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Introduction
Since nascence times, the questions of free will and determinism interested philosophers. Following Descartes, our actions are our voluntary control and we can control events in our life. Thus, Popkin and Stroll, Rohmann and Russel reject this opinion and prove that our beliefs are not under voluntary control. Our choices produce physical events in the brain and in the rest of the body, and these events would seem to be governed by physical laws. This position must make it credible that our choices could be free in the sense it advocates given the evidence we have about these physical laws, and according to the objection, this cannot be done.
Main body
In contrast to Descartes and his assumption of free will, Popkin and Stroll suppose that: “No one is free to act capriciously or by chance; all actions are deter- mined by past experience, by physical and mental constitution” (1993, p. 30). Popkin and Stroll agree that a decision’s being causally determined by factors beyond the agent’s control would preclude moral responsibility. If causal determinism rules out moral responsibility, then it is no remedy simply to provide slack in the causal net by making the causal history of actions indeterministic (Bergson, 2001).
Such a move would yield one incompatibilist requirement for moral responsibility–leeway for decision and action–but it would not supply another–sufficiently enhanced control. In particular, it would not provide the capacity to be the origin of one’s decisions and actions that according to incompatibilists is unavailable to compatibilists (Bergson, 2001). This formulation of the objection departs from Hume’s original version, since he denies that determinism undermines moral responsibility.
Instead, it develops this general sort of challenge from the point of view of an incompatibilist who favors origination as a requirement for moral responsibility. Popkin and Stroll add that: “true opinion can be held in different ways: it can be held openly by a mind that is always willing to change its point of view depending upon the evidence, or it can be held as sheer prejudice” (1993, p. 80).
‘Determinism’ means that a sufficiently complete knowledge of the state of things at one instant permits a precise prediction to be made for the state at some other time; while our discussion of the introspective meaning of ‘free-will’ has shown that an individual believing in it believes that there exist not only a set of alternate actions physically possible for him in a given situation within restrictions of his immediate environment, but also the possibility of his psychologically being able to choose any one of them, and the impossibility of any outside observer, no matter how knowledgeable, unvaryingly predicting his particular subsequent course of action in advance (Bergson, 2001).
The question arises of course most commonly in connection with the relationship between man and his actions, and an omniscient God. Freedom of the sort required for moral responsibility is accounted for by the existence of agents who possess a causal power to make choices without being determined to do so. In this view, it is crucial that the kind of causation involved in an agent’s making a free choice is not reducible to causation among states of the agent or events involving the agent, but is rather irreducibly an instance of a substance causing a choice not by way of states or events. The agent, fundamentally as a substance, possesses the causal power to make choices without being determined to do so. Chisholm, Taylor, Clarke, and O’Connor advance views in this category. Russel develops views of this sort.
He states that: ‘hierarchy of our instinctive beliefs, beginning with those we hold most strongly, and presenting each as much isolated and as free from irrelevant additions as possible” (Russel 1997, p. 25). First, he argues that decisions can be indeterministic and yet possess a number of characteristics we associate with agent control and with responsibility. If decisions are undetermined, then agents could still make them voluntarily, intentionally, knowingly, on purpose, and as a result of their efforts.
They may yet have reasons for making these decisions, they might choose for these reasons, rather than by mistake, accident, or chance, and they may want to choose for these reasons more than any others. Agents might nevertheless not be coerced or compelled in choosing, and they may not be controlled by other agents or circumstances (Bergson, 2001). Indeterminism is therefore consistent with an impressive sort of control in action, and, Rohman believes, enough control for moral responsibility (Castañeda and Hector-Neri. 1975).
Russel is right to the extent that he shows that indeterminism allows for significant control in action. But compatibilists, familiarly, also appeal to the same sorts of claims as Russel does to defend against the objection that determinism does not allow for control sufficient for responsibility. Since incompatibilists wish to deny that compatibilists can secure this sort of control, one might question whether Russel’s defense can, in the final analysis, accommodate what incompatibilists are most fundamentally after.
In the book “A World of Ideas” Rohmann argues that: “we may aspire to live in harmony with nature and to understand the device will” (2005, p. 382). Rohmann argues that if the phenomenology of indeterministic action were such that the initiation of an action were experienced as an uncaused, involuntary event, not resulting from one’s effort of will, then this would provide good reason to believe that no genuine choice is involved, and that the agent is not morally responsible.
But if the initiation of the action were indeterministic and experienced as voluntary and as resulting from one’s own effort of will, then the agent’s moral responsibility is not challenged. Russel describes a case of a businesswoman who is on the way to an important meeting when he observes an assault in an alley. An inner struggle ensues between her moral conscience, which urges her to stop and call for help, and career ambitions, which tell him he cannot miss the meeting. He resolves the struggle by making the decision to help the victim. Rohmann imagines in this case that the effort of will is indeterminate, and as a result the decision is undetermined (Castañeda and Hector-Neri. 1975).
Our beliefs are not under our voluntary control, so to get this result, one might specify that the individual does not in any sense intend his decision to occur at any instant in particular, but rather he only times it to occur during some very short temporal interval. He is not even aware that there is an instant, as opposed to some very short temporal interval, at which he might time his decision, or at which his decision eventually occurs (Bergson, 2001).
To add to the plausibility of this specification, note that there must be a limit to the human capacity to time decisions–there must be a limit to the control a human being has over exactly when a decision of hers will take place. Consequently, there will be some interval of time–perhaps some very fraction of a second, call it n–such that no human being can control at which point in that interval he makes a decision.
It may be that despite this limitation, an agent could still be responsible for making a decision at an instant if he intends to make it at that instant (supposing that this is psychologically possible). In the absence of such an intention, it seems reasonable to conclude that the agent is not responsible for making a decision at a particular instant as opposed to being responsible for making it during some interval with a minimum length (Castañeda and Hector-Neri. 1975).
Russel supposes that indeterministically free action cannot be reconciled with certain provisions in action theory that libertarians themselves would want to endorse. Specifically, they have argued that a theory of action cannot allow for agents to be morally responsible for freely willed action, for freely willed action to meet plausible general requirements on explanation, and for freely willed action to be rational. These kinds of criticisms are sometimes categorized as coherence objections to libertarianism. According to another sort of complaint against libertarianism, the free will it espouses does not harmonize with the empirical evidence.
Prospects for moral responsibility for the effort of will are not improved if the agent’s character is partly a result of his free choices. For consider the first free choice an agent ever makes (Bergson, 2001). By the above argument, he cannot be responsible for it. Then he cannot be responsible for the second choice either, whether or not the first choice was character-forming. If the first choice was not character-forming, then the character that explains the effort of will for the second choice is not produced by his free choice, and then by the above argument, he cannot be morally responsible for it. Suppose, alternatively, that the first choice was character-forming.
Because the agent cannot be responsible for the first choice, he also cannot be responsible for the resulting character formation. But then, by the above argument, he cannot be responsible for the second choice either. Since this type of reasoning can be repeated for all subsequent choices, Rohmann agent can never be morally responsible for effort of will. Given that such an agent can never be morally responsible for his efforts of will, neither can he be responsible for his choices.
For in Rohmann ‘s picture, there is nothing that supplements the contribution of the effort of will to produce the choice. Indeed, all free choices will ultimately be partially random events, for in the final analysis there will be factors beyond the agent’s control, such as his initial character, that partly produce the choice (Castañeda and Hector-Neri. 1975).
On the other hand, free will can be viewed as simply positing, as a primitive, agents who have the ultimate control that cannot be secured by event-causal libertarianism–agents who can be the sources of action in a way that from the incompatibilist point of view, confers moral responsibility. More exactly, this theory posits, as a primitive feature of agents, the causal power to choose without being determined by events beyond the agent’s control, and without the choice being a truly random event. This free will power cannot in turn be analyzed into event causal relations of any sort. In the best version of this position, free choices are identical to activations of this power (Bergson, 2001).
Following Russel and Popkin and Stroll free will can secure the kind of control required for moral responsibility depends crucially on whether the sort of causation proposed by the theory could exist. Critics have expressed their doubts about the coherence of this notion of causation. For example, it is sometimes claimed that the main problem for theory is that an agent, fundamentally as a substance, simply cannot be the first term of a causal relation. It is not problematic, on this conception, to regard agents as causes, so long as it turns out that any causation by agents is reducible to causation among events.
It is well understood that the causal relation holds between events, and that all of our well-established cases of causal relations are between events, it is not virtually an analytic truth that the causal relation holds only between events (Bergson, 2001). Second, there are no cases that make it intuitive that a sister relation holds between a sister and an event, and indeed the claim that this relation can hold between a sister and an event is thoroughly unintuitive. By contrast, it is not similarly unintuitive that choices can be caused by agents, fundamentally, not by events. In fact, from the introspective point of view it may be difficult to find an event, or a set of events, that could have been the cause of my choice for chocolate over strawberry ice cream (Castañeda and Hector-Neri. 1975).
Rejecting the response of dismay is justified for several reasons. Determinism does not challenge the causal efficacy of the deliberations and decisions by which we aim to mold our futures. Nor does it endanger the prospect of overcoming challenges that result from the kinds of external and internal impediments Honderich mentions. For example, determinism does not imperil the view that if others wish to make one’s life miserable, one might achieve a happy life for oneself despite their efforts, nor the claim that if one has a proclivity to laziness that threatens to frustrate one’s career aims, one might be able, through one’s efforts, to surmount this tendency.
The aspect he emphasizes is the dependence of our life-hopes on the notion of a self with an indeterministic causal power. He maintains that if the notion of such an indeterministic self is rejected, we are left with the position according to which our actions are caused solely by our environment and dispositions. In his view, “a hope for a future in which we are not creatures of our environments and our dispositional natures” (Bergson 2001, p. 87) must be rejected if determinism is true.
Russel argues that an aspect of our ordinary self-conception is that we are selves distinct from our mental states and dispositions to act, and that these selves have causal powers. Indeed, on one conception, we are selves of this sort and they have indeterministic causal powers. But such selves might also be components of a deterministic system. The Stoics and Descartes maintain that we are selves that are distinct from our dispositions, and at the same time that determinism is true (Castañeda and Hector-Neri. 1975).
The determinist must reject the notion of a self that has the power to overcome its dispositions and the effects of its environment indeterministically, but he need not deny that we are determined selves with the power to overcome these factors. This is an important concession to the intransigent response. One can be a determinist and deny that we are creatures of our dispositions and environment in the way that Rohmann envisions.
The pre-philosophical position does include the assumption that factors beyond our control do not generate our futures, because we have selves whose choices are not produced by factors beyond their control. Perhaps this assumption is tied to the belief that there is an intrinsic value to shaping aspects of our lives that were not determined prior to our decisions, and that there are such aspects of our lives (Bergson, 2001).
Philosophers (Russel, Popkin and Stroll, Rohmann) agree that one might maintain that the agent-causal view has no advantage over event-causal libertarianism in providing for moral responsibility because for the most basic sort of action, the notion of causation itself is irrelevant to moral responsibility. For example, Popkin and Stroll (1993) position is that an agent’s causing simple mental acts would have no such advantage over his simply performing such acts, where “performing” can be analyzed non-causally–just in terms of the agent’s being the subject of the act.
The answer that the advocate of agent causation should provide is that event-causal libertarianism does not provide agents with any more control than Descartes does, and hence a way must be found to enhance an agent’s control to the appropriate degree. The relevant sort of control involves two factors. The first is the absence of external determination, which both event-causal libertarianism and agent causation provide (Bergson, 2001). The second is the capacity of the agent to be the source of his decisions and actions, and this is the factor that event-causal libertarianism is missing.
To be the source of one’s decisions and actions is plausibly to be their cause. It is a credible hypothesis that being the agent-cause of one’s decisions and actions is required for the control that moral libertarian choices, agent-caused choices do not fall on the continuum we have devised. Agent-caused choices are not alien-deterministic events because the agent is not causally determined to cause them.
They are not truly random events, since they are caused not by nothing, but at least partly by the agent. If these agent-caused choices were partially random events, their causal history would be exhausted by the causal contribution of factors beyond the agent’s control. In the theory, the agent plays a fundamental causal role in the causation of the choice, and factors beyond his control do not causally determine him to make it. “We can make decisions of their own free will, we are being made more and more aware that this sort of assumption is very often erroneous” (Popkin and Stroll 1993, p. 115). ‘Prescription’ is a carry over of ‘moral’ cause from the child or the savage (Bergson, 2001).
Indeterminism is a necessary condition for free-will. To see that it is not a sufficient condition we can take some simple examples: the space-time motion of an electron through a set of slits is undetermined, the path of an atlas rocket leaving Cape Canaveral on its peaceful intercontinental ballistic missile path is determined, according to our present-day physical theories (Castañeda and Hector-Neri. 1975). However, in the first case we would not speak of the electron’s free-will, nor in the second would anyone be concerned about the rocket’s lack of free-will. The reasons are quite simply that one just doesn’t use such a category of description with reference to such entities (Bergson, 2001).
A second necessary condition for free-will then is that the entity under investigation be one about which free-will might or might not be legitimately attributed according to our prevailing world picture. In this, electrons and rockets would be excluded. As better and more ‘introspective’ mechanical ‘brains’ are developed it may become difficult to decide exactly where to draw the line, but for the moment we can certainly restrict our free-will consideration to living entities. In most semiotics it is further limited to animals, and often to human beings alone (Bergson, 2001).
Conclusion
In sum, Descartes is wrong stating that we cam determine our actions and control them. Philosophies of Popkin and Stroll, Rohman and Russel prove that our actions out of our voluntary control. The common-sense man has always had a belief in his personal free-will and, as soon as he acquired some knowledge of philosophy and theology with its concept of a superhuman God, has also usually become concerned with the validity of his belief.
Now certainly freedom from absolute external constraint is a necessary condition for feeling ‘free’, as the word is understood by common-sense man, but it is not nearly a sufficient condition. Past environmental compulsions acting upon the individual have modified his psychological constitution and are extended in fact into the present through this modification. If the laws are deterministic then we expect certain types of experience to follow others unvaryingly, but in no sense do the ‘laws’ compel the particular succession observed.
References
- Bergson, H. (2001). Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Dover Publications.
- Castañeda, Hector-Neri. (1975). Thinking and Doing (Dordrecht: D. Reidel.
- Double, Richard. (1998). Metaphilosophy and Free Will (New York: Oxford University Press.
- Rohmann, Ch. (2005). A World of Ideas. Bedford/St. Martin’s; 7th edition.
- Popkin, R.H., Stroll, A. (1993). Philosophy Made Simple. Made Simple; 2 Rev Sub edition.
- Russel, B. (1997). The Problems of Philosophy. Oxford University Press, USA; 2 Sub edition.
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