Free Will and Determinism
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Free Will and Determinism
In an ordered series of movers and things moved, it is necessarily the fact that, when the first mover is removed or ceases to move, no other mover will move [another] or be [itself] moved. For the first mover is the cause of motion for all the others.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles 1.13
Nothing happens at random; whatever comes about is by rational necessity.
Leucippus, Fragment (2)
The problem of natural agency is an ontological problem—a problem about whether the existence of actions can be admitted within a natural scientific ontology. . . . Naturalism does not essentially employ the concept of a causal relation whose first member is in the category of person or agent (or even, for that matter, in the broader category of continuant or “substance”). All natural causal relations have first members in the category of event or state of affairs.
John Bishop, Natural Agency
1—Introduction
Whether we admit it or not, we all take an ethical perspective about what is right and wrong, virtuous or villainous, worthy of praise or blame. And an ethical perspective on life depicts human beings in general as intellectually and morally responsible creatures. However, such responsibility seems to require some sort of freedom of the will as a necessary condition. But are we really free? If so, what sort of freedom do we have? Is determinism true and is it compatible with freedom?
The existence and nature of free will is a matter of practical importance for how we will employ an ethical perspective in our individual and social dealings with others. It is also a troublesome theoretical matter in light of various worldviews that people embrace. For example, some argue that if naturalism is true it is hard to see how human action could exist because naturalism seems to depict humans as passive machines that are part of a larger physical causal network. In such a view, all events are either purely uncaused and random or else determined by prior events. Either way, free actions are ruled out. For Christian theism, certain doctrines have raised problems for certain views about the existence and nature of free will: the existence and origin of evil, the sovereignty of God, predestination and election, the justice of hell, and God’s foreknowledge of contingent, free acts by human beings.
In this chapter, we will look at philosophical issues involved in clarifying the nature of freedom and in defending or criticizing its reality. But what do we mean by freedom? Part of our purpose in this chapter will be to address this question, but for now three different senses of freedom can be distinguished. First, there is the freedom of permission—the social/political notion of freedom involved in discussions of rights, the authority of the state, and law. This sense of freedom will not be our concern in this chapter.
Second, there is freedom of personal integrity—the ability of fully developed, ideally functioning persons to act as unified selves in a responsible, mature way. This sense of freedom contrasts with the slavery and bondage that comes from being an immature, divided, undeveloped self. So understood, the freedom of personal integrity is in large measure a developmental concept largely employed in studies of psychological and spiritual formation, though it does have philosophical aspects to it.
Finally, there is freedom of moral and rational responsibility—that freedom, whatever it turns out to be, that is part of human action and agency, in which the human being acts as an agent who is in some sense the originator of one’s own actions and, in this sense, is in control of one’s action. This type of freedom serves as a necessary condition for moral and, some would say, intellectual responsibility. This third sense of freedom will be the major usage in view in this chapter, and when we talk about freedom or free will, this is what will be meant unless otherwise indicated.
All Christians are agreed that we have free will, but there are major differences among them—and among philosophers in general—about what free will is. We can define determinism as the view that for every event that happens, there are conditions such that, given them, nothing else could have happened. For every event that happens, its happening was caused or necessitated by prior factors such that given these prior factors, the event in question had to occur. One form of determinism defines it as the view that every event is caused by antecedent causal events and the relevant laws sufficient for the production of that event. At any time t, there is only one physically possible future world that can obtain. Every event is the inexorable outcome of a chain of events leading to and sufficient for that event. Hard determinists agree with libertarians in holding that determinism is incompatible with free will. Hard determinism denies the existence of free will (as understood by libertarians), and libertarianism accepts free will and denies determinism with respect to human freedom. Soft determinism, also called compatibilism, holds that freedom and determinism are compatible with each other, and thus the truth of determinism does not eliminate freedom. As we will see, compatibilists have a different understanding of free will from the one embraced by libertarians and hard determinists.
The main purpose of this chapter is to define and compare libertarianism and compatibilism and to present some of the strengths and weaknesses of each. Part of the task of being able to evaluate compatibilist and libertarian views of freedom is clarifying what the two positions are. In fact, exposition of these standpoints is a main part of the case for which view to accept, since one’s decision in this regard will often come down to which theory is more congruent with one’s considered intuitions about a number of issues that arise in discussing human action. With this in mind, the main section of the chapter will begin by giving a general overview of compatibilism and libertarianism followed by a comparison of the two regarding five issues of crucial importance for an adequate theory of freedom: the ability condition, the control condition, rationality, causation, and the person. It will close with an examination of two final problem areas: fatalism and theological issues. In the process of exposition, comparison and contrast, arguments for and against each view will be mentioned.
2—Compatibilist and Libertarian Freedom
2.1 General Comparison
1. Compatibilism. The central idea behind compatibilism is this: if determinism is true, then every human action (e.g., raising one’s hand to vote) is causally necessitated by events that obtained prior to the action, including events that existed before the person acting was born. That is, human actions are mere happenings—they are parts of causal chains of events that lead up to them in a deterministic fashion. Moreover, determinism is true. But freedom properly understood is compatible with determinism; both determinism and freedom are true.
Concerning the compatibility between determinism and freedom, a distinction needs to be made between hard compatibilists and soft compatibilists. For hard compatibilists, free choice is inconceivable or impossible without determinism; a free choice is one that must be determined. Why? Because, argue hard compatibilists, the only choices that are free are those caused by one’s character, beliefs, and desires. If a choice, say to raise one’s hand to vote, is not caused by a prior event, then it is completely uncaused and utterly random or fortuitous. How can a completely random event (the raising of one’s hand) over which one has no control be a “free” choice? Soft compatibilists argue that it is possible though not likely that libertarianism is true, and thus free choice does not require determinism. But free choice is at least compatible (i.e., consistent) with determinism, and thus the truth of determinism cannot be used as an argument against freedom.
There is another distinction among compatibilists that helps to clarify contemporary compatibilist versions of freedom: classical versus contemporary or hierarchical compatibilism. To understand this distinction, we must first recognize that, while some actions are mental only and do not require the body to move (e.g., changing what one is thinking about from one topic to another), typically, human actions require the body to move (as in raising a hand to vote). Now classical compatibilists like John Locke and David Hume primarily applied the notion of freedom to bodily action. For them, one was free if and only if one could act according to one’s own desires and preferences in the absence of external constraint. Julie is free to leave the room if she desires to do so and no one is holding her down or keeping the door locked, even if her desire to leave is causally determined.
According to contemporary or hierarchical compatibilism, the problem with classical compatibilism is that freedom to act bodily seems to be neither necessary nor sufficient for having the type of freedom necessary to be a responsible agent. Kleptomaniacs and people with serious addictions or phobias are not free even though they can act according to their desires in the absence of external constraint. The problem with such people, say hierarchical compatibilists, is not that their choices are determined (since determinism is consistent with freedom), but rather that their choices are determined in the wrong sort of way by enslaving addictions. The agent has no control over his or her choices or the desires that cause them. So the classical freedom of action is not sufficient for real freedom.
Neither is it necessary. To see this, consider a case where a person could not have done other than what he did, but still acted freely. Suppose a scientist has placed an electrode in Jones’s brain so that he can read what Jones is going to do on any occasion and can cause him to do whatever the scientist desires. Now suppose the scientist wants Jones to kill Smith, and Jones himself, in the absence of any influence from the scientist, is deliberating about the murder. If Jones decides not to kill Smith, the scientist will activate the electrode and cause the killing, but he does not need to do so because Jones carries out the act on his own. Here Jones was free but could not have acted otherwise.
What this example shows is that freedom of the will is more central to the notion of freedom necessary for responsibility than is freedom of bodily action—the will is more central to the person than is mere bodily movement. Thus hierarchical compatibilists place their emphasis on freedom of the will, not freedom of action per se. Major compatibilists in the history of philosophy have been Locke, Hume, and Hobbes. Contemporary advocates are Daniel Dennett and Gary Watson.
2. Libertarianism. Libertarianism claims that the freedom necessary for responsible action is not compatible with determinism. Real freedom requires a type of control over one’s action—and, more importantly, over one’s will—such that, given a choice to do A (raise one’s hand and vote) or B (leave the room), nothing determines that either choice is made. Rather, the agent himself must simply exercise his own causal powers and will to do one alternative, say A (or have the power to refrain from willing to do something). When this happens, the agent either could have refrained from willing to do A or he could have willed to do B without anything else being different inside or outside of his being. He is the absolute originator of his own actions. As Aristotle said in Physics 256a, “A staff moves a stone, and is moved by a hand, which is moved by a man.” The event of the staff moving is caused by the event of the hand moving, which is caused by the substance known as the man himself. When an agent acts freely, he is a first or unmoved mover; no event or efficient cause causes him to act. His desires or beliefs may influence his choice or play an important role in his deliberations, but free acts are not determined or caused by prior events or states in the agent; rather, they are spontaneously done by the agent himself acting as a first mover. Thus libertarian freedom is both a position about freedom itself and a theory about the nature of agents and agency.
Suppose some person P freely does some act e, say P changed his thoughts or raised his arm. A more precise, initial characterization of libertarian freedom and agency can be given as follows:
Historically, well-known libertarians have been Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Reid. More recently, Timothy O’Connor, Peter van Inwagen, and William Rowe have been among the advocates of libertarian freedom. We can delve more deeply into compatibilist and libertarian accounts of freedom by looking at five areas central to an adequate theory of free will.
2.2 Five Areas of Comparison Between Compatibilism and Libertarianism
2.2.1 The Ability Condition
Most philosophers agree about the ability condition: that in order to have the freedom necessary for responsible agency, one must have the ability to choose or act differently from the way the agent actually does. A free choice, then, is one where a person can act, or at least will to do otherwise. Most compatibilists and libertarians agree about this. However, they differ about what this notion of can precisely is when we say, “A free act is one in which a person can act other than how he or she does act.” How do we spell out this ability?
According to compatibilists, the ability necessary for freedom should be expressed as a hypothetical ability, also called a conditional sense of can. Roughly, this means that the agent would have done otherwise had some other condition obtained; for example, had the agent desired to do so. If, given a choice to do A or B, Smith freely wills to do A, then he did this, say compatibilists, because he desired to do A. But Smith could have done B on the hypothetical condition that he had desired to do B. We are free to will whatever we desire even though our desires are themselves determined. Freedom is willing to act on your strongest preference.
Libertarians claim that this notion of ability is really a sleight of hand and not adequate to give the freedom we need to be responsible agents. For libertarians, the real issue is not whether we are free to do what we want, but whether we are free to want in the first place. In other words, a free act is one in which the agent is ultimately the originating source of the act itself. Freedom requires that we have the categorical ability to act, or at least, to will to act. This means that if Smith freely does (or wills to do) A, he could have refrained from doing (or willing to do) A or he could have done (or willed to have done) B without any conditions whatever being different. No description of Smith’s desires, beliefs, character, or other things in his makeup and no description of the universe prior to and at the moment of his choice to do A is sufficient to entail that he did A. It was not necessary that anything be different for Smith to refrain from doing A or to do B instead. His ability is not conditioned on any hypothetical difference in his desires (or beliefs, etc.) at the moment of choice; it is categorical.
Many libertarians claim that the libertarian notion of categorical ability is that of a dual ability (or control): if one has the ability to exert his power to do (or will to do) A, one also has the ability to refrain from exerting his power to do (or will to do) A. By contrast, the compatibilist notion of hypothetical ability is not a dual ability. Given a description of a person’s circumstances and internal states at time t, only one choice could obtain and the ability to refrain is not there; its presence depends on the hypothetical condition that the person had a desire (namely, to refrain from acting) that was not actually present.
Among compatibilist objections to the categorical notion of ability, one should be mentioned at this point. This objection points out that we often find that many of our choices seem determined and the alternative act is simply impossible, given our character. For example, some people have such a developed moral sense at the present moment t, that it would simply be psychologically impossible for them to murder their next door neighbor, given their current character, desires, and beliefs. If this were not the case, our actions would seem random, completely unrelated to our character, and unpredictable.
Libertarians have responded to this charge in one of two ways. First, some claim that in cases like the one just mentioned, the choice to refrain is a straightforward libertarian choice, even if it is highly improbable, because character, desires, and beliefs can strongly influence our choices without necessitating them. The crucial dimension of this response is to clarify a notion of “influence” that does not beg the question against the compatibilist and that allows character to have some sort of impact on action that stops short of being sufficient for the action to take place.
Second, other libertarians make a distinction between first-order and higher-order abilities in the self. An illustration may help clarify what is meant here. A person can have the first-order power to speak English and not Russian, but he may have the second-order power to develop the ability to speak Russian. Thus, due to habit, character formation, and so forth, a person at some time t may not have the categorical ability to act—for example, to murder one’s neighbor—but the act of refraining can still be one that is morally responsible and free in the sense that at some time in the past the person had the categorical ability either to develop his character in the way he did or to refrain from such practices. Therefore, an act can be determined at time t, but still be a morally responsible one if a libertarian choice to exercise or refrain from exercising a higher-order power relevant to the act was made at some time prior to t.
We have seen that compatibilists and libertarians have different understandings of the sense of ability relevant to responsible agency. And our discussion of this difference suggests that a closely related issue is of importance to the free will debate: the centrality of the agent being in control of his or her actions.
2.2.2 The Control Condition
Suppose Jones raises his hand to vote. Compatibilists and libertarians agree that a necessary condition of this act being a free one is that Jones must be in control of the act itself—the control condition. But they differ radically as to what control is.
In order to understand compatibilist views of the control condition, recall that compatibilists agree that determinism is true and that cause and effect is to be depicted as a series of events making up causal chains with earlier events together with the laws of nature causing later events. The universe is what it is at the present moment because of the state of the universe at the moment before the present together with the correct causal laws describing the universe. A crude example of such a causal chain would be a series of 100 dominos falling in sequence from the first domino on until domino 100 falls. Suppose all the dominos are black except numbers 40-50, which are green. Here we have a causal chain of events that progresses from domino 1 to 100 and that “runs through” the green dominos. On the other hand, suppose that dominos 1-39 fall in order, but when domino 39 is reached, the causal chain runs through an alternative series of dominos, bypassing the green ones and returning to dominos 51-100. In this case, the causal chain that leads up to domino 100 does not run through the green dominos. It bypasses them altogether.
Now, according to compatibilism, an act is free only if it is under the agent’s own control. And it is under the agent’s own control only if the causal chain of events—which extends back in time to events realized before the agent was even born—that caused the act (Jones’s hand being raised) “runs through” the agent himself in the correct way. Consider a situation in which a scientist places an electrode in Jones’s brain and hits a button at the right time (when a person asks for those voting for the bill to raise their hands), causing Jones’s hand to go up. This is not a free act for Jones because he was not in control of his hand going up. Why? The answer is not because his hand going up was an event deterministically caused by a chain of events leading up to it. For the compatibilist, the control necessary for freedom is a one-way ability (or control), not a dual control to act or refrain from acting, all things being the same up to the act itself. Jones does not have the control necessary to raise his hand or to refrain from raising it without further changes inside him. Rather, the reason Jones’s act was not a free act is because the causal chain did not run through Jones in the correct way, but instead bypassed Jones and ran through the scientist and his machinery.
But what does it mean to say that the causal chain “runs through the agent in the correct way”? Here compatibilists differ from each other, but basically, the idea is that an agent is in control of an act just in case the act is caused in the right way by prior states of the agent himself—by the agent’s own character, beliefs, desires, and values.
For example, suppose a person has a conflict between two first-order desires (that is, a lower-order desire involving specific states or events): to smoke and to engage in healthy activity. According to Harry Frankfurt, the notion of control necessary for moral responsibility is free action, that is, the freedom to do what one wants, to act on one’s first-order desires. Frankfurt also claims that freedom of will is necessary for a person to have the freedom of personal integrity, the freedom that consists in a mature caring about which of one’s first-order desires he will act on. The notion of control necessary for free will is that one’s act be the result of a second-order desire to have a first-order desire be effective, that is, the act must be what one wills on the matter. In the case just mentioned, if the person has a second-order desire that his first-order desire to act in a healthy manner be the desire that wins out, then this second-order desire causes the first-order desire to be effective, and the first-order desire causes an event of refraining from smoking. Such an act is free because it passes through the agent in the right way for him to be in control.
Gary Watson has a different view. According to him, we must distinguish those acts we desire without valuing them (e.g., smoking) from those we desire and which are expressions of one’s valuational system (roughly, one’s set of considered value judgments about what is the right, most reasonable thing to do in a given situation). An act is under my control if it is caused in the right way by my value system—if it is caused by and consistent with my own values.
Other compatibilists add that the act cannot be coerced, it must be done in an informed way, and so on. The basic idea here is that the chain of events leading up to the act must run through the agent in the correct way, and this means that it must be appropriately caused by the agent’s own prior states of character, desire, belief, and value. This is sometimes called a causal theory of action: an act is free if and only if it is under the agent’s own control, and it is under his own control if, and only if the act was appropriately caused by the right mental states existing in the agent prior to the act.
The causal theory of action has been subjected to a good deal of criticism. In order to understand the main problem with the view, consider a case in which a spy has agreed to send a signal to his compatriots if the enemy is going to attack tomorrow. He knows his friends will be using a telescope to look through the window of a meeting he will be having with the enemy that afternoon. If the attack will come, he will signal this by knocking over his cup of coffee. The meeting occurs, the attack is planned for the following day, and the spy intends to signal his countrymen in the agreed on way. However, his desire to signal them combined with his belief that by knocking over his cup he can send the signal causes him to be so nervous that he accidentally knocks over the cup and the event is observed by those viewing through the telescope.
Now if the causal theory of action says that a free act that is under the agent’s control is one that is caused by the agent’s own prior mental states (in this case a belief and desire on the part of the spy), then the spy’s deed would count as a free, intentional act. But obviously it is not. It was not even an act at all, but rather an accidental, jerky body movement. Thus the example shows that satisfying the causal theory is not sufficient for a free, intentional act because the spy satisfies the conditions of the theory but fails to so act. Cases like this are called examples of causal deviance: cases where the appropriate mental states (e.g., beliefs and desires) do in fact cause an event to take place but in an accidental way such that the event does not count as a real action.
Advocates of the causal theory of action have responded to cases of causal deviance by patching up the theory to include the idea that the act must be caused by the right mental states in the appropriate way. Since the spy’s mental states did not cause the act in the appropriate way, it doesn’t really satisfy the correct formulation of the causal theory of action. The problem with this response is that advocates of the causal theory of action have had a hard time defining “in the appropriate way.”
Libertarians reject the causal theory of action and the compatibilist notion of control and instead claim that a different sense of control is needed for freedom to exist. To understand their view, we need to return to Aristotle’s example cited above of a staff moving a stone but being itself moved by a hand that is moved by a man. In Summa contra Gentiles 1.8, Thomas Aquinas states a principle about causal chains that is relevant to this example and, more generally, the type of control necessary for freedom according to libertarians:
In an ordered series of movers and things moved [to move is to change in some way], it is necessarily the fact that, when the first mover is removed or ceases to move, no other mover will move [another] or be [itself] moved. For the first mover is the cause of motion for all the others. But, if there are movers and things moved following an order to infinity, there will be no first mover, but all would be as intermediate movers. . . . [Now] that which moves [another] as an instrumental cause cannot [so] move unless there be a principal moving cause [a first cause, an unmoved mover].
Suppose we have nine stationary cars lined up bumper to bumper and a tenth car runs into the first car causing each to move the next vehicle until car nine on the end is moved. Suppose further that all the cars are black except cars five through eight, which are green. Now, what caused the ninth car to move? According to Aquinas, cars one through eight are not the real cause of motion for car nine. Why? Because they are only instrumental causes; each of these cars passively receives motion and transfers that motion to the next car in the series. The first car (called the tenth car in our example) is the real cause since in our example it is the first mover of the series. It is the source of motion for all the others. In general, only first movers are the sources of action, not instrumental movers that merely receive motion passively and pass that on to the next member in a causal chain.
In Aristotle’s example, neither the staff nor the hand is the controlling cause of the stone’s motion since each is an intermediate cause. Rather, the man himself is the first, unmoved mover and as such is the absolute source of action. For libertarians, it is only if agents are first causes, unmoved movers, that they have the control necessary for freedom. An agent must be the absolute, originating source of his own actions to be in control. If, as compatibilists picture it, an agent is just a theater through which a chain of instrumental causes passes, then there is no real control. Further, the control that an unmoved mover exercises in free action is a dual control—it is the power to exercise his own ability to act or to refrain from exercising his own ability to act.
Philosophers do not agree about who is right in this debate. Libertarians point out that the compatibilist notion of control is not genuine. The compatibilist is like the person who says that the group of green cars above (cars five through eight) were in control of and, therefore, responsible for the damage to car nine because the causal chain passed through the green cars in the right way. But this is wrong because cars one through nine in the chain (including the green ones) are passive, intermediate links in the chain and only the first mover is responsible. Likewise, when compatibilists say that an event of raising one’s hand is not free if it is caused by a scientist’s electrode but it is free if caused by earlier character, belief, and desire states in the agent, they are mistaken. This is because in both cases, the earlier events causing the hand to go up (the electrode being triggered versus a state of desiring to vote and believing that raising one’s hand will satisfy this desire being triggered) are the passive results of earlier events in a causal chain and no control is genuinely present. Agents are just a series of passive events in a causal chain that ultimately reaches outside the agent and extends into the past before the agent’s birth. Where is there room for real control?
By contrast, compatibilists point out that the notion of an unmoved mover is mysterious and hard to understand. If an agent’s character, beliefs, and desires do not cause our actions, then what role do they play, and how is it that a person’s behavior is so predictable in light of his or her character and so forth? The actions of an unmoved mover appear to be random events without any control whatever. This point leads us naturally to consider the next feature of freedom—the rationality condition.
2.2.3 The Rationality Condition
The rationality condition requires that an agent have a personal reason for acting before the act counts as a free one. Now some libertarians allow for the existence of free acts that are not done for any reason at all, such as freely moving my hand back and forth or looking at one thing and then another (where these acts are not caused by, say, a nervous twitch or a sudden noise). Spontaneity is the name for nonrational, bare exercises of free will. But these libertarians agree with the fact that a crucial class of human actions are those done for certain reasons, so there is still an important area of debate between libertarians and compatibilists about the role of reason in free choices. Liberty is the name for this class of cases of free will.
Consider again the case of Jones raising his hand to vote. In order to understand the difference between the two schools about how to handle this case in light of the rationality condition, we need to draw a distinction between an efficient and a final cause. An efficient cause is that by means of which an effect is produced. One ball moving another is an example of efficient causality. By contrast, a final cause is that for the sake of which an effect is produced. Final causes are teleological goals, ends, purposes for which an event is done; the event is a means to the end that is the final cause.
Now a compatibilist will explain Jones’s voting in terms of efficient and not final causes. According to this view, Jones had a desire to vote and a belief that raising his hand would satisfy this desire and this state of affairs in him (the belief/desire set composed of the two items just mentioned) caused the state of affairs of his hand going up. In general, whenever some person S does A (raises his hand) in order to B (vote), we can restate this as S does A (raises his hand) because he desired to B (vote) and believed that by A-ing (raising his hand), he would satisfy desire B. On this view, a reason for acting turns out to be a certain type of state in the agent, a belief/desire state, that is the real efficient cause of the action taking place. Persons as substances do not act; rather, states within persons cause latter states to occur. The compatibilist, in possession of a clear way to explain cases where S does A in order to B, challenges the libertarian to come up with an alternative explanation.
Many libertarians respond by saying that our reasons for acting are final causes, not efficient causes. Jones raises his hand in order to vote, or perhaps, in order to satisfy his desire to vote. In general, when person S does A in order to B, B states the reason (e.g., a desire or a value) that is the teleological end or purpose for the sake of which S freely does A. Here the person acts as an unmoved mover by simply exercising his powers in raising his arm spontaneously. His beliefs and desires do not cause the arm to go up; he himself does. But B serves as a final cause or purpose for the sake of which he does A. Thus compatibilists embrace a belief/desire psychology (states of beliefs and desires in the agent cause the action to take place), while at least many libertarians reject it and see a different role for beliefs and desires in free acts.
There is a second difference between these two schools regarding the nature of reasons. For many libertarians, the process of reasoning known as deliberation, considering various reasons for and against certain actions, presupposes that the agent has libertarian freedom—one’s future is genuinely open in that one has the categorical ability to do more than one thing; one is in control in the sense that the choice is up to him as a first mover; and in this sense, rationality presupposes freedom. Sometimes libertarians express this by being committed to doxastic voluntarism, the view that one is free to choose what one will believe. Now direct doxastic voluntarism is clearly false, namely, the idea that at any moment one can directly choose to believe or not to believe a given item. In general, this is not possible. One could not really choose to believe right now that a large pink elephant was sitting on this page even if offered a million dollars to do so. But many libertarians say indirect doxastic voluntarism may well be true: the idea that one’s beliefs result from processes of deliberation in which one exercises freedom at various points along the way, in what one will or will not consider, how one will look at the issue, and so on. Libertarians claim that we hold people responsible for what they believe (and the New Testament would seem to command people to believe certain things and hold them accountable for their choice to believe or not to believe), and this requires some form of doxastic voluntarism to be true.
By contrast, compatibilists reject doxastic voluntarism if by it one means that people have libertarian freedom indirectly to choose their beliefs. For the compatibilist, a process of deliberation is simply a certain type of causal chain in which a series of mental events (reasonings, desirings, ponderings, believings, etc.) causes a conclusion to be reached and a course of action to be taken. Here, freedom presupposes rationality, not the other way around. That is, if an action is not caused by some personal belief/desire set constituting the person’s reason for acting, then the act is utterly random, fortuitous, and is not the sort of thing for which a person could be responsible. Christian compatibilists treat New Testament commands to believe as either expressing a form of doxastic voluntarism that utilizes a notion of freedom compatible with determinism or else they take these passages as not real commands to believe, but rather as statements that function to make clear what is already present in the listener’s heart.
There is a third area of debate about reason between compatibilists and libertarians. If we take the notion of “having a reason” for acting to include motives, feelings, and desires, and not just conceptual or more intellectual factors like beliefs, then this third area of debate is over the existence of akrasia—weakness of will. According to libertarians, weakness of will is a real phenomenon to be understood as an occasion where a person fails to act in keeping with his own personal preferences (his values, desires, beliefs, etc.) or acts against them.
For the compatibilist, people never act against their actual preferences, so if akrasia is defined in this way there is no akrasia. Actions are always caused by the strongest preferential state in the agent. People do have conflicting preferences (see the smoking case above) and sometimes one set of preferences is stronger and wins out over another set. If by akrasia we mean that one set of preferences we desire to act on to some degree is sometimes overridden by a stronger, sometimes immoral set of preferences, then there is such a thing as akrasia. In sum, libertarians and compatibilists differ over whether or not there is such a thing as akrasia and/or over how we are to define it.
2.2.4 Causation
From what has already been said, we can already anticipate a difference between libertarians and compatibilists about causation. To clarify this difference, let us assume that causation is a relation between two things, namely, the cause and the effect. For the compatibilist, the only type of causation is called event-event (also called state-state) causation. The only kind of entities that can be put into the causal relation are events. Suppose a brick breaks a glass. In general, event-event causation can be defined in this way: An event of kind K (the moving of the brick and its touching of the surface of the glass) in circumstances of kind C (the glass being in a solid and not liquid state) occurring to an entity of kind E (the glass object itself) causes an event of kind Q (the breaking of the glass) to occur. If we say that the wind caused the brick to break the glass, strictly speaking, this is not correct. Rather, we should say that the moving of the wind caused a moving of the brick which, in turn, caused a breaking of the glass. Here, all causes and effects in the chain are events. Similarly, if we say that a desire to vote caused Jones to raise his arm, we are wrong. Strictly speaking, a desiring to vote caused a raising of the arm inside of Jones.
Libertarians agree that event-event causation is the correct way to account for normal events in the natural world like bricks breaking glass. But when it comes to the free acts of persons, the person himself as a substance and as an agent occupies the first term in the causal relation (the cause) and the act is the second term (the effect). Persons are agents and, as such, in free acts they either cause their acts for the sake of reasons (called agent causation) or their acts are simply uncaused events they spontaneously do by exercising their powers for the sake of reasons (called a noncausal theory of agency). Either way, persons are seen as first causes or unmoved movers who simply have the power, as free agents, to exercise the ability to act as the ultimate originators of their actions. It is the I, the self that acts, not a state in the self that causes a moving of some kind. Libertarians claim that their view makes sense of the difference between actions (expressed by the active voice, e.g., Jones raised his hand to vote) and mere happenings (expressed by the passive voice, e.g., a raising of the hand was caused by a desiring to vote, which was caused by x, . . .).
At this point it may be helpful to consider the relevance of quantum physics to the free will debate. According to some, certain quantum events (e.g., the precise location of an electron hitting a plate after being shot through a slit, the exact time a specific atom of uranium will decay into lead) are completely uncaused events and, as such, are indeterminate, random happenings. Thus, it is argued, a quantum view of reality abandons determinism and makes room for indeterminism and for libertarian freedom.
Unfortunately, quantum physics has little relevance to the free will debate. For one thing, many scientists believe that the quantum world is just as determined as the regular world of macro-objects like baseballs and cars. We just do not (perhaps cannot) know the causes for some events, and we cannot predict exactly the precise behavior of quantum entities. For another thing, even if we grant that in the quantum world determinism really is false, it could still be argued that determinism reigns in the macroworld.
Third, and most important, for the libertarian, a necessary condition of free will is a view of the person as a substance that acts as an agent, that is, as a first cause or an unmoved mover. Thus determinism is sufficient for a denial of libertarian freedom, since it says that all events are caused by prior events and there are no substantial agents that act as unmoved movers. But even if determinism is false, this alone does not establish libertarian freedom, because completely uncaused events that randomly occur without reason, as in the quantum world, do not give the type of agency needed for libertarian freedom, namely, the freedom by which the agent as a substance is in control of his actions. The main debate between compatibilists and libertarians is one about the nature of agency and not determinism per se, although the truth of determinism is sufficient for the denial of libertarianism, as was already mentioned.
With this in mind, we are in a position to modify the understanding of modern compatibilism that we have used up to this point. Compatibilism is basically the thesis that freedom and determinism are compatible with each other, that they both can be true. But some—indeed, most—compatibilists go on to accept the truth of determinism, while others do not make a commitment to accepting determinism. However, both groups of compatibilists reject libertarian agency. So while we will continue to focus on the majority of compatibilists who, in fact, accept determinism, we need to remember that the nature of agency, and not determinism per se, is the main bone of contention between compatibilists and libertarians.
2.2.5 The Person as Agent
Our discussion of causation has already moved into a description of the person in compatibilist and libertarian models of action, which differ over how they understand the person as agent. For the compatibilist, the person, insofar as he or she is an agent, is simply a series of events through which a causal chain passes on its way to producing an effect, say, one’s hand going up. As long as this effect is caused by the right things in the right way (e.g., the character states in the agent) the act counts as free. Now the compatibilist could in fact hold that persons are genuine substances that sustain absolute personal identity though change. But the reasons for doing so would have to come from other philosophical considerations. As far as agency is concerned, it is consistent with compatibilism that a personal agent be a property-thing (see chap. 10) that reduces to a series of events through time and that does not sustain absolute personal identity through change (see chap. 16).
By contrast, a necessary condition for libertarian freedom is that the agent be a genuine substance in the tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas. In chapters ten through fourteen, we already saw that scientific naturalism denies that living organisms like human persons are to be understood as substances in the traditional sense. We are now in a position to understand why most naturalists deny libertarian freedom. This is not to say that all compatibilists are naturalists. Many Christians embrace compatibilism for a number of reasons, including certain views of election and predestination. But to the degree that a naturalist accepts some view of freedom, then the naturalist will most likely be a compatibilist, because as most naturalists acknowledge, naturalism denies a substance view of the agent and the reality of active power in favor of a property-thing view of the agent and event-event causation involving only passive liabilities.
We have looked at a general comparison between compatibilism and libertarianism and probed five different areas of contrast relevant to the debate about freedom: the ability condition, the control condition, the rationality condition, the nature of causation, and the nature of the person as agent. We now turn to a final comparison of compatibilism and libertarianism in two problem areas: fatalism and Benjamin Libet’s denial of free will.
2.3 Two Final Issues
2.3.1 The Problem of Fatalism
Because compatibilists claim that freedom is consistent with the truth of determinism, some have argued that a problem arises for the compatibilist: determinism implies fatalism, fatalism is false, and so determinism (along with compatibilism) must be rejected. Very roughly, fatalism is the view that everything that happens does so necessarily, and therefore we cannot do anything other than what we shall do. If determinism is true, all our acts are the inevitable results of events in the past that are beyond our control. Another way to state the problem is to say that determinism implies actualism—only what actually happens is possible. What a person actually does do coincides with what a person possibly could do. This view is sometimes called global fatalism. It is a controversial thesis and is to be distinguished from the relatively uncontroversial view called local fatalism. Local fatalism is the view that there are genuine, isolated instances in our lives where our outcome is fated irrespective of our deliberations or choices. For example, if a person jumps off a building, no amount of deliberation, no act of will can alter the person’s fated trajectory! Global fatalism says that this is the case for the universe in general. According to some philosophers, global fatalism is false and leads to passivity as a form of life.
Compatibilists and others have responded to the problem of fatalism by claiming that it is false and that determinism does not imply fatalism. It is true, given that determinism is the case, that only one future course of events can happen. But it does not follow that this future course of events will occur irrespective of our deliberations and choices. For example, it makes no sense to say of some single man named Harry that he is fated either to get married or not get married, and while we do not currently know which outcome is fated, one of them is and it will occur irrespective of Harry’s choices and deliberations. These choices and deliberations play a crucial role in the causal chain leading up to the outcome. In general, the future will unfold by running through the chain of events constituting our deliberations and choices, and thus these play a crucial role in causally contributing to what the future is going to be.
Other philosophers point out that this response misses the real point of the argument from fatalism. That point is that, given determinism, our choices and deliberations are themselves determined. They are events in causal chains that extend into the past and over which we have no control. Thus, in light of determinism, there are only passive happenings in the world, not real actions; there is no categorical ability or no real possibility for alternative outcomes to be realized; there are no first movers, no agent control over our choices. Causal chains simply “run through” the person. Thus the argument from fatalism is actually an attempt to give a general picture of the world and of human action that seems to follow from determinism. So understood, it is another way to surface problems in the compatibilist treatment of ability, control, agency, and causation. Whether the argument has force, then, will depend on one’s view of the debate about these issues.
2.3.2 The Findings of Benjamin Libet
In 1979 and subsequently in the early 1980s, American scientist Benjamin Libet conducted experiments that many interpreted to provide scientific evidence that there is no such thing as free will. Subjects were told to perform a simple motor action such as flexing their wrist or pressing a button with one of their fingers—allegedly spontaneous voluntary acts—at the moment of their choosing, but within a specified period of time (e.g., thirty seconds). At the same time the subjects were told to monitor their experiences by noting the time at which they were first aware of the “decision,” “urge,” or “intention” to act by observing a large, rapidly rotating clock face in front of them. All the while, Libet was monitoring their brain activity with an EEG. Libet discovered that a rise in brain activity he called a readiness potential (RP) occurred 550 milliseconds prior to finger movement, while subjects reported they decided to act 200 milliseconds before the finger movement. Thus, there was a 350-millisecond gap between the RP and the subject’s report of being aware of making the decision to act. Many understood this to mean that the brain activity RP causally determined the “decision” to act and, thus, the decision was not free. Libet’s results can be seen in figure 15.1.
Figure 15.1.
What are we to make of determinist claims based on Libet’s experiments? For several reasons, we must reject the idea that these experiments provide evidence that there is no libertarian free will. For one thing, while subsequent experimenters have tried to clean this up, Libet’s terminology was philosophically sloppy. He seems to equate and use interchangeably the following: decision, urge, intention, wish, desire, choice. Unfortunately, these are emphatically not interchangeable. Philosophers of action often claim that a desire/urge or wish to act comes first, this may be counterbalanced by opposite desires to refrain from acting for a moment, and thus a rapid process of deliberation takes place. Next comes the decision/intention/choice to act. But this alone does not produce the act, for one can still have weakness of will and not act on his or her final intention to act, so a final stage must occur—an exercise of active power to produce the muscle activity. Libet seems to have left out altogether the exercise of power, and he erroneously conflates the other notions, making his results suspect.
Second, Libet himself did not abandon libertarian freedom. In subsequent experiments, he found that even after the RP fired and people were aware of their decision to push the button, they still retained the ability to veto the decision and refrain from acting. Libet and others call this “free wont,” and it shows that agents retain the active power to refrain from acting despite prior brain activity.
Third, Richard Swinburne has argued that the extremely simple actions in Libet’s controlled experiment provide very poor analogies with the highly complex actions performed in daily life, and the complexity of these actions makes it almost guaranteed that no neuroscientific evidence for determinism regarding these acts will ever be forthcoming. Neuroscience may discover correlations with very simple, atomistic sensations (e.g., the urge to act), but that’s all. According to Swinburne, here is a proper analysis of ordinary, more complicated acts:
(Beliefs + Brain States + Sensations + Thoughts + Desires) → (Intentions + Beliefs (about means to fulfill the Intention)) → Bodily Movements
For example, one’s beliefs (I have to go to the store to get food for dinner, but I have to vote too) plus one’s brain states that correlate with the beliefs plus sensations (I feel hunger pangs in my stomach) plus thoughts (I wonder if the kids are hungry; I think the candidates are all bad and I wonder if anyone will find out if I don’t vote) plus desires (I desire pizza and I desire to be a good mother who has dinner ready for her children on time each day) all lead to an intention (I am going to get pizza and not vote) plus means (I need to get the car keys, drive to Domino’s and not the store, and I can get there faster if I take Fairmont Avenue) all lead to a series of relevant body movements (getting the keys, going to the car, turning it on, etc.). Swinburne rightly claims that the body movement is the result of so many interlocking, person-relative mental states (e.g., one person’s belief about pizza may be very different from another’s), that it is impossible to claim that every time a subject goes to Domino’s for pizza, the prior mental states and brain states are exactly the same.
Fourth, there would be a time lag between the intention to act and one’s awareness of that intention, especially if dualist interaction between soul and body is true. In this case, the intention to act would bring about a brain state that may very well cause a subsequent brain state that produces the awareness of the intention. Now the intention to act could directly bring about the awareness, in which case there would still be a time lag between the two. But on a dualist interaction view, the soul/mind employs organs to do things (eyes to see, brains to think), so the introduction of different brain states into the picture would bring about an even longer time lag between intention and awareness. Thus one may have formed the intention to act very near or simultaneously with the RP and only became aware of that intention later.
Fifth, it is self-refuting to believe that our mental states are caused by nonrational atoms in motion. In Libet’s experiments, the scientist must assume subjects have certain mental states (a desire to be honest, a knowledge of what the truth is about, the awareness to act, and an intent to report all this accurately) or else his experimental results cannot be trusted. In particular, if the scientist came to believe that the hand movement or verbal reports were merely physical events deterministically caused by earlier brain events without any regard for the semantic contents of the subject’s desires, intentions, and so on, then the scientist surely would not trust the hand movement or verbal report.
Table 15.1. Comparison between libertarians and compatibilists
compatibilism
libertarianism
ability condition
hypothetical, one-way ability
categorical, two-way ability
control condition
causal theory of action
first or unmoved mover
rationality condition
reasons are efficient causes
reasons are final causes
causation
event-event causation
agent causation or noncausal agency
person as agent
consistent with but does not require person to be a substance
person must be a substance
Finally, is it really possible for someone actually to believe they have no free will? We doubt that this is really possible. If we are right, then for any piece of evidence against free will, a person would be within his or her rights to look for defeaters of this evidence. In our view, under the highly artificial conditions of Libet’s experiments, it may well be that the RP registered an anticipation of making a decision, nothing more and nothing less. But even if we are wrong in this judgment, we have seen reasons to disregard Libet’s experiments in assessing whether we have freedom to act.
Chapter Summary
Determinism is the view that for every event that happens, there are conditions such that, given them, nothing else could have happened. Hard determinists agree with libertarians that determinism and freedom are incompatible, the former accepting and the latter rejecting freedom. Compatibilists hold that determinism and freedom are compatible with each other. Thus a major area of difference between compatibilists and libertarians is over their understanding of freedom.
There are different notions of freedom, but the main one we have analyzed is the freedom of moral and rational responsibility—that freedom is necessary for responsible agency. We have looked at both the compatibilist and libertarian perspectives on freedom and, along the way, we have seen some arguments for and against each view. Table 15.1 depicts five main areas of comparison between libertarians and compatibilists.
Finally, the chapter looked at two further areas of comparison between compatibilists and libertarians: fatalism and the findings of Benjamin Libet. All Christians are agreed that human beings in general have the freedom necessary for responsible agency, but they differ as to what account of freedom is correct. The issues are complicated, but one’s position will depend on biblical study, theological reflection, and philosophical judgments regarding which account is most plausible.
Checklist of Basic Terms and Concepts
ability condition
actualism
agency
agent causation
akrasia
belief/desire set
Benjamin Libet
categorical ability
causal power
causal theory of action
causation
compatibilism (hard and soft, classical versus contemporary or hierarchical)
control condition
deliberation
determinism (hard and soft)
doxastic voluntarism (direct and indirect)
dual ability/control
efficient cause
event-event (or state-state) causation
fatalism (global versus local)
final cause
first or unmoved mover
first-order and second-order desires
first-order and second-order powers
free action
free will
freedom of moral and rational responsibility
freedom of permission
freedom of personal integrity
future contingent event
happening
human action
hypothetical ability
indeterminism
instrumental cause
intermediate mover
libertarianism
noncausal theory of agency
one-way ability (or control)
person as agent
quantum physics
rationality condition
readiness potential
valuational system