Freedom of the Will: A Conditional Analysis (Routledge Studies in Metaphysics)

Freedom of the Will

Routledge Studies in Metaphysics

1. The Semantics and Metaphysics of Natural Kinds Edited by Helen Beebee and Nigel Sabbarton-Leary 2. The Metaphysics of Powers Their Grounding and their Manifestations Edited by Anna Marmodoro 3. Freedom of the Will A Conditional Analysis Ferenc Huoranszki

Freedom of the Will A Conditional Analysis

Ferenc Huoranszki

New York

London

First published 2011 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2011 Taylor & Francis The right of Ferenc Huoranszki to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Huoranszki, Ferenc, 1961Freedom of the will : a conditional analysis / by Ferenc Huoranszki. p. cm. — (Routledge studies in metaphysics ; 3) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Free will and determinism. I. Title. BJ1461.H86 2011 123'.5—dc22 2010022443 ISBN 0-203-83693-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN13: 978-0-415-87947-7 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-83693-4 (ebk)

For Éva

Contents

Acknowledgments 1

Introduction Contingency Intelligibility Spontaneity

ix 1 1 3 5

PART I Free Will and Powers 2

Powers and Possibilities 2.1 Determinism and the Consequence Argument 2.2 Past, Laws, and Choices 2.3 Past, Laws, and Abilities 2.4 Incompatibilist Intuitions

11 12 15 21 27

3

Agency and Responsibility 3.1 Direct Responsibility 3.2 Negligence and Control 3.3 The Power Over Choice 3.4 The Act of Choice

35 37 44 47 50

4

The Conditional Analysis of Free Will 4.1 Moore’s Analysis of Free Will 4.2 The Ability to Act Otherwise 4.3 Circularity and Regress Rejected 4.4 Freedom of Will and Free Actions

54 55 59 68 72

viii Contents 5

Abilities and Control 5.1 Responsibility and Real Options 5.2 Abilities, Opportunities, and Frankfurt’s Cases 5.3 Powers, Skills, and Chances 5.4 Interim Conclusion

75 76 83 89 94

PART II Free Will and Reasons 6

Intelligibility 6.1 Compatibilism and Reasons Dependence 6.2 Reasons and Mental Mechanisms 6.3 Moral Weakness 6.4 Attitudes and Choices

99 102 107 110 115

7

Rationality 7.1 Responsibility and Reasons 7.2 Actions Without Reasons 7.3 Sub Ratione Boni 7.4 Reasons and Rational Control

119 120 123 129 136

8

Spontaneity 8.1 Reasons, Abilities, and Spontaneity 8.2 Ultimate Responsibility 8.3 Motives, Choices, and Restrictivism 8.4 Plural Rationality

141 142 147 151 159

9

The Determination of the Self 9.1 Self-determination and the Formation of the Self 9.2 Character, Control, and Abilities 9.3 Independence 9.4 Summary

165 166 170 175 181

10 Conclusion

183

Notes Bibliography Index

187 197 205

Acknowledgments

In the last couple of years when I’ve been struggling with understanding freedom of the will, there were moments when I almost turned skeptical of its existence. The main reason why I’ve nevertheless found myself writing a study of this subject is that, although I’ve learned much about free will from contemporary discussions, at one point I started to feel that there is something to add to these debates. Freedom of will is usually discussed either as a question in ethics and philosophy of action, or as an issue related to the metaphysics of time, modality, and causation. And it is beyond question that philosophical views of freedom of will entail commitments in, and can receive inspiration from, these other philosophical topics. My main inspiration for understanding the problem of free will in the way I do in this book came, however, from another direction: from the philosophy of properties. I owe my main intellectual debt to those philosophers whose works have woken me up from my Humean slumber and have convinced me that properties, or at least most of them, are powers, and that seeing properties in this way can shed a new light on many traditional metaphysical problems, including the one that nagged me most of these years: the problem of free will. Among these philosophers, I’m especially grateful to Hugh Mellor for writing detailed comments on an earlier version of the fi rst part of the book. A lot has changed from that early version and I’m not certain that he would agree with all those changes, but his remarks as well as his encouragement at that early stage was an invaluable help to me. I would also like to thank Barry Loewer for his Humean comments on an early version of Chapter 2. I had the great fortune to join the Philosophy Department at Central European University ten years ago. The department has provided a wonderful research environment where I could benefit from many conversations with my colleagues both on questions of metaphysics in general and free will in particular. Part of this work was presented at our Departmental Seminar where I received comments from István Bodnár, Nenad Miscevic, György Márkus, and Mike Griffi n. Katalin Farkas, Howard Robinson, and Hanoch Ben-Yami have all read, and made many important remarks about, an earlier full draft of the fi rst part of the book. János Kis saw a

x

Acknowledgments

significant part of the complete manuscript. His comments helped me a lot to understand better the issue of control. And I’m grateful to Gábor Betegh for his detailed comments on my views of character, reassuring me that my problem with Aristotle’s theory is not just a regrettable consequence of the lack of proper Greek scholarship. Outside the department, but still in town, I have also colleagues from the Institute of Philosophy at Eötvös Loránd University who read parts of the book. I thank especially Imre Orthmayr, János Tőzsér, and László E. Szabó for important discussions. I had the opportunity to present the main ideas of the book at the Aspects of Responsibility Summer School in Budapest 2009. I would like to thank all participants, especially Thomas Pink, Paul Russell, Derk Pereboom, Tim O’Connor, Michael McKenna, Mark Balaguer, and András Szigeti, for their attention and for their helping remarks. I’m also very grateful to two anonymous referees at Routledge who read a complete version of the manuscript and made many important advises which led to changes (for the better, I hope) both in structure and content. Finally, I wish to thank Erica Wetter for her editorial work and Jasmine Perez for copyediting the book. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007–2013 under grant agreement no. FP7–238128I. I would also like to acknowledge the support of the Central European University for granting me one semester sabbatical leave to complete my project.

1

Introduction

Why they did not wish to acknowledge that if there is such a thing as fate, then freedom is not possible? If, on the other hand—I swept on, more and more astonished myself, steadily warming to the task—if there is such a thing as freedom, then there is no fate; that is to say— and I paused, but only long enough to catch my breath—that is to say, then we ourselves are fate, I realized all at once, but with a flash of clarity I had never experienced before. (Kertész 2004: 259–260)

This book investigates the problem of free will and aims to argue for a particular interpretation of it. Leibniz, in his work Theodicy, claimed that in order to be free in the morally relevant sense, an agent’s action must satisfy three conditions: contingency, intelligibility, and spontaneity.1 It seems to me that by identifying these three conditions, Leibniz has captured the fundamental problems about free will. In fact, the present book is an attempt to understand the three Leibnizian criteria in light of recent developments in the free will debate. The purpose of this introductory chapter is to highlight those aspects of the debate that I shall aim to discuss and to state briefly my own position concerning the interpretation of the three Leibnizian conditions: contingency, intelligibility and spontaneity.

CONTINGENCY The notion of free will I’m interested in for this book is essentially tied to the conditions of moral responsibility. It is usually granted that agents are morally responsible for their actions only if it is up to them what they do in the sense that they can control their own behavior. Many—although, as we shall see, not all—philosophers believe that we can control our behavior only if we can avoid doing what we do. Thus, agents’ actions are up to them only if they can do otherwise. Hence the traditional understanding of moral freedom: agents acted of their own free will only if they could have

2

Freedom of the Will

done something else than what they actually did. More generally, free will and responsibility imply alternative possibilities. Alternative possibilities, on the other hand, imply contingency since if agents’ actions were not contingent in some relevant sense then it would be impossible for them to act otherwise. Thus, an action’s contingency is a necessary condition of an agent’s responsibility. If actions could not be contingent then agents could not have done otherwise and hence cannot be held morally responsible. Consequently, there seems to be a close conceptual connection between the problem of free will and the issue concerning the relevant sense of contingency. The issue of contingency may be expressed as the problem of fate and freedom. In the history of philosophy, the notion of ‘fate’ has been used in at least two different senses. In one sense, an event is fated, if it is not contingent, exactly because it is impossible for it not to occur. In another sense, agents’ actions are fated if agents cannot properly control what they do. It is clear that fate in this second sense does not imply fate in the fi rst sense. For it is perfectly possible that agents can have no control over some contingent event. If, for instance, we do what we do by accident—as is often the case in classical tales illustrating the ‘power of fate’—we cannot control our actions even if they are contingent events in the sense that they may not have happened. It is much less obvious, however, whether or not fate in the fi rst sense implies fate in the second sense. Thus, one way to answer the problem of free will is to clarify the sense in which the non-contingency of an event is incompatible with the kind of control that is necessary for responsibility. Philosophers who believe that there is not any contingent event are often called necessitarians. If they are right, then there must be a sense in which no one could have avoided doing what she actually did. Thus, if contingency is indeed a condition of free will, then a metaphysical theory which implies necessitarianism seems to be incompatible with moral responsibility. There are many philosophical views which imply—or at least prima facie seem to imply—some form of necessitarianism. 2 But the implied necessitarian conclusions may not be incompatible with agents having free will. For, even if these arguments can indeed show that there is a sense in which our actions are not contingent, that sense—as many defenders of the arguments have rightly claimed—shall not necessarily diminish our power to control our own actions. Free will does not require metaphysical contingency simpliciter. Contingency matters only if its absence implies that agents cannot possess the power to control their own actions in the sense that they lose some relevant ability. There is a sense of non-contingency, however, which, according to many philosophers, is highly relevant to the issue of whether or not persons can have the power to control their own actions. In this sense, events are not contingent if their occurrence is physically determined. Since all physical actions are so determined if the fundamental laws of

Introduction 3 physics are deterministic, there seems to be a sense in which none of our physical actions can be contingent, if determinism is true. On the basis of this, many philosophers conclude that we can be responsible only if the fundamental laws of physics are not deterministic. Since moral responsibility requires control over our physical actions, and control requires the ability to avoid doing what we have done, we can be morally responsible agents only if physical determinism is false. If this is right, then physical determinism implies that what we do is not contingent exactly in the sense which is incompatible with our freedom of the will.

INTELLIGIBILITY If determinism indeed implies non-contingency in the agent-relevant sense, then our will can be free only if physical determinism is false. Thus, if free will is a condition of responsibility and physics proved one day beyond any doubt that our universe is deterministic, then we should stop regarding each other and ourselves as responsible agents. Some philosophers—the socalled incompatibilists—do accept this conclusion. According to them, we are responsible only if physical determinism is false. Consequently, a discovery about the nature of fundamental physical laws—an assumed proof of their deterministic nature—would also prove that we are not responsible agents. Since responsibility requires the power to do otherwise and according to the incompatibilists such power can exist only if determinism is false, moral agency is impossible in deterministic universes. If our physical universe is governed by deterministic physical laws, there is no such thing as free will and responsibility. The incompatibility of physical determinism and moral agency strikes others, however, as an extremely harsh conclusion. At least, it does not seem plausible to me that some discovery about the nature of fundamental physical laws can affect our view of ourselves as morally accountable agents. I’m not saying, of course, that nothing can undermine that conviction. If, for instance, it turned out that all of our actions are remote controlled by hyper-intelligent beings from a distant star and hence we are but toys in their hands (if they have any), I’d certainly stop believing that we are responsible agents. More generally, we cannot a priori preclude that our actions are the results of some such causal mechanism which is incompatible with our free will and responsibility. What I wish to deny is that determinism at the level of fundamental physical laws is incompatible with agents having free will. Since incompatibilists have seemingly good grounds to hold that moral responsibility is possible only if physical determinism is false, compatibilists are bound to show where exactly incompatibilists go wrong. There are various versions of compatibilism which differ according to where

4

Freedom of the Will

they fi nd the argument for incompatibility mistaken. In this book, I shall defend one of the most traditional forms of compatibilism. According to that view, we should reject the very last step in the argument. Responsibility for actions requires some kind of control, and the relevant sense of control does imply that agents can avoid doing what they do. Nonetheless, physical determinism does not deprive us of our power to control what we do. For determinism is not incompatible with the ability or power to do otherwise, which I take to be the agent-relevant sense of alternative possibility. Many other compatibilists would disagree with this response. They claim that, even if we can be responsible only if we can control what we do, the relevant sense of control does not require that we have alternative possibilities in any sense. According to them, agents can be responsible for what they do, even if they lack the power to do otherwise. What matters for responsibility is only how—or, more precisely, in what mental conditions—agents do what they actually do. More particularly, what matters for free will and responsibility is whether agents’ actions are sensitive to their reasons. It is irrelevant whether or not they could have done otherwise. Consequently, the issue of determinism is irrelevant not because agents can have the ability to do otherwise even if physical determinism is true, but rather because they can be free and responsible even if they cannot do otherwise. I shall argue against this kind of compatibilism in two ways. On the negative side, I shall argue that agents can be, and frequently are, responsible even if their actions are not sensitive to their reasons. Related to this, I shall also argue that the notion of free will cannot be captured in terms of agents’ reasons, which, as I shall maintain, are not their psychological attitudes. On the other hand, I shall also argue positively that the power to do otherwise is a condition of moral responsibility. Free will as a condition of responsibility is what it has been traditionally regarded: the ability or power to do otherwise. Further, I shall claim that there is indeed a form of determinism that is incompatible with free will: agents can have free will only if their actions are not determined by their psychological attitudes. We may even say that it is this kind of non-determinacy that explains the agent-relevant sense of contingency. But this sense of contingency does not imply the falsity of physical determinism. When I claim that the notion of free will cannot be captured in terms of agents’ reasons, I do not mean to deny that intelligibility is a condition of free will and responsibility. What I wish to say is that intelligibility does not require that agents’ actions be sensitive to their reasons. What it requires is only agents’ ability to perceive reasons together with their ability to act otherwise. I shall also argue that many actions which have not been done for a reason are intelligible in the sense of being psychologically explicable in ways that are perfectly compatible with agents’ responsibility.

Introduction 5 SPONTANEITY Interestingly, as we shall see, there are also certain libertarians (incompatibilists who believe that physical determinism must be false because we have free will) who accept that on many occasions agents can be responsible even if they cannot do otherwise. According to them, agents are often responsible even if their motives and character determine what they do. Then, these philosophers do not deny that some form of psychological determinism is compatible with responsibility. But they nevertheless insist that agents cannot be responsible in a deterministic world because, even if most of their actions are determined by their mental states and attitudes, in order to be responsible, their motives and character must be the results of some both physically and psychologically undetermined event. Their claim is that free will requires spontaneity in the sense that agents must have ‘ultimate responsibility’ for their own character and motives. And agents can have such responsibility only if the universe is not deterministic. Some other philosophers think that ultimate responsibility is indeed a condition of free will and responsibility, but they also claim that such responsibility is impossible no matter whether the world is deterministic or not. In the last chapter of the book I shall argue that they are right when they claim that ultimate responsibility is impossible. We are not able fully to determine who we are, what our reasons or motives are, and what our character is like. But I shall also argue that this is no reason to be skeptical about freedom of the will and moral responsibility because self-determination in this sense—in the sense of determining our own self—is not a condition of moral responsibility. I shall defend the view that free will and moral responsibility require spontaneity in the sense that our actions and—in some special circumstances—our abilities, must, or at least can, depend on our choices. Thus, I shall argue for what is often called the conditional analysis of free will. I shall attempt to formulate a version of that analysis which can avoid the usual objections raised against it. And I shall try to show that this version of the analysis can make perfectly good sense of the three Leibnizian conditions of moral agency. It can clarify the sense in which our actions must be contingent, intelligible, and spontaneous if we are responsible for them. And the analysis can explain why it is no more an objection to the possibility of free will that we cannot ‘ultimately’ determine our character and motives than that we cannot fully control the circumstances in which we live and act. We are indeed subject to fate in the sense that we can control our own character and circumstances only to a limited extent. But fate in this sense is surely not incompatible with freedom of the will. Although most of the traditional incompatibilists thought that the falsity of physical determinism is a condition of moral responsibility, recently some incompatibilists claim much more, and some, much less. Some of them say that indeterminism is not only a condition of moral responsibility; whereas

6

Freedom of the Will

others argue that indeterminism is not significant because it is a condition of moral responsibility. Rather, indeterminism at the fundamental physical level is important for us because only such indeterminism can guarantee that we ‘really make a difference’, that our decisions ‘origin in us’, or that our achievements are ‘attributable to us’.3 In my opinion, however, these attractive features, which may indeed be significant for a general theory of human values, are not relevant to the theory of free will as a condition of responsibility. First, I must admit that I fi nd the claims about difference-making, origination, and attributability so vague that I lack any clear intuition about how to argue about them. Let us suppose—contrary to what I shall argue for in the next paragraph—that intellectual or artistic achievements, for instance, can be attributable to their makers, or that agents’ decisions can ‘make a difference’, only if they can control them in the same sense as we require control for moral responsibility. Still, I am simply unable to make clear sense of the claims that the discovery of the General Theory of Relativity is ‘not really attributable’ to Einstein, or that Columbus’ decision to try to reach India through the Atlantic Ocean ‘did not really make a difference’, unless physical determinism is false. Second, and more importantly, even if one can fi nd some connection between difference-making, origination, and attributability on the one hand and physical indeterminism on the other, it is not entirely clear what exactly is the connection between the conditions of any of these and those of moral responsibility. Perhaps one can be justifi ably proud of her wise decisions or of her fi ne achievements only if the physical universe is indeterministic. Nothing important seems to follow from this, however, with regard to the issue of free will as a condition of moral responsibility. For many things originate in us and are attributable to us even if we do not do them of our own free will. It sounds more than turgid to say, for instance, that a scientist ‘has discovered something of her own free will’. No one can literally discover things of her own free will. For no one can control in any relevant sense what she discovers, just as no one can recognize what she sees or perceives, of her own free will. The whole point about free will as a condition of responsibility is, however, that it clarifies the sense in which we must be able to control what we do in order to be responsible. I shall regard the issue of freedom of will only as a question about the conditions of responsibility for our behavior. I’m not denying that difference-making, origination, or attributability may be valuable aspects of our agency. What I wish to say is that there are important aspects of human life and human agency which are not directly related to the problem of free will. This puts an important constraint on the investigations which the reader shall fi nd in this book. Many contemporary theories of free will want to incorporate more into that notion than what seems to be necessary for agents’ responsibility. As a consequence, they do not provide an account

Introduction 7 of freedom of the will as a condition of responsibility, but rather some rich theory about personal value and autonomy. I shall argue in Part II that this approach is unrewarding and shall return briefly to the issue of autonomy in the book’s conclusion. Right here at the beginning, I only want to indicate why I think that it is of primary importance to distinguish the issue of free will from a theory of autonomy. Agents’ autonomy, if anything, is a norm or ideal. It is a requirement about how they ought to be. Thus, whatever are the conditions of our autonomy, we must, if we indeed fi nd it valuable, strive for satisfying them. But free will as a condition of responsibility is a fact about us. We either have it or lack it. It is not something we can and should strive for. But it is not something we can in any way escape either. Thus, as Kertész’s hero realizes ‘with a flash of clarity’, we ourselves are fate.

Part I

Free Will and Powers

2

Powers and Possibilities

[D]etermination should not be confused with necessity. (Leibniz 1765/1996: II, xxi, 13)

[T]he principle that moves the instrumental parts of the body in such actions is in him, and the things of which the moving principle is in a man himself are in his power to do or not to do. (Aristotle [1941]: 1110, 15–20)

In this chapter, I shall investigate the question of whether physical determinism constitutes a threat to our free agency. According to a venerable philosophical tradition, we are responsible agents only if we have free will and our freedom of will implies alternative possibilities in the sense that persons can be held responsible for what they did or failed to do only if they could have done otherwise than they have actually done. But this entails that their actions must have been contingent in the sense that, although they have actually behaved in a certain way, they were not unable to do something else instead. An action’s contingency in this sense may not be suffi cient for responsibility. But the contingency of behavior has traditionally been regarded as a necessary condition of free agency. Physical determinism seems to threaten human freedom because, if a universe is deterministic, then there seems to be a sense in which the occurrence of physical events cannot be contingent and the performance of an overt physical action does imply the occurrence of some such events. It is generally agreed, however, that an event can be contingent in more than one sense. One way to approach the problem concerning the compatibility of free agency and determinism is to raise the question of whether physical determinism renders the events involved in actions non-contingent in some particular sense that matters for our freedom and responsibility. In what

12

Freedom of the Will

follows, I’m going to argue for a negative answer. Even if the actual physical universe is deterministic, human agents can sometimes act freely in the sense that, although they behaved in a certain way, they could have done something else instead.

2.1 DETERMINISM AND THE CONSEQUENCE ARGUMENT Why would anyone think that determinism is incompatible with the metaphysical contingency of certain kind of events? For a long while, this question was formulated in terms of causes, more precisely, as the problem of how ‘universal causation’ is compatible with human freedom. Events do not occur without causes and their causes necessitate their occurrence. Actions depend on their causes too in the sense that, if certain causes occur, it is impossible for them not to occur. Thus every event happens necessarily relative to its cause. But then events that are causes must themselves have causes which necessitate them. Consequently, the chain of causal dependency must go back to the infi nite, or to some fi rst cause. In either way, given this chain of necessitation, agents’ actions cannot be contingent at least as far as their ability to do otherwise is concerned. This way of formulating the problem has, however, lost popularity in the last couple of decades because the argument from universal causation relies on two assumptions that many philosophers would reject. First, the argument assumes that the occurrence of the cause must metaphysically necessitate its effect. It is in this sense that universal causation renders events non-contingent. Hume has famously claimed, however, that we ‘can always conceive any effect to follow from any cause, and indeed any event to follow upon another’ and that ‘whatever we conceive is possible, at least in the metaphysical sense’ (Hume 1739–1740/1978: 650). What Hume’s real view of causation was, of course, is still a contentious issue, but at least according to one possible interpretation, he seems to be saying that causal relations are metaphysically contingent. Thus the fact that an action was caused does not in itself prove that its occurrence was not contingent in the metaphysical sense.1 Second, the argument presupposes that causation must be deterministic; otherwise the occurrence of causes (in appropriate circumstances) could not be sufficient for the occurrence of their effects. But today it is generally granted that causes may only raise the chance that their effects will occur without being sufficient for them. Consequently, even if universal causation holds, it can be true of certain events that, although they did happen and they were caused, they may not have happened. 2 There is, however, an alternative way to formulate the problem of physical determinism and free will. This formulation aims to avoid any contentious assumption about the nature of causation. Peter van Inwagen has called it the Consequence Argument and has given the following informal presentation of it:

Powers and Possibilities

13

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 (including our present acts) are not up to us (van Inwagen 1983: 56). It does seem to be true that if some of us worry about whether determinism is compatible with human freedom it is at least partly on grounds that lie behind this argument. But the argument, as van Inwagen himself agrees, expresses only an initial intuition and we must see whether it survives further scrutiny. There are at least two expressions in the argument which need to be clarified in order to make it conclusive. First, we should explain in which sense our actions are the consequences of the remote past and the laws of nature, if determinism is true. Unless we can give a sufficiently clear interpretation of the consequence relation, the compatibilist can simply deny the relevance of events in the remote past to our present actions. And second, we should clarify the meaning of ‘up to us’. A compatibilist can argue that when we say, on the one hand, that the past or the laws of nature are not up to us, and when we say, on the other, that our actions are not up to us, we use ‘up to us’ in different senses. What matters for freedom is obviously this latter sense, but this may not have anything to do with the former. In order to understand the issue better let me use a simple example. Let us assume that ‘up to me’ means—as it often does—simply that ‘I have intentional control over . . . ’ expressing whatever distinguishes my talking and walking from my heart beating at a certain rate or from keeping my body temperature constant. I can have intentional control over my walking and talking, but I cannot intentionally control my heartbeat or my body temperature. Apply now the consequence argument to this understanding of ‘up to us’. Certainly I do not (cannot) have intentional control over the remote past or over the physical laws of the universe. And if determinism is true, then there is a sense in which my present behavior is the consequence of the remote past and the laws of nature. Does it follow that I do not (cannot) have intentional control over my present actions either? Obviously not. Not even those who believe that the truth of physical determinism can have important consequences to our responsible agency would agree that if physical determinism is true then there is no distinction between the types of behavior which can be intentionally controlled and those which cannot. This is not, of course, sufficient to refute the consequence argument; if not for other reasons, then just because actual intentional control, as we shall see, is neither necessary nor sufficient for agents’ responsibility. Thus, having such kind of control is not the same thing as having free will and it is open for further discussion whether or not the free will relevant interpretation of ‘up to us’ is compatible with nomological determinism. What the example has meant to show is only that the truth of the consequence argument is not a trivial matter.

14

Freedom of the Will

In the last thirty years or so, different philosophers have offered alternative interpretations of the consequent argument. 3 In what follows, I shall discuss van Inwagen’s own reconstructions of the argument. My main reason for discussing exactly these two versions of the consequence argument is that they directly purport to prove that in the circumstances of physical determinism agents cannot have the power to choose and cannot have the power to perform any other action than what they have actually performed. Since my own account of free will is formulated exactly in terms of these abilities, it is important to see whether or not having them implies the falsity of physical determinism. Van Inwagen in his classic exposition offers three versions of the argument, from which I shall consider the fi rst and the third. He claims that although his arguments ‘stand or fall together’ there is the following heuristic distinction among them: The virtue of the fi rst argument is its vocabulary, which is close to that of traditional discussions of the free-will problem. Its vice is its extremely complex structure. The virtue of the second argument is its extremely simple structure. Its vice is its vocabulary, which is radically different from the traditional vocabulary of the arguments about free will. The third argument is an intermediate case as regards complexity of logical structure and departure from traditional terminology. Its peculiar logical vice is a dialectical virtue: while the fi rst arguments are valid in fi rst-order extensional logic, the third employs special modal principles. (van Inwagen 1983: 57–58) In my discussion of the argument I shall apply the following argumentative strategy. First I shall discuss the third argument, which has a simpler structure but a ‘traditional vocabulary’ and argue that it is not obviously correct because it relies on a contentious modal principle. Only after that shall I discuss the more complex fi rst argument. I shall argue that this argument contains a similarly contentious premise. Finally I’ll try to explain both why incompatibilism may seem prima facie appealing and why, on a deeper analysis, the consequence argument cannot prove that it is obviously right. At this point I shall not explicitly discuss the second argument which is formulated in terms of accessibility to possible worlds. In my view, how accessibility in the relevant context should be understood depends on, and does not establish, whether compatibilism is true or false. Accessibility to worlds is a technical notion the proper definition of which in certain contexts must be a consequence of, rather than the reasons for, our modal convictions. Consequently, the soundness of the second argument depends on what we think of the fi rst and the third and does not have much independent force. I shall come back to this issue briefly at the end of the next section since in one of his more recent articles van Inwagen claims that the

Powers and Possibilities

15

adequate formulation of the consequence argument must be couched in terms of access to (regions of) possible worlds (van Inwagen 2002).

2.2 PAST, LAWS, AND CHOICES Since the argument for the incompatibility of determinism and free will concerns what we can or cannot do if our world is deterministic, it must involve some modal considerations. These modal considerations can, but needn’t, be expressed by the application of modal operators in the argument. As van Inwagen emphasizes, only the third of his arguments uses such modal operators. It is for this reason that he calls this formal reconstruction of the consequence argument ‘modal’. I begin my discussion with this version of the argument because this version illuminates best what is meant by the claim that, if determinism is true, my present and future actions are the consequences of the remote past and the laws of nature. First, we assume that it follows from the truth of physical determinism that propositions about the past and the laws of nature logically imply propositions about the present. Since we do not actually have to be able to identify what these propositions are, we introduce P 0, L, and P as abbreviations for sentences. P 0 abbreviates a (perhaps infi nitely long) sentence expressing the intrinsic state of the universe in some past moment. L abbreviates the sentence expressing all laws of nature. And P abbreviates any sentence about the present state of the universe, including some true sentence about what I do. Second, in order to formulate the modal argument, we need to introduce two modal operators. One is the ordinary logical necessity operator . According to the characterization of physical determinism, in any deterministic world the following must be true of any physical events:  [(P0 & L) ⊃ P]. The other is a special operator NC that qualifies whether we have any choice about the truth of certain proposition. NC p (where p is a true proposition) may be read as ‘p and no one has, or ever had, any choice about whether p’. With these operators in hand, the argument runs like this (van Inwagen 1983: 93–95). Given our characterization of determinism, in a deterministic world it is true that [1]  [(P0 & L) ⊃ P)], from which it follows logically that [2]  [P0 ⊃ (L ⊃ P)]. It seems intuitively clear, however, that no one has, or ever had, any choice about a logical truth, therefore [3] NC[P0 ⊃ (L ⊃ P)].

16 Freedom of the Will Further, we grant that no one has, or ever had, any choice about the past and about the laws of nature. It is in this sense that the past and the laws of nature are not ‘up to us’. Therefore [4] NCP0. At this point we must assume that, if no one has, or ever had, a choice about p, and no one has, or ever had, a choice about whether p ⊃ q, then no one has, or ever had, a choice about whether q. If so, then it follows that [5] NC(L ⊃ P), and then it follows that, given [6] NCL, it must be ∴[7] NCP. If this argument is sound, we must conclude that no one has any choice about anything if physical determinism is true. According to the modal argument, from the fact that no one has any choice about the past and about the laws of nature, and no one has any choice about what is logically true (or true by defi nition), it follows logically that no one has any choice about any present or future state of affairs either. This argument makes the nature of consequence relation rather clear. If determinism is true, and certain plausible seeming assumptions about the past and the laws of nature hold, it is logically impossible that we can ever make a choice. If we grant that the fi rst premise must be true in any deterministic universe (which is indeed a rather plausible assumption), there remain four ways to reject the argument. We may reject one (or both) of the two premises concerning whether or not we have a choice about the past and the laws of nature. Or we may reject one of the two modal inference rules on which the argument relies. According to one rule, if a proposition is logically necessary, then no one has, or ever had, a choice about whether it is true. This rule is applied in the inference from 2 to 3 and seems rather plausible. As everyone—including van Inwagen himself—agrees, the questionable inference rule is the second one, on which the argument heavily relies (from 3 and 4 to 5, and from 5 and 6 to the conclusion). In a later work, van Inwagen calls this rule the No Choice principle. According to this principle, if no one has, or ever had, a choice about p, and no one has, or ever had, a choice about whether if p then q, then no one can have, or could have ever had, a choice about q either (van Inwagen 1993: 189–190).4 Most likely, someone who thinks that determinism is compatible with free will wants to challenge this premise. Van Inwagen says at one point, however, that this rule ‘seems obviously right and compatibilism does not seem obviously right. If two principles are in confl ict and one of them seems obviously right and the

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other does not seem obviously right, then, if one must choose, one should accept the one that seems obviously right’ (van Inwagen 1983: 103). I agree that if we have to choose between two confl icting principles then we should choose what is obviously right. And I also agree that compatibilism is not obviously right. However, the No Choice principle does not appear to me as being obvious either. To put it a bit more technically: it is far from being evident that the ‘no one has, or ever had, a choice about’ operator is closed under logical implication. Whether or not it is depends on how we understand exactly the phrase ‘no one has, or ever had, a choice about’. I shall argue that when we’ll have clarified what the other premises of the argument can exactly mean, the No Choice principle loses all its appeal. For it does not seem possible to give a non-question-begging interpretation of the exact meaning of the No Choice operator, i.e., an interpretation which does not presuppose or rely already on the incompatibility of free will and determinism. More generally, my claim is that incompatibilists cannot interpret ‘what is not up to us’ with the help of the operator that ‘no one has, or ever had, a choice about’. Unquestionably, it seems initially very plausible that human beings cannot have a choice about the truth of propositions which express past events or laws of nature. There is a difference between the past on the one hand and the future on the other which is relevant to whether or not we can make choices. We can and often do choose to do something in the future and in this sense have a choice about the truth of propositions that express future events; and often we choose to do something in the present in order to bring about something in the future and in this sense we can have a choice about future states of affairs. Unless time travel is possible, however, we cannot choose now to perform an action in the past and hence cannot make propositions expressing events which happened in the past true or false. And unless we think that backward causation is possible, we cannot try to bring about something which (knowingly) happened in the past and in this sense we cannot make propositions expressing past facts true or false. But if this is the sense in which ‘no one has, or ever had, a choice about whether or not p’ then the argument must face a dilemma. Incompatibilists—as van Inwagen himself emphasizes—must distinguish the view that free will is not compatible with the truth of physical determinism from another, often called fatalism, according to which it is logically impossible that agents influence the future by their present choices. Not even an incompatibilist would want to say that, since we cannot influence (or bring about) the past and the laws of nature, we cannot influence (or bring about) anything in the future either, unless determinism is false. But if ‘no one has a choice about the past and the laws of nature’ means that no one can influence the past and the laws by his choices, then this version of the consequence argument seems to collapse into the thesis of fatalism. Whatever way we understand the No Choice operator, the argument cannot be valid unless we interpret it in the same way in the conclusion as we do

18

Freedom of the Will

in the premises. The most natural interpretation of the operator when applied to the laws and the past is that we cannot influence them by our choices. But then the conclusion must also be understood in the same way, i.e., as saying that no one can influence the truth of a proposition expressing a future event (the agent’s physical action) or state of affairs (the consequences of the action) by his present choices. So if incompatibilists want to deny (as they certainly should) that determinism implies fatalism then they cannot mean by the expression ‘no one has, or ever had, a choice about the past’ that no one can influence the past and the laws of nature by his present actions. In order to illustrate the problem, let me cite a story that van Inwagen uses as an example for an action done of one’s own free will (van Inwagen 1975). In that story, a certain judge has it in his power that, if he raises his hand in appropriate circumstances, he can prevent the execution of a criminal. If he does not raise his hand in those circumstances, the criminal is going to be executed. And let us suppose that the judge did not raise his hand so that the criminal was executed. It seems natural to say that the judge, at that particular time and in that situation, has a choice about whether or not the proposition ‘The criminal is executed at a later time t’ is true; while, at the same time and already in the same situation, the criminal has no choice about whether or not that proposition is true. We do not want to say that the criminal would have been executed even if the judge had raised his hand. An incompatibilist would not want to claim that if the No Choice principle is correct and determinism holds then fatalism is also true. But what explains the difference between the criminal and the judge with respect to a future state of affairs? Ordinarily, I think, we would say that the difference is best captured by the fact that the judge has a choice about a future event while the criminal does not. And whether or not either of them has a choice in this sense does not depend in any way on whether or not physical determinism is true. Consequently, from the fact that no one has a choice about the truth of propositions expressing the past states of physical universe and the laws, and no one has a choice about what they entail, it does not seem obviously to follow that no one ever has a choice about anything unless determinism is false. There is, of course, a very natural response to this objection. One may say that ‘no one has, or ever had, a choice about whether or not p’ should not be understood by reference to the external circumstances in which agents act and in terms of the possible effects of their actions. Rather, what the No Choice principle aims to express is that agents cannot exert their psychological ability to choose. Certainly, it seems true that there is a sense in which we cannot make choices about whether or not propositions expressing the past states of the universe or laws of nature are true since no one can make a choice about what she thinks is impossible for her to affect. So understood, the No Choice principle does not express (implausibly) that agents cannot influence the future unless physical determinism is false, but rather it says that they cannot make any choice about their actions unless

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determinism is false. What the argument is supposed to prove is that physical determinism is incompatible with the exertion of our ability to choose. However, if ‘not having a choice about whether or not p’ is understood in this way then the No Choice principle is obviously false. We can easily fi nd cases in which past events (with or without the relevant laws of nature) logically imply future events, but it seems intuitively obvious that an agent nevertheless could have made a choice about it in the sense that he exercised his relevant psychological ability. Here is one example. An assassin was asked whether he would kill Bill, the millionaire. After having been asked, he chooses to reject the offer because he thinks that the money offered is too little given the risk involved in trying to kill the well-guarded Bill. Unknown to the assassin, Bill had been killed by an untreatable heart attack a day before he received the offer. Did the assassin make a choice about whether or not to kill Bill? It seems obvious that he did exercise his ability to choose. He faced alternatives. He considered seriously what to do. He was mentally sane and uncompelled. He made up his mind. At the end of his deliberation he might have even said ‘I have made a choice. I reject the offer. I choose not to kill Bill’. It seems to me rather implausible to claim that whether or not he actually made a choice in the sense which entails the exertion of his psychological ability to choose must depend on circumstances totally external to his mental operations. Further, this would imply that, when next day he hears the news that Bill had already been dead, he should say ‘Well, so I did not make a choice’. My question is: what then did he exactly do instead of making a choice? I do not think anyone can tell. It may be said that the assassin has a choice only if it is open to him both to kill and not to kill Bill. But if Bill is already dead he could not have chosen to kill him. Consequently, he had no choice. Now, of course, if he had chosen to kill Bill, he would have necessarily failed. But even if in this situation he must fail to act in the way he intends, it does not follow that he did not make a choice about whether or not to do something. It frequently happens after all that we fail to do what we have chosen and intended to do. But this can hardly alter the (past) fact that we’ve made a choice about whether or not we intend to perform the action. The assassin could, even in this latter case, have made a choice. He would have chosen to kill. He would have also failed—contingently or necessarily, it matters little—to kill. This will hardly alter the (past) fact that he has made a choice. (I shall return to this question in the next chapter where I shall discuss some problems about the psychological ability of making choices in more detail.) One can further insist that in this latter case the assassin did not in fact make a choice about whether or not to kill Bill, but only whether or not to try to kill Bill or intend to kill Bill. But, to me, this move seems desperate. Firstly, if one cannot make a choice about whether or not to do certain things in the internal ability sense because the circumstances make the failure necessary, then one cannot make a choice about whether or not to try

20

Freedom of the Will

to do certain things either. Secondly, we do not choose to try to do things. Sometimes when we think that the chances of our success are very low we describe what we do as trying. But even then, we choose the actions that we try to do. And thirdly, and most importantly, if van Inwagen’s argument is correct, then it must apply to any choice, irrespective of what the agent is supposed to make a choice about. If we cannot make any choice, unless physical determinism is false, then we cannot have a choice about whether or not to try to do something either. Now incompatibilists may say that neither of these senses captures adequately what they mean by ‘having a choice about whether or not p’. Of course, it is not impossible that agents can influence the truth of certain propositions that are about future events or states of affairs even if physical determinism is true. And of course, agents can exercise their psychological ability to make choices even if physical determinism is true. But there is a third and more abstract interpretation of the No Choice principle. According to that interpretation, S has a choice about whether or not to A only if it is open to S at time t both to A and not to A in the future. 5 I shall return to the issue of ‘openness’ later in this chapter, but I would like to indicate right here why I feel unhappy about this proposal. The expression that some action ‘is open to’ someone is obviously metaphoric. We should defi ne it more specifically so that, fi rst, it has something to do with having or not having a choice; and second, it does not itself imply incompatibilism. And I do not think that such a defi nition could possibly be given. As regards the fi rst condition, the future can be open without having anything to do with agent-relevant abilities, including our ability to choose an action. So we cannot defi ne the ability of choice simply with reference to ‘open possibilities’; rather, we can only say that there must be some sense in which the future is open, if we have a choice. But to say that this sense is exactly the falsity of determinism is surely not an argument for incompatibilism. It is no more than a declaration of faith. Hence the problem with the second condition. If we accept the characterization of determinism according to which propositions about the past and the laws logically entail every proposition about the future, then it is just as obvious that there is a sense in which ‘the future is not open’ if determinism is true. The future is not open in the sense that it is entailed by the physical past and the laws, which themselves are not open. But the issue is exactly whether the lack of this kind of ‘openness’ has any consequence with regards to our agent-relevant abilities to perform an actually unperformed action. Again, just declaring that it does will hardly persuade any compatibilist. Thus, it seems to me that only the two previously discussed notions of ‘having a choice’ can be relevant to van Inwagen’s modal argument because these notions do not imply anything implicitly about the truth or falsity of compatibilism. In one sense having a choice involves only a specific kind of mental operation: the exertion of the agent’s psychological ability to choose. In this sense, if one can make a choice, one also has a choice. In another sense,

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whether or not a person has a choice depends on the external circumstances in which she acts. But neither of the two readings supports the claim that the No Choice principle is obviously valid. Consequently, this interpretation of the consequence argument does not give us sufficient grounds to believe that determinism is incompatible with agents having or making choices. Finally, it needs to be mentioned that in a more recent article van Inwagen himself rejects the original No Choice principle (van Inwagen 2002). But he rejects it in order to answer an objection which is unrelated to the problem I have discussed. That objection claims that the No Choice principle implies conjunction agglomeration to which there are obvious counterexamples. For instance, whenever I’m not certain which of the several possible outcomes of my action shall obtain, I have no choice about the one which actually occurs, but I may have a choice about whether or not any of the possible consequences shall occur. When I toss a fair coin I have no choice about whether it lands heads or tails up, but I may have a choice about whether or not either will occur since I may or may not toss the coin. As a response to this problem, van Inwagen suggests that the No Choice operator should be replaced by another one formulated in terms of accessibility to possible worlds: ‘p and every region to which anyone has, or ever had, exact access is a subregion of p’. And then he claims that every region of logical space to which anyone has exact access will be a subregion of the past and the laws. So if the physical past and the laws logically imply the present (i.e., no one has exact access to anything outside the exact subregion of the actual past and laws), then no one has access to any world except to the actual one. However, as van Inwagen himself admits, many compatibilists will not be persuaded by this. They would deny that we do not have ‘exact access’ to any of those ‘regions in the logical space’ which are not ‘subregions of the actual past and the laws’. But he thinks that ‘the compatibilist’s “move” is contrived and ad hoc’ (van Inwagen 2002: 167). Thus, what a compatibilist must show is that the required ‘move’ (basically, as we shall see, the rejection of the view that inferences about our ‘inabilities’ or ‘lack of powers’ are closed under logical implication) is not contrived and ad hoc at all, but quite the contrary, perfectly natural. It is the aim of the next section to argue that agents’ inability with respect to the physical past and laws does not imply that agents must be unable to perform any other actions than what they actually perform. And it is exactly the possession of these powers that explain what it means for agents ‘to have access to worlds’ in the sense relevant for their freedom of the will.

2.3 PAST, LAWS, AND ABILITIES In this section, I shall discuss van Inwagen’s fi rst argument. That argument differs from the previously discussed argument at least in two important

22

Freedom of the Will

respects. First, informally, the argument does not include any reference to agents’ ability to make choices and hence it is not vulnerable to the objections I’ve raised against the third argument. Rather, as we shall see, the argument’s aim is to prove that if physical determinism is true, agents cannot have the ability to perform certain actions; they lack the ability to perform any other actions than they have actually performed. Second, and more formally, this version of the consequence argument does not rely on any questionable modal principle. It does not contain any modal operator either, it is purely extensional. But since the issue concerns alternative possibilities after all, the premises must have modal content. Van Inwagen’s ingenious proposal is that this modal content can be grasped by the phrase ‘can render a proposition false’. It is generally agreed that the argument’s force depends on the interpretation of this phrase.6 I shall assume that if ‘can render a proposition false’ is really meant to prove something about agents’ freedom of the will in the circumstances of physical determinism, it must refer to their abilities to act certain ways. But then I shall argue that, so interpreted, one of the premises of the argument is implausible and hence the argument is not conclusive. Hume once claimed that ‘the distinction, which we often make betwixt power and the exercise of it, is [equally] without foundation’; i.e., that there aren’t any unexercised powers (Hume 1739–1740/1978: 171). I shall assume here that Hume’s view is wrong and that incompatibilists cannot agree with him since otherwise there would be no point in arguing that agents cannot have the power to do otherwise if physical determinism is true. More specifically, incompatibilists who are also libertarians cannot deny that at least in some specific circumstances it is metaphysically possible to have unexercised powers since they want to prove that agents can have the power or ability to perform an actually unperformed action only if determinism is false. Further, I shall also assume that incompatibilists do not want to prove that nothing whatever can have any power if determinism is true: water has the power to dissolve salt and sugar, trinitrotoluene has the power to explode, arsenic has the power to poison humans, etc., even if determinism is true. Now my claim is that if van Inwagen’s argument could prove that agents cannot have the power to act otherwise in a deterministic universe, then it would also prove that nothing whatever can have an unexercised power unless physical determinism is false. I think, however, that this is implausible. Thus, the argument cannot show that agents cannot have the ability to act otherwise unless physical determinism is false. The argument runs as follows. (With some modifications, I follow van Inwagen’s own formulation. See van Inwagen 1983: 70.) Let P 0 denote a proposition that expresses the intrinsic state of the universe in the remote past, and L denote the totality of laws of nature (understood as true law propositions). Let P denote a proposition about the total intrinsic state of the world at time t when a subject S refrains from performing some

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action A. If we assume that no one can render propositions about the past false then [1] If determinism is true, then the conjunction of P0 and L entails P [2] It is not possible that S A-ed at t, and P be true [3] If [2] is true, then if S could have A-ed at t, S could have rendered P false [4] If S could have rendered P false, and if the conjunction of P0 and L entails P, then S could have rendered the conjunction of P0 and L false [5] If S could have rendered the conjunction of P0 and L false, then S could have rendered L false [6] S could not have rendered L false ∴[7] If determinism is true, S could not have A-ed at t. It is generally agreed that this argument is formally valid. However, I shall argue that this argument is no more obviously sound than van Inwagen’s modal argument. The crucial issue is, as I have already mentioned, the interpretation of the phrase ‘can render a proposition false’. According to van Inwagen, saying that we ‘can render a proposition false’ is ‘a way to describe our powers to act—and, by acting, to modify the world—over the truth-values of propositions’ (van Inwagen 1983: 66, my emphasis). This may appear to mean that ‘can render a proposition false’ expresses our power to do something intentionally, especially because van Inwagen also says that ‘to be able to render a proposition false is to be able to arrange or modify the concrete objects that constitute one’s environment—shoes, ships, bits of sealing wax—in a way sufficient for the falsity of that proposition’ (67). However, ‘arranging’ and ‘modifying’ things around me may or may not be my intentional action. Given that there are infi nitely many unintended microphysical consequences of my behavior, it may be said that I’m able to ‘arrange’ things in ways that are sufficient for the falsity of some propositions even if I did not—and could not—intend to arrange them in that way. I may ‘be able to render a proposition false’ without having the ability to do something that renders it false intentionally. Thus ‘to be able to render a proposition false’ is meant to express something that an agent is able to do even if it is not her intentional action. Then it ought to be possible to reformulate the argument directly in terms of agents’ abilities. To illustrate, let t refer to a time interval ‘the last five minutes’. Let P express the total intrinsic state of the universe in the last five minutes when I did not speak. And fi nally let A refer to the action that I spoke. Since van Inwagen’s argument concerns our power or ability to perform an actually unperformed action in a deterministic world, let us express ‘could have’ in the original argument by the phrase ‘was able to’. If we apply van Inwagen’s fi rst argument to

24

Freedom of the Will

this particular behavior at this particular period of time, the argument will run like this: [1] If determinism is true, then the conjunction of P0 and L entails P. [2] It is not possible that I spoke in the last five minutes, and P be true. [3] If [2] is true, then if I was able to speak in the last five minutes, I was able to render P false. [4] If I was able to render P false, and if the conjunction of P 0 and L entails P, then I was able to render the conjunction of P0 and L false. [5] If I was able to render the conjunction of P0 and L false, then I was able to render L false. [6] I was not able to render L false. ∴[7] If determinism is true, I was not able to speak in the last five minutes. If this argument were correct, it would prove that if I did not actually speak in the last five minutes and I live in a physically deterministic world, I must have also lost my ability to speak. This sounds very strange. What would it mean that I was not able to speak? Does it mean that my mouth was gagged or that my tongue was paralyzed? Or does it mean that I became mute or forgot any language? Does this happen to me on each single occasion when I do not talk? Surely, it cannot mean any of these. So how can we avoid this strange conclusion? The standard response to such kind of compatibilist worries is to complain that incompatibilists have another sort of ability in mind. Van Inwagen himself says that we must distinguish ‘general abilities’ and skills, which are irrelevant to the question of determinism and free will, from the power to exercise the general ability on a particular occasion (van Inwagen 1983: 13). What really concerns us is not the question of whether or not we can have certain unexercised capacities, if determinism is true. We are interested in a special ability: the ability to exercise abilities that agents did not in fact exercise on certain occasions. That’s what ‘the ability to do otherwise’ relevant to agents’ freedom of will really means. From the fact that we have certain ‘general’ abilities or rather, capacities, like the ability to speak, it does not follow that we can have that special ability, if physical determinism is true. Now it is indeed important to see that the question of free will as the power or ability to do otherwise is not a question about agents’ skills or ‘general capacities’ (whatever this latter means). A compatibilist would agree that if my mouth had been gagged, I would have been unable to speak, even if I had retained my ‘general capacity’ to express myself verbally. In fact, I shall argue at various places in the next three chapters that alternative possibilities relevant for agents’ responsibility must be understood as

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agents’ most specific powers and abilities to act in certain ways at a given time and in specific circumstances. However, this does not mean that the specific ability is or could be the power to exercise a general ability. First, it seems that this idea would lead to a regress: if in order to exercise one ability we need another, why do we not need yet another power or ability to exercise the latter ability? And further, why would the ‘power to exercise a general ability’ be any more specific or less general than the ability which is exercised? Most importantly, however, we are not interested here in the issue of how abilities are exercised, but whether or not one can have the ability to do otherwise if physical determinism is true. Thus, the question about powers to exert abilities should be raised as whether someone can have the power to exercise an ability that she did not, in fact, exercise. However, it is clear that we cannot have that special ability, irrespective of whether determinism is true or not. I’ve been sitting at my desk in the last five minutes. Our question is whether, if determinism is true, I could have nevertheless stood up and walked away. It is not the question of whether I could have had the ability to make an unexercised ability exercised. I obviously cannot have that ability. I cannot have that ability, not because determinism is true, but because I cannot have an ability that would involve a logical contradiction. But if I had an ability to make an ability that was not exercised on a particular occasion a (then and there) exercised ability, then I could do the logically impossible. And this is not an issue anyone is interested in. Our question concerns whether agents can retain their ordinary abilities to perform some actually unperformed action, even if physical determinism is true. But if the conclusion is indeed unacceptable because I could have been able to speak in the most specific sense we can imagine in the last five minutes even if physical determinism is true, which premise is at fault? It is clear that, given van Inwagen’s characterization of what ‘can render a proposition false’ means, if I was able to speak in the last five minutes then I must have been able to render P false. But why should this entail that I must have been able to render the conjunction of the propositions expressing the past state of the universe and the laws of nature false? Certainly, if we accept van Inwagen’s characterization of physical determinism then the performance of an actually unperformed action entails that the conjunction is false. But it does not seem to follow that because I’m able to perform that action I must also be able to render the conjunction false. When someone actually performs an action then she renders, and hence must be able to render (intentionally or not), certain propositions true. But for rendering those propositions true, the agent needn’t have the ability to render propositions about the past or the laws of nature true no matter whether physical determinism is true or false. Why then would the ability to render certain propositions false by acting otherwise imply that the agent must have the ability to render propositions about the laws or past false?

26

Freedom of the Will

The fact that I’m not able to render propositions about the past and the laws true or false is as irrelevant for my present ability to act otherwise as it is for my ability to do what I actually do. What the argument seems to assume is that, if determinism is true, agents can have the ability to do something that they do not actually do only if they also have the ability to alter the past or to violate the laws of nature. It is this assumption on which the argument depends: if we cannot have the ability to alter the past or to break the laws (‘able to make the relevant propositions false’), then we cannot have the power or ability to perform any action that we have not actually performed, unless physical determinism is false. Thus the question is whether or not it is true that we cannot have the ability to perform an action that would render some propositions false without having the ability to render propositions about the past or the laws false if physical determinism is true. I think, however, that this is obviously false. Since if this were true then Hume would be right and nothing whatever could have any unexercised power at all. Consider the following example. Let us imagine that S is a rich person who loves fancy cars. But she is also a very cautious driver who always respects the legally prescribed speed limits. As it may happen, S owns a Ferrari. As it also happens (given the speed regulations in her country), she never actually goes faster with her Ferrari than 130km/h. Can her Ferrari nevertheless have the power to go faster than 130 km/h? In normal circumstances, it does. But according to van Inwagen’s argument it cannot, if determinism is true. If S’s Ferrari at any time t—as long as it has been in S’s possession—could have gone faster than 130 km/h, it could have also rendered a proposition P (expressing the intrinsic state of the world in that moment) false. If determinism is true, then S’s Ferrari could have rendered that proposition false, only if S’s Ferrari could have rendered the conjunction of P0 and L false. But if ‘could have rendered false’ expresses an (unexercised) power, it is obvious that the Ferrari could not have rendered that conjunction false, since it does not have the supernatural power to alter the past or to violate the laws of nature. Consequently, if determinism is true, S’s Ferrari cannot, as long as it is in S’s possession, have the power to go faster than 130 km/h either. But this seems obviously false. I think, therefore, that van Inwagen’s argument is not obviously right. It is not obviously right because, if the argument wants to show anything interesting about free will, the phrase ‘could have rendered a proposition false’ must refer to agents’ powers or abilities. But it is in no way clear that it must also refer to such abilities in premises [4]–[6]. And if it does not, then the argument is not conclusive. If physical determinism is true, then if an agent had exercised her ability to perform an action that she has not in fact performed then something would have been different in the past or some laws would be ‘violated’. But from this it does not follow that an agent must have the ability to alter the past or violate the laws of nature in order to have the ability to perform an actually unperformed action, just as S’s

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Ferrari does not have to have such abilities in order to have the unexercised power to go faster than 130km/h. Consequently, van Inwagen’s fi rst argument can convince us that we do not have the ability to act otherwise in a deterministic universe only if we are also ready to grant that nothing whatever can have an unexercised power unless physical determinism is false. I cannot preclude, of course, that there might be some such sense of ‘could have rendered false’ that makes the argument sound. My claim is only that if ‘could have rendered false’ is meant to express some agent- or action-relevant ability then the argument is not conclusive. As I shall argue in the next section, the argument can only prove—which seems indeed obvious—that there is a sense in which actions are not contingent if physical determinism is true. This is not contended by anyone. The issue is whether this makes it metaphysically impossible for us to do otherwise. And my claim is that the consequence argument is not sufficient to prove that physical determinism renders it metaphysically impossible for us to have the ability to perform an action that we have not actually performed. To talk somewhat metaphorically, the deterministic nature of the physical universe can hardly deprive agents of their abilities to perform certain actions. And, as I shall argue, what is relevant to agents’ freedom of the will is exactly the possession of those abilities. But if we are able to act otherwise then it cannot be metaphysically impossible for us to act otherwise even if physical determinism is true. What we need to understand is the nature of practical modality relevant to our freedom of the will as a condition of our responsibility. But we cannot understand that modality by investigating the logical consequences of propositions about physical states and events.

2.4 INCOMPATIBILIST INTUITIONS Thus far I have argued that van Inwagen’s two formal interpretations of the consequence argument do not conclusively prove that determinism and the freedom of will are incompatible. I cannot of course state with absolute certainty that it is impossible to give any interpretation of the consequence argument that would indeed prove the incompatibility. But I do fi nd it rather unlikely that any attempt to that end can succeed. Physical determinism cannot deprive us of our ability to choose or our ability to perform an action that we have not in fact performed. Nevertheless, compatibilist solutions can only be convincing, if they can explain why it appears to be true, at least prima facie, that determinism is incompatible with the freedom of will. Van Inwagen says at one point that: It has seemed to most people who have been exposed (perhaps ‘subjected’ would be a better word) to philosophy that free will and determinism are incompatible. It is almost impossible to get beginning students of philosophy to take seriously the idea that there could be

28

Freedom of the Will such a thing as free will in a deterministic universe. Indeed, people who have not been exposed to philosophy usually understand the word ‘determinism’ (if they know the word at all) to stand for the thesis that there is no free will. And you might think that the incompatibility of free will and determinism deserves to seem obvious—because it is obvious. (van Inwagen 1993: 187)

I agree with van Inwagen about his statistical observation. Most people, when they fi rst hear or think about the problem, fi nd what is called in philosophical jargon ‘incompatibilism’ obvious. I myself am not an exception. People (most compatibilists too, I suppose) do have some initial intuition about the incompatibility of free will and determinism. Nonetheless, I think that, on reflection, our initial intuitions can (and must) be explained away. It seems to me that there are two main sources of the incompatibilist intuition. One concerns our understanding of what determinism is. The other is the consequence of an ambiguity in our notion of free will. Let me begin with the former. Van Inwagen says that for many ‘determinism’ just means that we have no free will. I agree that there is a notion of determinism which implies that we cannot have free will. And I think that this is exactly what most people have in mind when they hear that a person’s actions are determined. But that notion has little to do with whether or not we live in a ‘deterministic universe’ (an expression the meaning of which is far from being clear), and it is rather different from the one that philosophers (van Inwagen included) discuss under the name ‘determinism’. When people say that it is obvious that determinism is incompatible with free will what they usually mean is local social (environmental) or psychological determinism. It is the view that our genetic heritage, our education and early life, or simply our psychological makeup determines what we do. And it does seem obvious that this notion of determinism precludes free will. It precludes free will exactly because we do not have any clear idea about what social and psychological determinism is apart from the conviction that if we are so determined our will is not free. Social and psychological determinism implies that even if we think we act sometimes of our own free will, this is in fact always an illusion. Local psychological determinism seemed plausible for a long time because many psychologists and philosophers believed that it is required by scientific psychology. Science aims at discovering causal laws which, according to the then contemporary standards, must explain deterministic processes. Hence, if psychology is meant to be scientific, as many thought, it must postulate the existence of such deterministic laws. Moreover, early twentieth-century psychology was behavioristically oriented. Psychological laws were understood in terms of how the perceptual stimuli or the agents’ broader environment determines (by conditioning, for instance) their behavior. Since free will has obviously got something to do with our

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ability to make choices, if we understand ‘being determined’ in this way, it follows indeed that there is no room for agents’ free will in the explanation of their actions. But the days of psychological behaviorism are over and, with due respect to its achievements, most of us do not think that psychological laws must be deterministic in the sense that they leave no room for our ability to make choices.7 And most (although not all) contemporary discussions about the issue of compatibility do not understand determinism in terms of deterministic social and/or psychological laws. In fact, van Inwagen’s argument can be convincing only if it applies a notion of physical determinism. It is an important assumption of the argument that no one can have the ability to change or break a law. But while it seems very plausible to claim that no one can intentionally violate a physical law or can intentionally cause an event that would violate such a law, it is rather obscure what it would mean that no one can be able to act in contradiction to a social or psychological law. It is clear what it means that agents are not able to travel faster than light. But it is unclear in which sense agents are not able to do intentionally something that social or psychological laws predict. Thus, the arguments for incompatibilism use an abstract and global notion of determinism. Determinism is global in the sense that it is defi ned with reference to the states of the whole universe. And it is abstract in the sense that it is not tied to any specific laws formulated by some special sciences. Most of the examples about deterministic laws are borrowed from physics and not from psychology. But even these laws are just examples; they do not provide us with the notion of physical determinism. For instance, the fi rst premise in van Inwagen’s different interpretations of the consequence argument is itself a consequence of determinism, and not its defi nition. It seems indeed to be a consequence of physical determinism that propositions expressing any physical state of the universe at one instant and propositions expressing the totality of laws of nature imply propositions about the physical states of the universe at all other instances. But it is no more a defi nition of determinism than the fact that propositions about bachelors imply certain propositions about persons’ marital status is a defi nition of bachelorship. The most we can say is that any defi nition of determinism (or of bachelors) must have the respective implications.8 I think in the moment we realize how abstract and global the notion of determinism involved in the consequence argument is, it is already less clear how that sort of determinism can deprive us of our free will. Most people do not seriously worry about the so-called ‘logical forms’ of determinism.9 Even if we grant that propositions about our future actions are true now in the same sense in which propositions are true about our past actions, it takes a philosopher to start worrying about our free will because of that. Or perhaps it is true that I could not have performed a different action because I can do only what I in fact do; only a ‘counterpart’ of me, no matter how very similar to me, can act otherwise; but that person would not

30

Freedom of the Will

be, strictly speaking, me. However, even if we understand and even accept the arguments against the possibility of counterfactual identity, it does not necessarily make us seriously worry about whether or not we have free will. Once we understand determinism as an abstract relation among the physical states of the universe at different times, it is no more obvious why living in a ‘deterministic universe’ should threaten our freedom of will. It does not, at least, seem to threaten it more than ‘logical determinism’ or counterfactual non-identity does, i.e., very little. To see why abstract and global determinism does not threaten our freedom of will, we must turn now to the second source of our incompatibilist intuitions: our notion of free will. We have seen that we can understand the notion of determinism (at least in the context of the debate about incompatibilism) in at least two different ways. We can understand it locally and psychologically; and we can also understand it globally and metaphysically. There is a similar ambiguity in our notion of free will. On the one hand, that notion seems to involve some mental and/or actional ability. Stones, for instance, surely cannot have free will. But in the contemporary free will debates, the notion of ‘free will’ is oftentimes not defi ned with reference to any human ability. Van Inwagen, for instance, continues the earlier cited passage by claiming that ‘To say that we have free will is to say that more than one future is sometimes open to us’ (ibid.). Now I’m not denying that the openness of the future, in some sense, may be necessary for having free will. But if ‘having free will’ just means that ‘more than one future is open to us’, then free will seems to have little directly to do with our agency. In order to explain how this abstract notion of free will may give occasion to some incompatibilist intuitions, let me refer to a famous distinction concerning the two senses of ‘can’. This distinction, which John Austin introduced in his article called ‘Ifs and Cans’, is widely used (though for different purposes) both by incompatibilists and compatibilists. In the rest of this section, I want to show that, even though Austin does make an interesting observation about two different ways in which the modal auxiliary ‘can’ may be used, the distinction has also generated a misunderstanding concerning the conditions of our freedom of will. Austin claims that there is a sense in which ‘can’ involves opportunities and there is another in which ‘can’ involves abilities or capacities (Austin 1979: 222). And it is perfectly possible that a person can do something in one sense, but not in the other. From this, many philosophers have concluded that in order to have free will we have to have not only the ability to do otherwise, but also the opportunity to do so. The following little story may help see the point behind the distinction. Susan is an exceptionally talented swimmer. She also goes very conscientiously to training, where it has been proven many times that she can swim the hundred-meter butterfly faster than the actual world record. But the authorities that select the national swimming team to the Olympic Games

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treat her unfairly so that she never actually makes the team. What would we say if we were asked whether or not Susan can win an Olympic medal? It seems that there is no obviously right answer to that question because of an ambiguity of ‘can’. There is a sense in which Susan cannot be Olympic champion, since it is logically impossible to win an Olympic medal without participating in the Games. But there is another sense in which it would be highly unfair to say that she could not win the championship. Given her records, she has the ability to win the competition, and since abilities imply ‘cans’, we must say that in this latter sense she can win the hundred-meter butterfly. The fact that one does not have the opportunity to exercise a special ability does not prove that she lacks the ability. Let us imagine now that the person who substituted Susan in the team is a much less able swimmer. Her records do not even prove that she would ever qualify to the Olympic Games’ final. But she is lucky and she participates in the Games. No magic happens, however, so she does not indeed make it to the fi nal. Now could she win the Olympic Gold Medal? For all we know about her abilities as a swimmer, the answer must be negative. But as far as her opportunities are concerned, the answer must be yes. Unlike Susan (and most of us) she participated in the Games and in this sense she could have won an Olympic medal. She had the opportunity to win one, even if she lacked the ability. Consequently, it seems that one can, in the opportunity sense, do certain things that one cannot do in the ability sense; and conversely, one can, in the ability sense, do certain things that one cannot do in the opportunity sense. And many philosophers seem to think—even when they do not explicitly refer to it—that the distinction plays an essential role in the free will debate. A freely willed act must be contingent in the sense that the agent who has performed it could have acted otherwise, i.e., it was not impossible for her to act otherwise. But, as the previous example shows, there are different senses in which it is impossible for someone to do certain things. One may not have the ability to do certain things, or one may not have the opportunity to do certain things. And neither implies the other. We can lose and gain certain abilities, without losing and gaining certain opportunities; and conversely, we can lose and gain certain opportunities, without losing or gaining certain abilities. Thus, relying on the distinction of the two senses of ‘can’, philosophers are prone to distinguish two questions concerning the possibility of free will. One question concerns agents’ intrinsic ability or power to perform an action that they have not actually performed. The other allegedly concerns whether agents have the extrinsic opportunity to perform that action. Then some philosophers conclude that, since ‘free will’ must be understood as a condition of our responsible agency, it can concern only agents’ intrinsic abilities. And philosophers with the opposite persuasion will respond that ‘free will’ in the metaphysical sense is a question about the ‘openness of the future’ and hence the issue of free will concerns agents’ opportunities

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in a deterministic world as much as their intrinsic abilities. What I want to argue for, however, is that it is misleading to raise the issue in this way. Consider the following example, a version of which was fi rst suggested by Locke.10 I’m in a room, which I ought to leave. I decide not to. In fact, unbeknownst to me, the room’s only door is locked, I have no key and, in general, there is no way for me to exit the room. Can I leave the room? It seems obvious that I cannot. But it may not seem obvious why I cannot. I would say—with Locke—that I cannot because I’m unable to: I lack the power or ability to leave it. It is for this reason that it is false to say that I stayed in the room of my own free will, even if I did decide to stay. But some may respond: of course, you are able to leave the room so long as you retain your ability to walk, to see the door, and to fi nd your way out. You could have left the room as far as your intrinsic abilities are concerned, just like Susan the swimmer in our earlier example could have won an Olympic medal. What you do not have is the external opportunity to leave it. So the lack of opportunities can after all deprive you of your free will. One of the central theses of this book is that this response is wrong and the comparison is inadequate. In some sense I may indeed have the ‘ability to leave rooms’. But if in the previous situation the door is indeed locked then I do not have the ability to leave the room there and then. This is very much unlike not having opportunities. Certainly, I would not have the opportunity to leave a room if I stood in the middle of a desert with no shelter above me. And I would not have the opportunity to swim if there were no deep water around me just as Susan does not have the opportunity to win an Olympic medal if she does not participate in the Games. However, these examples do not prove that agents cannot have free will unless in addition to the ability to perform an actually unperformed action they also have the opportunity to exercise it. What the examples show is that the abilities to act otherwise cannot always be identified as some intrinsic property of the agent.11 But—as I shall argue in detail in the next chapter—those actions for which we are responsible and hence for which it matters whether or not we have done them of our own free will are almost never intrinsically identified. Thus, without the satisfaction of some well-specified extrinsic conditions, the agent may not have the relevant actional abilities. Consequently, I do not think that the issue of whether or not, or under what conditions, agents can have free will is necessarily affected by their opportunities. Opportunities matter to free will only to the extent that they are relevant to the possession of some of the agent’s actional abilities. But the fact that the past physical states of the whole universe and the physical laws imply every future physical state of the whole universe if determinism is true seems to be irrelevant to the identification of my specific actional abilities. What Austin’s distinction of the two senses of ‘can’ shows is that certain kinds of circumstances may be irrelevant to our having or

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not having free will, while others are relevant exactly because they affect our actional abilitites. Admittedly, if physical determinism is true, there is a sense in which ‘the future is not open’. The different versions of the consequence argument all aim to show exactly this: if determinism is true then there is a sense in which only one future is open to me because, relative to the physical past and the laws of nature, my future actions are not contingent physical events. And if it were true that my own future (at least physical) actions are not contingent because they are the consequences of the past states of the physical universe then I must be unable to do anything else except what I actually do. But the issue of whether or not we have free will is not a question about openness of abstract physical opportunities: it is a question about our agency. If, in a deterministic world, actions are not contingent because, relative to the past, only one future is open, then, by definition, in a nondeterministic world without agents, events would be contingent in the very same sense: more than a single future would be open. But in such a world nothing would be free. Hence we need to strike a conceptual link between contingency in the sense of openness and free will as a property of agents. And that link can only be established by the fact that agents may have unexercised actional abilities. By contrast, the considerations about whether or not we have abstract opportunities if determinism is false establish nothing. For abstract opportunities won’t bring about any event, neither can they prevent the occurrence of anything. Only agents can do this by the exertion of their actional abilities. Thus, understanding free will as the openness of the future is, if not mistaken, at least ambiguous. As I said earlier, there is a sense in which the future is not open if physical determinism is true; thus, if determinism is true, we lack some sort of abstract opportunity. But it is not obvious at all that this is the free will relevant sense of openness. As we have seen, the lack of opportunity in this sense cannot affect our abilities to perform certain actions in the future. And it is with reference to such abilities that alternatives that are relevant for the freedom of will must be identified.12 We can understand possibilities best if we understand fi rst counterfactuals. And my assumption is that we can understand best the free will relevant counterfactuals if we take them to be the consequences of the ascription of abilities. Considerations about abstract and global determinism are as irrelevant as considerations about the eternal truth of propositions or counterfactual non-identity. Whether or not they are plausible otherwise, they cannot prove that we lack practically significant alternatives. I believe, therefore, that our initial incompatibilist intuitions can be rationally explained away. If we understand determinism as the different versions of the consequence argument do, i.e., in global and/or abstract terms, and if we understand freedom of the will in a sense that is important to our agency, i.e., as involving the ability to perform an actually unperformed

34

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action, determinism is no threat to our free will. It may be true that there is a sense in which we lose opportunities, if determinism is true. But our actions remain contingent in the sense significant for freedom of the will because the sense in which we might lose opportunities leaves our agentrelevant abilities unaffected.13 Whether or not an event is metaphysically contingent does not depend on whether or not it is derivable from some other events. It depends on what kind of powers and abilities objects and agents have in defi nite circumstances. In the remainder of Part I, I shall argue that the actions for which agents are responsible are contingent in the sense that they cannot be responsible for their actions and omissions unless they could have done otherwise and that the relevant ability to do otherwise can be understood independently of any consideration about physical determinism.

3

Agency and Responsibility

So that liberty is not an idea belonging to volition, or preferring; but to the person having the power of doing, or forbearing to do, according as the mind shall choose or direct. (Locke 1689/1975: II, xxi, 10)

The aim of this chapter is to ground my positive proposal about freedom of the will in the next. That proposal rests on one assumption and purports to support two hypotheses. The assumption is that free will, whatever else it is, is a condition of agents’ responsibility for their actions and omissions. However, it may not be the condition of their responsibility for many other things. It is far from being obvious that freedom of the will is a condition of agents’ responsibility for their beliefs, desires, emotions, or the consequences of their actions. My assumption is that even if persons cannot believe, desire, or feel ‘of their own free will’, they are responsible agents exactly because, and to the extent that, their will is free. Why is free will a condition of agents’ responsibility for their actions and omissions? The fi rst hypothesis I wish to defend is that agents’ actions and omissions, unlike their mental attitudes, can be subject to their choices. More exactly, agents are responsible for their actions and omissions only to the extent that these can be controlled by the agents’ choices whereas responsibility for mental states and responsibility for the consequences of actions do not demand the possibility of this kind of control. My other hypothesis is that agents’ will is free in the responsibilitygrounding sense only if they have the power or ability to do otherwise. Thus, following Locke, I understand freedom of the will—what he, resenting the expression, called simply ‘liberty’—as an agent’s power. That freedom of the will is an agent’s power might sound obvious but as the discussion of the previous chapter testifies, it is not. Some, for instance, understand freedom of the will as the ‘openness of future’ which prima facie does not seem to entail anything about agents’ powers or abilities. And some others believe that freedom of the will concerns the causal origin of the action that

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Freedom of the Will

the agent performs. In my view, however, even if free will does imply the openness of future in some sense and may have something to do with the causal origin of an agent’s action, it is essentially a property of agents. Since free will is a condition of responsibility for actions and omissions, the relevant property must be agents’ ability to perform or omit certain actions. It follows that the abilities in question must be identified with reference to the kind of actions for which the agent is responsible. In the fi rst section of this chapter, I discuss an essential feature of the identification of such kind of actions. My most important conclusion will be that the types of action for the performance or omission of which we are directly responsible must be extrinsically identified and hence the relevant performance abilities are also extrinsic. This will have important consequences both for my own account of ‘could have done otherwise’ and for my criticism of some rival understandings about free will as a condition of responsibility for actions and omissions. In the second section of the chapter, I shall discuss some features of responsibility for negligent behavior. I shall argue that agents can be responsible for such behavior even if they do not have intentional control over what they do or fail to do. Here again the types of action for which agents are responsible must be extrinsically identified. But more importantly, such cases make it obvious that agents are responsible because they possess some properties and not because of some feature of their actually performed actions. And third, I shall discuss the problem of choice itself. My claim is that choices are not intentional actions and hence responsibility for them—to the extent it makes sense to talk about responsibility for choices and not only for chosen actions—cannot be subject to the same conditions as responsibility for our actions and omissions. Again, the appreciation of this fact shall be crucial to my interpretation of the conditional analysis of free will. I would like to emphasize that the subject of this book is the problem of free will as a condition of responsibility of actions and omissions. I do not attempt to provide any account of responsibility in general. One of the major contentions of this book—as I’ve already mentioned—is that our freedom of the will is a property of us. Consequently, I cannot observe any distinction between the conditions of agents’ being responsible and the conditions in which they are correctly or justifiably held responsible or take responsibility. I’m not quite sure how helpful such distinctions are for some general account of responsibility which includes a theory about agents’ responsibility for their mental attitudes and the consequences of their actions. But my claim is that as far as responsibility for actions and omissions are concerned, we need no such distinctions. Of course, it is impossible to argue about such matters without making some reference to our practice of holding people responsible. It is important to keep in mind, however, that whenever I refer to this practice I do it only as evidence that can support certain arguments about the conditions

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in which agents are responsible. Briefly put, my assumption is that we can correctly hold persons responsible only if they are. Our practice of holding them responsible is never constitutive to their responsibility or forms some subclass of responsibility. One purpose of this book is to show that free will is a fact about us. And it is a fact about us because it is a condition of our being responsible for what we do or fail to do.

3.1 DIRECT RESPONSIBILITY Intentional actions are complex occurrences; they have a structure. This structure is best expressed by saying that most of the times when we intentionally do certain things we do it by doing some other as well. On a committee meeting we vote, for instance, by raising our hand. Or we express our views verbally by moving our mouth and tongue. Thus, even if there are some mental actions the performance of which does not require that we move our body, the performance of any external physical action requires at least that we can appropriately control our bodily movement. We may express this by saying that our most basic physical actions are our bodily movements. There is a long debate in philosophy of action about whether and in which sense such actions are indeed basic.1 And there is another, related, equally difficult question concerning whether bodily movements and their intended results are different actions or the very same actions described by their different properties.2 However, my present concern is not philosophy of action, but the issue of responsibility. My main question here is whether or not our moral responsibility for our complex actions derives from our ability to move our body in certain ways. Depending on what we think about the identity of actions, this question can be interpreted in two different ways. On the one hand, if we think that bodily movements and actions identified by their results are ontologically different—even if not distinct— entities, then we can ask whether our responsibility for the intended result is derived from our direct responsibility for our bodily actions. On the other hand, if we think that bodily movements and the actions referred to in terms of their intended results are only different descriptions of the same actions, then we may ask whether the agent is directly responsible for the action’s result by virtue of her responsibility for the bodily movement. I shall argue that agents’ responsibility for their performed or omitted actions does not derive in any way from responsibility for their bodily movement. The relation is the exact opposite: we hold agents non-derivatively responsible for actions that are identified in terms of their intended results and only derivatively for their bodily movements. Thus, when we talk about agents’ ability to do or to avoid doing certain actions in the responsibilityrelevant sense, what matters is always an ability that is partly extrinsically identified. Since agents are directly responsible for their intended actions

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Freedom of the Will

which are identified by their results, the condition of their responsibility must be captured in terms of some extrinsic ability: the ability to perform or fail to perform some kind of action that is identified by some of its results. Many philosophers think otherwise, perhaps on the following grounds. Agents’ responsibility for their actions requires intentional control over what they do. Since a large part of the (mental, social, and physical) circumstances that are necessary for the successful performance of a complex action are not under agents’ direct intentional control, we can be directly responsible only for our bodily movements. What we do with our body is up to us and responsibility for our complex actions must be derived from what is up to us. Jay Wallace, for instance, claims that ‘the basic quality and degree of a person’s moral responsibility even for the consequences of what he does seems to be determined by those bodily movements that express the person’s choice’ (Wallace 1998: 259). I wish to argue that exactly the opposite is true. It is the extrinsically identified actions which determine ‘the basic quality and degree’ of agents’ responsibility exactly because actions identified by their intended results express best the agent’s choice. Agents are responsible for their bodily movements only to the extent that they are constitutive part of their intended complex actions. In this sense their responsibility for them is only derivative. It has been claimed that responsibility for omissions gives strong support to the view that we are directly responsible for our bodily movements. Harry Frankfurt discusses an example (originally due to Peter van Inwagen, see van Inwagen 1978) in which a person P who is witnessing a crime is not responsible for failing to call the police because his telephone is not working. According to Frankfurt, however, Now this is what P is morally responsible for: it is for making these movements. He is morally responsible for making them, of course, only under certain conditions—only, for instance, when he makes them with certain intentions or expectations. But if those conditions are satisfied, then what he is morally responsible for is just making the movements themselves . . . Whether it will be more appropriate to describe what P does as calling the police or only trying to call them will depend heavily upon what consequences his movements have . . . But it is precisely because P is judged simply for making of his movements that the quality and the degree of his moral responsibility for what he does remain the same in either case. (Frankfurt 1983: 100, my emphasis) But why should we think that agents’ moral responsibility for their complex actions and particularly the omissions of some actions derives from their simple actions or bodily movements?3 It is true, of course, that—paranormal phenomena aside—we can only perform a complex action by making our body move. But it does not

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follow that our moral responsibility for our complex actions originates in, or derives from, our moral responsibility for our voluntary bodily movements. In order to show this, I shall consider situations in which a person S is φ-ing because she is A-ing, where [1] φ-ing is some complex action, [2] A-ing is some bodily movement, and [3] the ‘because’ expresses some ‘byrelation’ which may or may not be causal.4 Briefly put, my claim is that even if S is responsible (or ‘judged to be responsible’) for φ-ing because she is A-ing, it is not true that S is responsible (or ‘judged to be responsible’) for φ-ing because she is responsible (or ‘judged to be responsible’) for A-ing. I agree with Wallace that the real question is what expresses best an agent’s morally relevant choice. Agents’ responsibility for their actions, I shall argue throughout this book, requires the ability that they make a choice about the performance of the type of action for which we hold them responsible. But, as I shall argue here, the relevant types of actions are virtually never bodily movements. Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that we can literally choose our voluntary bodily movements independently of choosing the complex actions of which they are part. This assumption, as we shall see soon, has its own difficulties, but for the moment we can put these difficulties aside. Even then our choice of a bodily movement appears to be relevant to our moral responsibility only to the extent that it is a part of the choice of a complex action. The simplest way of arguing for this is by a reductio. Let us assume that agents are indeed directly responsible for their bodily movements and their responsibility for them is not derivative from their responsibility of their intended complex actions. This would imply that we must identify the chosen bodily movement without reference to its role in the complex action, since otherwise it would be difficult to see how responsibility for complex actions could derive from an agent’s direct responsibility for her bodily movements. Our criterion for identifying the relevant bodily movement must be ‘internal’ to it. Now it seems that we can distinguish two bodily movements by reference to the different bodily organs that have been moved. Thus whatever I do with my forefi nger cannot be the same bodily movement as what I do with my thumb. And whatever I do with my right hand is not the same bodily movement as what I do with my left hand. But then, when an assassin holds his gun in his right hand and when he holds it in his left hand, he obviously performs different bodily actions. Similarly, when he pulls the trigger with his forefi nger, and when he pulls it with his thumb, these must be different bodily actions. But the choice between these types of bodily actions, provided that all other conditions remain the same (the gun is pointed at the victim with the intention to shoot him), does not make any difference as far as the agent’s moral responsibility is concerned. He is surely no more or less responsible if he chooses to pull the trigger with his forefi nger rather than with his thumb.

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It is important to be clear about what this argument has meant to show. Certainly, I’m not arguing for the implausible idea that we are not responsible for what we do with our body. What I am saying is that we are responsible for these movements (pace Wallace, Frankfurt, and others) only because we choose and intend to perform some complex action which is identified with reference to its (causal or non-causal) results. For the target of our moral (or more generally, practical) concern is the performance or omission of a type of action that is identified by the bodily movement’s result. If free will is a condition of responsibility, then we must have been able both to bring about and prevent those results. This seems to be even more apparent in the case of omission. Our moral (or practical) concern is not to move or not to move our body, but that the movement would mean the performance of some action that is identified with reference to the movements’ result: something that we may intend to avoid. Our bodily movements are only constitutive parts of our intended complex actions (like a murder, or a sacrifice in order to save someone else’s life) for which we are morally responsible. Killing with a gun presupposes that the murderer uses a weapon: using the weapon is a constitutive part of her action. But it would be weird to say that she is ‘more directly’ responsible for the choice of a type of gun than her killing with it. That choice can hardly matter for her responsibility. Analogously, bodily movements as constitutive parts of the intended complex actions can be altered without this having any significance to the agents’ responsibility. Consequently, the fact that we are φ-ing because we are A-ing does not imply at all that we are responsible for φ-ing because we are responsible for A-ing. Thus, the order of explanation runs in the opposite direction when we explain a complex action as a (causal or other) result of a simple bodily movement and when we judge agents’ responsibility for it. Our complex actions are brought about by our simple bodily movements in certain circumstances. But the responsibility for our simple bodily movements is ascribed on the basis of the complex actions of which they are parts. This is clearly reflected by the fact that one may have totally different reasons for choosing to perform the complex action and choosing to move her particular body parts. The assassin might have some reasons for killing rather than not; but he has different kinds of reasons for choosing to move his forefi nger rather than his thumb when killing. The basic quality and degree of his responsibility is determined by his reason to kill rather than not; his reasons to move one part of his body rather than another—for instance that he has an itch in his thumb—is irrelevant for his moral responsibility. It may be worth mentioning that it is far from being obvious that we can always choose our bodily movements. For instance, when I talk I may be morally responsible for what I say. Apparently, I cannot talk without making my tongue move. The contribution of my body to my talk consists exactly in the way in which I move my tongue and my mouth when I talk.

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But if I were asked how I actually choose the ways in which my mouth and my tongue move, I would surely feel perplexed. And if I were criticized for how my mouth and my tongue move, then, if I understood the point of this criticism at all, I would think I’m criticized for my pronunciation and not for what I have said. For whatever moral criticism I may deserve for what I have said, it surely cannot be grounded on some criticism about how I happen to move my mouth and my tongue. More generally, it seems to me that we can be responsible only for such actions the content of which we can conceptually represent and hence they can be subject of our evaluations. And this does not seem to apply to many kinds of bodily movements. Now one may want to argue that if our responsibility for our bodily movements derives from their results then we cannot distinguish between responsibility for actions and responsibility for the action’s consequences. But this does not follow. My claim is that every action which is relevant for moral responsibility must be identified with reference to some of its causal or non-causal results. This does not imply that there is no distinction between responsibility for actions and responsibility for consequences. What follows from my view is that the distinction should not be understood in terms of agent’s bodily movement as opposed to its consequences. Rather, we should distinguish the two kinds of responsibility with reference to the agents’ attitude toward what they plan to do. The difference between responsibility for actions and responsibility for their consequences is that we choose our complex actions, but we only predict their consequences. For instance, I choose to buy a lottery ticket and I predict that with a certain probability it’ll be drawn and so I shall win. It is for this reason that responsibility for our actions requires freedom of the will, but responsibility for our actions’ consequences does not. Even if I’m responsible in some sense for winning, I’m not responsible because I’ve won of my own free will. Both choosing and predicting are mental activities (although they are not, as I shall argue soon, intentional or voluntary mental actions). But both involve essentially mental attitudes too and these attitudes are different in the two cases. We cannot honestly claim that we have chosen to do something that we cannot intend to perform. And we cannot honestly say that we are predicting something to happen (with a certain probability, perhaps) without expecting that it is going to happen. Thus, we can only choose to do something if we also intend to perform the chosen action. And we can predict our actions’ consequences only if we expect that they are going to happen. The actions for which we are directly responsible are our (complex) intended (and not only intentional) actions. The consequences for which we may or may not be responsible are the foreseeable or even expected, but not intended consequences of our intended actions. My arguments thus far relied on Wallace’s observation that whatever we are directly responsible for, it must be something that best expresses our choice. But there might be another argument that appears to support the view that we are directly responsible for our bodily movements. This

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argument claims that responsibility for the omission of complex actions requires a sufficient degree of control over our bodily movements. We exculpate agents if we learn that they were unable to move their body in the requisite ways. Normal capacity of control over our own bodily movements seems to be a necessary condition for ascribing responsibility for actions and omissions. However, it does not follow from this that we are directly morally responsible for these voluntary bodily movements. For instance, it is also a condition of agents’ responsibility that agents act in normal mental conditions. Persons are not responsible when they are hypnotized or sleepwalk because they cannot have appropriate mental control over what they do. But this does not entail that what they are directly morally responsible is their own mental conditions. A related but more important argument might claim that agents are directly responsible for their bodily movements because they appear to have more control over them than over their complex actions. Since we do other things by doing something with our body, we are more intimately related to our bodily movements than to our bodily movements’ results. The idea here may be that since responsibility requires control, the more direct control one has over a type of action, the more direct is her responsibility. However, this idea is mistaken since the degree of causal control has little to do with the issue of what we are directly responsible for. Our control over our bodily movement is certainly direct in the sense that, if certain normal physiological conditions are satisfied, we can move our limbs, tongue, etc., just by trying or attempting to move them and not by doing something else. But this is perfectly compatible with the fact that it is not our bodily movements for which we are directly morally responsible. And it is also compatible with the fact that our control over our bodily movements can be just as limited as our control over our complex actions. Consider any basic physical action that we may perform. In order to intentionally move our body, it is necessary that, in addition to our trying or attempting to do it, certain neural and muscular processes take place. As cases of paralysis show, if certain neural connections malfunction, we cannot voluntarily control the movements of our own body. So even if it is undoubtedly true that whenever our body moves at will we can directly attempt to move it, and that we do not, and cannot, directly attempt to bring about changes in our neural system, these neural events causally mediate between our intentions and our bodily actions. In this purely causal sense, control over our bodily movements is no more direct than our control over their extra-bodily consequences. And this is obviously relevant to the issue whether we have reason to believe that we are directly responsible and morally judged for our actually performed or unperformed bodily movements. To illustrate why this is so, let me fi rst use a somewhat recherché example. Imagine that a paralyzed assassin hires a group of engineers to design a device for him which substitutes his malfunctioning neural pathways.

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Whenever his brain emits a certain sign that would normally cause his limbs to move in a certain way, the device detects it and makes his body move accordingly. But let us further assume that the device is not, as it were, perfectly reliable. In certain cases it makes the assassin’s limbs move appropriately, on some other occasions it does not transmit the sign properly. Imagine now that the assassin chooses or intends to shoot his victim, manages to shoot and in fact kills her. Does the degree of reliability of the device affect in any way the assassin’s moral responsibility? I think the answer must be clearly in the negative. Suppose that the device is not a deterministic one. Nevertheless, it may work very reliably and moves the assassin’s limbs as he intends ninetynine times out of one hundred attempts. Or perhaps it functions poorly, and transmits properly the assassin’s proximate intention to move his body only once out of one hundred attempts. Surely, the more reliable the device is, the more control the assassin has over his bodily movements. But if he succeeds to hit his target, the degree of control over his bodily movement is irrelevant to his moral responsibility. He is hardly less responsible for the murder, just because the device works less reliably. Briefly, it is easy to imagine cases when our attempts to move our body are transmitted by some prosthetic aid, which we may call—following John Bishop—heteromesial.5 Heteromesial actions may allow a varying degree of control over one’s own bodily motions. But agents’ responsibility for their intended bodily actions will not (or at least not necessarily) be influenced by how much control they have over their bodily movements.6 Although the possibility of variably reliable heteromesial actions illustrates best why responsibility should not depend on the degree to which agents can control their bodily movements, more familiar cases will do as well. Normally we move our body by affecting changes (unintentionally) on our own efferent neural mechanism. But not all of us can control our bodily movements equally well; otherwise we would all be equally good sharpshooters (or dancers, or basketball players, etc.). We are not, because some people can control better than others what their limbs do. But this will hardly affect our responsibility: killing with a trembling hand is no more (or less) of a sin than killing with a steady one. It is crucial here to distinguish the issue of control relevant to direct responsibility from the problem of skills. The latter concerns the conditions under which we can truly say that a person has done something intentionally.7 Someone playing basketball for the fi rst time might throw the ball toward the basket and the ball might happily reach the target; nevertheless, we would be reluctant to say that she scored it intentionally. Acting intentionally might require that the agent has acquired a certain skill in performing the relevant kind of action. However, if the agent has reasons to avoid a certain kind of action, it would hardly count as an excuse that she did what she did unskillfully. She is responsible for that action even if its success was a matter of luck.8

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Consequently, we cannot argue that agents are directly responsible for their bodily movements on the grounds that they have necessarily more control over their simple bodily actions than over their complex actions. What our examples show is that if we are morally responsible for our bodily movements, it is surely not because we must have ‘stronger’ or more reliable intentional control over our bodily movements than we do over our complex actions. Our voluntary control over our bodily movements is direct only in the sense of ‘by-relation’: we do not perform our bodily movements by doing some other (at least physical 9) action. But it is not direct in the causal sense, and it is this latter sense of ‘direct’ which is relevant to the argument concerning the relation between our direct responsibility and the capacity of control. Thus, the reliability of agents’ control over their bodily movements is no more relevant to their responsibility than the degree of control over their complex actions. Even if it is only by moving our body that we can control our bodily movements’ results, our responsibility does not require that either of them be under our full or perfect control.

3.2 NEGLIGENCE AND CONTROL Thus far I have considered the problem of how to identify the kind of actions the performance or omission of which agents are directly responsible. In this section, I shall argue that actual intentional control is not a necessary condition of responsibility for actions and omissions. This shall be relevant for my analysis to the extent that it explains why an adequate account of free will as a condition of responsibility for actions and omissions must be different from a theory about actual intentional control. Agents can be responsible for an action or omission even if they had no intention to perform or omit to perform it. But agents cannot be responsible, unless their will is free. Consequently, free will as a condition of responsibility does not require actual intentional control. In what follows, I shall discuss some familiar cases in which agents are responsible even if they do not exercise direct intentional control over what they do. The aim of the discussion is to show that neither direct nor indirect actual intentional control is a condition of responsibility. This will be essential not only for my own analysis of the freedom of will but also for my criticism about one of its most important compatibilist alternatives. Examples about cases when agents are responsible for their actions and omissions even if they have not intentionally controlled what they did— or more typically, omitted to do—are abundant. A driver can be morally responsible for an accident even if she had no intention whatsoever to cause an accident. Why is she responsible? The natural explanation is that she is responsible because she was careless. But carelessness in the relevant context can mean more than one thing.

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Carelessness may involve conscious forbearance: although agents are aware of what they ought to do, they nevertheless do not care to perform the pertinent kind of action. For instance, as in our earlier example, one may know that he ought to call the police but he just does not care. In such cases, agents may choose to refrain from an action, and hence they intentionally omit to do what they ought to. If carelessness always meant that agents consciously choose the omission of some (morally or prudentially pertinent) action, then intentional control over actions and omissions may indeed be a necessary condition of their responsibility. But there are at least two other forms of carelessness that do not seem to involve intentional control over what we do or fail to do. First, as in the driver’s case, carelessness can mean insufficient degree of attention to the performance of some action. But no one can choose and intend to pay insufficient attention to what one does. One can—sometimes—choose not to pay any attention: this may be a form of intentional omission. But it seems impossible to voluntarily not pay sufficient attention to the performance of some intended action. Just as no one can voluntarily misunderstand what one hears or reads (one can only voluntarily pretend to do such things), no one can consciously intend to pay insufficient attention to what one does. Misunderstanding and lack of sufficient attention are mental states in which agents can retrospectively fi nd themselves, but which they cannot voluntarily bring about. So if an action is careless because insufficient attention was paid at performing it and if agents are morally responsible for performing an action in a careless way, then their responsibility does not require actual intentional control over what they do. Second, carelessness can also mean that persons fail to do or not to do something because they have forgotten to do it. Sometimes omissions (and perhaps less typically, actions) are results of simple forgetfulness. When we forget to do something we do not consciously consider what we ought to do. And we do not choose or intend to omit the type of action that we would be obliged to perform. When a professor is in a hurry to leave her office, she may forget to lock its door. If on one such occasion the university’s property has been stolen from her office, she is responsible even though she did not have intentional control over her not locking the door. Certainly, she did not intend to forget to do what she otherwise wanted to. Yet her omission was blameworthy, so she is morally responsible for it. It seems therefore that no direct intentional control must be exercised in order to be responsible. But some say that in such cases agents are responsible because they have indirect control in the sense that they could have exercised intentional control over what they were going to do. The correct response to this claim shall be crucial to my account of free will. I suggest that we must distinguish two senses in which careless agents could have intentional control over what they do. On the one hand, careless agents are responsible only if they have the ability to perform some voluntarily or intentionally controlled action which they have actually failed to perform.

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In this sense, if they are responsible, it is true that they must have had the ability to intentionally control what they’ve done. On the other hand, this does not imply that they could have indirectly intentionally controlled what they have done or failed to do. Indirect intentional control could be a condition of responsibility only if agents who do not exercise control over what they do at the time of action (or omission) could have done intentionally something in the past by which they would have ensured their respective later behavior.10 But, as I shall argue in Chapter 8, such kind of control is only possible if agents’ present unintentional omissions are the foreseeable consequences of their earlier intentional actions. Otherwise negligent agents cannot be responsible for the reason that they could indirectly intentionally control whether or not, or how, they perform an action. Now I’m not denying that this kind of intentional control over what we are going to do is sometimes possible and that this has interesting consequences with regards to the notion of selfdetermination necessary for free will and responsibility. But it seems to me obvious that we cannot always have such indirect intentional control over the actions for which we are nevertheless responsible. 11 First, I can intentionally control my present behavior by my earlier action only if I was able to recognize at that earlier time that there was at least a high probability that I would omit to do something which I would be expected to do. But, patently, I cannot recognize a future tendency in my behavior in any unexpected situation. Some abilities of recognition—like the ability to recognize moral or practical reasons—are indeed conditions of responsibility. But—disregarding perhaps extraordinary circumstances— the ability to recognize future tendencies of one’s own mental states is not relevant for judging persons’ moral responsibility.12 Perhaps some people are better than others at recognizing how they will feel, or what thought will or won’t occur to them at some future time. But even if this capacity has undeniable prudential relevance, possessing it is not a necessary condition of moral responsibility. Second, and more importantly, this suggestion involves a vicious regress. Let us suppose that the professor in our example, foreseeing that she will forget something important, tries to remind herself to lock the door before she leaves by putting a notice on the inside of the door. What happens if, in her haste, she does not pay sufficient attention to read the notice? Given her awful absentmindedness, she is then responsible for not having designed another mechanism that would have reminded her to read carefully what has been written on the inside of the door. But what happens, if she did design such a mechanism, but she nevertheless forgot to apply it in the relevant circumstances? Is she responsible because she could have chosen and intended to design yet another mechanism that would have reminded her to apply the fi rst? This should go on, infi nitely. Thus, we cannot deny that it happens sometimes that we just forget to do what we ought to and we have to bear responsibility for the omission of the

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relevant kind of action even if we had neither direct nor indirect intentional control over whether or not we perform it. In such cases, we are responsible even if our present lack of control is not a foreseeable consequence of our earlier intentional actions. We are responsible for such kind of omissions because at the time of omission we had the ability to perform the kind of action that we have, unintentionally, failed to perform. Since we are responsible for our careless actions and omissions, it seems to be impossible that both free will and actual intentional control be the conditions of responsibility. So we face a choice. Either we say that we can be responsible even if our will is not free. Or we insist that freedom of will is a condition of responsibility and admit that actual intentional control is not a condition of our free will. Many philosophers endorse the fi rst view. They think that careless or negligent agents are responsible even if they are not free.13 According to them, moral freedom and intentional control must go hand in hand. What examples about agents’ responsibility without their intentional control show is that sometimes they can be responsible, even if their will is not free. But since these occasions are rare and untypical, they are irrelevant for an analysis of free will as a condition of moral responsibility. I wish to sustain, however, that exactly the opposite is true. Negligent behavior is a lot more frequent phenomena than intentional wrongdoing. But even if it is true that whenever, for instance, we forget to perform an action we cannot intentionally control whether or not we perform it, our will can be free and it is this that grounds our responsibility. What explains our responsibility is that even if we cannot always voluntarily control whether or not we exercise our ability of choice we do not thereby lose the ability to make the relevant choices. Hence, what matters for responsibility is the possession of certain powers and abilities even when we fail to exercise them. Our freedom of will as a condition of responsibility requires the ability to make a choice about the performance of a kind of action but it does not demand that we actually intentionally control—either directly or indirectly—what we actually do.

3.3 THE POWER OVER CHOICE The conclusion of the previous section was that we can be responsible for our behavior even when we didn’t, and in some sense couldn’t, intentionally control them. Since not even indirect intentional control is necessary for responsibility, we can be responsible even if we happen to fail to exercise our ability to choose. In this section, I shall consider the ability to make choices about whether or not to perform a certain kind of action. I shall try to identify the most general features of the sort of control that we can have over the exertion of our ability to choose. My main contention is that the nature of this control is fundamentally different from the kind of control

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we can have over the types of actions for which we are directly responsible. This shall be highly relevant for my account of freedom of will as a condition of responsibility. Let me start the discussion with a famous argument by Locke. He claims That Willing, or Volition, being an action, and Freedom consisting in a power of acting, or not acting, a Man in respect of willing, or the Act of Volition, when any action in his power is once proposed to his Thoughts, as presently to be done, cannot be free. So that in respect of willing, a man in such a case is not free: Liberty consisting in a power to act or not to act, which, in regard to Volition, a Man, upon such proposal has not. For it is unavoidably necessary to prefer doing, or forbearance, of an action in a man’s power, which is one so proposed to his thoughts; a man must necessarily will the one, or the other of them, upon which preference, or volition, the action, or forbearance, certainly follows, and is truly voluntary: But the act of volition, or preferring one of the two, being that which he cannot avoid, a Man in respect of that act of willing, is under necessity, and cannot be free; . . . (Locke 1689/1975: 245–246) On the plausible assumption that Locke is talking here about the ‘act of choice’—as opposed to the intention to perform the chosen action14 —his claim seems to be that we cannot control whether or not we choose. I shall argue that Locke is right to the extent that agents’ ability to choose to perform one action rather than another does not logically (conceptually) imply that they can also control by their choices whether or not they must choose. And in this sense ‘a man in respect of willing or act of volition’ indeed ‘cannot be free’. This, however, leaves us with a further question about choice and control. We must understand in which sense agents can control what they choose, which I shall attempt to do in the next section. Locke’s argument has been traditionally criticized on the grounds that there seem to be cases in which we can make a choice about, and hence can intentionally control, whether or not we choose. For instance, we can delay our choice about certain alternatives until we have carefully deliberated which course of action we fi nd most preferable.15 In fact, some scholastics thought that exactly this capacity (‘freedom of exertion’ as opposed to ‘freedom of specification’) constitutes freedom of the will.16 Alternatively, as we shall see in Chapter 8, we can make ourselves unable to make certain choices in the future. So there seem to be ways to self-control future possibilities of making certain choices. Moreover, it is arguable that exercising self-control over our own choice-making is one of the most important functions of our intentions.17 By forming and retaining intentions, agents are able to coordinate which future choices they make and which ones they avoid making.

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Despite all this, I think that Locke’s point is essentially correct. First (as it is clear from his example18), Locke claims that agents are not free to make a choice when their alternatives are already factored into binary options, i.e., when they must decide whether or not they perform a particular action which they think is ‘in their power’. And, in this respect, delaying a choice works in the same way as any other choice does: the agent must decide whether or not to delay. Second, consider the following example: I have to make a decision about some holiday plans for the next year. Certainly, I can postpone my choice until I’ve consulted my family to see their preferences, gathered information about prices, etc. But I cannot postpone a decision forever. For sooner or later postponing it shall result in choosing not to have any plan. And whenever I choose to postpone a decision I do not control whether or not I make a choice, I only modify the options: I enlarge the set of alternatives by the option of not choosing anything from the original and narrower set of options. But this does not imply that Locke is wrong when he says that ‘a Man in respect of willing, or the Act of Volition, when any action in his power is once proposed to his Thoughts, as presently to be done, cannot be free’. A more sophisticated objection may claim that although we cannot choose whether or not we make a choice, we can choose whether or not we consider some options and it is this ability in which our ‘freedom of choice’ may consist. However, in order to understand this proposal correctly, we must distinguish two different questions about the relevant considerations here. First, agents may consciously consider which practical options they have. Second, they may consciously consider which practical option they want to follow. Locke’s argument is relevant and basically correct as far as the fi rst issue is concerned. But it does not help to understand the relation between conscious considerations and the choice which is their issue. As our earlier discussion about negligence and forgetfulness illustrates, agents do not have to be able to control whether or not they consciously consider the options that are open to them in order to be responsible since negligent agents—if they had consciously considered some options which they could, but happened not to, consider—might have acted differently. Thus, since negligent agents are responsible, if free will is a condition of responsibility, freedom of the will does not require that agents be able to control which options they actually consider. Consequently, choices and actions differ in a fundamental respect as far as the possibility of intentional control is concerned. On the one hand, agents can have the power to control whether or not they perform an action even if they do not actually exercise such control. On the other, they cannot control whether or not they make a choice even when they choose. Moreover, agents can be responsible even if they cannot control which options they consider in a particular situation. Some options just occur to them and then they cannot avoid making choices. Other options do not occur to them

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even if they are epistemically accessible to them. But the lack of this kind of control does not exempt them from responsibility. However, Locke is not quite right when he says that ‘man must necessarily will’ (choose), because it can happen that we do not make any choice although it is possible for us to make one. That we cannot always intentionally control whether or not we choose does not imply that we are unable to make one. In our earlier example, one can have a plan that requires of her to leave her office in time. And one can have, at the same time, an intention to take sufficient care of the university’s property. There is no question which action the agent ought to have chosen: she ought to have chosen to lock the door before she leaves. And had she made a choice, she would have surely chosen to lock it. But it can happen all too frequently that one of our plans makes us oblivious to another, and therefore we forget to make certain choices that we ought to make. Similarly, when a drowsy driver causes an accident, she may be responsible because earlier she has made a choice to drive home, even if she knew that her mental conditions were inappropriate. If, however, someone drives a car in appropriate mental conditions and yet is responsible for causing an accident, her responsibility does not require that an earlier choice should have been made. It only implies that she has retained her ability to choose while driving and that she could have made a choice and could have acted so that the accident would have been avoided. Not to pay sufficient attention is obviously not a matter of conscious choice. But whenever in such cases we are morally responsible we could have made a choice and avoided doing what we did if we had not been as careless as we were. Most of our actions are not preceded by conscious deliberation. And in the absence of conscious deliberation, the ability to make a choice is often revealed when agents actually fail to make it. Thus, agents can retain their ability to choose even if they fail to face consciously an option which is epistemically accessible to them and which they would have chosen if it had occurred to them. Hence, the fact that they did not choose what they have omitted to do was not necessary or ‘unavoidable’ in the metaphysical sense.

3.4 THE ACT OF CHOICE As I have noted earlier, Locke’s argument does not seem to say anything about our power to control what we choose. His considerations about our power to control whether or not we make a choice does not seem to have any direct consequence as to how agents choose when they do make a choice. How agents make choices is, of course, an enormous question to which we shall return at several stages of this book. Right now I shall consider only one feature of our ability to make choices which is directly relevant to the correct understanding of my proposed analysis of free will.

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I want to argue that choosing a particular option is not an intentional action and hence whatever conditions agents must satisfy in order to be responsible for their actions or omissions the very same conditions cannot apply to their choices. Freedom of the will is surely not the same thing as ‘freedom of choice’. Why should anyone believe that choosing a particular option is an intentional action? The answer seems to me that many times we consciously deliberate which option we want to perform and philosophers sometimes identify choice with practical deliberation.19 Now deliberation is indeed an intentional action which we sometimes can, as we have seen previously, choose to do. But choices in the sense that will be relevant to my analysis of free will are not acts of deliberation, but rather their results, like coming to a (practical) conclusion. And it is not obvious at all that in this sense too choice is an intentional action. Daniel Dennett succinctly summarizes the problem: Are decisions voluntary? Or are they things that happen to us? From some fleeting vantage points they seem to be the preeminently voluntary moves in our lives, the instants at which we exercise our agency to the fullest. But those same decisions can also be seen to be strangely out of control. We have to wait to see how we are going to decide something, and when we do decide, our decision bubbles up to consciousness from we know not where. We do not witness it being made; we witness its arrival. (Dennett 1984: 78) Here Dennett calls our attention to an important phenomenological fact. On the one hand, choosing or deciding to do something appears to be involuntary, if voluntariness implies the presence of prior or concurrent intention to perform the intended action; for the whole point about making a conscious choice is that we do not yet intend to choose what we eventually choose to do. On the other hand, making a choice certainly seems to be voluntary if what we mean by voluntariness is that the choice we make is only up to us. Whom else could it ‘be up to’ after all? It seems to me that the correct response to this puzzle is to say that (1) our choices do not only happen to us; (2) but this does not imply that they are voluntary in the sense that agents can intentionally control their choice of a particular action in the same sense as they can control which actions they perform. 20 What makes it appear that, unless our choices are voluntary, they can only happen to us is that we tend to think of our choices in terms of our intentional actions. Our actions do not only happen to us exactly because they are voluntary and intentional. But the converse does not hold. Not everything that does not only happen to us is voluntary and intentional. Consider theoretical deliberation, like fi nding a solution to a mathematical problem. When mathematicians solve a problem or fi nd a proof this is

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obviously not something that ‘just happens to them’. They have solved the problem. But it would be awkward to say that they solved it ‘voluntarily’. First, because it is hard to see what it would mean to say that they have solved it involuntary. And second, because doing something voluntarily and intentionally presupposes that we can represent what we want to do. But the point of a mathematical discovery is exactly that before the proof is found it cannot be represented. So there are certain mental activities that do not just happen to us, but nevertheless it would be strange to say that we do them voluntarily or intentionally. Our choices are one of them. The fi rst step toward understanding the relation between making a choice about something and choosing a particular option is to define correctly the scope of ‘intentionally’ when it is applied to some activity’s result. When someone has made a discovery she must have done something intentionally such that it was a discovery. But this does not follow that someone intentionally made a discovery. Although the discovery must be a result of some intentional action, it does not follow that that result itself could have been intended. On the other hand, from the agents’ point of view, the result is not simply an accident or some unintended consequence of her intentional action. Hence, there are two constraints that the proper understanding of the nature of agents’ relations to their choosing a particular option must satisfy. On the one hand, it cannot be a purely accidental consequence of something one does intentionally. Discoveries are not intentional or voluntary in the sense that one may not even be aware of the possible outcomes of one’s activity: one may investigate a problem and just discovers a solution. In this respect, our choices are different: we cannot choose a practical option unless we can represent its result before we choose to perform the relevant action. However, the choice of a particular action is similar to fi nding a solution to a problem to the extent that the outcome of the activity is unknown to the agent until the activity has actually been performed; for, to repeat, there would be no point in making a choice if one had already intended to perform the action which is the concern of her choice. Thus, what we have to understand correctly is the relation between the activity of choice making and its result: choosing to perform a particular action. Now I’d suggest that we compare the activity to make choices to another kind of action the result of which essentially involves alternatives. For instance, when someone aims to resolve an uncertainty about what to do, she can throw a coin with the intention to have either a tails up or a heads up. Suppose the result is heads. Now we can say that the agent did something intentionally (has thrown a coin) such that it was a throwing of head: throwing a head was not just an accident from the agent’s point of view. If the coin had landed on its edge that might have indeed been an accident. But if the agent did what she did with the intention that one of the options should be realized, the result is not just an unintended consequence of what she did even if she did not intend that particular result.

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The voluntariness of choice seems to be parallel to the coin throwing case. Agents make choices because they face practical options: they believe—even if they do not consciously consider—that they can perform and avoid performing some actions. As we have seen, in certain situations and after the proper factoring of the options, a person is not even able to avoid making a choice about whether or not to perform a particular action. Which particular action the agent chooses to perform is up to the agent in the sense that it is a non-accidental result of her making a choice. This, it seems to me, explains well why our choices ‘seem to be . . . preeminently voluntary’ and, at the same time, ‘bubble . . . up to consciousness from we know not where’. There are two important similarities between the coin throwing case and choices which make the comparison helpful. First, both entail the exertion of some power that essentially involves alternatives. If the agent intends to decide what to do by throwing a coin, it is no point to throw one of which she knows that it can only land heads up. Similarly, an agent cannot make a choice about whether or not to perform an action unless she believes that it is open to her both to choose to perform it and choose not to perform it. And second, if the coin is heavily biased so that it can only land heads up, then by throwing it the agent does do something but she is not able to do what she intended to do. Similarly, if an agent believes that she can choose to perform and she can choose not to perform an action, but, in fact, she is in a condition that only one of the options is available to her, then she is not able to choose even if she is unaware of this fact. Whether or not the latter situation is possible at all is far from being obvious to me. But if it is, then the fact that the agent believed that she made a choice did not make it a choice anymore than the fact that she believed that she had thrown a fair coin makes her to have thrown a fair coin. However, I cannot emphasize enough, that I introduced this analogy only to explain in which sense our choices are not intentional actions even if they are the results of some (conscious or unconscious) activity. It is crucial to see that making a choice is not ‘throwing an internal coin’ simply because it is not a chance event. Although choices and chance events are similar in the sense that both essentially involve alternatives, this does not imply that the former equally implies historically evolving objective probabilities. A chance event occurs with a certain probability that is derivable from certain objective physical laws or dispositions. Choosing a particular option, on the contrary, is a psychologically undetermined event. In order to ascribe to someone the ability to make a choice about whether or not to perform some actions we needn’t know, or even assume, that there is any objective probability that this or that option shall be chosen. No one can have the power to choose whether or not to perform an action unless she believes (truly) that she can choose to do it and can choose not to do it. But the ability of choice—unlike the ascription of probabilistic physical powers—does not require that there be a defi nite prior-to-the-event chance distribution over the choices of the possible practical options.21

4

The Conditional Analysis of Free Will

That so far as anyone can, by the direction or choice of his mind, preferring the existence of any action, to the non-existence to that action and, vica versa, make it to exist, or not exist, so far he is free. (Locke 1689/1975: II, xxi, 21)

In this chapter, I am going to argue for a version of the so-called conditional analysis of free will. My claim is that the significance of this analysis as an account of ‘could have done otherwise’ is largely misunderstood or, at least, is not properly appreciated. Conditional analyses of free will have been around at least since the early modern times. Hobbes, Locke, and Hume—among others—seem to have held some version of the analysis, and many later philosophers shared their view that it is the most plausible interpretation of the notion of free will. It is hard to believe that they all failed to capture anything important. However, philosophers who held some version of the analysis had rather different purposes in mind. Some accepted the conditional analysis mainly because they thought that it can explain how ‘freedom and necessity’ are compatible. Arguably, such compatibility was at least partly Hobbes’ and Hume’s concern. But this made the account vulnerable to the incompatibilists’ criticism that the only point in defending the conditional analysis is to make free will and responsibility compatible with determinism. Otherwise, they claim, it is an unnatural interpretation of the notion of free will. But others—like Locke, I believe—had less concern with the issue of compatibility. They endorsed some version of the conditional analysis because they thought that it captures best our idea of free agency. In my exposition, I follow their spirit. Although, as we shall see, the conditional analysis is compatibilist at least to the extent that it is compatible with the truth of physical determinism, I do not propose to accept it because it is compatibilist. First, I do not believe that freedom and necessity are compatible.

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Rather, as I’ve argued in Chapter 2, I think that physical determinism does not imply metaphysical necessity—since it does not imply anything about powers and potentialities—and it is for this reason that free will and physical determinism are compatible. Second, as I have already mentioned, I do not think that free will is compatible with psychological determinism. Thirdly, and most importantly, I will argue that we should accept the conditional analysis because it is the best theory of freedom of the will as the condition of agents’ responsibility for their actions and omissions. Although—as it might be clear to the reader already—it is the spirit of Locke’s analysis that is in many ways closest to mine, his theory is intricate and open to many questions of interpretation that I cannot discuss in a work the subject of which is not historical.1 Hence, my starting point in this chapter shall be G. E. Moore’s later and more influential analysis of ‘could have done otherwise’. I shall present my own account as a modification of his analysis.

4.1 MOORE’S ANALYSIS OF FREE WILL In his Ethics at the end of the chapter that discusses the problem of free will, Moore summarizes his proposal like this. It is, therefore, quite certain (1) that we often should have acted differently, if we had chosen to; (2) that similarly we often should have chosen differently, if we had so to choose; and (3) that it was almost always possible that we should have chosen differently, in the sense that no man could know for certain that we should not so choose. All these three things are facts, and all of them are quite consistent with the principle of causality. Can anybody undertake to say for certain that none of these three facts and no combination of them will justify us in saying that we have Free Will? (Moore 1912: 220–221) The subsequent history of Moore’s analysis testifies that, even if his question was meant to be rhetorical, the correct answer is ‘yes’. In fact, many, if not most, contemporary philosophers, compatibilists and incompatibilists alike, would deny that Moore’s facts are sufficient to characterize freedom of will. Most discussions of the problem concentrate on the fi rst of the Moorean facts. They discuss the question of whether the conditional statement ‘S would have acted otherwise, if she had chosen so’ expresses adequately our ability to do otherwise in the sense of having free will. (I take, as most contemporary philosophers, ‘would’ to be a more up-to-date stylistic variant of Moore’s original ‘should’.) But, as the previous citation shows, Moore himself did not think that the fi rst ‘fact’ is sufficient for having free will.

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Hence, there are three different questions we may want to raise about Moore’s analysis. The fi rst question is whether the fi rst condition must be satisfied in order for us to have the ability to do otherwise in the sense of having free will. The second question is whether Moore’s own suggestion about how the fi rst condition should be supplemented in order to be sufficient is acceptable. And fi nally, if the answer to this latter question is negative, whether there is a satisfactory way to supplement the fi rst condition. As I see it, this last question is the most interesting one since Moore’s own completions of the fi rst condition do not seem to be good. There are two apparent problems with Moore’s second ‘fact’. First of all, it does not appear to be a fact at all, because it is far from being obvious that our will is free only if we would have chosen differently if we had so to choose. Moore thinks that ‘there is no doubt it is often true that we should have chosen to do a particular thing if we had chosen to make the choice; and that this is a very important sense in which it is often in our power to make a choice’ (Moore 1912: 219). The second part of this sentence is surely true: it is often in our power to make a choice and this is essential to our freedom of the will. But the first assertion does not seem to be equally true. In fact, as I have argued in the previous chapter in detail, freedom of will as a condition of responsibility does not require that we can choose to make a choice. But, secondly, even if we could choose to make a choice, the proposal appears to lead to a regress. The suggestion is that in order to be able freely to act otherwise we also have to be able to choose otherwise. And in order to be free to choose otherwise, it is required that we would have chosen otherwise, if we had chosen so. But then the analysis should also apply to our capacity of freely choosing to choose otherwise. And this means that freedom of will would require an infinite series of choices. 2 Moore’s third condition is surely no help to rescue his analysis. The ‘fact’ that ‘no man could know for certain’ how we should choose is utterly insignificant. Even if someone else could have predicted my choices, I could have nevertheless acted otherwise. Moreover, this does not seem to be a fact either. If someone offers me a little money provided I am ready to slander a friend, most people who know me shall—I hope—predict quite reliably (‘for almost certain’) that I will reject the offer with indignation. In fact, they can predict my choice with much more reliability than they can predict the occurrence of a storm on the same afternoon. Nevertheless, given the situation, I am free to choose and act otherwise, whereas the storm is not free to occur.3 Before I turn to the question of whether and why the fi rst condition needs to be supplemented at all, I would like to call attention to a (generally admitted) feature of the Moorean analysis. If the analysis or some amended version of it works, then our ability to do otherwise is unproblematically compatible with physical/nomological determinism. Moore himself offered his analysis as an answer to the problem of free will and determinism. But he understood ‘determinism’ (like most of his contemporaries) as the thesis

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of universal causation. Since according to Moore, the phrase ‘S would have done otherwise, if she had chosen so’ expresses an ordinary causal conditional, it is obvious that free will so interpreted is perfectly compatible with universal causation. But we must still see whether Moore’s analysis, or some amended version of it, would provide a compatibilist answer to the consequence argument. In fact it does. Recall that the questionable premise of van Inwagen’s fi rst argument for the incompatibility of free will and physical determinism was the fourth one. The premise says that ‘If S could have rendered P false, and if the conjunction of P0 and L entails P, then S could have rendered the conjunction of P0 and L false’. What this premise expresses is that, if determinism is true, then someone can have the power to perform an actually unperformed action only if she also has the power to alter the past or to violate some laws of nature. We have also seen that according to van Inwagen’s formulation, the phrase ‘S could have rendered P false’ expresses agents’ ability to perform some actually unperformed action the performance of which is incompatible with the truth of P. But if we accept some version of the Moorean analysis, then S’s ability to do otherwise in the relevant sense can be described as ‘S would have rendered P false, if S had chosen so’. And it seems to be clear that from S’s ability to do otherwise in the sense that S would have rendered some propositions false, if she had chosen so, it does not follow at all that she has the same ability with regard to propositions about the past and the laws of nature. For if S had chosen to do something that had rendered propositions about the past and the laws of nature false, S certainly would not do that. A bit more technically put, even if someone has the power to perform an actually unperformed action, and performing that action logically implies that some past event(s) must have been different or some law(s) of nature must have been violated, it does not follow that the agent’s power transfers in the sense that she can only have the power to perform an actually unperformed action if she also has the power to alter the past or violate some laws of nature.4 Some compatibilists thought that to deny the transfer of power principle on the basis of a Moorean analysis of free will is sufficient to reject the consequence argument. But I do not think that this is correct. Incompatibilists can say—as they actually did say—that even if it is true that the acceptance of some version of the Moorean analysis implies that the consequence argument is unsound, what follows from this is that the Moorean analysis of our ability to do otherwise is mistaken.5 According to them, van Inwagen’s fourth premise (in the first version of the consequence argument that we discussed in Chapter 2) has a lot more intuitive force than the Moorean analysis, the adequacy of which has been questioned on independent grounds anyway. The dialectic of my argument is, however, different. In Chapter 2, I argued that the consequence argument is not obviously sound. In fact,

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we have serious reasons to doubt that, on refl ection, the argument is conclusive. Hence, the fact that some analysis of our power or ability to perform an actually unperformed action is not compatible with the consequence argument is surely not suffi cient to reject the analysis. Rather, unless we have independent reasons to doubt that it is correct, the analysis can provide an explanation of why exactly the consequence argument goes wrong. As we have seen, Moore formulates his fi rst condition of free will by using a subjunctive conditional. Since a similar analysis has been proposed about other concepts expressing other powers and abilities, there is a more general and a more specific question to raise about Moore’s theory. The more specific question is whether or not it gives a correct analysis of our ability to perform an actually unperformed action in the sense of having free will. The more general question is how his analysis of free will is related to a general account of powers and abilities. Perhaps some conditional analysis is correct in the case of other powers, but we have special reasons to reject a similar analysis about freedom of the will. However, for the sake of argument, let us assume fi rst that if some version of the conditional analysis is correct, then it must work for any unactualized power. And let us recall the example about the powers of S’s Ferrari. We have seen that S’s Ferrari, while it never goes faster than 130 km/h as long as it is in S’s possession, can have the power to go faster than that, even if it cannot have the power to alter the past or to violate some laws of nature. The conditional analysis can make it perfectly clear why this is so. It is so because from the truth of the conditional that ‘S’s Ferrari would have gone faster than 130 km/h if (in appropriate circumstances) more fuel had been injected into its engine’, it does not follow at all that S’s Ferrari would have altered the past or violated some laws of nature if more fuel had been injected into its engine. So even if it is true that some past event(s) must have been different or some law(s) of nature must have been violated in order for the Ferrari’s power to be exercised in a deterministic world, it does not follow that the Ferrari cannot have this ordinary power or ability unless it also has some supernatural ones. Hence, the decisive issue is whether we have independent grounds to doubt that Moore’s theory as an analysis of free will is correct. For even if a version of his view is correct as a general account of unactualized powers or abilities, it can nonetheless fail to be an adequate analysis of freedom of the will. Most contemporary philosophers (compatibilists and incompatibilists alike) think that the analysis is irreparably mistaken. As I have already indicated, we can indeed have doubts that Moore’s original suggestion is correct. But I shall also argue that Moore’s fi rst ‘fact’ does capture something essential about free will. And we can substitute his second and third ‘facts’ with other conditions that can render his analysis much more convincing.

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4.2 THE ABILITY TO ACT OTHERWISE It is customary to refer to the Moorean analysis as the conditional analysis of free will and I myself follow this tradition. But this may give rise to the mistaken impression that the analysis implies that freedom of will is a ‘conditional ability’ which has been designed only to make free will and determinism compatible. In my view, however, the conditional analysis is not a specific ‘compatibilist’ account of our power or ability to do otherwise, even if it is true that having that power is compatible with physical determinism. The conditional analysis is an analysis of the meaning of our ability to perform an actually unperformed action in the sense of having free will. It does not imply that—as John Austin in an early critique of Moore’s analysis claims—‘cans are constitutionally iffy’ (Austin 1956: 205). It is generally agreed that the meaning of many ordinary powers and abilities can only be analyzed with the help of conditionals. But it does not follow from this that the powers and abilities themselves are either ‘conditional’ or ‘categorical’, or that the properties the meaning of which we capture by such conditionals are not as ‘real’ as other ‘non power-like’ properties are.6 In order to understand this correctly, fi rst we must clarify the relation between abilities and dispositions. The relationship is somewhat ambiguous because there are quite different senses in which philosophers use the term ‘disposition’. In a broad sense ‘dispositional’ just means ‘non-occurrent’. In this sense, something has a disposition, i.e., a property expressed by a dispositional predicate, if it has the potentiality to behave in certain ways in certain circumstances. But we also use the notion of ‘disposition’ in two more specific senses. First, dispositions refer to objects’ powers. In another sense, a thing, or rather, a person has a particular disposition if it or she has a tendency of behavior or some inclination to do certain things. The distinction between these two senses of dispositions will be of fundamental importance in a number of issues we are going to discuss. In the present context, its importance lies in the fact that the two senses of disposition bear fundamentally different relations to our ability to do otherwise. In one sense, dispositional terms refer to abilities. In the other sense, dispositions only imply or presuppose abilities. In order to make this more vivid, consider the following two pairs of propositions: [1] Sue can swim; [2] Sue is a swimmer; [1*] Sue can lie; [2*] Sue is a liar. The fi rst two propositions refer to the agent’s powers or abilities. But the second two do not: they express the fact that she swims regularly or that she is inclined to lie (in certain circumstances). Note the crucial difference between the fi rst kind and the second kind of propositions. The second kind of propositions does imply the fi rst, but not inversely. No one can be a regular swimmer or a liar without being able to swim or being able to say lies. But someone can swim and can lie even if she virtually never does. Now recall the example I used earlier to argue against Moore’s third condition. Someone will offer me a little money provided that I slander a

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friend only if she thinks that I’m able to do that. And let us suppose that I am in fact able to do that. It does not follow, however, that I’m disposed to do that in the sense that I’m inclined to. There are infi nitely many things I’m able to do, but I’m not disposed to do in this sense. (In fact, this explains why Moore’s third condition is mistaken. People can make quite reliable predictions about my choices if they have sufficient knowledge about what I’m disposed to do.) If I have certain dispositions to do certain kind of things in the latter sense, I must have the ability to do those things. But, I’m not inclined to do everything I have the ability to do. Dispositional terms refer to a substance’s, an object’s, or a person’s power to behave in certain ways in certain kind of circumstances, even if they never actually behave that way. (This is, of course, false about behavioral tendencies; no one can be a liar if she never lies.) Thus, it is usually assumed that the ascription of a disposition is analytically connected to the truth of some counterfactual conditional. But—and this shall be crucial to my account of free will—this does imply that we ascribe a ‘conditional ability or power’ to persons or objects. Unquestionably, some propositions are conditional and conditional propositions are involved in the analysis of dispositional terms. But what it would be for the ability or power to be conditional, I do not quite see. Consequently, a Moorean analysis of free will does not commit us to the view that ‘free will’ is a ‘conditional power’. What is then the objection that many philosophers have taken to be decisive against Moore’s analysis? In effect, the objection considers only Moore’s fi rst ‘fact’ as relevant for his analysis. I shall expose it in its most influential formulation put forward by Keith Lehrer in the 1960s. According to this, Moore’s analysis is fallacious because It is logically possible that a man could not have done what he would have done, if he willed to, chose to, tried to, or what not (Lehrer 1968: 41). Now Lehrer, and many other philosophers following him, believes that this possibility is decisive against Moore’s analysis. I think, however, that there are two separate questions here. One is whether or not Lehrer’s claim, as it stands, is correct. And it is a second and separate question whether or not it is decisive against any Moorean-type conditional analysis about the meaning of free will. I shall argue that, although Lehrer’s claim is correct as it stands, it is not decisive, because the analysis can be amended so that it eschews the objection. Why does Lehrer think that an agent, who would have done otherwise if she had chosen to, might still have been unable to do otherwise? He gives the following reason. An analysis of our ability to do otherwise is satisfactory only if there could not be any set of propositions the truth of which is consistent with the analysans and inconsistent with the analysandum. But the Moorean analysis does not satisfy this condition. There are two propositions the conjunction of which the anlysans (‘S would have done A, if S

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had chosen so’) is consistent with, but the analysandum (‘S could have done A’) is not. The fi rst of these propositions states that ‘S could have done A, if S had chosen so’, the second says that ‘It is not the case that S had chosen so’. These two propositions imply that S could not have done A. But the conjunction of these propositions is perfectly compatible with the proposition that S would have done A, if S had chosen so. Therefore, the Moorean analysis must be mistaken. Some philosophers have tried to resist this argument with intransigence. They thought that, even if the argument sounds prima facie convincing, there must be some fault in it. But why must the argument be faulty? Perhaps for the following reason. Moore’s analysis of free will as the ability to do otherwise is a special application of a general analysis of dispositional concepts that refer to powers or abilities. And if Moore’s analysis is a special application of a general analysis of such dispositions, then Lehrer’s objection ought to apply to any conditional analysis of dispositions. And some thought that this is a reductio ad absurdum of Lehrer’s argument. In an early critique of the argument, Alvin Goldman uses the following example. It is customary to defi ne ‘X is soluble’ in the following way: ‘X would dissolve, if it were immersed in water’. But consider the following two propositions ‘If X is not immersed in water, it is not soluble’ and ‘X is not immersed in water’. This is consistent with the proposition that X would dissolve, if it were immersed in water, because it is logically possible that, whenever X is not immersed in water, it suddenly changes in a way that it becomes non-soluble. But the conjunction of these two propositions entails that X is not soluble (Goldman 1970: 199–200). Since, according to Goldman, this shows that the same objection as Lehrer’s would apply in case of any conditional analysis of powers, but some similar analysis is usually granted to be correct, Lehrer’s argument must be mistaken. One can use different strategies to immunize Lehrer’s argument against Goldman’s criticism. An obvious way to save Lehrer’s view would be to reject the assumption of generality. We can say that our ability to perform an actually unperformed action is so special that arguments that may work for the conditional analysis of other powers are not valid as far as our ability to do otherwise is concerned. My main reason to reject this answer is that in my view we can appreciate the importance of the conditional analysis of free will best if we compare it to the analysis of ‘ordinary powers’. Consequently, if Goldman is right and dispositional concepts expressing our abilities can be correctly analyzed in terms of conditionals in the way he says then Lehrer’s argument must be faulty. Of course, when I say that it helps compare freedom of will to other powers, I do not mean that there is nothing special about free will as our ability to do otherwise. This ability is certainly special, since it considers our ability to perform and avoid performing particular actions. It is rare, however, that we ascribe the ability to avoid certain behavior to an object. There are dispositions to resist certain changes, but I would find it contrived

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to understand such powers as ‘the power to avoid’. Hence, behavioral abilities relevant to free will and responsibility must have special characteristics that our analysis must not lose sight of. In this sense, an analysis of these abilities must be more specific than a general account of powers. Moreover, there are at least two further important differences between the (physical, chemical, physiological, etc.) powers in general and the actional abilities relevant to freedom of the will. The fi rst difference is that, on the one hand, the latter are almost always extrinsic in the sense that the ascription of such abilities is sensitive to conditions that lie beyond the agent’s body7, but their exertions, on the other hand, depend on whether or not certain intrinsic conditions obtain. It is easy to see why this must be so. As I have argued in detail in the previous chapter, we are directly responsible for the performance and omission of some kind of actions that are extrinsically identified. It seems to follow then that the responsibilityrelevant sense of ‘could have done otherwise’ must be extrinsic too: the ability to perform an extrinsically identified action. Another related difference between the ascriptions of powers in general and the ascription of the relevant ability to do otherwise concerns their specificity. It is not only that the responsibility relevant abilities are most often extrinsically identified; their ascription requires the satisfaction of much more specific extrinsic conditions than the ascription of physical powers. A glass is no less fragile just because it is wrapped in a safe packing. But an agent in the locked room without keys or alternative exits does lose her ability to leave the room even if she retains her ‘general ability’ to leave rooms. Again, not every circumstantial factor matters and, as we shall see in the next chapter, this is crucial to the correct understanding of ‘could have done otherwise’. But the abilities which are relevant to the agent’s free will as a condition of her responsibility must be as specific as the type of actions the performance or avoidance of which we may hold the agent responsible. And we do not hold an agent responsible for not leaving rooms in general. We hold or do not hold her responsible for not leaving a room in specific circumstances. In another respect, however, freedom of will as the ability to do otherwise refers to a very general power. For an analysis of free will must apply to any kinds of action we are able to perform even if we do not actually perform them. And these actions differ from each other significantly. So even if an analysis of our ability to perform an actually unperformed action must be more specific than our most general account of powers—since it must refer to specifically action-related abilities—in some respect it must be general enough so that it can capture the condition of responsibility for actions and omissions. Now back to the other strategy. What Goldman’s response assumes, and I deny, is that the simple conditional analysis of powers and abilities (in general) is adequate. As the recent literature on dispositions attests, it is not. Interestingly, however, if we appropriately amend the conditional

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analysis of dispositions, we can also give a fair chance to some kind of Moorean analysis of free will to be right. Since some dispositional terms refer to powers or abilities, we may use in our analysis of free will what we have learned from the analysis of dispositions as powers. Dispositions as powers refer to properties that, just as other properties, can come and go. An object can have such properties at certain moments, and can lack them at others. However, granting this fact can give rise to a serious objection to the conditional analysis of dispositions. Following an example of C. B. Martin, philosophers call some dispositions ‘fi nkish’ (Martin 1994: 2–3). Finkish dispositions have a special feature: either objects lose them in circumstances in which they are about to be actualized, or inversely, objects acquire them only in the circumstances in which they are about to be actualized, and they disappear otherwise. Such dispositions are logically possible. And it is obvious that the simple conditional analysis will be mistaken for any of these dispositions. Consider Goldman’s example again. The sugar cube that is not soluble when it is not immersed in water is fi nkishly soluble: it acquires the property of solubility only when it is immersed in water. Nevertheless, it will be true of it that it would dissolve, if it were immersed in water even when it is not soluble at all. Consequently, Goldman is mistaken to think that the simple conditional analysis he relies on is an adequate account of dispositions. But this observation may also help us to see how we can save the conditional analysis of free will against Lehrer’s objection. The objection is correct exactly because the simple conditional analysis is mistaken. The analogy between the Lehrer-Goldman debate about the analysis of our ability to perform an actually unperformed action on the one hand and the problem of fi nkish dispositions on the other is the key to understand how the original Moorean analysis can be revised and made correct. As Goldman’s example (and many other examples of fi nkish dispositions) shows, the conditional analysis fails because how objects (or agents) would behave in specifi c circumstances is not suffi cient to grant them a power or ability. Our defi nition must also include a clause saying that they do not lose or acquire that ability when the circumstances in which the disposition is about to become manifest obtain. 8 Normal sugar cubes retain their solubility even when they are not put in water. Finkishly abnormal sugar cubes lack solubility whenever they are not in water. (In effect, they also lose their solubility when they are put in water, so although they dissolve, they are never soluble. A strange disposition indeed!) To see how all this is related to the Moorean analysis of our ability to do otherwise, it is instructive to cite Lehrer’s two examples for cases in which the simple conditional analysis fails. The two examples, as we shall see, are significantly different in that they call for different emendations of the original analysis. Here is the fi rst one.

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Freedom of the Will It is logically possible that as a result of my not willing, not choosing, or not undertaking some action, I might lose any of my powers. If we allow ourselves to be somewhat fanciful, it is easy to imagine how this would come about. Suppose that, unknown to myself, a small object has been implanted in my brain, and that when a button is pushed by a demonic being who implanted this object, I became temporarily paralyzed and unable to act. My not choosing to perform an act might cause the button to be pushed and thereby render me unable to act. (Lehrer 1968: 44)

It is interesting to observe how analogous this example against the conditional analysis of free will is to the examples involving finkish dispositions. Lehrer shows that even if an agent would do otherwise if he had chosen so, he can nonetheless lose that ability simply by not performing the pertinent action. In Goldman’s case, and in any other case of finkish dispositions, a power is lost whenever it is not exercised. Similarly, in Lehrer’s example, an ability is lost whenever it is not chosen to be exercised. And it is for exactly this reason that the simple conditional analysis breaks down in these cases. Hence, whatever strategy we may apply to save the conditional analysis of powers, it may also be applicable to our ability to perform an actually unperformed action. As I have indicated earlier, the right strategy is to introduce a further condition into our defi nition to the effect that objects do not change in respect to their relevant abilities in circumstances when these abilities are about to become manifest. Take the example of solubility. What it means that a sugar cube is soluble is that, if it were immersed in water and it retained its actual powers or abilities, then it would dissolve. This is obviously false of Goldman’s sugar cube since when it is immersed in water, it acquires certain abilities (solubility) that it lacked earlier. But consider now another sugar cube that, whenever it is immersed in water, immediately loses its power to dissolve. This sugar cube is soluble only until it is immersed in water. Although the simple conditional analysis fails in both of these cases, our revised analysis gives us the correct result. In Lehrer’s example, making a choice to the effect that the agent will not exercise his ability results in his losing the ability. It means that before the agent made the choice he must have had the ability—otherwise he would have had nothing to lose. After the choice has been made, however, he ceases to have the ability. We can accommodate this possibility if we modify the simple conditional analysis in the following way: S’s will is free in the sense of having the ability to perform an actually unperformed action A at t iff S would have done A, if (1) S had chosen so and (2) S had not changed with respect to her ability to perform A at t. The revised analysis is immune to Lehrer’s objection to the simple conditional analysis. Before the choice was made, the agent had had, by

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assumption, the ability to perform the actually unperformed action. And it is equally true of him that, if he had chosen to do A and retained his ability to perform A, he would do A. After the choice has been made, however, he loses his ability to perform A as an effect of his own choice. But it is equally false of him, that he would have performed the action, if he had chosen so and if he retained that ability to perform A because, from that moment on, he is not able to perform A. In every moment in Lehrer’s story, therefore, the agent has the power to perform an actually unperformed action if and only if he would have performed that action, if he had chosen so and had not changed with respect to his ability to perform that action. Lehrer, however, has another counterexample to the conditional analysis. He says that ‘more commonplace pathology will illustrate the same point’. As far as I can see, he should have said that his other example illustrates a related point. The second example offers indeed as effective a counterexample to the simple conditional analysis as the fi rst one. But this latter example remains effective even against our revised analysis. Lehrer’s second example must therefore spot a different weakness in the simple conditional analysis of free will. Suppose that I am offered a bowl of candy and in the bowl are small round red sugar balls. I do not choose to take one of the read sugar balls because I have a pathological aversion to such candy. ( . . . ) It is logically consistent to suppose that if I had chosen to take the red sugar ball, I would have taken one, but not so choosing, I am utterly unable to touch one. I can take a red candy ball only if I so choose, but my pathological aversion being what it is, I could not possibly bring myself so to choose. I could do it only if I chose to, and I do not. (Lehrer 1968: 44) Does the person in Lehrer’s story indeed lack the ability to perform an actually unperformed action? We may feel uncertain about the answer. Since it is true of the person that, if he had chosen to take the red sugar ball, he would have taken one, there must be a sense in which he has the ability to take one. For instance, he has the ability in the sense that he has a hand, which is not paralyzed, so he is able to seize red sugar balls with it. And in fact our revised analysis yields the same conclusion because the person would have done otherwise, if he had chosen so and retained his ability to perform that action. Nonetheless, we do have the intuition that the agent in this story could not have acted otherwise in the sense of having free will. Lehrer’ second story itself, however, contains a hint as to how we should respond to this counterexample. He says that the agent ‘could not bring himself to choose to do’ what would count as a manifestation of his ability to perform the particular action. This phrase as it stands is ambiguous between two readings. It may be read as ‘it was impossible to him to choose so (as to take the red sugar ball)’ or ‘it was impossible for him to make a choice about it’. In the light of the discussion of the previous chapter, it

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seems to be clear that only the second reading can be correct. If the agent could have made a choice, then his behavior would not be pathological and then we would say that he was free to take or not to take the ball. I would suggest, therefore, the following further emendation on our proposed analysis of free will: S’s will is free in the sense of having the ability to perform an actually unperformed action A at t iff S would have done A, if (1) S had chosen so and (2) had not changed with respect to her ability to perform A at t and (3) had not changed with respect to her ability to make a choice about whether or not to perform A at t. In Lehrer’s second example, although the agent would have indeed performed an action, if he had chosen so and had not changed his ability to perform the action, he nevertheless could not have done it, because he did not have the psychological ability to make a choice about whether or not to perform A. I would like to emphasize that there is nothing ad hoc about the introduction of this third condition. In fact, something like this further condition is generally recognized both by compatibilist and also by incompatibilist accounts of free will (see, for instance, Ayer 1954 and Ginet 1990: 118– 121). But the condition is usually formulated in a negative way requiring that the agent does not suffer from some form of pathological compulsion and hence can make choices. That formulation is, however, inadequate because one can lack the ability to make a choice about a particular type of action in defi nite circumstances even when one is not psychologically compelled to do what one does. For instance, while I’m not awake I cannot do otherwise in the sense relevant to my freedom of will—as a condition of my responsibility for the omision of some specific action—even if it is true of me that I would have done otherwise if I had chosen to and I had not changed with respect to my ability to perform the chosen action. I cannot do otherwise because in that specific condition I lack the ability to make a choice. The fact that I have some ‘general ability’—or rather, faculty—to choose is obviously insufficient for holding me responsible. The relevant ability must be specific enough to ground the agent’s responsibility. As we have seen, abilities, like properties, can change in time. As long as my leg is broken I’m not able to walk. Before and after the injury I can walk, even when I do not. When I’m sound asleep I’m unable to gather visual information about my environment; neither am I able to make choices. Sleepwalkers are able to do the fi rst, but not able to do the second. That’s why they are not responsible. The same holds for compulsion. In the ‘general faculty sense’, even pathologically compulsive agents have the ability to choose; after all, they can make many choices about many kinds of actions. Our assumption is that they are not able to make choices about the particular type of action

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for the performance or omission of which they are not responsible. But such pathological states can also change. As a result of some severe shock or threat, agents might become temporarily psychologically compulsive and so are unable to make certain choices. Then they are not responsible at that particular time for performing or failing to perform a kind of action. But they can be responsible for performing or failing to perform the same kind of action at other times because at those time they can make the relevant choices and can act accordingly. Moreover, if certain epistemic conditions are not satisfied, I cannot make a choice even if I’m not psychologically compelled, asleep, etc. If I’m convinced that the only door of the room in which I stay is fi rmly locked and I have no keys, etc., then I do not have a choice about whether or not to leave it, even if in fact the room’s door is open (Dennett 1984: 116–7). For—as Locke has already correctly observed—I cannot make a choice about an action if I’m convinced that I’m unable to perform it.9 It is for this reason that we think that certain—though not all—forms of manipulations of information can deprive agents of their freedom of will. Consequently, the psychological ability to make choices about the performance of a particular action at a particular time is a specific ability and hence the same applies to it as to the ability to perform some action: we can ascribe that ability only with reference to the relevant context. Surely, I can have the ‘general ability’ or faculty to make choices even if I cannot choose to stand up and leave my bedroom when I’m sound asleep. And surely, the person in Lehrer’s example has the capacity to make many choices even if he cannot make a choice about whether or not to take the candy (and that is what explains that he is not taking one, not his choice). What he is unable to make is one specific kind of choice which is relevant in the context of the action or omission for which he would be responsible if he could make a choice. Thus, my general conclusion concerning the conditional analysis is the following. Lehrer’s argument, together with his examples, are sufficient to reject the simple conditional analysis. But the simple conditional analysis is mistaken anyway and not even Moore seemed to accept it. The real problem with Moore’s original analysis is that, as we have seen, his further conditions do not adequately capture what must be satisfied in order for an agent to be able to perform an actually unperformed action in the sense of having free will. His third condition is irrelevant and his second condition leads to a regress. The revised analysis that I propose, however, is free of these problems. Moreover, it seems to me that we have other reasons, which are independent of our attempt to save the conditional analysis, to introduce the two further conditions. The starting point of my investigation was that any theory of free will as the ability or power to perform an actually unperformed action must also be relevant for the theory of moral responsibility. And even before detailed analysis, there are two different kinds of abilities

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that intuitively appear to be relevant in this context. One is performance ability and the other is the psychological ability to make choices. Our suggested analysis gives justice to these intuitions. In order to act freely and responsibly, we have to have the ability to perform certain actions, if we choose so, and we must also have the psychological ability to make a choice about the relevant type of action in defi nite circumstances.

4.3 CIRCULARITY AND REGRESS REJECTED As we have seen, there are at least two prima facie objections often raised against the Moorean analysis of free will as the ability to do otherwise. It is important to see why my proposed analysis cannot be rejected on the basis of those objections. One can attack the second condition of my revised analysis on the grounds that it makes the analysis circular. And one can object to my third condition that it leads to the same regress that I have criticized in Moore’s analysis. I shall argue that both of these objections can be effectively answered. We can answer the fi rst complaint relatively briefly. The second demands a lengthier discussion. First, let me reemphasize the analogy between our analysis of free will, on the one hand, and the analysis of dispositional concepts on the other. The analogy should not come as a surprise: the ability to perform an actually unperformed action is a disposition after all in one of the senses in which we talk about dispositions. It refers to a power or ability, and hence it involves some unactualized potentiality. The logical possibility of fi nkish dispositions has proved that the simple conditional analysis of such unactualized potentialities is mistaken. To amend the analysis, in addition to the specification of the circumstances in which the powers would be manifested, we must also introduce the condition that the very same circumstances in which the ability would become manifest cannot deprive the agent of it. In this way, we can give an adequate account which respects the logical possibility of finkish dispositions. As I have argued, our ability to perform an actually unperformed action requires a similar analysis. On the one hand, our will is free only if we would have done otherwise in exactly the specific circumstances in which we had chosen so. But free will also requires the retention of our abilities in the sense that the circumstances in which they are manifested cannot bring them into existence (or alternatively, cannot make them cease to exist). Now, this condition can only be expressed by referring to the ability in question in our analysans. This reference is, however, innocent and does not make our analysis viciously circular. The second occurrence of the ability in the analysans stipulates only that whatever the analysandum refers to will not be altered by the circumstances that the analysans specifies. And this can be included in the specification of the circumstances among which the ability would become manifest without making the analysis uninformative.

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Moreover, as I have said, the conditional analysis of our power or ability to perform an actually unperformed action does not make the powers or abilities themselves conditional. If we have an ability, then we have it as one of our properties. It is not a ‘conditional property’. Only the analysis uses a conditional in order to elucidate the meaning of freedom of the will as a condition of responsibility for our actions and omissions. And we can elucidate the meaning of free will by the relevant conditional even if the analysans contains an anaphoric reference to the analysandum. The second objection requires a longer answer since it involves further questions about the specification of our relevant abilities. According to that objection, my account cannot avoid the same kind of regress that besets the original Moorean analysis. If we assume that the ability to do otherwise cannot be fully understood without an analysis of the ability to make (the relevant) choices and that that analysis must be given in conditional terms since making a choice is just another intentional action, then we may end up with the same regress problem which allegedly doomed Moore’s original analysis: one cannot have the ability to make the relevant choice unless one would have chosen otherwise, if she had chosen to choose so. I think, however, that we should reject both of these assumptions. To start, we must observe that an analysis of ‘could have done otherwise’ as the agent’s ability to perform an actually unperformed action does not require some further analysis of our ability to make choices. My version of the conditional analysis does not aim to provide a reductive analysis of the abilities relevant for freedom of the will. In fact, I do not think that any such analysis is worth seeking or can be given. To see why, let me compare again my analysis of free will to the analysis of dispositions. A reductive analysis of dispositions would require that we analyze the meaning of every power which can be (truly) ascribed to an object in terms of occurrent and/ or categorical properties. However, I doubt that any such analysis is possible at least for two reasons. First, the only way for a reductive analysis to try to avoid the problem raised by the possibility of fi nkish dispositions is to refer to objects’ ‘internal structure’ as the ‘disposition’s realizers’.10 However, such attempts must face many difficulties, one of them is the fact that some dispositions seem to be extrinsic. Given our conclusions in the previous chapter, the responsibility relevant abilities to perform some actually unperformed action are generally extrinsic. But there is another serious problem that this kind of reductive analyses must face. It is hard to believe that the relevant ‘internal structure’ can be purely ‘categorical’. Just to the contrary, it seems that an internal structure can ‘realize’ a disposition only if the structure itself has certain dispositional features.11 Thus, even if some powers can be reductively explained in some sense, they cannot be analyzed in a dispositionfree way. Second, and more importantly to the present issue, it seems unavoidable that we use some unanalyzed dispositional notions at the specification of

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the circumstances in which the power analyzed would become manifest. If something is fragile, then it would break if it were struck by a hard object (a chewing gum would probably not do). Ice has the disposition to melt in circumstances in which the outside temperature is higher than 0 Celsius degrees. These analyses of the relevant dispositions can be perfectly illuminating without adding a further specification about what hardness or temperature (other dispositions or powers) are. This would not, of course, count as an answer to the objection if we understood the choice of a particular action as another intentional action which must be controlled by some further choice. However, here the fault is not with the conditional analysis but with an inadequate understanding of the relevant ability to choose and its particular exertion. First, as I’ve argued in detail in the previous chapter, even when we consciously exercise our ability to choose, the choice of a particular action is the result of that exertion and not its intended outcome. Hence, it is just logically impossible to control what we choose by some prior choice and intention: that’s exactly the point, as I’ve argued, in making a choice about which particular option the agent intends to perform. Consequently, it is not only unneeded but also logically impossible to give the same kind of conditional analysis about the psychological ability to make choices as we have given on the ability to perform an actually unperformed action. Freedom of the will as a condition of agents’ responsibility for their actions or omissions should be understood—as I have presupposed thus far and as I shall argue in detail in the next chapter—as their ability to act otherwise. Of course, an analysis of that ability is different from an analysis of the ability to choose. For, although it is perfectly conceivable that an agent performs an intentional action in the circumstances in which she does not have the ability to do otherwise, it sounds senseless to say that one can exercise her psychological ability to make a particular choice without saying that she was able to choose otherwise. As I have argued in the previous chapter, the exertion of psychological ability to choose essentially involves alternatives. Hence, we needn’t and cannot understand the ability to choose by the same conditional that we applied in our analysis of the free will relevant ability to perform an actually unperformed action. It follows that my version of the conditional analysis is not compatible with psychological determinism. As I’ve already mentioned, I believe that any adequate account of freedom of the will must be compatible with physical determinism. But freedom of the will cannot be compatible with psychological determinism because it implies that agents have the psychological ability to make the relevant choices and that ability is essentially non-deterministic. I shall return to this issue in more detail in Part II of this book when I will compare my analysis to alternative compatibilist and libertarian accounts of free will.

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Finally, it is also crucial to distinguish freedom of the will as a condition of agents’ responsibility for actions and omissions from their intentional control over whether or not they exercise their ability to choose at some particular time. That kind of control, as I have argued in the previous chapter, is not a condition of responsibility. Our responsibility for our actions and omissions does not require that we have direct or indirect control over whether or not we make choices. But we can be responsible even if we’ve failed to exercise our ability to choose exactly because our will was free. We could have performed an actually unperformed action in the sense that we would have done otherwise if we had chosen so and retained our ability to make a choice about whether or not to perform the relevant action even if we did not actually make any. Consider the following case. I am in a queue and suddenly feel that someone is standing on my toes. Is she responsible? If her intention was to harass me or intentionally cause pain to me, she is clearly responsible for what she did. If she was shoved or somehow disabled—and therefore unable to control her bodily movements in appropriate ways—she is surely not responsible. But what if the person was so much preoccupied with some other activities (reading her newspaper, as it were) that she did not pay any attention to where she was standing? I think she would still be responsible. And she is responsible because—unlike someone who was shoved or disabled—she could have avoided causing me pain exactly in the sense that she would have avoided it if she had chosen so and had retained her ability to make a choice about it. The fact that she has not actually made a choice does not exempt her from responsibility exactly because her will was free. In general, careless agents are responsible if they could have done otherwise, i.e., had the ability to perform an action that they did not actually perform. And if they are responsible then it must also be true of them that they would have done otherwise if they had chosen so, had not changed with respect to their abilities, and had retained the ability to make a choice about whether or not to perform the action that they have actually failed to perform. And this is exactly what our freedom of will requires. Moral responsibility for actions or omissions does not demand that agents be able to choose whether or not they make a choice. In fact, as I have argued in the previous chapter, our voluntary control over whether or not we exercise our ability to choose is rather limited. But in order to be responsible, we do not have to have the same kind of control over the exertion of our ability to choose as over our extrinsically identified actions and omissions. This seems to me a great advantage of my proposed analysis of free will. If free will required actual choice and intentional control over the exertion of our ability to choose, then responsibility for careless actions and omissions would show that we can be responsible even if we lack freedom of the will. According to my analysis, however, whenever agents are responsible for some action or omission, they must have freedom of the will.

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4.4 FREEDOM OF WILL AND FREE ACTIONS As we have seen in the previous chapter, Locke claimed that there is no sense in which a choice can be free. However, he has also said that freedom of the will is not an intelligible notion. But whereas I agree with him that the notion of ‘freedom’ is not correctly applicable to the exertion of an agent’s ability to choose, I do believe that freedom of the will is an essential condition of responsible agency. How is it possible? The difference between my view and Locke’s is that when Locke declared the notion of freedom of the will ‘unintelligible’, he understood it as a feature of the agent’s choice. He thought that freedom of the will must mean an agent’s ability to control whether or not she exercises her ability to choose. My point is that freedom of will as a condition of agents’ responsibility should not be so understood. Thus, I disagree with what Randolph Clarke aptly calls the ‘willist account’ of free will (Clarke 2003: 121). However, I do not think—as Clarke does—that the ‘willist account’ is best expressed by Bishop John Bramhall’s thesis that ‘all freedom of the agent is from the freedom of the will’; for I certainly do not deny that that thesis is true. What I would deny is that freedom of the will as a condition of responsibility refers to some intrinsic faculty of the agent. It is for this reason that I fi nd the notion of freedom of will not only meaningful, but also an essential condition of our responsibility. Freedom of will means that an agent acts in the conditions in which she has the ability to do otherwise, i.e., she has the ability to perform an actually unperformed action. Those who endorse the ‘willist account’ may argue like this: if I deny that freedom of will should be understood in terms of intentional control over the exertion of our ability to choose, then I must also deny that free will is a condition of responsibility. For free will is exactly the freedom to will or to choose as one wants; just like freedom of action is the freedom to do as one wants.12 If freedom of action requires some degree of voluntary control over what we do, then freedom to will requires a similar kind of control. In order to will freely, we must be able to voluntarily control when and what we choose. Thus, if I deny that intentional control over our choices is a condition of our responsibility, then I’m forced to say (with Locke) that it is only agents’ freedom of action, and not their freedom of the will that is necessary for their responsibility. However, this objection rests on a misunderstanding about the notion of free will as a condition of responsibility. As I have argued at length, free will does not imply that we must be ‘free to choose’ (whatever that means) in the same sense as we are free to act; and free will does indeed involve ‘freedom of action’ in some sense. But it does not follow that we ought not to distinguish freedom of the will from freedom of action. First, and most obviously, free will does not require the actual performance of any action. And second, and more importantly, our free will is an ability to perform

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certain actions, whereas the freedom of our actions characterizes only the circumstances in which we act. An action may be unfree when the agent is coerced to perform it. But there are forms of coercion—as I shall argue in Chapter 9—which do not imply that the agent has not acted of her own free will; and, conversely, an agent can lack free will even if she is not coerced to do what she does. Freedom of action characterizes only the features of the circumstances in which the agent acts. Freedom of the will, on the other hand, is a property of agents, even if it is an extrinsically identified power and hence the ascription of the ability to perform an actually unperformed action can be sensitive to some features of the agents’ circumstances. For instance, if some circumstances had required the performance of an extraordinarily brave action, we would be more prone to excuse an agent who failed to perform that action than we would be if the agent had acted in less demanding circumstances. But the agents, whose actions may not have been free to the extent that they have acted in difficult circumstances, could have nevertheless retained their freedom of will. For not every aspect of agents’ circumstances affects their powers and abilities. If his telephone was not working, the agent in our earlier example is not responsible for failing to call the police because he lacked the ability to call it. If, however, his telephone was working, but something made him afraid of calling the police, then he refrained from calling the police of his own free will, even if he did not, to the extent his fear was justified, acted freely. Thus, in ordinary context, when we talk about ‘free choices’ what we mean is either that the agent was not coerced to do what she did or that she faced ‘real’ alternatives. In the fi rst case, ‘freely’ does not apply to the choice itself; rather, it is ‘freely chosen’ which qualifies the action. However, the performance of ‘unfreely chosen’ actions is compatible with the agent’s retaining her ability to make a choice about whether or not to perform them. Sometimes when we say that an action was freely chosen we simply mean that the person was not blackmailed or was not under strong motivational pressure, etc. All this, however, concerns the circumstances in which a choice was made and not the agent’s ability to make a choice.13 In other cases, when we say that an action was freely chosen we simply mean that the agent faced alternatives. But then what we want to express is exactly that the agent’s action depended on her conscious choice. A freely chosen action in this sense does not require that the choice (as opposed to the chosen action) must have the special character of ‘being free’. Sometimes we have a choice; oftentimes we cannot even avoid choosing; and some other times we cannot choose because we have no epistemically accessible practical options. But whenever we can make a choice it does not sound quite right to qualify the choice as ‘free’ or ‘unfree’. An ‘unfree choice’ cannot mean that S might have chosen even if she couldn’t face practical options. I do not have a ‘free choice’ about whether or not I’m going to jump over a block of houses instead of walking around

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it if I’m perfectly aware that I cannot jump that high. Although some philosophers have talked about an ‘absolutely free will’, which is independent of agent’s knowledge of their own performance capacities, Locke seems to me right that someone can only wish or desire, but cannot will, to do certain things ‘absolutely’.14 Wishes and desires do not imply that the agent has a view of her own performance capacities, but freedom of the will certainly does. Thus, no one can have a ‘free choice’ about things that she herself regards impossible to do simply because in such circumstances she cannot choose at all. The power to make choices is our ability to determine in a particular way what we are going to do. Thus, the ability to choose whether or not to perform an action implies that the agent must represent herself as being able to act and to avoid acting in certain ways. It is for this reason why we doubt that very small children or animals can make choices. In order to have the ability to choose, it is not enough that we see that a creature faces alternatives; she must also represent herself as being able to do and to avoid doing certain actions. The pathologically compulsive agent cannot make a choice exactly for this reason: she does not believe that she is able to perform (or not to perform) certain kind of actions (even if, in fact, she is). But then the correct thing to say is not that she makes an ‘unfree choice’. Rather, she lacks, in that particular context, the ability to make a choice. At the bottom of it, what the conditional analysis expresses is that agents’ will is free only if what they do or fail to do can depend on the exertion of their ability to choose. It is not a theory about choice. It is a theory of the role that choice plays in the potential determination of actions. For it is with reference to that role that we can understand not only the conditions of responsibility, but also how and why agents’ reasons, motives, and character are relevant for the moral evaluation of their actions.

5

Abilities and Control

But, if the word “could” is ambiguous—if, that is to say, it is used in different senses on different occasions—it is obviously quite possible that though, in one sense, nothing ever could have happened except what did happen, yet in another sense, it may at the same time be perfectly true that some things which did not happen could have happened. (G. E. Moore: 1912, 209)

In the previous chapter, I argued for a conditional analysis of freedom of the will. Although most critics of the conditional analysis have complained that it leaves some important condition of free will and responsibility unspecified, some others have objected that the analysis demands more than our responsibility in fact requires. It is not obvious, they say, that agents’ ability to do otherwise is indeed a necessary condition of responsibility. We shall consider objections of the former sort in Part II. The present chapter addresses the issue whether the ability to do otherwise is indeed a necessary condition of responsibility. The objections I shall address in this chapter contend that the conditional analysis does not provide an adequate account of the kind of control that we need to possess in order to be responsible. The fi rst claims that our analysis identifies the wrong sort of control. The second—and as we shall see, related—objection claims that the conditional analysis of free will requires an inappropriate extent of control. Both objections seem to entail that responsibility is compatible with our inability to do otherwise. I’m going to argue that the objections do not succeed and that the conditional analysis of free will specifies correctly the conditions of responsibility. In Chapter 3, I have already shown that the absence of actual intentional control over what we do is compatible with responsibility for our actions and omissions. Here I shall argue that agents are responsible only if they have the power to do otherwise. Actually, this general claim needs certain specification that I shall discuss later in Chapter 8. The aim of the present chapter is, fi rst, to show that agents’ responsibility for their actions and

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omissions does indeed require their ability to do otherwise; and then to show that the conditional analysis expresses adequately the extent of control which agents need to have over their actions in order to be responsible for them.

5.1 RESPONSIBILITY AND REAL OPTIONS Perhaps the most serious challenge to my analysis of free will comes from some interesting examples that aim to show that responsibility for actions does not require alternative possibilities. I have claimed both that freedom of will implies that agents could have done otherwise and that freedom of will in this sense is a necessary condition of our responsibility. But if these counterexamples work, then either freedom of will is not a condition of our responsibility or free will does not require that agents have the power to perform an actually unperformed action. However, in what follows I shall argue that the examples, properly interpreted, can prove neither that agents’ freedom is not a condition of their responsibility nor that they are responsible even when they cannot do otherwise. Most philosophers who deny that alternative possibilities are necessary for agents’ responsibility have been convinced by some ingenious examples originally put forward by Harry Frankfurt. The so-called ‘Frankfurt-type cases’ are alleged counterexamples to the claim that our responsibility requires alternative possibilities. It is difficult to see what those examples would imply as regards our freedom of the will as a condition of responsibility. Frankfurt himself claims that agents’ responsibility has nothing to do with their freedom of the will. But, as we shall see, his interpretation of the freedom of will is rather peculiar. Others may think that if Frankfurt is right then there is no such thing as free will, or alternatively, that the notion of free will should be understood so that it does not entail agents’ ability to do otherwise. In this section, I’m going to argue, not surprisingly, that Frankfurt’s examples do not support what they are designed to prove. Agents cannot be responsible unless they could have done otherwise. But, perhaps more surprisingly, in the next section I shall argue that Frankfurt’s examples can be used to provide further purchase to our proposed analysis of free will as a condition of moral responsibility. Our analysis claims that agents’ actions must be contingent in one particular sense if they are to be held responsible for what they do or fail to do. I shall argue that Frankfurt’s examples can illuminate even better the sense in which agents are responsible for their actions only if they could have done something that they have not actually done. Whether or not Frankfurt has succeeded to prove that alternative possibilities are not necessary for agents’ responsibility has been a subject of an ongoing debate ever since the publication of ‘Alternate Possibilities and

Abilities and Control 77 Moral Responsibility’. However, many philosophers who disagreed with him and who argued that alternative possibilities are necessary for our freedom and responsibility are libertarian, or at least incompatibilist. And Frankfurt’s view can indeed be interpreted as a special sort of compatibilism. For it seems to imply that even if our actions are determined, we can, at the same time, be free and responsible agents. Those, on the other hand, who argued for Frankfurt’s position, have tried to refi ne his original examples mainly as a response to the incompatibilists’ arguments. The main strategy of the defensive arguments seems to be that they described more and more detailed (and sometimes rather contrived) scenarios that allegedly make persons, whom we’d hold intuitively responsible, unable to do otherwise. 1 Despite these developments, in what follows, I shall discuss only one of Frankfurt’s original examples. I do not want to suggest, of course, that the new examples are not interesting or that they do not set new challenges to those who think that alternative possibilities are necessary for agents’ responsibility. But it seems to me that the new scenarios can effectively answer only the incompatibilists’ objections to Frankfurt’s argument, if anything. For if my arguments are correct, then whether or not Frankfurt is right does not depend at all on the nature of mechanisms that allegedly make people unable to do otherwise. On the one hand, I think—unlike the incompatibilists—that agents are responsible even if physical determinism is true. But I wish to uphold the traditional compatibilist view that they are free and responsible only if they could have done otherwise. The Moorean account of freedom, as we have seen, is perfectly compatible with physical determinism. I do not, therefore, think that events must be contingent in the ‘libertarian sense’—whatever it is—in order to hold agents responsible for their actions. And as we shall see, the sense in which our actions must be contingent if we are responsible for them is a crucial issue at the interpretation of Frankfurt-type cases. If responsibility and freedom require contingency just in the sense that I have proposed in the previous chapter, then what kind of mechanism can generate Frankfurt-type cases seems to be irrelevant to the question of whether or not people can be responsible only if they can do otherwise. In fact, I want to say that traditional compatibilists, who believe both that alternative possibilities are necessary for moral responsibility and that free will in this sense is compatible with determinism, are in a better position to answer Frankfurt’s counterexamples than libertarians, or more generally, traditional incompatibilists are. Frankfurt in his original article describes four scenarios in which agents are claimed to be responsible even if they could not have done otherwise. But there is just one of them that, even according to Frankfurt, may constitute a decisive counterexample to any interpretation of how someone must have been able to do otherwise in order to be responsible. Hence, I shall consider only this example in detail. I shall then briefly indicate why my

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response to this example can be generalized to all other counterexamples to the requirement of alternative possibilities. The following situation, according to Frankfurt, shows that alternative possibilities are unnecessary for moral responsibility. Suppose someone—Black, let us say—wants Jones to perform a certain action. Black is prepared to go considerable lengths to get his way, but he prefers to avoid showing his hand unnecessarily. So he waits until Jones 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 Jones is going to decide to do something other than what he wants him to do. If it does become clear that Jones is going to decide something else, Black takes effective steps to ensure that Jones decides to do, and that he does do, what he wants him to do. (Frankfurt 1969: 6) There is an obvious problem with this example. Given my account of choice in Chapter 3, I doubt that it is possible to make someone to choose to perform an action. Alien intervention seems to be simply incompatible with the exertion of the agent’s ability to choose just as laying a fair coin heads up cannot be the result of an exertion of the coin’s indeterministic power. But this problem might be set aside, for it is not at least logically impossible to induce an intention in someone which could have been a possible outcome of her choice. And that possibility is sufficient for Frankfurt-type arguments to work. Then, the moral of the story is that if Black never actually shows his hand, then Jones is morally responsible, even if he could not have done otherwise. Frankfurt’s example is particularly interesting because no one can, I think, reasonably claim that if Jones in the situation described makes his own choice then he is not responsible for what he does. In this case, Black’s presence or absence does not influence Jones’ responsibility for his action. The contentious issue is whether or not Black’s inactive presence implies that Jones could not have done otherwise. Frankfurt and those who are convinced by this (or some similar) example think that it does. But, as I wish to argue, it is far from being obvious that Jones can be both responsible and unable to do otherwise. What I mean is the following. Either we interpret Black’s unactualized power to intervene into Jones’ decision so that it makes Jones unable to do otherwise, but then Jones is not responsible. Or, if we do hold Jones responsible for what he has done, then we must deny that Black’s presence and silent powers can, in the relevant sense, deprive Jones of his ability to do otherwise. I shall take as my starting point Frankfurt’s own observation about the circumstances under which we would exempt someone from responsibility. He says that agents are not morally responsible for their actions if they did it only because they could not have done otherwise, even if they really wanted to do what they did (Frankfurt 1969: 10).

Abilities and Control 79 Frankfurt is unquestionably right that we can do things we want to do without being responsible for them. Perhaps I really want to do something, but I do not dare. Then you hypnotize me and make me to do what I want. Or perhaps I would dare do what I want to do even if you had not hypnotized me. Nevertheless, you did hypnotize me, and I did what I did only because you hypnotized me. In such cases I am obviously not responsible for what I have done, even if I really wanted to do the thing I’ve done. Since wanting the performed action is not sufficient for responsibility, there must be some further condition that is necessary for it. The interesting question concerns exactly this further condition of agents’ responsibility. There is an initial, and perhaps natural, response that suggests itself. At one point Frankfurt says that if ‘Jones, for reasons of his own, decides to perform and does perform the very action Black wants him to perform’ (Frankfurt 1969: 7, my emphasis), then he is just as morally responsible for his action as he would be if Black had not been there to guarantee that he do it. We have not, however, made much progress until we know what agents’ reasons mean here and what it means to decide to perform and then perform an action for a reason. The point is that those who believe that responsibility requires alternative possibilities may claim exactly that agents cannot act for a reason in the responsibility-grounding sense unless they are able to do otherwise. How responsibility and agents’ reasons are related is a difficult issue that I shall address in detail in the subsequent two chapters where I’ll argue that acting for a reason is not even necessary for responsibility. But let me mention here two initial worries which prove that deciding and acting for someone’s own reasons is surely not sufficient for the agent’s responsibility. First, imagine a situation in which an agent has equally strong reasons to perform two confl icting kinds of action and that she is absolutely indifferent in the sense that before choosing one action she has no initial preference for the performance of one kind of action over the other. Imagine further a potential intervener in the background who is able to manipulate the agent’s intentions; but he can manipulate them only to the extent that the agent has already some initial reason to choose and do an action. Suppose that the agent chooses and performs an action without any actual intervention. Certainly, we would hold her responsible. But now suppose that she performs the same action because the intervener actually interferes and makes her intend to perform the blameworthy action. The intervener may do this either by manipulating directly the agent’s intentions or by manipulating the agent’s mental state so that her preferences over the confl icting kinds of actions change. 2 In this example there is a sense in which the agent intervened upon acted ‘for her own reason’ since the intervener couldn’t made her act in the way she did unless she already had the reason. But that sense cannot be the responsibility-grounding sense since in the circumstances described previously we would not regard the agent responsible. In fact, I’m not even sure

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that we would regard the agent responsible even if her reasons for performing the action had been decisive, but her intention would have been directly induced by the intervener’s manipulation. The point is that one can act for her own reasons in many different ways, but she is responsible only if she acts for those reasons of her own free will. Second, it seems to me obvious that there are many ordinary cases in which agents act for their own reasons, but we do not hold them responsible. A typical example is Frankfurt’s own. There may be forms of addictive behavior for which we do not hold agents responsible. But surely, the addictive person acts for reasons of her own: she wants, for instance, to be relieved from the pain or serious physical discomfort caused by drug deprivation. However, if some form of addiction is indeed a form of compulsion—which is, of course, a contentious assumption—then the agent is not responsible even if she acts for some reasons of her own. And she is not responsible because she does not act of her own free will. The essential point here—that I shall develop later in Chapter 7 in detail—is that acting for a reason in the responsibility-grounding sense presupposes rather than explains freedom of the will as a condition of responsibility. The substantial issue seems, therefore, whether agents can act of their own free will without having the power to do otherwise. Frankfurt would not agree with this because, as I have mentioned earlier, he thinks that freedom of the will is not a condition of responsibility at all (Frankfurt 1971: 23–24). This is a consequence of his peculiar ‘willist’ account of free will according to which a person enjoys freedom of the will when ‘he is free to will what he wants to will, or to have the will he wants’ (Frankfurt 1971: 20).3 Now Frankfurt is certainly right that freedom of will understood in this way cannot be a necessary condition of responsibility because then the absence of such effective second-order wants or desires were sufficient for exempting agents from responsibility for what they do.4 In spite of this, it is instructive to see why this is so since it seems that the lack of such wants or desires may indeed exempt agents in some cases. Frankfurt’s example is the ‘unwilling addict’ who ‘really wants’ to take the drug, but he is not responsible, since he has a second-order desire not to take it, by which, however, he never actually controls his fi rst-order desire that moves him to act (Frankfurt 1971: 18). This line of argument may suggest that agents act only because they could not have done otherwise whenever they are unable to make their second-order wants or desires effective. However, fi rst, having higher order wants or desires couldn’t provide an adequate account of why a person is or is not responsible for any particular action. Let us suppose that in Frankfurt’s original example Jones has to decide whether or not he is going to commit a murderous act. Is he responsible only if he has an effective second-order desire to desire to kill? I do not think this is necessary at all. He may, as it were, want to kill only for the money. Perhaps he does have a second-order desire, which is effective, to desire the money. But this desire does not explain why he is responsible

Abilities and Control 81 for a particular act of murder. Most persons, I suppose, who effectively identify themselves with a fi rst-order desire for money would not choose to kill someone else for it. Second, and more interestingly, the lack of effective second-order (or higher order) desires cannot be sufficient for exempting agents from their responsibility. The unwilling addict is not responsible for his taking the drug because, although he has a second-order desire not to have the fi rst-order desire that actually moves him to act, his second-order desire is never effective. 5 So even if he acts according to his own fi rstorder desire, he is not only short of the Frankfurtian freedom of will, he is also exempted from responsibility. But consider now a habitual gambler who has a second-order desire not to desire to gamble, i.e., who does not identify herself with her effective desire to gamble. She can nevertheless be responsible for her act of gambling, even if she has a second-order desire that is never effective. It is perfectly possible after all that whenever she makes a choice whether or not to gamble she is always motivated by her unwanted fi rst-order desire. What is the difference between the addict and the gambler? The natural response seems to be that the addict cannot make the desired fi rst-order desire effective, whereas the gambler can, even if she never actually does. But how, further, can we understand this difference between the two persons’ abilities? It seems to me that there is just one way to understand it: the addict does not have the power to abstain from the drug, whereas the gambler does have the power to keep away from gambling. Consequently, in order to understand why and when people are responsible if they do not act according to a desire with which they want to identify themselves, we fi rst have to decide whether or not they have the power to do otherwise. Therefore, even if Frankfurt were right that having higher order desires is a necessary condition of human agency, this is surely not sufficient to understand the sense in which agents’ decisions must be ‘their own’ in order to be responsible for what they do. Moreover, as the example shows, we cannot avoid making some reference to alternative possibilities when we judge whether or not agents are responsible for their particular actions. But if this is right, how can we explain away the intuition, suggested by Frankfurt’s examples, that agents can be responsible even if they could not have done otherwise? The key to the answer is provided by the correct understanding of the sense in which agents could have done otherwise if they have free will. Frankfurt thinks that ‘anyone with a theory concerning what “could have done otherwise” means may answer this question for himself by describing whatever measures he would regard as sufficient to guarantee that, in the relevant sense, Jones cannot do otherwise . . .’ because ‘the structure of the example is flexible enough, I think, to fi nd a way around any charge of irrelevance by accommodating the doctrine on which the charge is based’ (Frankfurt 1969: 7).

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It is this claim that I want to challenge. I think that if we understand ‘could have done otherwise’ in the way I proposed in the previous chapter it is just false to say that Jones is responsible, unless he could have done otherwise. As we have seen, Frankfurt says that agents are not responsible if they did what they did only because they could not have done otherwise. My suggestion is that the phrase ‘S did what he did only because S could not have done otherwise’ must mean that S lacks the ability to do otherwise in the sense defi ned in the previous chapter. As the example of addiction shows, we think that agents are not responsible for an action, only if we think that they are unable to avoid it. Our analysis of the ability to perform an actually unperformed action illuminates exactly the sense in which agents cannot be responsible without having alternative possibilities. According to that analysis, one has the ability to perform an actually unperformed action only if one would have done otherwise, if he had chosen so and had not changed with respect to his ability to choose and perform the chosen action. In this sense, Jones must have the power to do otherwise in order to be able to freely will what he is going to do. If he had been unable to do anything else than what he has actually done, then he would not be responsible; since then he did what he did only because he could not have done otherwise. And he is unable to act otherwise exactly in the sense that he would not have done otherwise, even if he had chosen so and had not changed with respect to his ability to choose and perform the chosen action. What it means to say that Jones is not responsible, if he did what he did only because he could not have done otherwise, is exactly that Jones did not have the power to perform an actually unperformed action in the sense that he would not have done it, even if he had chosen to do it and had not changed with respect to his ability to choose and perform the chosen action. It is, therefore, a necessary condition of agents’ responsibility for their actions that, when they decide what to do, they have the ability to do otherwise. Frankfurt-type examples rely on the (at least logical) possibility of such circumstances in which it is impossible for the agent to manifest his ability to do otherwise. In these situations, if agents were about to make a certain choice to perform a certain kind of action, the circumstances would bring it about that they lose their power to choose and perform that action. But this hardly implies that agents in such situations are responsible even if they do not have the power to perform an actually unperformed action when they do not choose to perform it. In this sense, an agent is, and can be, responsible only if she can do otherwise. It is true that in Frankfurt-type scenarios if agents were to choose to perform the actually unperformed action, they would have lost their ability to choose and perform it. But this only means that, given the special circumstances, they have no occasion to exercise their ability to do otherwise. It surely does not mean that they would be responsible even if they lacked the ability.

Abilities and Control 83 Interestingly, all this seems to me perfectly compatible with what Frankfurt himself claims about his examples: The distinctively potent element in this sort of counterexample to PAP (principle of alternate possibilities) is that a certain kind of overdetermination, which involves a sequential fail-safe arrangement such that one causally sufficient factor functions exclusively as backup for another. The arrangement ensures that a certain effect will be brought about by one or the other of the two causal factors, but not by both together. Thus the backup factor may contribute nothing whatever to bringing about the effect whose occurrence it guarantees. (Frankfurt 1983: 96) What does the backup factor actually do? It ensures that if agents in these circumstances were to choose to do otherwise, they would lose their ability to choose and hence to perform the alternative action. But pretty obviously, for the backup factor to achieve this, agents must initially have the ability to perform the actually unperformed action. If agents were to choose not to exercise that ability, the backup factor remains silent, and hence they are responsible because they acted of their own free will in the sense which implies that they had the power to perform an actually unperformed action. However, in case agents were to exercise that power, the backup factor gets activated and deprives them of their ability to choose and to perform the relevant action. So they are not responsible. But in both cases it remains true that they are responsible only if they have the ability to choose and to perform the actually unperformed action.

5.2 ABILITIES, OPPORTUNITIES, AND FRANKFURT’S CASES I’m not the only philosopher, of course, who claims that Frankfurt’s examples cannot prove the irrelevance of alternative possibilities on the grounds that agents in the Frankfurt-type situations are responsible only if they retain their ability to do otherwise.6 John Martin Fischer, in a recent survey of the arguments about Frankfurt-type cases, calls this approach the ‘nonstandard response’ and mounts the following criticism against it: I would offer the following diagnosis of the confusion of the nonstandard response. I believe the nonstandard theorist is conflating general abilities with the sort of ability that corresponds to J.L. Austin’s ‘all-in sense of ‘can’, or ‘can in the particular circumstances’. One may have a general ability without having the latter sort of ability, insofar as one does not have the opportunity to exercise the general ability. Whereas I would certainly concede that the agent in a Frankfurt-type case has the

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I wish to sustain, however, that at least my version of the ‘nonstandard response’ is not guilty of any such confusion. My reasoning in the previous section aimed to support the following argument: [1] In Frankfurt’s examples, the actual interference into the agent’s choice and/or action must make a relevant difference as far as her responsibility is concerned. [2] The relevant difference cannot concern the agent’s opportunities to perform some action since, if any of the ‘Frankfurt-type scenarios’ can work at all, then, with or without actual interference, the agent lacks that opportunity to act in certain ways. [3] Thus the relevant difference must concern the agent’s ability. [4] The relevant ability the agent loses as a result of the intervention is her ability to perform an actually unperformed action in the sense defi ned by the conditional analysis. [5] Consequently, agents are responsible only if they are able to do otherwise. There might indeed be some confusion in these matters, but it is not confusion about what kind of abilities agents must have in order to be responsible. Rather, it seems to me that there is a certain tendency to confuse the correct and important distinction between the two senses of ‘can’ (the ‘can’ of opportunity and the ‘can’ of ability) with the distinction between ‘general abilities’—or, perhaps, skills—and the ‘can in the particular circumstances’. For whatever ‘general abilities’ are, I certainly agree—as I have already argued at length—that it is only agents’ ability to perform an actually unperformed action in the definite circumstances that is relevant to the issue of their responsibility. As I see it, Fischer’s objection to the ‘non-standard response’ is a consequence of some implicit Humean assumptions about abilities and powers. For Humeans, an object’s powers or abilities are to be reduced to some causal or counterfactual relation between certain kinds of events. Now, if the circumstances are such that they make it impossible for the power or ability to manifest itself even if the object has not undergone any internal change, then a Humean may want to say that the object’s ‘general ability’ is retained, but the ‘specific ability’ to exercise the general one is lost. However, as I have argued in Chapter 2, I do not think that we can make clear sense of the ‘ability to exercise an ability’ since the postulation of such ‘meta-abilities’ would, if anything, lead to an inadmissible regress. My claim is that in order to understand the relevant ability correctly we must reject the Humean assumptions. First, as I have already argued in detail, agents’ specific actional abilities can be lost even if they suffer

Abilities and Control 85 no internal change. Second, and more importantly to the present point, objects or persons’ abilities are certainly not lost simply because they are in such circumstances in which their powers cannot be manifested (or in which they lack the opportunity to make them manifest). And fi nally, powers or abilities are not reducible to some counterfactual relations between kinds of events. We may defi ne abilities with reference to those events, but, as we have seen in the previous chapter, this does not imply any reduction. Thus, what we must possess in order to be responsible is always some particular ability at some particular time. And from the moment on that we have lost the relevant abilities, we are not responsible for what we do or fail to do. What we must distinguish is not general abilities and the abilities to exercise them, but rather agents’ faculties and skills, which are essentially generic, and their abilities to perform some particular action in certain circumstances. There is a sense, of course, in which even these abilities are ‘general’. Abilities are properties of agents, and properties can, in the purely logical sense, be instantiated by many individuals.7 But abilities and powers are certainly not essentially generic in the sense that they can be more or less specific. Since abilities are properties, we can distinguish the more and the less general abilities by saying that they are more ore less determinate. The ability to speak is less determinate than the ability to speak English; or the ability to swim is less determinate than the ability to butterfly or the ability to butterfly one hundred meters within two minutes. But if we understand the generality of abilities in this way—and I see no other way to understand it—then the abilities I have in mind are not at all ‘general’. Of course, if agents have some specific ability, it does imply that they have the general one just as having the ability to see red implies the ability to see colors. But my account of the responsibility-relevant sense of ‘could have done otherwise’ is based on agents’ specific abilities. And hence my claim that the victims of Frankfurt-type scenarios are responsible only so long as they are able to perform an actually unperformed action is about the most specific (i.e., less general) abilities that are necessary for the performance of the relevant kind of action in the definite circumstances. To see how irrelevant ‘generality’ is to the ascription of powers, recall the example in Chapter 2 about the swimmer. But imagine now, that this swimmer has in fact won an Olympic gold medal, and won it with a new world record. Let us imagine that this was the fi rst and last time that he could swim so fast. And let us suppose that no other human being has ever been, or will ever be, able to swim such distance so fast. Since actual and non-accidental (i.e., not unintentional) performance implies the corresponding performance abilities and this swimmer did actually swim once so fast, he must have been able to do that, i.e., he must at that time have had the ability to do so. There is no sensible question about the ‘generality’ of this ability. He certainly had that ability, but only he had it, and had it only once (or for one very short period of time). It seems perfectly obvious to me

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that agents can have abilities exactly in the same ‘particular’ way even if they do not actually exercise them. What is indeed relevant to the issue of alternative possibilities is that abilities, like many other properties, are such that certain individuals may have them at one particular time and can lose or lack them at others. What Austin calls the ‘can in the particular sense’ is not any kind of ability. It is—as I have argued in detail in Chapter 2—the ‘can’ of opportunity. And the point of my argument was exactly that not every opportunity is relevant to agents’ free will and responsibility. Opportunities matter only if their absence can deprive agents of their pertinent abilities. My claim is that, in the Frankfurt-type examples, whenever there is no actual intervention, the lack of opportunity does not affect agents’ (most specific kind of) ability to perform the alternative sort of action, and it is exactly for this reason that we hold them responsible. At this point, it may be useful to compare my response to Frankfurt’s argument to another that is, in some ways, similar to my proposal. Michael Smith and Michael Fara have recently suggested that agents in the Frankfurt-type scenarios are responsible because their capacity to act otherwise is only masked (see Smith 2003, Fara 2008). The possibility of masks, just as the logical possibility of fi nks, has originally been put forward as a challenge to the reductive accounts of dispositions.8 A glass’ fragility seems to entail that it would break if it were hit by a hard object. But it might not break when it is hit, if it is packed in a safe enough way. We may say then that the safe packing ‘masks’ the glass’ fragility. This means that there could be circumstances in which objects can retain a disposition and nevertheless don’t manifest it even if the conditions of its manifestation obtained. The idea is then that the Frankfurt-type intervener is ‘a masker’: he masks the agent’s ability to do otherwise. But this does not show that the agent actually lacks the relevant ability. There is a subtle but important difference, however, between Smith’s and Fara’s proposal and mine. It is true that in one respect the problem of masking is relevantly similar to the problem of ‘fi nks’: both show that the simple conditional analysis of abilities is not sufficient to specify the exact circumstances in which an ability will be exercised. It seems to me, however, that there is a fundamental difference between the problem of ‘fi nks’ and ‘masks’. Finks work by depriving the object of its power in the circumstances of its would-be manifestation, while masks—as their name suggests—only hide them. A glass in a safe package remains fragile; but the the sugar cube in Goldman’s example becomes insoluble whenever it is about to be immersed in water. And this difference between a power being only masked and its being lost appears to be crucial to my response to Frankfurt’s examples. If the interference only masks but does not change the agent’s ability, then the ability is still there even when the interference does actually occur. And hence we cannot explain why the agent is not responsible when the

Abilities and Control 87 intervention is actualized. This problem is obviously relevant to the issue that Fischer discusses. If we want to capture the relevant sense of ‘could have done otherwise’ with reference to a generic capacity to choose and perform a certain kind of action—as Smith seems to do (in Smith 2003)—then Fischer’s objection does bite exactly because when an agent’s ability is only masked then she does retain it even when the interference is operative. Thus, having a generic capacity cannot explain in which sense the agent must have been able to do otherwise only if the interfering mechanism is silent. According to my account, however, abilities are extrinsic and maximally specific, i.e., they are identified with reference to what is required to the choice and performance of the omitted action in the given circumstances. And they capture the relevant sense of alternative possibility exactly because they explain why the agent is responsible when there is no active interference: in such and only in such circumstances the agent has the ability to perform the actually unperformed action. The agent is not responsible, however, when there is an active interference exactly because the interference does not only mask the agent’s general capacity, but deprives her of the responsibility-relevant ability to do otherwise. How can we then understand the peculiarity of the Frankfurt-type scenarios? Frankfurt himself summarizes the point behind his examples thus: The following may all be true: there were circumstances that made it impossible for a person to avoid doing something; these circumstances actually played a role in bringing it about that he did it, so that it is correct to say that he did it because he could not have done otherwise; the person really wanted to do what he did; he did it because it was what he really wanted to do, so that it is not correct to say that he did what he did only because he could not have done otherwise. Under these conditions, the person may well be morally responsible for what he has done. (Frankfurt 1969: 10, my emphasis) There is something puzzling about this. What is the role that the circumstances actually played in bringing about what the agent did? On the bases of Frankfurt’s previously cited characterization about his cases, we must deny that the role was causal. For the person is responsible only if the backup factor—the presence of which made it impossible for him to avoid doing what he did—has actually remained silent, i.e., causally inactive. Frankfurt’s cases are peculiar exactly because they constrain what agents can do without depriving them of their relevant abilities. In all of these cases, agents’ will is free so long as they retain their ability to perform an actually unperformed action. And the simple inactive presence of a mechanism in the background is perfectly compatible with the retention of their pertinent abilities. That the fail-safe mechanism would have deprived agents of their powers if they had chosen to perform the actually unperformed action is not relevant since agents are responsible

88 Freedom of the Will only as long as they retained their ability to perform the alternative action. The fact that in certain circumstances agents would lose their powers is irrelevant when we decide whether or not they have the pertinent abilities. And what matters for their responsibility is whether or not they actually have those abilities, and not under what circumstances they would lose them. Thus, Fischer is right when he says that in Frankfurt-type cases the person’s circumstances set constraints on the agent’s opportunities to exercise his powers. If consistent Frankfurt-type scenarios can be conceived at all, then agents in those circumstances cannot have the opportunity to exercise their powers. But fi rst, the relevant powers are not general skills or capacities, but the most specific abilities relevant to the performance of the actions which the agent didn’t perform. And second, agents do not have the opportunity to exercise that ability for a rather special reason: because of the presence of a special backup factor, which would deprive them of the relevant ability when they were to exercise it. Nevertheless, what Frankfurt’s cases show is not that agents can be responsible even if they could not have done otherwise in the relevant sense. Just the opposite is true. Frankfurt’s cases are counterexamples to the view that the relevant sense of ‘can’ is the opportunity sense. Agents may not have the opportunity to perform an actually unperformed action, but they can be responsible nonetheless. Otherwise put, Frankfurt-type cases are counterexamples to the claim that agents are responsible only if they have the opportunity to exercise a certain kind of ability the possession of which is indeed necessary for their responsibility. It is interesting to observe that Frankfurt and his libertarian critics share an important presupposition. Both libertarians and defenders of Frankfurt’s view believe that every lack of opportunity to exercise our powers can deprive us of our ability to perform an actually unperformed action. Libertarians must grant this because otherwise—as we have seen in Chapter 2—they would not have good reason to think that physical determinism is incompatible with freedom of the will. And Frankfurt and those who agree with him must believe this because only then can they consistently uphold their claim that the pure inactive presence of some backup factor can render agents unable to do otherwise. However, as I’ve argued, there couldn’t be any backup factor which is compatible with agents’ responsibility and which can, at the same time, deprive them of their ability to do otherwise. As everyone, even Frankfurt himself, admits agents are not responsible if they do what they do only because they could not have done otherwise. That is why they are not responsible if the backup mechanism is active. But if and until it is not active, agents are responsible exactly because they are free in the sense that they retain their power or ability to perform an alternative action. Given the special circumstances, they do not have the opportunity to exercise that power. But as long as they are responsible, they must have the ability to

Abilities and Control 89 perform an actually unperformed action. And they do what they actually do of their own free will in exactly that sense. My last comment on Frankfurt’s counterexamples is that, rather interestingly, if they are properly interpreted, they can lend further support to our interpretation of the traditional compatibilist view about free will. In Chapter 2, I argued that our incompatibilist intuitions are at least partly based on a misunderstanding about the relevance of the distinction between the two senses of ‘can’. Indeed, we can do things that we do not actually do in the sense of having the opportunity to do them; and we can perform some actually omitted action in the sense of having the specific ability to do them. But I also said that the lack of opportunity does not in every case imply that we are not able to do what we have not actually done. Since the different versions of the consequence argument can prove something only about abstract opportunities, but they do not prove that determinism deprives us of any relevant actional abilities, free will as the ability to do otherwise is compatible with physical determinism. Frankfurt-type examples as I understand them confi rm the view that ‘can’ in the sense of opportunities is not always relevant to agents’ free will. These examples are interesting, because, unlike the consequence argument, they do not rely on a global and abstract notion of determinism. Rather, they rely on intuitions about local psychological or neuro-physiological mechanisms, which may deprive agents of certain opportunities to manifest their abilities, but the silent presence of which does not exempt them from responsibility exactly because they have free will. We should not, however, conclude on the basis of those examples that agents are responsible even if they could not have done otherwise. The correct interpretation of the examples is that they provide further evidence to the view that what matters for free will is the ability to do otherwise, which can be retained even if certain opportunities to exercise it are not present.

5.3 POWERS, SKILLS, AND CHANCES According to our analysis of free will, agents are responsible only if they can do otherwise, and they cannot have the power to do otherwise unless they would do otherwise, if they chose so. But then the possibility of nondeterministic physical processes seems to pose a problem to our analysis. In order to see how physical indeterminacy may be relevant to our power to do otherwise, consider the following example of Richard Feynman cited by Elisabeth Anscombe: A bomb is connected with a Geiger counter so that it will go off if the Geiger counter registers a certain reading; whether it will or not is not determined, for it is so placed that near to some radioactive material that it may or may not register that reading. (Anscombe 1971: 101)

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This example was originally designed to show how indeterminacy at the microphysical level can be relevant for indeterminacy at the macroscopic level. But it is easy to modify it so that we can see its relevance to our analysis of free will as the power to do otherwise.9 Imagine that the only person around who can fabricate such a device is asked to install one in the crowded downtown of a city and to dismantle it next day. This person has a choice about whether or not to do this. If she declines the offer, we hold her morally responsible for saving the city from great damage, and perhaps also for saving many lives. But it may not seem obvious that it is a necessary condition of her responsibility that she would have done otherwise if she had chosen so. For even if she had installed the device, the city might not have been damaged. Therefore, the objection claims, it is not a necessary condition of persons’ responsibility that they are able to perform an actually unperformed action in the sense that they would have done otherwise, if they had chosen so. There might seem to be a simple and natural response to this objection. According to that response, the conditions of responsibility for our bodily movements (including our refraining from making those movements) are not the same as the conditions of responsibility for our complex intentional actions. It is only the former for which we must be directly responsible and hence the relevant alternatives must be specified as the ability to perform some bodily movement. For instance, the person in our example is directly responsible for declining to install the device. But she is only derivatively responsible, if at all, for saving the city’s downtown. And she can control perfectly well whether or not she rejects the request even if, given indeterminism of the causal processes, she cannot so control the results of her bodily movements. This is what she is responsible for and which she might not do. Freedom of the will is not relevant at judging whether agents are responsible for the consequences of their bodily movements exactly because those are not under their direct control. However, distinguishing the conditions of responsibility for complex actions and responsibility for bodily movements is not a promising strategy to defend our analysis of free will in face of the challenge that arises from the possibility of indeterministic causal processes. First, as we have seen, we do not control voluntary bodily movements directly even in the causal sense. Since neural connections may work non-deterministically, the same problem can arise with regard to agents’ control over their bodily movements as with regards to the bodily movements’ consequences. Second, the performance of many bodily actions can require the acquisition of certain skills. But even a very well trained skater can fall on the ice sometimes and even a very well trained piano player can occasionally hit the wrong key. Acquired skills do not guarantee success in performance. Further, even if it is true that reliability of performance is a necessary condition of having some skills, it is also important to see that the relevant notion of reliability is not statistical. What matters is

Abilities and Control 91 not that the skilled agent can succeed to do what she intends more often than the unskilled, but that the unskilled can do it only by fluke. There are certain actions—like scoring a goal from a corner kick—which only the skilled can claim to do intentionally, even if the probability of success is very low. Finally, and most importantly, as I have argued at length in Chapter 3, it is simply false that we are directly responsible for our bodily movements in the normative, and not in the causal, sense of responsibility. The agent in the example is directly morally responsible for saving the city. And she is only derivatively responsible for saying ‘no’ or not moving her body in the ways that might have resulted in the destruction of the city. She is responsible for the latter only because in the given circumstances it was a constitutive part of the former, intended action. Hence, the action which she avoids but which she must be able to perform in order to be responsible has to be identified with reference to the indeterministic—and in this case very unlikely—result of her bodily movements. When we say that we are responsible because our will is free what we mean is that we could have done otherwise in the sense that we would have performed an action, if we had chosen, and therefore intended, to perform that action. But since the types of actions that we choose and that we could have avoided performing are identified with reference to some of their results which may fail to occur even if some bodily movement is performed, it is always possible that we do not perform the action we have chosen and intended to perform. Hence agents’ actional abilities, the possession of which provides the foundation of free will and responsibility, cannot be intrinsic. What lends force to the objection from indeterminism is exactly that our agency extends beyond our body.10 Thus, the person in our example—who rejects to install the indeterministic explosive device—is responsible for saving the city’s downtown, if, and because, her intended action was to save it. Whether she saved it by refraining form installing a deterministic or indeterministic device matters little. But then how can we answer the objection that the ability to perform an actually unperformed action is not a necessary condition of responsibility? My answer is that the truth of the conditional—with which we nonreductively analyze the meaning of our power to perform an actually unperformed action—does not require that the connection between the event described by the antecedent (the choice-event) and the event described by the consequence (the action-event) be deterministic. Our will is free only if we have the ability or power to do otherwise. We can do otherwise in this sense provided that we would perform an actually unperformed action if we chose so and retain our ability to choose and perform it. And we can have the relevant performance ability even if it might happen that we do not perform an action, even if we chose so.11 Some may say that this answer cannot work, because it contradicts a widely accepted defi nition of might-conditionals. According to that

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defi nition, suggested by Lewis in his classical treatment of counterfactuals, ‘If it were p, then it might be not-q’ should be defi ned as ‘It is not the case that if it were p then it would be q’ (Lewis: 1973: 2). But even if someone insisted that this is the only correct understanding of might-counterfactuals, the conditional analysis should not be rejected; only the consequent should be modified. We should say that in order to have free will, the agent must have the ability to do otherwise in the sense that she would raise the objective chance of the performance of an actually unperformed action if she chose to perform that action. I must admit, however, that I fi nd this complication unnecessary. How might-conditionals should be understood, particularly when they express relations between events which happen in the circumstances of indeterminism, is a highly contentious issue, where intuitions can easily clash. Many philosophers argue that it is possible that something might not happen in circumstances in which we can truly say that it would happen.12 In my view, power-ascriptions in general provide a good example for such cases. I have an even stronger conviction as regards our particular topic, the nature of those abilities that are necessary for free will. Overall, it is the best characterization of one’s unexercised responsibility-relevant ability that one would have done otherwise if she had chosen so, even if we can imagine circumstances in which it happens that one fails to do what one has chosen to. It is interesting to see how this issue is related to the problem of alternative possibilities. As we have seen, those who grant that Frankfurt-style scenarios of some sort can prove the irrelevance of alternative possibilities to moral responsibility must believe that the inactive presence of a potential intervener is sufficient to deprive agents of their ability to do otherwise. But if the inactive presence of a potential intervener would be sufficient to deprive someone or something of a power, then virtually nothing could possibly have any power. Some snakes are venomous: they have the power to kill by biting their victims, including humans. There are, however, antidotes to their poison. Hence, it is always possible that when they have bitten a person, someone ‘intervenes’ and an antidote is administered so that the victim survives without any harm done to her health. Does this mean that the snake is not venomous after all or that her bite is not lethal? I do not think it does. The point is that the relevant power is identified with reference to such circumstances in which all counteracting powers are ‘inactive’. This is a trivial ceteris paribus condition without which no power can be defi ned.13 The same applies to agents’ ability to perform an actually unperformed action. We cannot understand what an ability is and what its exertion means without reference to the corresponding conditional. But this is perfectly compatible with the fact that the ascription of the power entails only what happens in the actual circumstances ceteris paribus, i.e., in the absence of any possible counteracting powers.

Abilities and Control 93 Now returning to the problem of indeterminacy, the proper strategy to answer the Anscombe-type objection is simply to deny that the agent in the example did not have the ability or power to do otherwise. I sustain that she is responsible only if she could have done otherwise in the sense that she would have performed another action if she had chosen so. This conditional is meant to express the agent’s ability or power to perform an actually unperformed action. We have to reject the assumption that agents cannot have the power to do otherwise if they might not have done what they had chosen to. Otherwise put, it is a mistake to assume that agents can have the ability to do otherwise in the relevant sense only if the chance that they succeed to perform their chosen actions is one or at least very high. This latter condition is certainly not satisfied in most cases in which we hold agents responsible. Anscombe’s example is special only because it involves a physically indeterministic process. But we do not have to use such examples in order to see that we may fail to perform our chosen, and intended, actions. The more complex our intended actions or the more skills their performance requires the less chance we have that we succeed to perform them. To have the requisite kind of power, however, it is sufficient that an agent’s choice raises the chances of the occurrence of the intended action-defi ning consequences. An agent’s ability to perform an actually unperformed action is perfectly compatible with the fact that her choice will not determine the performance of the chosen action. In Chapter 2, I have argued that agents can retain their power to perform an actually unperformed action even if determinism is true. In Chapter 6, I shall argue that it would be a mistake to infer from this that agents can have their ability to perform an actually unperformed action only if (physical or psychological) determinism is true. It seems to me that the main reason why some philosophers believe that the conditional analysis could work only if determinism holds is that they wish to tie the conditions of responsibility to the wrong sort of control. They think that, in order to have the ability to do otherwise, agents must have full or perfect control over what they can do. But agents can have the power to do otherwise even if they might not have done what they have chosen to. There is indeed a sense in which we lose some control over our actions if our power to perform an alternative action is not deterministic. But as far as our responsibility is concerned, the relevant question is whether or not we retain our ability and not how strong control we have. Consequently, even if the non-deterministic nature of powers can indeed diminish our control, it does not follow that, for this very reason, we should reject the conditional analysis of free will. What we must reject is that our freedom and responsibility requires perfect control over what we do. What our responsibility requires is the ability to perform an actually unperformed action. And having that power or ability is compatible with the possibility that, in certain circumstances, we might not do what we chose to do.

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5.4 INTERIM CONCLUSION I have argued in Part I for an amended Moorean analysis of our ability to perform an actually unperformed action. I have shown that the consequence argument is not conclusive and hence it does not seem to be impossible to offer some analysis of freedom of will which is compatible with the truth of physical determinism. Then I have given such an analysis by showing how Moore’s original account can be modified and made immune to the standard sorts of criticisms. In the present chapter, I have shown that free will in the sense defi ned in the previous one is indeed a necessary condition of responsibility. First of all, agents are not responsible, unless they have the power or ability to do otherwise. There could be special circumstances in which their ability cannot become manifest thanks to some actually silent mechanism which lurks in the background and which would deprive agents of their abilities, if they were about to exercise them. But as long as agents are responsible, they could have done otherwise in the sense of having the ability to perform an actually unperformed action. Finally, I have argued that imperfect control over the exertion of one’s performance abilities is compatible with the agent’s ability to do otherwise in the sense of their freedom of the will. But there is more work to be done. One objection to the conditional analysis—which I have mentioned already—is that it is ad hoc: its only aim is to reconcile free will with physical determinism. As Hilary Bok—who also defends, although in a rather different spirit, a compatibilist solution to the free will problem—observes, writers who argue for the conditional analysis ‘rarely stop to argue for their most basic assumption: that we act freely when our actions depend on our choices’. But, she adds ‘it is this assumption, rather than any unclarity in the conditional analysis that will most deeply trouble libertarians’ (Bok 1998: 22). I’m not sure what troubles libertarians—or those compatibilists who reject the conditional analysis— most. And, as we have seen, I do not think that we act freely only when our actions depend on our choices. But Bok’s point is legitimate. It is incumbent upon defenders of the conditional analysis to show that their favored notion of free will captures the essential condition of moral responsibility. At some points in this and the previous chapter I have already indicated that the conditional analysis is not only an ad hoc attempt to reconcile free will with physical or nomological determinism. Free will does require both the ability to make choices and the ability to perform certain actions. According to the conditional analysis, freedom of the will is a condition of responsibility exactly because someone can have one of these abilities without having the other; and even when one possesses both, the appropriate dependence might fail to obtain. Many philosophers believe, however, that the conditional analysis cannot be an adequate account of free will as a condition of responsibility. First, because the conditional analysis does not seem to grant a sufficient

Abilities and Control 95 role to our characteristically human rational capacities in the understanding of the conditions of responsibility. And second, because it neglects some relevant conditions that concern the (personal) historical origin of agents’ behavior. But responsibility, in fact, demands much more: it demands that we have certain rational capacities and that we participate to a sufficient extent in the formation of our own self. In Part II, I shall investigate in which sense and to what extent such further—or alternative—conditions are necessary for responsibility for our actions and omissions. Two main points will emerge. First, I shall show that even if alternative possibilities are not sufficient for agents’ responsibility, any further condition that concerns their responsibility for their actions and omissions must depend on agents’ freedom of the will as defined by the conditional analysis. And second, I shall argue that some of the alleged further conditions might be conditions of agents’ autonomy, and not conditions of moral responsibility. But one can be responsible even if one is not autonomous. What responsible moral agency requires, I shall claim, is best captured by the conditional analysis.

Part II

Free Will and Reasons

6

Intelligibility

That which in a slave is effected by bonds and constraint in us is effected by passions, whose violence is sweet, but none the less pernicious. . . . Nevertheless that evil state of the slave, which is also our own, does not prevent us, any more than him, from making a free choice of that which pleases us most, in the state to which we are reduced, in proportion to our present strength and knowledge. (Leibniz 1710/1951: §289)

In Part I, I have discussed what many philosophers regard as the most fundamental metaphysical problem about the freedom of will: the interpretation of free will as the power to do otherwise and its compatibility with nomological determinism. There is, however, another aspect of the free will problem that has traditionally been regarded at least as important as the issue of alternative possibilities: the relationship between freedom and reasons. In the previous chapters, I argued for a version of the conditional analysis which is a compatibilist account of free will. Some compatibilists believe, however, that the correct understanding of the relation between responsibility and reasons is sufficient to demonstrate that determinism cannot contradict moral freedom. And, as we shall see in Chapter 8, even some libertarians claim that the central issue for a libertarian theory of free will is to provide an adequate account of the relation between agents’ reasons and their responsibility. The main concern of this chapter and the next is the nature of this relationship. Apart from some existentialists, who notoriously held that human freedom is essentially irrational, everyone agrees that agents who act of their own free will can also act for a reason. And there is a long philosophical tradition which granted an even stronger connection between freedom and reasons. According to that tradition, acting for good reasons is necessarily conducive to human freedom. Descartes, for instance, says at one point that: In order to be free, there is no need for me to be inclined in both ways; on the contrary, the more I incline in one direction—either because I

100 Freedom of the Will clearly understand that reasons of truth and goodness point that way, or because of a divinely produced disposition of my inmost thoughts— the freer is my choice. Neither divine grace nor natural knowledge ever diminished my freedom; on the contrary, they increase and strengthen it. But the indifference I feel when there is no reason pushing me in one direction rather than another is the lowest grade of freedom; it is evidence not of my perfection of freedom, but rather of a defect in knowledge or a kind of negation. For if I always saw clearly what was true and good, I should never have to deliberate about the right judgment or choice; in that case, although I should be wholly free, it would be impossible for me ever to be in a state of indifference. (Descartes 1641: 57–58) And Locke argues in a rather similar spirit: If to break lose from the conduct of Reason, and to want that restraint of Examination and Judgment, which keeps us from chusing or doing the worse, be Liberty, mad Men and Fools are the only Freemen: But yet, I think, no Body would chuse to be mad for the sake of such Liberty, but he that is mad already. (Locke 1689: II, xxi, 50) Most of early rationalists and empiricists thought that acting for good reasons must be compatible with, and even conducive to, free action. Descartes and Locke (and many other early modern philosophers) claimed—in agreement with an even older tradition—that our deliberative capacity to perceive (good) reasons cannot in any way constrain our freedom of will. And sometimes they seem to claim even more: that our freedom is worthy for us exactly because we can recognize and act upon good reasons. I shall call this thesis—somewhat anachronistically as far as Descartes or Locke are concerned—the autonomy thesis. According to the autonomy thesis, free will is valuable only because it guarantees that agents can act for (good) reasons. The main purpose of the present and the next chapter is to argue that even if the autonomy thesis is plausible, free will as a condition of responsibility cannot be understood as a rational or deliberative capacity. Many philosophers, compatibilists and libertarians alike, think that our will can be free only if our actions depend on, or can respond in appropriate ways to, our reasons. Some of them do not deny that the ability to do otherwise is a necessary condition of responsibility for actions and omissions. Some others, persuaded by Frankfurt’s arguments, think that moral responsibility is compatible with the absence of alternative possibilities. But they all seem to agree that we are responsible for our actions only if they depend on, or can respond to, our reasons. Certainly, those who believe that freedom and responsibility require that agents’ behavior depend on their reasons cannot simply claim that agents are responsible only if their actions are the results of their rational

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deliberations, since agent can be, and many times are, responsible for their unreasonable behavior. Presumably, even in such cases, we can make agents’ action intelligible by saying why they have behaved in the way they do. But to say that there is a reason why agents act in certain ways is hardly sufficient for ascribing responsibility. The reason why an agent did something may have been that the she was pathologically compulsive or hypnotized. We can identify a reason why a person did something without concluding that her will was free or that she is responsible. Thus, we should understand agents’ reasons to act in a way that can explain how reasons can ground their responsibility. What seems to make practical reasons so important for agents’ responsibility is that reasons in the relevant sense must not only explain, but also subjectively justify the agent’s action. Reasons for actions are essentially normative in the sense that their ascription implies that agents themselves fi nd their actions, in some way or another, justified.1 The reasons why an agent acts in the way she does needn’t be normative in this sense. Since reasons for actions are subjectively justificatory, when an agent acts for such reasons, her behavior is assumed to express her values and commitments. It seems to follow that only those actions can be relevant to an agent’s responsibility which she can control by her reasons. And that is what explains why reasons dependence must be the condition of responsibility. It would be implausible to deny that the possession of deliberative capacity or the ability to perceive reasons for actions is one of the conditions of our responsibility for them. And perhaps the autonomy thesis is correct: free will is most valuable for us exactly because it makes us possible that we guide our actions by our reasons. Thus, acting for our best reasons and acting of our own free will cannot be incompatible. It seems also to be true that we can be responsible only if we have the ability to perceive certain reasons. More specifically, one can only be morally responsible if she is capable of perceiving, or perceiving adequately, moral reasons. What I want to challenge is not the view that the general capacity of adequate apprehension of reasons is a necessary condition of responsibility. What I deny is that freedom of the will as a condition of responsibility should be understood in term of agents’ rational capacities. I shall argue that even when agents act for a reason, they are not free and responsible because they act on those reasons. They are responsible because they can choose to act for those reasons. It is in this sense that I want to argue for a view that may be called a kind of voluntarism. Certainly, responsible agents who act upon their reasons are more autonomous than those who do not. But reasons dependence is sufficient neither for autonomy nor for responsibility. Moreover, according to the sort of voluntarism I shall argue for, in order to be responsible, agents’ actions need not depend on, or respond to, their reasons.2 Thus, agents’ autonomy cannot be a condition of their responsibility. Consequently, free will is not identical to, but is rather a precondition of, normative autonomy.

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6.1 COMPATIBILISM AND REASONS DEPENDENCE Although, as we shall see in Chapter 8, there are some libertarians who believe that reasons dependence is at least a necessary condition of agents’ responsibility, the idea of reasons dependence seems to have a special status in some compatibilist accounts of free will; since some compatibilists believe that it is not only a necessary, but also a sufficient condition of moral responsibility. Some of them even argued that reasons dependence can provide further purchase for compatibilism itself, if we grant, as they think we should, that the appropriate relation of dependence must be deterministic. According to such compatibilists, agents cannot be responsible unless their reasons causally determine their choices and actions.3 There are two main arguments in favor of the view that agents are responsible only if their actions depend (in some specific way) on their reasons. The fi rst argument claims that agents are responsible only if their actions are explicable in terms of their reasons and that the pertinent explanation must be both causal and at least subjectively justificatory. The second is that agents can intentionally control their actions in ways required for responsibility only if they act for a reason. The two arguments are obviously not independent, since the possibility of intentional control is an essential connotation of our notion of causation and hence of causal explanation.4 But how are the issues of reasons dependence and of compatibilism connected? As we have already seen in the Introduction, compatibilism comes in different varieties. However, for our present purpose, we need to distinguish only two radically different views about the compatibility of freedom of will and determinism. 5 Some compatibilists claim that we are free and responsible even if physical-nomological determinism is true. This is the sort of compatibilism I defended in Part I. According to it, incompatibilists are wrong because the falsity of physical determinism is not necessary for free will and responsibility. I call this view the ‘even if’ kind of compatibilism. As we have seen in Chapter 5, compatibilists of this sort are not forced to say that we can be responsible only if determinism holds. They claim only that we are free and responsible agents even if physical determinism—in the sense characterized earlier—turns out to be true. This view is mainly motivated by the conviction that the issue of our moral agency is intuitively independent of any contingent truth concerning the nature of physical laws that govern the evolution of physical events in our universe. Responsibility for our actions is an essential feature of our moral agency. Hence, even if physics may conclusively prove one day that we live in a deterministic universe, this discovery cannot shake us in our persuasion that we are responsible agents. The converse of this argument relies, perhaps, on an even stronger intuition. If incompatibilism were true and we cannot deny, without some obvious absurdity, that we are free and responsible agents, then deterministic interpretations of physics must be mistaken. But ‘even if’ compatibilists believe, quite correctly by my light,

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that our convictions about our responsibility and moral agency should not influence our views about the nature of fundamental physical laws. The second main variety of compatibilism claims that we cannot be free and responsible agents unless a certain kind of determinism obtains. Compatibilists of this sort do not have to deny that there may be some kind of indeterminism that is compatible with responsibility for our actions. For instance, indeterminism at the microphysical level may be compatible with responsibility as long as it does not preclude determinism at the ‘higher’ neural and/or psychological level. However, according to this kind of compatibilism, in order to be responsible, our psychological states must determine our choices and actions. Consequently, ‘only if’ compatibilists’ view of the relation between free will, on the one hand, and physical and psychological determinism, on the other, is the exact opposite of mine. I’ve argued in Chapter 2 that physical determinism is perfectly compatible with freedom of the will, but psychological determinism is not. ‘Only if’ compatibilists think that the truth of psychological determinism is a precondition of free will and moral responsibility and that it is compatible with physical indeterminism. Why would anyone think that psychological determinism is a condition of free will and responsibility? Arguments to that effect can be found already in Hume’s theory of motivation,6 but more recently they have been exposed by A. J. Ayer in a most clear and concise fashion. But now we must ask how it is that I come to make my choice. Either it is an accident that I choose to act as I do or it is not. If it is an accident, then it is a matter of chance that I did not choose otherwise; and if it is merely a matter of chance that I did not choose otherwise, it is surely irrational to hold me responsible for choosing as I did. But if it is not an accident that I choose to do one thing rather than another, then presumably there is some causal explanation of my choice: and in this case we are led back to determinism. (Ayer 1954: 18) The argument’s point is that, unless a sort of psychological determinism is true, we cannot be responsible for what we have done. If our responsibility derives from our choices and our choices are undetermined events, then what we do is a matter of chance. Since what happens by chance is an accident in the sense of not being causally explicable, if our choices do indeed result from chance, we cannot be responsible for them. On the basis of this consideration, Ayer seems to conclude that, unless psychological determinism holds, it would be inappropriate to hold persons responsible. One objection Ayer’s argument often receives is that an event being undetermined does not imply its being an accident and hence being inexplicable. First, even if agents have no deterministic causal control over their choices, their choices needn’t be accidents. It is possible, for instance, that agents’ reasons explain their actions in some non-causal way.7 And second, as I

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have already argued in the previous chapter, an agent does not lose control over everything the occurrence of which is chancy. Whether or not in fact we do intentionally what we intend to do can often be a matter of chance. This does not imply, however, that we are not able to control our intentional actions to a degree sufficient for our responsibility. Similarly, we may not lose control over our choices just because our prior psychological states do not determine them. Indeed, as I shall argue later, Ayer’s argument does misrepresent the function of choice in the explanation of human behavior. However, it is obvious that even if we grant that causal explicability is a necessary condition of our freedom of will—an assumption that I shall dispute later—not every sort of causal-psychological explanation will ground agents’ responsibility. As Ayer himself notes, compulsive behavior may, for instance, be causally explicable by agents’ psychological states; nevertheless, compulsive agents are not responsible for what they do. Many philosophers—although not Ayer himself, as far as I can tell—have concluded that the psychological condition which explains and also grounds agents’ responsibility is that their behavior is determined by their reasons. This implies that agents can be free and responsible only if their choices and actions depend on their reasons. Interestingly, there is a way to characterize this view by using a version of the conditional analysis. According to this version—which is not mine—agents are responsible only if they would have acted differently, provided that they had sufficient reason to do so. Some philosophers think that this formulation of the conditional analysis is superior to Moore’s analysis, because, among other things, it can avoid the ‘regress problem’.8 Since actions must be conditional on agents’ reasons and their reasons are obviously not their actions, the conditional analysis so interpreted need not be applied to the condition itself. Thus, some have concluded that freedom of the will as a condition of responsibility for actions and omissions should be understood with reference to agents’ reasons rather than to their choices. Moreover, reasons dependence as a condition of responsibility is neutral with respect to the question of whether or not moral responsibility requires alternative possibilities. Ayer and other ‘only if’ compatibilists do not deny that agents are responsible only if they could have done otherwise. For them, the condition of reasons dependence meant to express the sense in which agents must have the ability to do otherwise. According to their view, in order to be responsible, agents must have alternative possibilities in the sense that they would have done otherwise, if they had good enough reason to do so. There is a different and more direct route, however, to the conclusion that agents are responsible only if their actions depend on their reasons. Some philosophers believe that reasons dependence is not an interpretation of the ability to do otherwise, but rather an alternative condition of moral responsibility. This idea fi rst arose in the stoic necessitarian tradition.9 But it has become influential again after Harry Frankfurt’s argument

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against the condition of alternative possibilities. We have already discussed and rejected Frankfurt’s argument in the previous chapter. But those who accept the argument need to fi nd a substitute for alternative possibilities as a condition of moral responsibility. And some of them have argued that a version of reasons dependence might be a plausible candidate. As a matter of fact, it is not obvious that this attempt has been successful. For, as we shall see, it is questionable that one can give an account of reasons dependence that is independent from agent’s power to do otherwise. But if any such account could work, then we might have another grounds to think that alternative possibilities are unnecessary for moral responsibility. The semi-compatibilist view, as it is often called, is different from the traditional ‘only if’ sort of compatibilisms to the extent that semi-compatibilists, like me, believe that nomological determinism is irrelevant to the issue of moral responsibility. But they believe this on a rather different ground. They think that agents are responsible only if their actions are controlled by their reasons in some pertinent ways. However, they also claim that agents can be responsible even if they do not have the power to do otherwise, provided that they act in the way they do because of the reasons they have and not as a result of some other (‘alien’) mechanism. Consequently, whether or not we are responsible depends not on our ability to perform an actually unperformed action, but rather on the kind of causal mechanism that has actually been operating in the production of our actions.10 We can elucidate better the point behind semi-compatibilism if we contrast it with the Moorean type of conditional analysis I’m arguing for. According to that analysis, agents’ will is free only if they would have done otherwise if they had chosen so and retained their ability to choose and to perform the relevant action. Thus, agents’ will is free if their actions depend, or can depend, on their choices and it is in this sense that agents’ abilities, which are necessary for their responsibility, imply alternative possibilities. According to the semi-compatibilists, however, what agents’ responsibility requires is only that their actually performed actions be responsive to their reasons. Hence, agents can be responsible even if they do not have the ability to act otherwise. So the ability to perform an actually unperformed action seems to be unnecessary for moral responsibility. As we have seen in the previous chapter, this is exactly what Frankfurt’s examples, upon which semi-compatibilists rest their case, aim to prove. If they are right, then the ‘only if’ compatibilist’s conditional must be understood as expressing a feature of how agents’ actual actions were produced rather than their ability to perform an actually unperformed action. The most detailed semi-compatibilist theory of responsibility, John Fischer and Mark Ravizza’s account, argues exactly in this way. They claim that agents are responsible for what they have done or failed to do only if their actions and omissions have been ‘moderately’ responsive to their reasons11. But such responsiveness to reasons is defi ned in conditional terms: if agents had sufficient reason to do otherwise and the same kind of mechanism

106 Freedom of the Will operated as actually was operating—hence no intervention had occurred— they would do otherwise exactly for the alternative reasons to do otherwise (see Fischer and Ravizza 1998: 63–64).12 It is crucial to note that this conditional is not meant to specify the sense in which alternative possibilities are needed for moral responsibility. According to Fischer and Ravizza, ‘the pertinent power is a general capacity of the agent’s mechanism, rather than a particular ability of the agent’ (Fischer and Ravizza 1998: 75, my emphasis). Semi-compatibilists think that agents need not have alternative possibilities in order to be responsible because they accept that the mere presence of the inactive fail-safe action generating mechanism in the Frankfurt-type scenarios deprives agents of their ability to do otherwise, but, at the same time, it does not exempt them from their responsibility. Thus, the semi-compatibilist conditional is meant to characterize the kind of actual (presumably psychological) mechanism which must be actually functioning when agents control their actions by their reasons. This semi-compatibilist account of moral responsibility requires both more and less of the responsible agent than traditional compatibilist accounts do. On the one hand, it requires less because, in order to be responsible, agents needn’t have the ability to perform an actually unperformed action. On the other hand, however, the notion of reasons responsiveness seems to require more for agents’ responsibility than to have the capacity to perceive moral reasons and the ability to choose to perform the relevant kind of action. The idea behind the condition of reasons responsiveness is that the actually operating mechanism must somehow guarantee that agents’ actions are controlled by their reasons. Thus, although semi-compatibilists do not require a deterministic connection between agents’ reasons and their actions, they argue that agents are responsible only if the actual operation of some psychological mechanism can ensure that agents’ actions appropriately depend on their reasons. In this sense, the semi-compatibilist account of reasons responsiveness relies on the same intuitions about responsibility and reasons dependence as the more traditional ‘only if’ compatibilist theories do. In fact, it is an interesting question whether or not the two are relevantly different at all (Watson 2001: 382). Why can the semi-compatibilist account not be understood simply as a sophisticated version of those more traditional compatibilists’ views that use reasons dependence as an interpretation of the relevant sense of alternative possibilities? Certainly, it is not clear in which sense Fischer and Ravizza’s account captures the meaning of the responsibility-relevant ‘mechanism’ without assuming that the agent has the power to do otherwise. The appeal to reasons responsive ‘mechanism’ seems to differ from the more traditional accounts of reasons dependence only to the extent that it introduces a further condition—the condition that ‘the same mechanism is operative’—in the conditional specifying the power to do otherwise. Obviously, the

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condition is introduced in order to avoid the problem raised by the possible presence of Frankfurt-type potential interveners. It seems, however, that it is open to interpret Fischer and Ravizza’s proposal as a more detailed specification of the responsibility-relevant power to do otherwise. But no matter how we understand the relation between ‘only if’ compatibilists’ and semi-compatibilists’ interpretations of the conditions of responsibility, they both suppose that we are responsible only if our actions depend (in some causal and/or counterfactual sense) on our reasons. My claim is that this assumption is mistaken. I shall argue that the question of whether or not agents are responsible is independent of the question of whether or not their behavior has depended, or has been responsive to, reasons. It is freedom of the will in the sense defined by the conditional analysis that is a precondition of acting for reasons in a responsible way. Then, I shall argue in the next chapter that agents can be responsible for their actions or omissions irrespective of their reasons.

6.2 REASONS AND MENTAL MECHANISMS Why would anyone think that agents can be responsible only if their actions or omissions depend on some of their reasons? Perhaps one believes that any explanation of agents’ actions that is not couched in terms of their reasons must necessarily exempt them from responsibility. Recall Ayer’s argument. He claims that in the absence of some causal explanation of agents’ actions we could not hold them responsible. However, not every kind of causal explanation would do, because we can causally explain actions for which agents are not responsible. For instance, agents whose behavior is causally explained by pathological compulsion are not morally responsible for what they do. So agents can be responsible only if they have reasons to do or not to do something and it is their reasons that causally explain their actions. In sum, the argument is that [1] What makes us responsible for our actions and omissions is that what we do is up to us. [2] What we do is up to us only if certain psychological conditions of actions are satisfied. [3] The appropriate psychological condition that must be satisfied is that our actions depend (causally and/or counterfactually) on our reasons. ∴[4] In order to be responsible, agents’ actions and omissions must depend, in some pertinent way, on their reasons. In fact, this may have further important consequences concerning freedom of the will as a condition of responsibility. If responsibility requires reasons dependence because our actions are up to us in the responsibility-grounding

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sense only if they depend on our reasons, then a further condition of responsibility seems to be generated. Perhaps we are responsible only if the reasons we have are also up to us.13 I shall discuss this issue in detail in Chapters 8 and 9. At this point, I only want to emphasize that according to the ‘voluntarist’ view I endorse, the origin of our reasons is irrelevant as far as our freedom of the will as a condition of our responsible agency is concerned. And it is irrelevant exactly because reasons dependence is not a condition of responsibility. As an answer to the earlier argument, I claim that its third premise is mistaken. It is true that agents are responsible for their actions and omissions only if they are able to perceive reasons for their actions. But fi rst, this does not mean that agents are responsible because their actions or omissions depend on those reasons. And second (as I shall argue in the next chapter), we hold agents responsible even when their actions do not depend on any reasons at all. Consequently, reasons dependence cannot be a necessary condition of responsibility. It does seem to be right that we are responsible for our actions only if they are ‘up to us’; and unquestionably our will can be free in the responsibility-relevant sense only if some psychological conditions are satisfied. But the pertinent psychological condition is not some form of reasons dependence. Rather, the relevant psychological condition is that we either made or could have made a choice about whether or not to perform the action for which we are responsible. The psychological source of agents’ responsibility is their ability to make (the relevant) choices and not the fact that their actions depend on their reasons. Why would anyone believe that it is an action’s relation to the agent’s reasons that grounds her responsibility for it? What is so special about reasons? The fundamental—although often only implicit—presupposition behind the idea of reasons dependence appears to be that a mental mechanism can sustain agents’ responsibility only if it can ensure that the agent’s action is justified in her own eyes. As we shall see in the next chapter, the justification might be very minimal indeed: it may involve only some prima facie rationalization of the agent’s action. But the central idea behind reasons dependence is exactly that an agent can be responsible for an action only if the action is a causal result of a psychological mechanism that can guarantee a pertinent connection between the agent’s value judgment about her action and the action actually performed. There are at least two ways to understand what exactly the idea of reasons responsive mechanism aims to capture depending on what we mean by an agent’s reasons. First, we may assume that agents’ reasons are their psychological attitudes and hence reasons explanations of actions are some kind of psychological explanations. Then one can claim that in order to be responsible, agents’ reasons themselves must be causally operative in the production of their actions. Reasons dependence so understood may be the view that agents can only be responsible if there is an appropriate causal connection between their relevant psychological attitudes and their

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actions. However, this understanding of the relevant mechanism appears to me doomed because agents do not seem to justify their actions by their psychological attitudes. Rather, they reason practically from the attitudes’ content.14 Thus, the reasons which explain agents’ actions by subjectively justifying them are not their psychological states, but the facts that those attitudes represent. 15 My reason for taking an umbrella with me when I leave my home on a rainy day is not that I’m believing that it’s raining (even if I am). If I’m a rational person, I take it with me because it is raining. The reasons for which I act are facts and not my beliefs or desires even if the reason why I do something is that I have certain beliefs and desires. I will certainly not be motivated to act in a certain way if I do not perceive that something is the case or something ought to be done. But this only means that in order to act for a reason, certain psychological conditions must be satisfied. This does not show that the reasons for which I act are those psychological attitudes that are (proximately) causally responsible for what I do. As we have seen, the ultimate grounds behind the idea of reasons dependence as a condition of responsibility is that agents’ reasons can justify their actions in their own eyes and hence express best their values and commitments. But reflections on the agent’s own mental states can play this justificatory role only in exceptional cases.16 If reasons for actions are typically not taken to be agents’ own psychological attitudes, then the responsibility-grounding mechanism cannot be that agents’ reasons themselves cause their actions. As I argued previously, the criterion of reasons dependence is based on the assumption that in order to hold someone responsible for an action, the action must have an appropriate psychological origin. But if reasons for actions are important for responsibility because agents’ reasons subjectively justify what they do, then their reasons cannot count among the necessary psychological conditions of responsibility simply because their actions are typically not justified by their psychological attitudes. However, the relevant psychological mechanism of reasons dependence can be understood otherwise. According to this understanding, agents are responsible if and only if the psychological mechanism that is operative in the production of the action is such that it can ensure that agents’ actions respond to their reasons. This characterization of the relevant mechanism does not require that reasons themselves be psychological attitudes that causally bring about the action. Saying that persons are responsive to the shape and color of objects they see is a way to characterize a mental mechanism, but it does not imply that the shapes and colors themselves are psychological states. Similarly, one can say that responsiveness to reasons can characterize a psychological mechanism without assuming that reasons themselves are agents’ psychological sates. In what follows, I shall argue that no matter how we interpret it, reasons dependence is neither necessary nor sufficient for agents’ responsibility. Hence, free will as a condition of responsibility cannot be understood in

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terms of reasons dependence. First, as we shall see in the next chapter, agents can be responsible even when they act with no reason at all. Thus, reasons dependence is certainly not necessary for responsibility. Second, reasons dependence is not sufficient for holding people responsible. There are many psychologically different ways in which agents’ actions can be responsive to their reasons, some of which are compatible with their responsibility, some of which are not. And whenever agents are not responsible even if their actions depend on their reasons, they are not responsible exactly because their will was not free in the sense defi ned by the conditional analysis. Perhaps they would have done otherwise if they had chosen to, but they lacked the ability to make the relevant choice. Hence, the fundamental difference between the requirement of reasons dependence and the ‘voluntarist’ view that I defend is the way in which they understand the relation among reasons, choices, and actions. According to the reasons dependence view, our actions are ‘up to us’ in the responsibility-grounding sense only if they depend on our reasons. Whereas, according to the ‘voluntarist’ view, the psychological condition of responsibility for actions is that agents must be able to make a choice about whether or not to perform it.

6.3 MORAL WEAKNESS In the previous section, I’ve argued that the fundamental idea behind reasons dependence is that the only way to capture the kind of mental mechanism that is necessary for agents’ responsibility is to say that, in order to be responsible, their actions must depend on their reasons. So if freedom of the will is a condition of responsibility, it ought to be understood in terms of reasons dependence. In this section, I’d like to investigate a problem with this suggestion in the context of moral weakness. Moral weakness is a kind of moral fault, but not every moral fault is moral weakness. For instance, acting wickedly or being evil are moral faults but they do not—or do not necessarily—display moral weakness in the relevant sense. Moral weakness requires both that agents who suffer from it know or at least believe that they do something wrong and that they feel remorse for what they have done. More metaphorically, they wish they were (mentally) ‘stronger’ and hence able to act on moral reasons. When agents are morally weak, they consider their moral reasons to be sufficient for some action even if they actually fail to perform that action. We must also distinguish the issue about moral weakness from the question of whether moral reasons can ever be overridden. Perhaps we do not always have to regard moral reasons as a sufficiently strong reason. There could be occasions on which, all things considered, we choose to sacrifice moral values in order to promote some other good. As a famous example, think of Bernard Williams’ story about Gauguin who decides to leave his

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family in order to achieve higher quality in art (Williams 1981). According to Williams’ understanding of the story, Gauguin’s choice, given his success in art, can be justified. Perhaps this is debatable. Whether moral reasons are absolute or whether there can be cases in which we are allowed or even required to sacrifice them for the sake of other ends is a difficult question in normative ethics. But we do not have to commit ourselves on that issue here. Suffice it to admit, and I think we can grant this without any further argument, that such choices can be made. And no matter how we act, our action does not exhibit moral weakness. Although agents in such cases choose to act against their moral reasons, they believe nonetheless that, all things considered, they did the best. In the case of moral weakness, however, agents do regard moral reasons their best reasons. They think that they ought to act as their moral reasons require. Nevertheless, they do not do what they judge they ought to. It is often thought that even the morally weak must act, or omit certain actions, for some reasons. First, I shall argue that there is an important connection between this thought and the idea of reasons dependence. Then I shall show that moral weakness cannot be so understood; and this, I shall claim, is a serious challenge for reasons dependence. First, because agents can be morally weak and responsible even if their actions do not depend on their reasons. And second, because agents may not be responsible even when their actions do depend on some reasons. Agent’s responsibility for their morally weak behavior does not hinge on what reasons they had, but rather on why certain reasons have failed to motivate their actions. And this is exactly why alternative possibilities in the sense defi ned by the conditional analysis are necessary for moral responsibility. Whatever a morally weak action is, it is an action that is not done for a moral reason. However, it is often assumed that even such actions or omissions can be made intelligible only if they are done for some reasons. Morally weak actions or omissions must be understood as means for the satisfaction of some of the agent’s—selfish or at least non-moral—desires so that the morally weak agent’s behavior can be justified in terms of some means-ends reasoning. This understanding of moral weakness assures that agents must act for a reason in order to be morally responsible. They either act for their perceived moral reasons, or they act for some non-moral reason which derives from some of their desires through means-ends reasoning. But necessarily, even the morally weak agent must act for some reasons.17 My claim is that this view of moral weakness is relevant for the issue of reasons dependence because it assumes that whenever agents act against a moral reason so that they are morally responsible they must have a reason for that action; a reason that derives from some of their desires. It is this assumption that I would like to challenge. First, as I have already said, even if it might be the case that agents act against their moral reasons because of their self-interest, this is not necessarily a manifestation of moral weakness,

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even if it may be a moral fault. But second, and more importantly from the point of view of reasons dependence, I would also like to argue that responsibility for moral weakness does not imply at all that agents’ actions are the results of some reasons responsive psychological mechanism. Their responsibility requires rather that they were able to do otherwise in the sense that they would have done otherwise if they had chosen to and retained their capacity to make the relevant choice. Consider a person who thinks that it would be morally right to send money to famine relief. Nevertheless, she never manages to bestir herself to go send the money. Perhaps she fails to send the money because, although she intends to do it, she is just too lazy to take the necessary steps for doing it (e.g., to go to the bank and transfer a sum, etc.). It is also possible, however, that, although a person thinks she has every reason to make the donation, she never chooses to do it. Perhaps she is afraid of giving money away. It is then her avarice that explains why she fails to do what she herself thinks she ought to. Laziness and (self-reproached) avarice can be forms of moral weakness. If agents believe that there is strong enough moral reason to act in a certain way, but nevertheless they omit the requisite sort of action because of their laziness or avarice, they fail to act because they are morally weak. These two kinds of weakness should be differently explained, but they have an important common feature: in neither case does it seem that agents’ behavior depends on their reasons. Nevertheless, both the lazy and the avaricious are responsible for their actions. Thus, someone believing in reasons dependence must explain how lazy and avaricious behavior can nevertheless be a product of some reasons responsive mechanism. It seems that the only way to explain this is to assume that what such agents do can be subjectively justified by some means-ends reasoning which derives from their self-interest. Thus, even if such actions do not depend on agents’ moral reasons, they are the outcome of a mechanism that is responsive to reasons in some way and this is why we hold agents responsible for them. In fact, however, no such mechanism need exist in order for the agents to be responsible for such behavior. If the person in the example who eventually has not contributed to famine relief believes that giving money out is wrong (‘charity begins at home’, she may say), then her action is indeed explained by her reason (even if by not a very good one), but then she manifests no moral weakness. If, however, she does not make the donation despite that she judges that she ought to, whether or not she has any reason to do so is irrelevant for her responsibility. Suppose that what explains the agent’s behavior is her anxiety about giving out money. Is this a reason for which she acts? It does not seem so to me. But the important fact is that as far as the agent’s responsibility is concerned, it is irrelevant whether or not her anxiety is a reason. For suppose that the prospect of relief from anxiety is indeed the reason for which she acts. This is surely not sufficient to hold her responsible! The anxiety

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can grow so strong that she becomes pathologically compelled and hence becomes simply unable to make any choice about whether or not to send the money off. But then she is not responsible even if the prospect of relief from anxiety is a reason for her behavior and her action (or omission) does depend on that reason. Hence, what matters to her responsibility is not whether or not her action depends on a reason or whether it was, in any sense, the product of some reasons responsive mechanism. What does matters is whether or not she was able to choose to do otherwise. If, because of her pathologically compulsive state, she was not able to make the (relevant) choice and do otherwise, then she is not responsible. But if her anxiety was not pathological and hence she was able to make a choice, then she is responsible. However, even in this case, it seems implausible that she would regard her anxiety as subjectively justificatory, and hence a reason for, her (in)action even if it was obviously the psychological reason why she behaved in that way. If an agent is not compulsive and hence able to choose to do otherwise, she is responsible for her action even in the absence of any means-ends justification of her action. Thus, reasons dependence is neither sufficient nor necessary for responsibility. Another common form of moral weakness that I’ve already mentioned is laziness. It does not seem to be obvious that the lazy person has a reason for her (in)action. Laziness is a kind of weakness, and as many other kinds of weakness, it is sometimes forgivable. Moreover, with reference to it, we can explain why agents fail to perform an action which they have otherwise good reason to perform. But when we explain agents’ actions or omissions in this way, we use a commonsense psychological explanation which does not assume that agents must have some reason in order to omit the performance of an action. Sometimes it is said that lazy persons have a reason to refrain from performing an action which they judge to be good in the circumstances. The reason derives from their self-interest: the omission of the relevant kind of action ‘saves energy’ or ‘spares efforts’. However, even if it is true that by not doing something we save energy and can avoid making any effort, I fi nd it extremely strained to say that these facts provide agents with (however ‘bad’) reasons for omitting certain actions, which they have otherwise ‘good’ reason to perform. I may do or fail to do something in order to save energy; but that is surely not laziness. Laziness is essentially a kind of weakness, whereas saving my energy is not. It can even require some strength of will when, for instance, I reject doing something enjoyable in order to save my energy. But the relevant question about the inactive person’s responsibility is not at all whether or not she has a reason for her behavior. The important issue is how to distinguish laziness from some serious state of depression. If the person fails to do what she herself believes she ought to do because she is so seriously depressed that she literary cannot bring herself to act, then she is

114 Freedom of the Will not responsible. She is not responsible because she is not able to do otherwise even is she had chosen to. Alternatively, the state of depression might be understood as an agent’s inability to make the (relevant) choices, i.e., to form some intentions to act. In any way, the explanation of why a lazy person is responsible has nothing to do with the nature of her reasons. The relevant issue is whether or not she was able to choose to do otherwise. Finally, consider a typical form of prudential and/or moral weakness: cowardice. Does the coward have a reason for what she does or fails to do? Perhaps she does: her reason is that she is afraid. Again, it is far from being obvious that the feeling of fear itself can be a reason for the agent to act or omit some actions. It seems more plausible to say that whenever agents fail to perform the action which they judge morally or prudentially good because they are afraid of doing it we explain what they do by their psychological sate. But this needn’t count as a justification of their actions even by their own light. Agents’ fear can explain an action or an omission psychologically, but saying that they are afraid can hardly count as a reason for the omission of an action.18 This does not mean, of course, that agents cannot have a reason to avoid some action because they perceive that it is too dangerous. But then such actions do not necessarily involve moral or prudential weakness in any sense since they may be just appropriate responses to the perceived reasons. The important issue about how the feeling of fear explains an agent’s behavior, however, is independent of whether or not the agent’s action was the result of the correct appraisal of the situation. Certainly, that something is dangerous is a good reason to avoid it. However, it is perfectly possible that the perception of danger causes such panic reaction in the agent that she is not able to make any choice or perhaps not even able to move. Then she is not responsible for what she does or fails to do even if she has a reason for it. What matters for the agent’s responsibility is whether or not she was able to choose to do otherwise and not whether she had a reason for what she has done or failed to do. The coward is responsible, but not because she can justify her action by some means-ends reasoning derived from her selfinterest and hence has a reason to avoid what she does. She is responsible because her will is free in the sense that she could have done otherwise. S