein for this statement and this insightful way of redeﬁning karma. See Goldstein (1999, 291). The deﬁnition of karma as volitional action is not only good Pali Buddhism but it is also the position of the great Mahayanist philosopher Vasubandhu: “karma is will (cetana) and voluntary action (cetayita karanam)” (cited in Stcherbatsky 1974, 32). 17. For the best comparative studies of the Buddha and Hume, see Betty (1971) and Giles (1993). 18. Cited in Conze (1962, 149). 19. Kalupahana (1987, 20–21). Kalupahana’s Pali has been changed to Sanskrit. 20. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1139b4–1139b5 (1975, Ostwald trans.). 21. See the “Nature” and “Spirit” sections of Nishida (1990). 22. See Garﬁeld (2002) for the best comparative analysis of this issue. 23. See Mabbett (1995, 203). For a constructive postmodern interpretation see Kalupahana (1992, 1986). 24. Garﬁeld (1995); Streng (1967, 181–220).

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25. Cited in Tsong-Karpa (1977, 117). 26. See Gier (1983). 27. See Herman (1983, 287–288). 28. Conze (1975, 25).

References Aristotle. 1975. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by M. Ostwald. Old Tappan, N.J.: Macmillan. Betty, L. S. 1971. “The Buddhist-Humean Parallels: Postmortem.” Philosophy East and West 21: 237–254. Bradley, F. H. 1930. Appearance and Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Buddhadasa, B. 1972. Toward Truth. D. K. Swearer, ed. Philadelphia, Pa.: Westminster Press. Conze, E. 1962. Buddhist Thought in India. London: George Allen and Unwin. . trans. 1975. Buddhist Wisdom Books. London: George Allen and Unwin. Frankfurt, H. G. 1971. “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person.” Journal of Philosophy 68: 5–20. Galston, W. 1991. Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . 1995. “Liberal Virtues and the Formation of Civic Character.” In M. A. Glendon and D. Blankenhorn, eds., The Seedbeds of Virtue: Sources of Competence, Character, and Citizenship in American Society. Lanham, Md.: Madison Books. Garﬁeld, J. L. 1995. The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way. New York: Oxford University Press. . 2002. Empty Words: Buddhist Philosophy and Cross-Cultural Interpretation. New York: Oxford University Press. Gier, N. F. 1983. “Dialectic: East and West.” Indian Philosophical Quarterly 10: 207–218. . 1991. “Three Types of Divine Power.” Process Studies 20: 221–232. . 2000. Spiritual Titanism: Indian, Chinese, and Western Perspectives. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press. . 2001. “Synthetic Reason, Aesthetic Order, and the Grammar of Virtue.” Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 18: 13–28.

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Giles, J. 1993. “The No-Self Theory: Hume, Buddhism, and Personal Identity.” Philosophy East and West 43: 175–200. Goldstein, J. 1999. “Cause and Effect.” In J. Smith, ed., Radiant Mind: Essential Buddhist Teachings and Texts. New York: Riverhead Books. Gomez, L. O. 1975. “Some Aspects of Free-Will in the Nikayas.” Philosophy East and West 25: 81–90. Gudmunsen, C. 1977. Wittgenstein and Buddhism. New York: Barnes and Noble. Harvey, P. 1993. “The Mind–Body Relationship in Pali Buddhism: A Philosophical Investigation.” Asian Philosophy 3: 29–41. Herman, A. L. 1983. An Introduction to Buddhist Thought. Landham, Md.: University Press of America. Hudson, H. 1973. “Wittgenstein and Zen Buddhism.” Philosophy East and West 23: 471–482. . 1985. “Wittgenstein and Nagarjuna.” Philosophy East and West 35: 157–170. Hume, D. 1978. A Treatise of Human Nature. New York: Oxford University Press. Katz, N. 1983. “Nagarjuna and Wittgenstein on Error.” In N. Katz, ed., Buddhist and Western Philosophy. Atlantic Heights, N.J.: Humanities Press. Kalupahana, D. J. 1976. Buddhist Philosophy: A Historical Analysis. Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press. . 1986. Nagarjuna: Philosophy of the Middle Way. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press. . 1987. The Principles of Buddhist Psychology. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press. . 1992. A History of Buddhist Philosophy: Continuities and Discontinuities. Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press. Keown, D. 1992. The Nature of Buddhist Ethics. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Macedo, S. 1990. Liberal Virtues. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mabbett, I. W. 1995. “Nagarjuna and Deconstruction.” Philosophy East and West 45: 203–226. McCagney, N. 1997. Nagarjuna and the Philosophy of Openness. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littleﬁeld. Nishida, N. 1990. An Inquiry Into the Good. M. Abe and C. Ives, trans. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Robinson, R. H. and W. L. Johnson. 1992. The Buddhist Religion: A Historical Introduction. Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth.

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Schumann, H. W. 1973. Buddhism: An Outline of its Teachings and Schools. Georg Feuerstein, trans. London: Rider. Stcherbatsky, T. 1958. Buddhist Logic. The Hague: Mouton and Company. . 1974. The Central Conception of Buddhism. New Delhi: Motilal Barnarsidass. Streng, F. J. 1967. Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning. Nashville: Abingdon Press. Tsong-Karpa. 1977. Tantra in Tibet. London: Allen and Unwin. Verma, S. 1970. The Metaphysical Foundations of Gandhi’s Thought. New Delhi: Orient Longmans. Whitehead, A. N. 1978. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. New York: Free Press.

14

After Compatibilism and Incompatibilism

Ted Honderich

1

Determinism and Whether It Is True

You can take determinism to be the family of views, a few of them clear and otherwise conceptually adequate, that our decisions and the like and also our actions ﬂowing from them are the effects of certain ordinary causal sequences. These personal events are necessitated by initial and also by subsequent causal circumstances that make up the causal sequences. Has this determinism been shown to be false? Whether we actually experience its being false, which is to say become aware of its falsehood in the course of our deciding and acting, has been disputed. From the seventeenth century right up to an issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies the other year (Searle 2000), some philosophers have said that we do indeed experience the falsehood of determinism. We learn or somehow get the truth that at least sometimes our decisions and actions are not ordinary effects. That is, in deciding and acting we ordinarily have a certain idea of freedom, and we also somehow see that we do actually have this freedom— that we are having it in the course of the deciding and acting. It is part of our consciousness of pieces of deciding and acting that they could go the other way instead, given things exactly as they are and were. Rather than being ordinary effects, the decisions and actions are originated. To say they are originated is to refer to some special mental or neural generative activity that takes the explanatory place of ordinary and clear causation. Often an attempt is made by philosophers to describe this generative activity itself. It is described as being a matter of extraordinary or funny causes, even self-causes, or creative endeavors, or teleology, or ordinary English verbs oddly understood, or something sui generis, or reasons

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in a particular sense of the term where they are not only terms of logical relations, premises for conclusions, but events—although of course not ordinary causal events. Events of some kind are needed, of course, for the explanation of other events—the decisions and actions.1 All of these descriptions of origination are found unclear or factitious by other philosophers, unsurprisingly. But that is not the end of origination. To say decisions and actions are sometimes originated can be to say no more than that our decisions and actions come about in such a way, whatever it is, that certain attitudes on our part are in order. These attitudes include certain hopes for the future and the particular moral approval that credits us with a particular kind of moral responsibility, and so on. To say the lesser thing is to say something perfectly intelligible.2 Nor does it become unintelligible if you go further and say that our decisions are somehow within our control or up to us, whatever that comes to, and hence that certain attitudes are in place.3 Against the idea that in deciding and acting we actually experience the falsehood of determinism, other philosophers have said or contemplated4 that what we ordinarily experience in deciding and acting is something quite different from an absence of effects. We have the idea that decisions and the like are effects but not effects of a particular kind—and we can know this idea ﬁts the facts. That is, decisions and acts are not effects of compelling, constraining, or inhibiting causal circumstances—causal circumstances in conﬂict with our desires, wills, personalities, or characters. As we discern in these typical cases, there is nothing that is forcing our decisions on us. There is an absence of compulsion or the like. We know that in this clear sense the thing can go the other way. There is the freedom of voluntariness, as distinct from origination. Determinism is left perfectly possible by it. Whatever is to be said of this dispute about deciding and acting with respect to determinism, of which more in a minute, there is a truth about the rest of our common experience, including our actual experience in science—and in neuroscience most relevantly. It is that this wider experience leads us towards the view, a second determinism, that all experienced events other than decisions and actions are effects of ordinary causal sequences. If this is so, we surely have good reason, a strong inferential base, for taking the same to be true of the decisions and actions.

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Certainly with nature as we encounter it in our lives, and also with machines, and most importantly with our bodies, we do know of sequences of causal circumstances for the events in them. We have at least some evidence. At breakfast, no spoon levitates. At work, no keyboard or lever fails inexplicably or truly randomly. No event in my central nervous system is a real mystery, something of which there is no ordinary causal explanation to be had. We know enough of ordinary events outside of our deciding and acting to know—what indeed our very language of causation expresses— that they are effects of ordinary causal sequences. Do you say that our experience of other ordinary events than our decisions and actions is one thing and our theory, particularly our quantum theory, is another? You may indeed, but without great effect on some of your listeners, particularly some who were on hand for Professor Earman’s admirable tour of the subject at the 2001 Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference.5 We are not all overwhelmed by science put to philosophical purposes, or science when it becomes philosophy. After nearly a century during which the indeterministic interpretation of quantum theory might have been proved, corroborated, supported by direct and univocal experimental evidence along these deﬁnite lines, it has not been. This shouldn’t be overlooked with deference. Nor has anyone dispatched the relevant proposition, annoying to practical-minded physicists, that two theories can both work even if they are inconsistent and hence one of them is false. It has not even been made clear, of the items in quantum theory as interpreted that are said not to be effects, that they are indubitably in the category of things said by determinists of the several kinds to be effects. That is, it has not been made clear these items are events, individuals in a stretch of space and time as distinct from abstract entities. No determinist with his head screwed on frontwards has ever said one end of an equation is the effect of the other, or that a ﬁgure’s having angles adding up to 180 degrees is the effect of its being a triangle. It has become apparent that the indeterministic interpretation of quantum theory has a nature akin to that of a philosophical theory, or indeed just is a philosophical theory. I have in mind a theory that is at a certain distance from experience and experimental data, and also mathematics, and that aspires instead to the essence of philosophy. That is a kind of logic,

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which is to say greater conceptual adequacy than that found in science— higher standards of clarity, consistency, completeness, and so on. That a theory may fail dismally in this aspiration, ﬁrst of all on account of being self-contradictory, as the indeterminist interpretation of quantum theory has so often been and admitted to be, does not remove it from the class of philosophical or would-be philosophical theories. About the truth of a determinism of decisions and actions, it is worth remarking, too, that the supposed microindeterminism based on quantum theory would almost certainly not touch the matter if it really were a fact. It would almost certainly be consistent with the determinism of decisions and actions, a macrodeterminism related to the macrodeterminism of neuroscience. It would be as consistent as it would be with that determinism of the ordinary world remarked on earlier—the absence of levitating spoons and so on.6 For the purposes of this paper, a determinism of decisions and actions will be taken as a reasonable assumption. This paper does not assume, with the author of the piece in the earlier issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies (Searle 2000), that causation works upwards or simultaneously with brain and mind in deciding and acting, but does not work sideways or across time with respect to these activities. That is, this paper does not assume that quantum theory as interpreted does not relate numerically different if simultaneous macroevents in choosing and acting, but does relate earlier and later ones. This paper does not assume either, with respect to sideways relations in general, that our brains and minds jump back and forth between quantum theory as interpreted, and causation, depending on whether we are deciding something or, on the other hand, just seeing or thinking something. This stuff, to my mind, is a dog’s breakfast (Honderich 2001a). What most moves me to this un-American intemperateness, perhaps, is that there can be no doubt whatever, as we shall soon be seeing, that certain desires are in play with respect to determinism and freedom. They are the stuff of attitudes of hope, moral approval, conﬁdence in belief, personal pride, and so on. Something like this is rightly allowed by such open libertarians as Kane (1996). They are deep desires, sometimes with religion in them. They are more in play than desires in some other parts of philosophy. To speak generally, we want a certain freedom and the dignity it gives us, and it seems we want them more as retirement approaches. When

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suddenly it turns out that an interpretation of quantum theory, until now supposed to be a perfectly general theory of reality, can be understood as operating in so friendly and local and inconsistent a fashion as to satisfy a philosopher’s deep desire, it is possible to wonder, to vary the metaphor, which is the dog and which is the tail. And let me remark on one other reason for my assumption of determinism and my intemperateness. Some philosophers, as you have heard, look into their experience of deciding and acting and see that it is uncompelled. Whatever introspection comes to, that is something they can actually do, as implied above. I am indeed aware that what is making me hand over my wallet is the man with the gun. But can I look into my experience and see that it is uncaused? Of course not. That fact, if it is one, is something outside the experience, presumably prior to it. Does more need to be said? Some other time. 2

Incompatibilism and Compatibilism, Their Falsehood, and Attitudinism

To turn now from the truth of determinism to its consequences or upshot for us, we have one regiment of philosophers saying that in our consciousness of deciding and acting we have our idea of freedom and it is inconsistent with determinism. And we have the other regiment of philosophers agreeing that in our deciding and acting we have our idea of freedom, anyway typically, and it is consistent with determinism. The ﬁrst regiment assigns to us the idea of origination, along with voluntariness of course, and the second regiment assigns to us only the idea of voluntariness. Each side says we have only their preferred conception. Or, both regiments hedge their bets, and say that their preferred conception is the only one somehow important to us (Kane 2002). These contentions can come to seem very remarkable. In moving and after moving my ﬁnger to the left rather than the right, or in and after voting for the Left rather than the Right, I can have either idea of freedom with respect to my experience. I can have it if I haven’t read or heard a word of philosophy. I can have either idea this very moment about moving my ﬁnger. So can you and anybody else. What could the incompatibilist philosopher conceivably say to stop me having the compatibilist idea of voluntariness? It’s true of my moving my ﬁnger at the moment, certainly. What could the compatibilist philosopher

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say to stop me having the incompatibilist idea of orgination? It’s intelligible if it doesn’t go too far, and it’s no contradiction, and it can come to me even if I take determinism to be true. For these ideas it’s a free country, isn’t it? Is the incompatibilist’s contention, or the compatibilist’s, actually the thriller that we have his idea more often? Does the incompatibilist’s contention reduce to the seeming philosophical scandal that his idea about us accords to us something he wants as a person, some ascendancy or elevation above nature or the rest of nature? Is the compatibilist’s contention really that the claim of our voluntariness is the only claim as to freedom that he in his conventional clear-mindedness ﬁnds reassuring? That we all have both ideas of freedom and, so to speak, make use of them and are supported by them to about the same extent, has seemed to me patently true. That is to say that both incompatibilism and compatibilism are false. They are and always have been doctrines to the effect that we all have a single, settled idea of freedom. They have always agreed in that. Remember Hume, for a start, about all mankind agreeing about liberty (1963 [1748], 95). That they are false is better conﬁrmed, indeed demonstrated, by reﬂection on other things than our experience of deciding and acting. There are whole structures of our culture and social life that not merely give evidence of but are informed by either one or the other of the two ideas of freedom we all have. They provide a kind of large-scale behavioral proof that we have the two ideas. We have retributive punishment, based on an assumption of the origination of offences by offenders. Some of our societies kill offenders by way of this idea. But we also have preventive punishment, which requires no such assumption. What lies behind the two practices or impulses—and also various practices or impulses of reward—are other things that are as conﬁrmatory in themselves of our all having both ideas of freedom. These are two kinds of moral attitudes toward holding people responsible and crediting them with responsibility. In a sentence, I can disapprove of you morally for not having done otherwise given the past and present as they were, and I can disapprove of you, differently, for being the person who willingly did that awful thing out of your very own character and personality and nothing else. It is as true, to revert to the external rather than the attitudinal world, that the social and legal structures of individual rights ordinarily have to do

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with ensuring only the voluntariness of actions by individuals. What the framers of bills of rights have in mind, obviously, is to secure that we are preserved from certain constraints and compulsions—that we have the freedom of voluntariness. On the other hand, while we have no signiﬁcant structures for the preservation of origination, since this is not within our power, we do in our lives give about as important a place to origination. It is one large assumption about ourselves that enables us to separate ourselves from the rest of conscious life, what used to be called the animal kingdom. Our assumption is a part of what explained, recently, the willingness of England to cure cows of an ailment bearable to them and harmless to us by killing and burning endless numbers of them. We do not allow that we can kill people in order to keep up market prices. It is indeed a second assumption of this rapid paper, then, that both incompatibilism and compatibilism are false. The supposed problem of consistency dividing the two regiments of philosophers collapses into nothing as soon as it is seen there is no single concept of ours in this neighborhood about which a question of its consistency with determinism arises, but rather two concepts, one of which is patently inconsistent with determinism and one of which is patently not. Incompatibilism and compatibilism are answers to a question with a false presupposition, that we have but one conception of freedom, or one important conception, and they themselves assert or presuppose that falsehood. Having been impressed by some of the previous pieces in this book, are you still as unpersuaded as an editor of this volume is or was?7 Do you say something along the following lines? “Compatibilism is the thesis that determinism is consistent with the claim that persons often have moral freedom or free will. Incompatibilism is the denial of compatibilism. How can they both be false? Doesn’t this conﬂict with the law of the excluded middle?” The answer is that it doesn’t if there is no such thing as the claim that persons often have moral freedom or free will—which there isn’t—and one of two claims here is inconsistent with determinism and one isn’t. Being as stubborn as philosophers ought to be, do you now say something of the following sort? “Philosophers who work on moral freedom are concerned to provide an account of what it is for somebody’s actions to be up to him or something of the sort. Incompatibilists say one thing, compatibilists

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another, about our shared belief of what it is for something to be up to him. It isn’t as if there is a prephilosophical or pretheoretical notion of origination and a different prephilosophical notion of voluntariness.” Well, your third proposition there is the conclusion you’re supposed to be arguing for. And your ﬁrst two propositions also beg the question. What you need is an argument for the proposition that we have only one idea, or one important idea, of what it is for somebody’s action to be up to him. And most certainly, by the way, you get no such thing in concentrating on what is called the consequence argument of the incompatibilists—the thought that something can’t be up to somebody if it is the consequence of something in the remote past that wasn’t up to him. Or by concentrating on the compatibilist thought that somebody can be morally responsible for something even if they couldn’t do otherwise—what is called the argument for alternative possibilities. But for my reasons for saying so, if you can’t now guess them, you will have to look elsewhere (2002a, 115–121; 2002b, 469–473). 3

One Remaining Problem, and the Response of Afﬁrmation

So exit a question about consistency with a false presupposition, the presupposition that we have one conception of freedom. And exit incompatibilism and compatibilism. What is right is attitudinism—that we all have two families of attitudes, one family containing one of the two conceptions of freedom. In that case, what is our real philosophical situation? Well, the two conceptions do indeed enter into and are indeed bound up with attitudes and practices with fundamental places in our lives. So there is a remaining problem of determinism and freedom. It has seemed to me to be the problem that results from taking determinism to be true, or from contemplating its truth, the problem of giving up or contemplating giving up what is inconsistent with it, that the attitudes and practices bound up with the idea of origination, at bottom certain desires. The possibility can come to mind, incidentally, that this real problem has in fact been the concern of at least some compatibilists who have purported to be proving to us, one more time, that voluntariness by itself is our only idea of freedom or our only signiﬁcant idea. One way in which you can try to give up an idea or belief and what goes with it, is to try to persuade yourself that you don’t actually have the idea or belief. You are more

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likely to fall into the strategy out of an excessively intellectual orientation to our existence. In any case, the real problem of determinism has seemed to me the given kind of practical problem. It is the problem of how to do something, the problem of how to accept the frustration of deep desires, those bound up with origination. We want the content of certain hopes, as already remarked, which is to say futures in a sense open as distinct from being only a matter of agreeable necessity. We want the reassurance of certain moral attitudes. Also, we want a conﬁdence that our inquiries of various kinds, our pursuits of knowledge, are in a way unlimited as well as unfettered. So it is with our nonmoral attitudes to others—personal attitudes. By attention to these latter attitudes, Peter Strawson (1962) moved the philosophy of determinism and freedom towards an awareness of the various attitudes that seem to be its actual subject matter. The practical problem is not to be solved by a kind of collapse, a response of dismay to determinism. This, in short, is a kind of concentration on the particular kind of hopes, conﬁdence in beliefs, personal feelings and so on that are inconsistent with determinism. For a start, there is no rationality in persisting in dismay when something else may be possible. Also this response will not be a settled one. Nor is the practical problem solved by another response to determinism, an intransigence. This is a kind of concentration on the kind of hopes and so on that is consistent with determinism. For a start this response is also unsettled, vulnerable to the other one. It has been my own proposal until recently that the best response to determinism is something called afﬁrmation (2002a, ch. 10; 1988, ch. 9). This consists in perceiving and valuing the life consistent with determinism, perceiving and valuing certain attitudes, relationships, and structures of culture, and thereby giving up the life inconsistent with determinism. The response is usefully parodied as a case of looking on the bright side, and is indeed a part of a philosophy of life. This afﬁrmation recommends itself, but it can be supposed that particular means or strategies can also be of use in connection with it. One such strategy is a kind of satisfying naturalism in other than the current philosophical sense—the satisfying naturalism that can be called taking up membership in nature, maybe Nature. Another means, requiring no sensibility or poetry, is contemplating escape from certain of the feelings inconsistent

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with determinism, notably the special guilt and failure associated with our images of origination in connection with our own actions. None of this is likely to be successful, essentially because of the strength of our desires. It has seemed to me that success in the project of afﬁrmation will be owed, in the end, to nothing other than plain and settled belief in determinism. That remains rare, a lot rarer than contemplating the truth of determinism—taking it as something in need of being considered. It has seemed to me that we or most of us, and perhaps more of our successors, will succeed in the response of afﬁrmation only when we really believe of the things we dearly want that we do not have them and cannot ever have them. 4

Another Problem

Thomas Nagel in an account of determinism and freedom (1986) remarks that he changes his mind about the subject every time he thinks about it, and others may at least be tempted to carry on like this, as lately I have been. A question can be raised in your mind, indeed something like a conviction, about such an attitudinal view as the one just outlined and the project of afﬁrmation—or for that matter about compatibilism. But my concern is attitudinism and the project. The principal point is that a persistent question can be raised in your mind about attitudinism—mainly what is said of the role of the idea of origination—and about afﬁrmation. A question can be raised about them by way of reﬂective attention to your own life. A question can be raised, that is, by indulgence in autobiographical thinking or writing, at any rate if it has had in it actions and so on such that you would think better of your life and yourself now if they were missing (see 2001b, 395–399). It can seem impossible not to feel responsible in a certain way for what you have done. This is to disapprove morally of yourself in a certain way, at bottom to have certain desires of several kinds. This disapproval is akin to the disapproval of which we know, the kind that carries in it an idea or image of the initiation of your actions that is inconsistent with determinism—origination. You are not saved from this self-doubt, self-accusation, or guilt by the thought that you seem to be wanting your past to have been inconsistent with determinism. Rather, you are stuck with the thought, aren’t you, that there is some fact about your past that enters into the disapproval? It is

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certainly relevant that the disapproval is unhappy and self-diminishing, not something agreeable. That is not the end of the story about autobiographical reﬂection, but only half of it. Very likely your dealings with your past are not all of them judgemental, not all of them concerned with moral or other disapproval or approval. Often, if you get started on this reﬂection, what you want is just to understand. The aim is explanation of what happened, not judgement on it (see Richardson and Bishop 2002). And, to come toward the point, the terrible fact is that you can deal with your past life in this way and fall into no doubt whatever about determinism. No doubt whatever that everything that happened did have an explanation in the ordinary and indeed the only real sense. That stuff wasn’t random. It was ordinary effects. Indeed you can increase your conviction of the truth of determinism. That, at any rate, has been my experience. This is owed, presumably, to nothing arcane, but just to your coming to more knowledge about a subject matter, maybe reading your diary and putting together facts. So, here is a seeming contradiction. A kind of disapproval exists and seems to be based on some fact. The natural candidate is origination—but since determinism is the case, there is no origination (2002a, 2004a, ch. 12). The seeming contradiction is something like the different and absolutely intractable one announced by Kant, also as a result of something about morality (1950 [1781]). Kant rightly did not respond in the compatibilist way of course, by just giving up the proposition of indeterminism and going on about freedom as being only voluntariness. Rather, he announced that he would have both of the determinism and the indeterminism, by putting them in different places. Determinism in or for the phenomenal world, indeterminism in the noumenal world. This higher compatibilism, entirely at odds with ordinary or mundane compatibilism, seems hopeless. A distinction between two worlds is of course possible, and has a number of philosophical versions, several of them less metaphysical than Kant’s. But there seems no hope whatsoever of locating indeterminism and freedom signiﬁcantly in only one of them, and certainly no hope for taking it out of the experienced world entirely. In any case, since what is undetermined and free must in some sense turn up in both worlds, it is impossible to see that the contradiction is actually escaped. Is it conceivable that some philosophical idea as radical as Kant’s can have a better hope of dealing with the seeming contradiction? In particular,

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to come to the crux, is it conceivable that we can by some idea or other persist in certain attitudes—close to the attitudes tied up with origination— persist in these attitudes without recourse to origination and consistently with determinism? 5

Perceptual Consciousness, Causal Lines

Let me lay out a couple of lines of thought. Both of them do indicate more of how radical it seems to me we need to be—it isn’t a matter of anything like more tinkering with origination. Both of them just might be of use, too, with the seeming contradiction. The ﬁrst has to do with the nature of consciousness, the second with causation and explanation. What is it for you to be aware of this room now? More generally, on the assumption that consciousness divides into perceptual, reﬂective, and affective parts, what is it for you to be perceptually conscious? Two sorts of general answer are given, and also given with respect to the other two parts of consciousness. One sort of answer, if you will allow a quick but enlightening parody, is that perceptual consciousness is cells. It is neural activity. This is the old physicalism about the mind of the seventeenth century, a physicalism that now includes functionalism and cognitive science with philosophical ambition. The other answer is only more disgraceful in terms of the physicalist conventionality of our current philosophy of mind. It is not often given openly, but is implied by the increasing resistance to the idea that consciousness is cells. This other answer, not much parodied, is that consciousness is nonphysical stuff in heads. It is possible to be attracted, as I am, to a quite general physicalism—the view that all that exists is something close to physical. It is possible to be attracted too, likely by way of the fact of the subjectivity of consciousness, to the intolerable idea that perceptual consciousnessness is indeed funny stuff in heads. You might think this situation is rather like what we have been considering, attraction to both determinism and to something that so far has been sunk in indeterminism. It seems to me possible that the situation with perceptual consciousness will be resolved by a radical view of this consciousness. What is it, really, for you now to be aware of this room? It is for the room in a way to exist. That answer can be shown not to be merely a rhetorical

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way of saying no more than that you are aware of the room. It is not a nonanalysis. Rather, the claim that your perceptual consciousness consists in a kind of existence of a world consists in the claim that there is a certain state of affairs, certainly not in your head. It is things, reasonably called chairs and the like, being in space and time and dependent both on another world, roughly speaking the relevant atoms, and also on your neurons in particular. The world in question is anterior to the physical world, the one dependent both on atoms and crucially on all of us, above all our shared perceptual apparatus. A few words delivered on the wing are unlikely to persuade you of this doctrine, ‘consciousness as existence’ (2000, 2001c, 2004b). My ﬁrst and lesser aim, as you have heard, is to indicate something of the order of differentness of thought that seems needed if we are to make a further and better escape from three centuries of impasse in the philosophy of determinism and freedom. In the doctrine about perceptual consciousness, a general physicalism is in a way held onto, and the mystery of nonphysical stuff in the head absolutely abandoned. But what attracted us to the stuff in the head, its recommendation, is delivered to us by other means. Above all, we are offered a real subjectivity, something clear on this subject. This is your world of perceptual consciousness, different from the shared physical world. Given the history and state of the philosophy of determinism and freedom, is it not clear that only so signiﬁcant a departure from the cart tracks, and maybe one’s own recent tracks, has a chance? Might it be that we have a chance of dealing with the seeming contradiction involving determinism and certain attitudes by way of reﬂection on the nature of consciousness—and in particular on consciousness as existence? Searle thinks something like the ﬁrst thing, and so, after all, if I may be permitted another moment of un-American philosophical activity, there may be one thing in his paper that is right. Surely no question of freedom could arise about just exactly a physical world—a world in which we are present only as conceived in the current physicalism of the philosophy of mind. To say a word now of a particular idea about determinism and consciousness, the autobiographical feelings of responsibility that persist despite determinism are a matter of a certain individualism. If my feelings of this kind cannot rest on my having originated my life, so to speak, can they rest on the fact that my consciousness consists in what can be called the private ownership of some reality?

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Consciousness as existence does not leave me, so to speak, outside the world and merely its product. Rather, my being aware of things is my having a standing that in a certain sense is creative, at any rate constructive. A world of perceptual consciousness, a world anterior to the physical world and no more mental, actually depends not only on atoms but on me. Do I thus have a role or station that makes sense of feelings like those that have hitherto been assigned to origination? (2002a, 147–151; cf. 2001b, 395–399). To ﬁnish up here, let me add, for all of us and particularly for the one or two open-minded graduate students of our age, another indication of the extent to which we should think of abandoning the philosophy of determinism and freedom as we have it and making a new start in this new millenium. This has to do with causation and explanation. A causal circumstance, as you know, is a set of events that necessitated an effect. We typically isolate one of those events and say it caused the effect, or indeed was the cause of the effect—as against another mere condition of the effect, another event in the causal circumstance. This could be the human action in the set, and will hardly ever be the presence of oxygen. In general it is the event that most interests us or the event that it is in our interests to isolate. Suppose you now set about explaining something in a life, perhaps a pattern of it or a culmination of it, and you take that pattern or culmination to be the effect of a causal sequence, this being a past array of causal circumstances. You can now do the further thing of isolating a cause in each of the causal circumstances or maybe just some of them. This gives you what can be called a causal line within and from the beginning of the sequence to the pattern or culmination. It may be that this is much of what is had in mind by Alasdair MacIntyre (1981) and other philosophers who speak of a narrative in connection with a life. There is a problem about isolating a single condition in a causal circumstance and dignifying it as the cause. The problem, a paradox if you will, is that in a clear sense this cause is no more explanatory of the effect than any other condition in the causal circumstance. All are required or necessary conditions. But the cause seems to be exactly that—more explanatory. That is exactly what is conveyed by calling it the cause. Evidently there is the very same problem about a causal line. In a clear sense it cannot be more explanatory than any other chosen succession of items or states, say presences of oxygen. But it is more explanatory, isn’t it?

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What this comes to is that the culmination of a life, say, is a matter of plain determinism, but there seems also to be the possibility of some kind of explanation of it that is different in kind. Some kind of departure from determinism, or unexpected addition to it. At any rate there is a problem or paradox here. The putative explanation would be consistent with determinism, indeed within it, but different in kind. I wonder if the thing is worth reﬂection in connection with determinism and the attitudes in which we can ﬁnd ourselves persisting, but I mainly offer it here as another indication of the extent to which we should start out anew with determinism and freedom (2002a, 151–153; 2001b, 399–415). It may be that we shall get nowhere. If so, I myself shall go beyond compatibilism and incompatibilism only to the attitudinism and the project of afﬁrmation. Sticking to this will have to involve something like seeing that what presents itself as a certain moral attitude to oneself and one’s past is in fact moralism, indeed a kind of moralized self-abuse. But this afﬁrmation will not be perfect contentment. Notes 1. There would be no hope, of course, in replacing ordinary causation with reasons conceived as just premises in deductive, inductive, or otherwise normative relations. Reasons in this sense are indeed just propositions standing in relations with other propositions. That there is a good reason in this sense for my doing something, even a reason that overwhelms all others, or even a reason that conﬂicts with nothing, is perfectly consistent with my not doing it at all. Reasons of this ordinary kind explain no actions and cannot conceivably replace ordinary causes in their explanatory role. To speak only of such reasons is to give no explanation of action in the relevant sense. As for reasons in what is perhaps the most ordinary sense, where they are actual causes taken by their owner as rational or the like, sometimes called psychological causes, these deterministic items are of course ruled out for the philosopher of origination from the start. 2. Peter Strawson (1962) spoke for many philosophers before and after him when he spoke of “the obscure and panicky metaphysics” of origination. Galen Strawson (1986) takes the view, in brief, that we do not need to think about determinism since there is nothing intelligible in conﬂict with it in the talk of origination. Father right, son not so right. 3. There is more on origination as I see it, and on other matters considered in this paper, from causation onward, in Honderich (2002a) and (2002b). There is a lot more on almost all relevant matters, for resolute readers, in (1988).

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4. Honderich (2001a). My own contemplation of the proposition about what we ordinarily experience, however, certainly does not issue in support for compatibilism, the doctrine usually associated with it and considered below. 5. For the ﬁnal version of Prof. Earman’s lecture, see the ﬁrst paper in this book, “Determinism: What We Have Learned and What We Still Don’t Know”. Cf. the various contributions in Atmanspacher & Bishop (2002). You need not rush to agree, however, with what may be assumed, that the only conceptually adequate conception of determinism is in terms of physics. 6. These various skeptical thoughts about the indeterminist interpretation of quantum theory and its use in defense of freedom of origination are set out more fully, along with other thoughts of the same tendency, in my (2002a, 71–80) and (1988, 304–334). 7. Joseph Keim Campbell.

References Atmanspacher, H. and R. Bishop. 2002. Between Choice and Chance. Thorverton and Charlottesville: Imprint Academic. Honderich. T. 1988. A Theory of Determinism: The Mind, Neuroscience, and Life-Hopes. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Reprinted in 1990 as the two paperbacks Mind and Brain and The Consequences of Determinism. . 2000. “Consciousness as Existence Again.” In B. Elevitch, ed., Philosophy of Mind: The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, volume 9. Philosophy Documentation Center. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University. Also in Theoria 95. . 2001a. “Mind the Guff: A Response to John Searle.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 8: 62–78. . 2001b. Philosopher: A Kind of Life. London and New York: Routledge. . 2001c. “Consciousness as Existence and the End of Intentionality.” In A. O’Hear, ed., Philosophy at the New Millenium, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures for 2001–2002. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . 2002. How Free Are You? Second edition. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. . 2002a. “Determinism as True, Compatibilism and Incompatibilism as False, and the Real Problem.” In Kane (2002). . 2004a. On Determinism and Freedom (collected papers). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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. 2004b. On Consciousness (collected papers). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hume, D. 1963/1748. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. L. A. Selby-Bigge, ed. Oxford: Clarendon. Kane, R. 1996. The Signiﬁcance of Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press. , ed. 2002. The Oxford Handbook of Free Will. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Kant, I. 1950/1781. Critique of Pure Reason. N. Kemp Smith, trans. London: Macmillan. MacIntyre, A. 1981. After Virtue. London: Duckworth. Nagel, T. 1986. The View From Nowhere. New York: Oxford University Press. Richardson, F. and R. Bishop. 2002. “Rethinking Determinism in Social Science.” In Atmanspacher and Bishop (2002). Searle, J. R. 2000. “Consciousness, Free Action, and the Brain.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 7: 3–22 (“Mind the Gap” issue). Strawson, G. 1986. Freedom and Belief. Oxford, Clarendon Press. Strawson, P. F. 1962. “Freedom and Resentment.” Proceedings of the British Academy 48: 1–25. Reprinted in Studies in the Philosophy of Thought and Action. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1968.

Index

Ability, 216–218, 231, 233, 237, 241–245, 252 basic, 242 strong account of, 231–232, 237, 241, 250 weak account of, 231–233, 237, 241–243, 245, 248–252 Accountability, 114–115, 117–118, 123–124 Action, 7, ch. 4 passim, 108–111, 113, 116–117, 119–124, 126–127, 130, 135–137, 174–175, 181, 206, 217,

Agency/agent, 61–62, 76–77, 87, 174, 205, 283–285, 288, 292 Alienation, 178, 180 Alternative possibilities (also, alternatives), 3–6, 111–112, 114, 126–129, 143, 152, 189, 217 argument for, 312 condition of (AP), 70–72, 74 principle of (PAP), 4, 55, 126–127, 219–222 Annihilationism, 289 Approval, moral, 306, 308, 310,

220, 234, 241, 246, 277, 287, 292, 305–306, 308–310 akratic, 174–175, 179

314–315 Atman, 88–289 Attitudes

autonomous, 174–175, 181 basic, 90–91, 244 consequences of, 217, 220–221

personal, 313 reactive, 152 Attitudinism, 312, 314, 319

courses of, 106

Austin-style examples, 71–72, 79

free, 217–218, 228, 257, 273, 277, 285 future, 128

Autobiographical reﬂection, 314–315 Autonomy, 285, ch. 8 passim

intentional, 243 nonakratic, 174 nonautonomous, 175–176 repertoire of, 242, 244 self-forming, 73–74, 77–82, 85–87 theory of, 174–175 volitional, 287 weak theory of, 250 Afﬁrmation, 313–314, 319

as agency, 174–175 agent, ch. 8 passim as authenticity, 176–178, 186 heroic, 179, 184 normative moral, 176, 183 as psychological independence, 175–176, 179, 183–184 as reasons-responsiveness, 180–181, 184, 186

Index

324

Autonomy (cont.) as self-control, 173–176, 179–180, 184 as self-efﬁcacy, 175

Closure principle, 256 Cognition, 269 Coinstantiation, 240 Compatibilism, 4, 7, 53, 55–56, 60,

Belief, 120–123, 127, 130, 174, 242–245, 250–251 manifesting, 110

63–64, 70, 113, 128–129, 140, 152, 190, 194–195, 197, 199, 203, 215–216, 222–223, 225, 228, ch. 11

Beta blocker, 223 -rule, 5–6, 198, 223–224, 229, 250. See also Unavoidability operator

passim, 271–275, 278, 282, 287, 293, 299, 305, 309–312, 315, 319–320 conditional-analysis argument for, 222

Blame, 274 future, 136, 138, 140–141, 144, 146 past, 136, 138, 140, 144–145

existentialist, 239–240 of free will and indeterminism, 222 logic of, 53

Blameworthiness, ch. 6 passim, 152,

question of, 70–76

162, 164, 166, 168, 173, 178, 186–187 Body, 279, 289, 294

semi-, 6, 190 Conditionality (i.e., dependent coarising), 285–288, 294–297, 301

Brain, 308 in a vat, 255–256, 260 Braino, 50

Consciousness, 286, 288–289, 291, 316–317 as existence, doctrine of, 317–338

Buddha mind, 293 Buddhism Mahayanist, 277–278, 290–294, 299

perceptual, 316–318 Consequence argument, 5–6, 74, 231, 271

Pali, 277–279, 281–291, 299 Zen, 293–294, 299 ‘Can’, 47, 64, 66, 71, 74 ‘Causally determined’, 264 Cause/causation, 47, 56–59, 61–63, 68, 76–77, 82, 108, 127, 130, 156, 174, 231, 240, 251, 278, 280–281, 283–288, 294–295, 305–307, 316, 318 agent, 114, 227–229 efﬁcacy, 109 event, 227 line, 318 self-, 305 Cetana, 289–290 Chaos, 27–28, 78–79 Choice, 70, 73, 81, 84 free, 217–219, 221 having a, 223

Constraint, 2 Context sensitivity, 258–262, 264–267, 270–271 Contextualism epistemological, 255–257, 259–263, 266–275 free will, 255, 258–259, 262–266, 270–275 Control, 78, 82, 85 failure of, 181 guidance, 151–153, 162, 164, 207 plural voluntary, 81 regulative, 151 self, 174–177, 179, 181, 184, 186–187 ‘Could have done otherwise’, 4–5, 262 Counterfactuals, 251 Cravings, 283 Crowding out, 200 Cycles of existence, 278

Index

Decision, 90, 108–109, 111–112, 125, 127, 135, 139, 305–306, 308–310 autonomous, 176 Deliberation, 181, 201, 217–218 mechanism of, ch. 7 passim purpose of, 118–119, 121–122 rational, ch. 5 passim Desert, 135 Desert base, 135 Desire, 48, 131, 174, 242–245,

325

Establish whether P, 235–236 Eternalism, 289 Events, 234–236, 240, 307 concrete, 220, 222 mental, 174 Executions, 244 Existence question, 70, 75 Explanation, 316, 318–319 action, 110, 123 causal, 263–265, 270–273

250–251 external, 178 ﬁrst-order, 298

Facts, 220, 281–282, 284, 286 Fallibilism, 273–274

second-order, 174, 298

Field theory, 27–28

Determinism, 7, ch. 1 passim, 63–65, 76, 109–112, 127–128, 213–215, 217,

relativistic quantum, 29–34, 41 First Noble Truth of Buddhism, 297–298

222–225, 231, 233, 237, 239, 243,

Forcing, 240

248–250, 252, 255, 257, 262, 264, 270–275, 277–278, 283, 285, 293, ch. 14 passim

Four-cornered negation, 295 Frankfurt examples, 5, 55, 136, 138, 139–140, 142, 147, 151–152,

causal, 2, 3, 140–143, 189, 193–198, 200–206, 208 fragility of, 22–23

155–157, 163–164, 167–169 actual sequence, 152, 156–159, 161 alternative sequence, 155–164

hard, 4, 7, 58 Laplacian, ch. 1 passim

‘Free’, 114–115, 262–266, 270–275 ‘Freedom’, 113–114

logical, 2 ontological, 21, 27 soft, 4, 7, 287

Freedom, 51, 64, 67–68, 105–106, 113–116, 123, 125, 151, 231, 251, 255, 257, 262, 264–265, 270–274,

temporal, 2 theological, 2 Dharma, 284

277–280, 283, 285, 290, 293, 297, 308–315, 317–319 absolute spiritual, 278–279

Dialectical stalemate, 196–199, 202–204, 208

of action, 53, 55, 60 concept of, 113–115, 123, 128

Distinction thesis, 154–155, 157 Divergent miracles defense, 251 Domain of dependence, 28–29

conception-neutral reading of, 115–116, 118, 123 conceptions of, 113–114

Doubt, Cartesian, 281

metaphysical, 2, 271 of the mind, 283 minimal notion of, 47, 49 moral, 1–7 political, 2, 271 religious, 2 sense of, ch. 5 passim

Emotions, 279, 282 Empiricism, 281–282 Emptiness, 293 Endorsement, 181 Epistemology, 255–256, 260, 263, 265

Index

326

Free will, 3–4, ch. 3 passim, 105, 113, 115, 128, 175, ch. 10 passim, 243, 277–281, 285, 298–299, 311 as a mystery, 224–227 plurality conditions for, 72, 74 F-type case, 189–191 Functionalism, 278, 288–290, 316 Goals, 131 Gravitation, Newtonian, 25 quantum, 41–43 Hinduism, 279, 288–289

Interdependent coorigination doctrine of, 286, 288, 296 principle of, 283, 287 Intuitions, 166 Involuntariness, 283 Irrationality, 130–131, 169, 175 Jainism, 279, 283–284, 288, 300 Judgment, 86–87 moral, 205 valuational, 114 Justiﬁcation, 117–118, 123, 261, 269, 272–273

Idealism, 277 Yogacara, 278, 290, 293–296, 298

Karma, 283, 287, 290

Imperatives, 130

Karmic bondage, 279, 285

Incompatibilism, 4, 6–7, 58, 63, 65, 67–68, 70, 72, 113, 128, ch. 10 passim, 231, 233, 239, 248, 250,

‘Know’, 259–262, 265–268, 275 Knowledge, 114, 255, 257–262, 265–270, 281

270–272, 274, 299, 305, 309–312, 319 of causal determinism and alternative

Laws causal, 257

possibilities, 189–191 of causal determinism and moral

of nature, 65–68, 109, 213–214, 231, 233, 236–240, 246–252

responsibility, 189, 193–205, 208 of free will and indeterminism, 225–226

physical, 216 psychological, 216 strong accounts of, 231–232, 237–240,

Mind argument for, 222 Indeterminism, 28, 61, 63, 71, 74, 77–86, 106, 109, 112–114, 126–127,

243, 245, 249–250, 252 weak accounts of, 231–233, 237, 239–241, 252

139, 141–143, 197, 200, 217, 222, 224–225, 272, 285, 300, 307–308,

Liar, Paradox of, 225–226 Libertarianism, 4, 6–7, 61, 76, 86,

315–316, 320 hard, 6 Individualism, 317 Inevitability, 108–109 Inference to the best explanation, 269, 273 Intelligibility question, 70, 75–77 Intention, ch. 4 passim, 111, 130–131 Interdependence, 288

297, 308 agent-causal theories of, 77 paradox of, 62–63 teleological intelligibility theories of, 77 Logic, two-valued, 234–235 Luck/chance, 79, 82–83, 228 Madhyamaka, 298 Making happen, 240

Index

327

Manipulation principle, 155–156,

Passivity, 178

160–164, 167, 169–170 Measurement problem in QM,

Perception, 243–244, 269, 284 Personal identity, 177,

31–33

184–185, 279

Meditation, 283 Memory, 269 Metamind, 48, 60

Phronesis, 284 Physicalism, 316–317 antecedent, 208

Middle Way of Buddha, 289 Mindfulness, 282 Modernism, 277, 280–281, 298

Physics, general relativistic, 34–44 Newtonian, 23–28, 36 special relativistic, 28–29

‘Moral responsibility’, 262 Motion, 21–27, 32 Motivating complex of cognitions,

Plenitude, principle of, 75 Possible worlds, 215, 240 Postmodernism

243–244 Multiplicity of conditions, doctrine of, 287

constructive, 278, 289, 291–294, 296–297, 301 deconstructive, 278, 291–295 Power, 71, 74

Narrative, 318 Naturalism, 313 ethical, 284

active, 2 to do otherwise, 219 Pragmatism

Neural processes, 78, 80–81, 83, 87, 263, 316 Neuroscience, 306, 308

American, 279 contextual, 284 Praiseworthiness, 152, 162, 164, 166,

Nihilism, 1, 6–7, 130–131, 288 Nirvana, 279, 281, 283, 294,

168, 173, 178, 186–187 Predictability, 21

298–299 No-responsibility path, 199–200, 202, 206

Preference, ch. 2 passim, 243, 282–283 ﬁrst-level, 50–51

Normativity, 114 No-self, doctrine of, 288

freedom of, 52–56, 60–61 power, 51–54, 56–58, 60, 62–63, 65

Objectivism, 281 Obligation, moral, 124, 144–145

second-level, 50–51 Preference structure, 51–57, 60,

Observables, 36 Omissions, intentional, 135 Omnipotence, 280

62, 65 Prepunishment, 137–138, 145 Primacy condition, 52

Openness, libertarian (L-openness), 138–141 of future, 138 Origination, 6, 305–306, 309–316, 318–319 Overdetermination, 108, 191, 193–195, 200

Prohairesis, 289 Propositions, 234–236, 239–240, 250, 253 Psychology, moral, 2, 174 Punishment, 128, 274, 310 Purposes, 70 Pythagoras’s theorem, 240

Index

328

Quantum gravity, 41–43

Samsara, 283, 299

Quantum mechanics, nonrelativistic, 29–34, 41

Sankhya-Yoga, 279, 288, 300 Sanskara, 289–290

Quantum theory, 307–309, 320

Science, “no laws” view of, 21

Rationality, 61, 72, 78, 86, 180–181, 273 Rationalization, 110–112, 127, 243–244

Self, 131, 174, 278, 288–293, 297–300 Cartesian, 288 empirical (i.e., life principle, jiva),

Realism, 277–278, 290, 292–293, 296 Reasoning practical, 129, 155, 199–201, 204, 206

289–290 false, 177 functional, 288

theoretical, 131 Reasons, 47, 56–58, 62, 112, 117–119, 122–124, ch. 7 passim, 180–181, 184,

governed, 174 governing, 174 phenomenal, 292–294

217, 243, 245, 269–270, 319 moral, 144, 180 Reasons-responsiveness, 151–152, 155, 166, 169, 205, 207

real, 177–179 -reﬂection, 122–123 spectator, 288 ‘Sense’, 115–116

moderate, 151, 153–154, 158–162, 164–171 Reference class, 258

Senses, 279 Sensibility, moral, 186 Sentiment, moral, 144

Relations asymmetrical, doctrine of, 296 causal, 288

Signiﬁcance question, 70 Singularity, spacetime, 37–40, 44 Skepticism, 105, 125, 131, 255–260,

full internal, doctrine of, 296 Render true/false, 216, 234–236,

262, 264, 266–270, 272, 274, 277, 281, 293, 297

246–249 Responsibility, 72, 78–79, 86–87, 114–115, 122 creative, 114 moral, 1–4, 114, 122, 124, 128, 135–136, 139, 143–147, ch. 7 passim,

Sovereignty, 279 Space, container view of, 23–24 Spacetime, anti–de Sitter, 35 classical, 23, 25 Gödel, 35 in GTR, 34–41

173, 176, 182, 184–187, ch. 9 passim, 217–222, 225–226, 231, 257, 273,

Minkowski, 28–29, 37, 40 neo-Newtonian, 25

278, 281, 287–288, 293, 306, 310, 312 moral self-disclosure view, 145–146 prospective, 135–137

Spiritual Titanism, 279 State of affairs, 220–222 Structural connections, 240

retrospective, 135–136

Subjectivism, Cartesian, 281 Substance, 61, 227, 285

Rights, 311 R principle, ch. 5 passim belief-concept reading of, 106, 113–124 commitment-concept reading of, 123 indeterministic reading of, 106–113, 116, 124, 126–128

Teleology, 305 Temptation, 78 Testimony, 269 Transfer of blamelessness, principle of, 189–190

Index

Transfer of nonresponsibility, principle of, ch. 9 passim NR formulation, 190–193, 196–199, 201–205, 207 NR formulation, 191–192, 196 NR formulation, 193–199, 202–203, 208 NRC formulation, 201–203 one-path case of, 192–198, 200–206 two-path case of, 193, 199–200, 204–206 Transfer of powerlessness, principle of, 190 Truth, 234–236, 253 ‘Try’, 91 Trying to act, ch. 4 passim Two truths, doctrine of, 297 Ultimate responsibility condition, 72–75 Ultrachoice, 58 Ultrapreference, 56–61 Unavoidability operator, 5–6, 198, 223–224, 229, 250. See also -rule Unwilling addict, 177 Upanishads, 279, 288 Vagueness, mystery of, 225–226 Value, 177, 281–282, 284, 286 Value experiment, 86 Virtue, 282 Volitional necessity, 176–177 Volitions, 62, 89, 244 Voluntariness, 72, 78, 82, 86, 306, 309–312, 315 Wanton, 184 Will, 70–71, 84–85, 90, 277, 283, 290 weakness of, 169, 177 Will-setting, 72, 74 World phenomenal, 315 state of, 109 Zeno, 22–23, 26

329