The freedom of the will

Last month, Perry Robinson replied to something I’d written on the freewill controversy. For reasons of time and interest, I confined my initial response to the more theological content of his reply. Now that I have a bit of spare time I’ll respond to the more philosophical content.

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Consequently Hays is just wrong to say that if there was libertarian freedom then Hard Determinism is a logical possibility. Hays is also wrong to say that if libertarian free will existed then Soft Determinism is a logical possibility. Soft Determinism is the thesis that determinism is true and is compatible with freedom, though not with libertarian freedom.

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This is a straw man argument by imputing to me things I didn’t say or imply. I never contended that LFW entails the possibility of hard or soft determinism. I simply list these as the three background options in the debate over freewill and determinism. One wonders how Robinson can misread my so badly.

CONDITIONAL ANALYSIS

i) Under this heading, Robinson acts as if I’m inferring compatibilism from the ordinary linguistic conventions of the verb “can,” and then proceeds to cite Austin and Chisholm against that inference. But this is neither here nor there. The concept isn’t inferred from the usage; rather, the usage is simply a way of capturing the concept.

ii) Apropos (i), Robinson then proceeds to fault the formula because it is insufficient to get the job done. So what? The “freedom to do otherwise” is just a handy slogan. It was never meant to function as a model of action theory.

iii) What is more, both the libertarian and the compatibilist expand this formula. If the compatibilist glosses the formula to mean: freedom to do otherwise if the agent wanted to do otherwise, the libertarian expands the formula to mean: freedom to otherwise in the very same situation.

iv) It is true that merely wanting to do otherwise is not, of itself, a sufficient condition for the freedom to otherwise. But that doesn’t differentiate compatibilism from LFW, for the mere fact that a libertarian agent wanted to do otherwise doesn’t necessary mean that he can successfully realize his desire.

The formula is only defective if you mistakenly believe that words can do the work of concepts. If that’s your position, then both sides are equally deficient.

Both the libertarian and the compatibilist will have to spell out the necessary and sufficient conditions for the freedom to do otherwise. This will go beyond a catchy little pharse. It will require a detailed model of action theory.

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Hays regards compatibilism as a special case of determinism but this too is a mistake. Compatibilism is not a type of determinism or a particular instance of it but rather a thesis about the relation between freedom and determinism, namely that logically they can both be true.

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A couple of problems with this assertion:

i) It is too weak even on Robinson’s grounds. He had previously said:

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If libertarianism is true, that is if there is libertarian free will, then Hard Determinism and Soft Determinism are false. Moreover if libertarianism is true then indeterminism as a theory of causation is also true since it is a necessary condition for libertarianism. Hard Determinism is a species of incompatibilism, that freedom and determinism logically both cannot be true.

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In the earlier statement he had related the positions in terms of what is logically necessary. In the later statement is he relating the positions in terms of what is logically possible.

ii) Remember as well that this isn’t just a debate over generic determinism or compatibilism, but theological determinism and theological compatibilism. This is a debate over Calvinism, involving a distinction between primary and secondary causality as it bears on the problem of evil. That’s the nested framework.

FRANKFURT CASES

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Hays seems to not grasp what I was doing in discussing Frankfurt cases. When I gave the Kane/Widerker objection to Frankfurt’s counter-examples, I was not laying out other “interpretations” of Frankfurt cases but articulating objections to them. Kane & Widerker argue that contrary to Frankfurt’s claims, his case does presuppose determinism and thereby beg the question against the libertarian. For this reason, Frankfurt cases do not show, contrary to what Frankfurt claimed, that freedom doesn’t imply the ability to do otherwise. In any case, Frankfurt Cases are not examples of Hard Determinism because they are not cases where the subject is determined. That is how it undercuts Steve’s argument because Frankfurt cases then can’t be deployed as instances where someone is determined and yet thinks they are free because Frankfurt constructed them with the subject being free. Hays isn’t giving a Frankfurt case but rather a Cartesian case where a subject is deceived in believing x and is deceived in believing that y supports x by a covert controller. Hays is free to modify Frankfurt cases and then put forward the new thought experiments but then they wouldn’t be Frankfurt cases.

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1.Robinson seems to not grasp what I was doing in discussing Frankfurt cases. I’m not concerned with Frankfurt’s theory of the will. The Frankfurt cases have an inner logic of their own, irrespective of any particular theory of the will you bring to them.

First of all, his description is reductionistic: the Frankfurt case illustrates two things, not one:

i) The possibility of an illusory sense of libertarian freedom.

ii) The possibility of responsibility apart from libertarian freedom.

Remember the two essential ingredients to the classic case for libertarian freedom:

i) We enjoy the freedom to do otherwise.

ii) The freedom to do otherwise is a necessary condition of responsibility.

The libertarian will argue this in either (or both) of two ways:

a) Given (ii) moral responsibility, (i) the freedom to do otherwise must obtain.

b) Given that we do deliberate over various alternatives and do, in fact, choose between various alternatives, then (i) the freedom to do otherwise must obtain.

A Frankfurt counterexample undercuts both intuitions. And, let us recall, that’s all the case for libertarian freedom amounts to. It was never logically compelling. Rather, it was prized on certain popular intuitions.

The subject thinks he’s free to do otherwise. And his lack of freedom is uncoerced since the failsafe is never activated. So there’s nothing that either makes him do what he does or prevents him from doing what he does. His choices are unforced one way or the other.

But there is something which would hinder him from making a certain choice were he so inclined, which he isn’t.

2.It is not Cartesian. Robinson is confounding deception with self-deception. The fact that the subject may fallaciously infer his libertarian freedom from the experience of deliberation or choice does not imply that God has deceived him. Rather, he’s laboring under an illusion of his own making. He is self-deluded.

3. The presupposition of the Frankfurt case is not that there really is a covert controller, but that the libertarian intuitions about freedom and responsibility are consistent with the existence of a covert controller, and hence are underdetermined by experience.

EPISTEMOLOGY.

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Moreover it is not clear that freedom is a belief like a belief in an external object but more like a belief in one’s own consciousness. How does one know that one is conscious? Does one make inferences to establish this? No. One’s access to their consciousness is direct and since libertarian freedom is intrinsically part of one’s consciousness, or so Libertarians would argue, by virtue of the fact that free choices are intentional, a belief in freedom seems a lot more like a belief in one’s own consciousness rather than the red coke can over on the table. The appeal to experience by Libertarians is therefore direct and not acquired through inferrential steps.

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Sorry, but this is full of holes. Libertarian freedom is not a self-presenting state. The only self-presented state, in this context, is the experience of deliberation.

Even the impression of having successfully executed a choice is not a self-presenting state, for that involves a relation between an agent and a presumptive external object.

Deliberation is quite consistent with compatibilism. So is the phenomenon of choice.

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What Hays is trying to show is that the evidence from experience for libertarian freedom doesn’t imply that we are justified in believing that we have libertarian freedom. The evidence is just "no good." As I noted before, Hays is presuming that our belief derived from experience for libertarian freedom is formed like beliefs we form from sensory experience. And he is supposing that our beliefs from experience are made on the basis of inferences from the senses to beliefs. That is, he is assuming an internalist theory of knowledge. The case he gives is supposed to show that the inference from the evidence isn’t sufficient to produce knowledge. But as I noted above, we don’t make inferences to our belief that we are conscious from an experience of consciousness. Likewise we don’t make inferences from our sensations to beliefs. The connection between our beliefs and sensory data is causal rather than inferential and this is what skepticism is trying to teach us. (See John Greco’s, Putting Skeptics in their Place, Cambridge, 2000). To be an internalist is all well and good (well maybe not good) but a lack of justification for libertarianism shouldn't turn on an internalist theory of knowledge.

Arguments against libertarianism shouldn’t turn on the truth of epistemological internalism. The mere fact that evil demon cases show that the evidence is consistent with a belief only shows at best that the belief on an inferential basis fails to provide justification for the belief, not that the belief is false. What is more, evil demon cases show that any evidence fails to provide justification for a belief indicating that the problem is not with the evidence for libertarianism but with the epistemological theory to which the objection is applied.

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This is all well wide of the mark:

My little piece was directed at two of the major arguments for LFW: the experience of choice and the preconditions of responsibility. That does not exhaust my objections to LFW.

My primary objection is theological, i.e., that LFW is contrary to revelation. Moreover, it isn’t hard to come up with counterexamples to the intuition that responsibility is contingent on LFW. Furthermore, there are longstanding philosophical objections to the very coherence of freewill.

TIME TRAVEL

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It is true that Hays argument was predicated on the impossibility of time travel and that is exactly the point. Libertarians agree that time travel is impossible and libertarianism doesn’t imply otherwise. Just because libertarians believe in the ability to will otherwise that does not commit them to the idea that time travel or retrocausation is possible.

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This misses the point. The question is what renders time-travel impossible.

i) To begin with, one can use a thought-experiment which, all things considered, is impossible, but waive various objections for the sake of argument.

For example, philosophers are fond of toying with SF scenarios. Now, it is not necessary, for the purpose of the hypothetical, that the philosopher establish the overall coherence of the futuristic world he is positing for purposes of his hypothetical. Perhaps a brain cannot survive in a vat, or survive transplantation. But that’s beside the point.

Or take the Frankfurt counterexamples. Their cogency, or lack thereof, is not contingent on the science of the failsafe device.

Philosophers often use time-travel scenarios to illustrate a point. This doesn’t commit them to the possibility of time-travel. They may think that time travel is impossible due to the arrow of time or the direction of causality. But that’s irrelevant to the thought-experiment.

Rather, both sides postulate, for the sake of argument, that time-travel is possible, all other things being equal, save for a particular defeater, such as the generation of a paradox. The stock example is the son who travels back in time an inadvertently prevents his own conception.

That is how my time-travel scenario functions. I’m using it as a limiting-case on libertarian freewill.

There’s a sense in which any counterfactual style of argument is going to postulate a situation which isn’t true. That’s what makes it a counterfactual. But the question turns on the specific defeater. We stipulate the hypothetical to be possible or actual but for some particular impediment.

ii) My argument doesn’t presuppose that the libertarian is committed to retrocausation. To the contrary, I’m mounting an argument from analogy. I’m contending that the objection to LFW is analogous to the objection to retrocausation, and if the libertarian rejects the latter, then he ought to reject the former.

iii) My time-travel experiment isn’t especially directed at the past. It could just as well be directed at the future, taking the present as the point of departure.

These distinctions were already drawn in my original statement which, for some odd reason, have passed right over Robinson’s head. As I said at the time:

Finally, I’d like to raise another objection to LFW. Since we’ve all grown up on SF, we’re all familiar with the paradoxes of time-travel. And this is one reason to believe that time travel and retrocausation are impossible.

In a typical case, a scientist goes back in time and accidentally kills his father before is father has a chance to father him. But to change the future in that respect would remove a necessary condition for the experiment in the first place, since the son would not exist in the future to go back in time and accidentally kill his own father.

Now, I submit that if LFW were true, it would raise this conundrum to a global level. The typical form of the paradox assumes that a time traveler must intervene in the past to change the past in order to change the future.

But, if LFW were true, no such intervention would be needed to change the future. It would be inessential to alter the past in order to alter the future.

Rather, all you’d need to do, to alter the future, would be to exactly replicate the past. For the leading principle of LFW is that an agent is free to do otherwise under the very same circumstances.

And this, I submit, carries a further implication. If LFW were true, and you kept replicating the past, then, of necessity, the same agent would do otherwise in the same situation. If he really could do otherwise, and you keep giving him enough chances to do otherwise, he would do otherwise—sooner or later.

But if enough past agents were to do otherwise, the future would be so different that the experiment could not be performed in the first place.

Hence, I conclude that LFW is incoherent on the same grounds as retrocausation.

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2005/07/freedom-time-travel.html

INSTANT REPLAY

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Hays says that if we replay the past a million times it might be “barely” possible that the agent will make the same choice every time. I don’t know what “barely” possible is. If it is possible, then its possible. Hays was clearly wrong in saying that if the agent has the power to do otherwise then “necessarily” they will do otherwise. First it doesn’t follow that just because I have a power that I will employ it. Second, there is nothing necessary about it which is why its called “free” will.

Hays then likens replaying the past up to the point in which a libertarianly free agent makes a choice to chance happenings as in gambling. But this is a false analogy since libertarianly free choices are intentional and goal directed and unlike the toss of a die or the draw of a deck. I can have good reasons for always making the same choice and never the alternative. If someone asks me to kill my little girl, then can ask as many times as they like and I will never do it. I have no good reasons to do it and I have plenty of good reasons not to.

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i) I illustrated what I meant by my example of a card game. It is possible that if I were to play poker, I would be dealt a royal flush a million times in a row. But such outcome is so unlikely that the casino would rightly suspect that I was cheating even if I were only dealt a royal flush ten times in a row.

Yes, if something is possible, then it’s possible—but possibilities range along a continuum of possibilities, and some possibilities are so improbable that when a certain outcome occurs we attribute the outcome, not to sheer possibility, but a predeterminant.

ii) This is also where Perry misses the irony of my talk about necessity in relation to possibility, because sheer possibility lacks the requisite explanatory power to account for the outcome.

iii) Perry then notes a disanalogy between a card game and a choice. That is true, but the disanalogy favors my position, not his. For his argument is reducible to compatibilism.

If the agent might always make the same choice for the same reason, then two things follow:

a) There is a precondition which determines the choice;

b) The same precondition obtains in the same situation.

i) Now this is a classic form of character-determinism. A choice, whether a mental act or the execution of that act, is an event. If the event is caused by my motive, then it is not free in the libertarian sense, for there is then a prior set of necessary and sufficient conditions which invariably yield that outcome—contrary to the classic libertarian view that no set of preconditions are sufficient to yield the outcome. What he has offered is a form of psychological causal determinism.

ii) In addition, if I always act according to the same motive in the same situation, then I can choose according to my motives, but I cannot choose my motives. So I should think a bona fide libertarian would object to the scenario of an agent always choosing according to the same motive in the same situation. Under that scenario, the agent is not free to do otherwise because he is not free to intend to do otherwise. Robinson has only pushed his problem back a step.

Finally, Prejean posted a comment:

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Hays admits Helm's B-theory (static) approach to God's timelessness. Asserting counterfactuals of Godly freedom in a B-theory model is simply incoherent as far as I can tell (Helm certainly has yet to convince me otherwise). It doesn't make any sense to talk about how a static universe could have been otherwise; nothing ever actually happened!

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This is a terribly jejune observation. In a B-theoretical framework, it would simply mean that God was free to instantiate one “static” universe rather than another; that there were any number of different possible worlds, each one governed by a B-theory of time, from which God was free to choose, or choose to create nothing at all.